Alex Hormozi on Skills That Actually Build Wealth SB1784

Summary

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Podcast Summary

The Stacking Benjamins Show

Episode: Alex Hormozi on Skills That Actually Build Wealth (SB1784)
Date: January 2, 2026
Hosts: Joe Saul-Sehy (A), OG (B), Neighbor Doug (C)
Guest: Alex Hormozi (D) – Bestselling author and business expert

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1. Episode Overview

This episode sets the tone for the new year by focusing on a different side of personal finance: how to increase your income by investing in yourself and building scalable skills. Joe interviews renowned business builder Alex Hormozi in Las Vegas, with frequent commentary and breakdowns by OG and Doug. The conversation rejects short-term hacks and incremental change in favor of big-picture, high-leverage thinking, aiming to inspire listeners—whether entrepreneurs or employees—to proactively design their own path to wealth.

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2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

A. The Importance of “Doing More” and Long-term Persistence

• Start with Action: Success often comes from simply doing more, embracing a high velocity of mistakes to learn rapidly.
  • “Do more than you probably are. In the earlier days… you have to act a lot on faith.” – Alex (10:21)
  • Host Reflection: “We evaluate too much and we do too little. We don’t take action enough...” – Joe (14:16)
• Focus on Activity, Not Just Results:
  • “Success comes from doing the thing, not from the result of the thing.” – OG (11:44)
  • Compounding small, consistent actions leads to wealth, even if daily results are invisible.

B. Everyone is in Sales & Skill Acquisition is Key

• Universal Relevance of Sales Skills:
  • “If you think about the highest leverage skill that you can have, it's to get other people to do stuff for you.” – Alex (15:13)
• The S&ME 500 (Investing in Yourself):
  • “I’d reinvest all of [my money] into skill acquisition… courses, seminars, tutoring, mentorship...” – Alex (22:27)
  • Small, practical certifications (e.g., phlebotomy) can provide rapid value multipliers for employees.

C. Incremental Optimization vs. Order-of-Magnitude Thinking

• Stop Obsessing Over Tiny Tweaks:
  • “Optimizing typically gets you incremental returns, not order of magnitude returns… Focus on what makes ALL your goals irrelevant if you do it.” – Alex (34:04)
  • Example: Instead of saving pennies clipping coupons, work on earning more by developing a rare, valuable skill.

D. Build a Unique “Skill Stack” to Unlock Opportunities

• Multiplicative Power of Skills:
  • “Where you get outsized returns is adding skills together. That’s what creates unicorns… each of those is a skill that opens the doors to the next level.” – Alex (43:41)
  • Skills from distant but relevant domains create market differentiation (e.g., finance + negotiation + advertising).

E. Know Your Market (and Its Ceiling)

• Pick Your Arena Wisely:
  • If your field’s best performers aren't making the kind of money you aspire to, consider pivoting.
  • “You can’t be in a market where nobody has a shot at [major wealth].” – Joe (45:49)
  • The size of the pie matters, but so does creativity in expanding it.

F. Measure and Leverage Your Value

• Track Your Dollars Per Hour:
  • “Looking at dollars per hour is actually a wonderful way to continually measure your intrinsic value...” – Alex (29:51)
  • Take charge of your own upskilling and career trajectory; don’t wait for a boss to define it.

G. The Theory of Constraints and High-Leverage Actions

• Identify Your Bottleneck:
  • “Every system will grow until it’s constrained, then grow no further. Be able to identify the actual constraint in your system.” – Alex (54:06)
  • Massive change comes not from more effort everywhere, but from removing the biggest current barrier.

H. Opportunity Cost of Ignorance

• Not Knowing is Expensive:
  • [Alex retells a powerful story (56:00):]
    • “$950,000 per year is what you pay in ignorance, not knowing how to make a million dollars a year.”

I. Risk, Negotiation, and Exponential Rewards

• Those Who Take and Understand Risk Win Big:
  • “You can make outsized returns without having been the one who made the value… if you are willing to take on risk, you will get disproportionately rewarded.” – Alex (61:55)
  • For employees, upside comes through negotiation and accepting more responsibility/risk (e.g., commissions, bonuses).

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“Long-term sounds good in theory, until it takes a long time.”

— Alex Hormozi (13:02)

“If you think about the highest leverage skill that you can have, it’s to get other people to do stuff for you.”

— Alex Hormozi (15:13)

“Success comes from doing the thing, not from the result of the thing.”

— OG (11:44)

“Invest in the S&ME 500 rather than the S&P 500… the first hundred thousand dollars, I’d reinvest all of that into skill acquisition.”

— Alex Hormozi (21:52)

“Optimizing typically gets you incremental returns, not order of magnitude returns.”

— Alex Hormozi (34:05)

“The more skills that you have, the more of a weapon you become.”

— Alex Hormozi (44:57)

“$950,000 per year is what you pay in ignorance, not knowing how to make a million dollars a year.”

— Alex Hormozi (56:23)

“If you have a clear path to a billion, it’s time. If you don’t, it’s skill.”

— Alex Hormozi (61:10)

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4. Timestamps to Key Segments

• Advice to Young Alex—Just Do More: (10:10–11:01)
• Sales Is the Highest Leverage Skill: (15:13–15:23)
• Confidence and Mindset on Wealth/Bouncing Back: (16:37–21:35)
• Invest in Yourself—the S&ME 500: (21:52–24:41)
• Skill Stacking Illustrated (Finance Example): (43:41–44:57)
• Pie Size, Negotiation, Replaceability & Value: (42:12–45:49)
• Opportunity Cost of Ignorance Story: (56:00–56:23)
• Theory of Constraints Applied to Your Career: (54:06–55:46)
• Risk and Rewards (Eduardo Saverin Example): (61:19–62:16)

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5. Practical Takeaways for Listeners

• Take relentless action—don’t overanalyze, over-plan, or focus too soon on long-term results.
• View every job as a sales job and learn how to persuade, communicate, and drive value.
• Invest your time and money in acquiring skills that move you to higher-value arenas.
• Stop obsessing over tiny optimizations and instead seek one or two high-leverage moves to transform your trajectory.
• Proactively build a unique skill stack that distinguishes you from others in your field.
• Regularly calculate your personal value (dollars per hour) and look for ways to multiply it through new skills, not simply cost savings.
• Identify and remove the constraints holding back your career or business, instead of piling on more effort.
• Recognize risk as an amplifier of rewards—but manage it through knowledge and skills, making it look less risky to you.

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6. Conclusion

This episode combines Alex Hormozi’s “big swing” entrepreneurial mindset with personal finance practicality, urging listeners to invest aggressively in their own skills, attack the highest-value opportunities available, and think much bigger. Everyone has a shot at transforming their financial life—if they relentlessly build skills, take smart risks, and refuse to settle for incremental gains.

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For More:
Find Alex Hormozi’s resources at acquisition.com

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Stacking Benjamins returns with Part Two of this conversation, diving further into building your “income machine”.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, Stackers. Happy holiday week. And well, today for a lot of people, you're headed back to work. Maybe you had to work the entire week. And this.

[B]

Isn't this the week where everybody is eating, like, rice cakes and. And, like, cutting out bread and like. No, boo.

[C]

The. The one week that they use their gym membership.

[A]

Yeah, the gym.

[B]

Enjoy it. Enjoy it this week, everybody.

[A]

I don't know. For me, it's the end of celebrating. Just one. I. I love it. I love it when New Year's is right in the middle of the week because you just feel like you can extend it into this following weekend.

[B]

My problem is, is then my kids are going to school. They don't go to school till Tuesday. And then Alex doesn't go back to school till Monday the following week. So he's still kind of around, you know, and then we leave to go on vacation for a week. So still party on. It's kind of. I mean, the bar's still open at Og's house. I mean, we never shut this thing down. We might shut it down in the middle of January.

[A]

That's why I'm headed to your house this afternoon. Hey, one thing that is wide open right now is, sadly, your credit. People checking out your credit all the time. People checking out your ID online when you don't want that to happen. You also have all these different subscriptions draining your budget. How do you get those under control? We, with the help of the team from Array, created the Benjamin Vault app where you put a lock on your Benjamins by managing your credit, ensuring that you have the privacy and ID protection that you deserve, and taking stock of all those subscriptions and putting together a better, tighter budget in 2026. It's stacky benjamins.com vault get you there or just go to benjamin vault.com for more. It's great to see people signing up for this. The team from Array, who helps millions of people take control of their money, help us develop this tool that we created for you. And it's great to see people saying, you know what? I'm going to do 20, 26 different. All right, coming up today, guys, th. This was our biggest pair of episodes. In fact, the one you're about to hear. The first episode was downloaded double the number of times of any other episode in 2025. The second one downloaded about 85% more than any episode in 2025. This was a great way to kick off 2025. I think it's a great way to kick off 2026. Alex Heroi I flew out to Las Vegas to interview Alex and then og you and I just broke it down. We took it, we broke it into chunks and we talked about how do you earn more money? Maybe it's not $10 million. So there might have been a little clickbait in that title.

[B]

You know what, didn't it?

[C]

100 million.

[A]

See, there's even more clickbait. We just 10 xed it right here just now.

[B]

Bang.

[C]

It worked.

[A]

Look what we could do. So how to make a hundred million dollars or how to make more money and add more value? Alex Hermosi really brought it. We're happy for you to hear this. Coming on Monday, all new programming back on the Stacking Benjamin Show. The holiday extravagance is over. Time to dig in. And we're digging in on Monday and this week, by the way, our mentor on Wednesday, time management expert Laura Vanderkam is going to join us to kick off the new year. So kicking off with Harmozi, Laura Vanderkam, a bunch of great mentors in 2026. But for now, let's hit play on episode one of two with Alex Hermosi.

[B]

May old acquaintance be forgot. I don't know the rest of the world.

[C]

Live from Joe's mom's basement, it's the Stacking Benjamin Show. I'm Joe's mom's neighbor dog. And buckle up, buttercup, because today we're gonna teach you how to make $100 million a year with a guy who makes millions and helps others make millions, Alex Hormozi. Joe recently flew to Las Vegas to meet with the famous business building expert. And today we're breaking down that interview for you so that 2025 is your best income producing year. And now two guys who have the notepads ready and their game faces on for this money earning extravaganza, it's Joe and O Jaja. Juju G.

[A]

Happy new year, stackers. And welcome. Let me be the first to welcome you to 2025. I am Joe Sal Sehai. I'm super happy you're here. In January, we usually kick things off by helping you get out of debt, by helping you set up new goals. This year we are starting with income. We're going to hopefully OG increase Stacker's income a bunch. If you want to have a brighter year of far more Benjamins in 2025, this is your show.

[B]

Amen. And you said get your notepads ready. Oh, geez. Going digital this year. So I've got my remarkable tablet ready to rock.

[A]

Remarkable. You finally got one of those. How do you like it?

[B]

I am. I'm in the 100 day free trial period. I will, I will report back.

[C]

Was that a Christmas gift from our caller, Nick?

[B]

No, it was, it was. It was a Christmas gift from our. From our friend OG to himself.

[A]

Oh. She's like, back away, Nick.

[B]

I have all these notebooks, right? Like these little journal books. They're always with me. So that I just have contemporaneous, like whatever I'm thinking about. So it's a big change to go to here, but I'm going to do it. I'm committed to doing it for the first quarter just to see how it.

[C]

Goes for 99 more days.

[D]

Yeah, but who's counting?

[B]

No better way to kick it off than this fantastic interview, which I've been waiting to hear since I knew that you went to Las Vegas without me to do it.

[A]

Yeah, let's talk about how this is going to go down because we.

[C]

Did you hear him slip that in there?

[A]

Yeah, just. He puts the aggressive and passive aggressive. Doug.

[B]

I thought I could get a pump on with him. That's what I was thinking. I was like, I like to work out. Alex likes to work out. I'm sorry. We can get a little jack together. I mean, if he's way more jacked than me.

[A]

But for our stackers that have never seen Alex Hormozi, you need to just look this guy up.

[B]

He's swole.

[A]

Sun's out, guns out. Yes. And it's funny because I was, I was teasing, saying that when I went out there that I was just going to reach across and just bump on. Because he likes to. Likes to show off those guns. Now he, he had on a long sleeve shirt when I went out to visit him. But let's set this up for everybody because we are not doing our normal variety show day here. We are digging into one interview. I'm going to play the interview. But a lot of what Alex Hormozi does is, speaks to entrepreneurs. And a lot of our stackers are not necessarily entrepreneurs. You might work for somebody else. You're what we call an intrapreneur. You may think if Og and I didn't stop this interview and talk about what does this mean to you, you may think that this doesn't apply to you. There are so many nuggets in what you're about to hear that are going to apply to far more of you than you think. This is going to be fantastic. And while sure you might not make a hundred million dollars, we're going to get you on the path to making a lot more money. And I'm super excited. So I flew out there, I spent about 45 minutes talking to him. We're just going to dive into that interview. Oh gee. And I are going to stop it from time to time. We're going to dig in and we're going to make sure that you get the nuggets that you need to make more money. Before we get there, we have some sponsors that make sure that this is free for you. How about that? We're going to help you make more money and we're going to keep the product free. We're going to hear from a couple then. And then we're going to jump into my interview with a guy who knows how to make money. Mr. Alex Harmozi.

[D]

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[B]

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[D]

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[B]

Get ready for the Rush with Max Crosby.

[D]

It's time.

[B]

Don't miss the behind the scenes moments everyone's talking about, regardless of what they say.

[D]

I'll take the fine.

[A]

I don't care.

[B]

All pro defensive end Max Crosby takes you beyond the field with exclusive insights.

[D]

I could say this because I've played them.

[B]

This is the Rush.

[D]

You guys already know what time it is.

[B]

It was fire.

[A]

And we'll be right back on the pod and we'll be talking about it next week.

[B]

The Rush with Max Crosby. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.

[A]

Hey, welcome to 2025 Stackers. And you know what? I know this feels weird, but mom let me out of the basement. I'm actually in Las Vegas where I've got Mr. Alex Hermosi with us. Happy New Year, my friend.

[D]

It's great to be here in 2025. Another day similar it's actually completely different than 2024. I'm amazed at how different the world is compared to yesterday. It's like the light was turned on.

[A]

Isn't that wild how things change overnight? All of a sudden things change.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

But let me ask you this. Let's say it's January 1st, you're 22 years old. You can talk to the old Alex, who was 22 years old. What would you tell Alex, 22 on New Year's Day?

[D]

Same thing I would tell him every other day, do more than you probably are. I think a lot of it is just honestly it'd be keep doing what you're doing in the earlier days. It's like you have to act a lot on faith. You have to act like, I think this will work. And one of the problems with successful actions is that especially if you have a longer term viewpoint, long term sounds good in theory until it takes a long time. And so I think just reminding myself that like you are on the right path, if you've lost £5 and you're not down the £100 that you set the goal on, it's like you still need to eat a calorie deficit. You still need to work.

[A]

No, you mean by January 4th?

[D]

Yeah, right, right, exactly. But yeah, a lot of times it's like the success has to get tied to the actions that we have to take. In the meantime, man, already two seconds.

[A]

In og, There's a ton there. First of all, his very first answer, do more. And we're going to hear this from Alex quite a bit over the next hour. The thing that I've seen with very successful people is they just try more stuff. Their failure rate in the beginning especially is much like everybody else's failure rate. They just do it on a quicker basis. I remember Tony Robbins, hearing Tony Robbins talk about this in the past. If you just increase the velocity at which you make mistakes, you will gain the lessons from those mistakes much more quickly, which means then you can move on down the path toward bigger successes. This idea of do more, his flip it answer, I think was huge.

[B]

Well, and I heard two things there. One I heard was do more. And I thought about it in the context of incrementally more. He talked about losing weight. If you're working out three times a week, is there a chance that you can work out three times a week plus an extra 10 minutes? Can you do just that incrementally more stuff? The other thing that I heard him say was focus on the thing that you're doing. Not necessarily the result that you're having from the thing that you're doing, because it's the thing that you're doing is going to produce the result. And he said it right at the very end, there was success comes from doing the thing, not from the result of the thing. And we learn about this in Strategic Coach. You're going to do a lot more in the next 10 years or in the next 25 years than you even thought possible. But it's because the compounding effect of all of the little changes that you make in your life over that 25 year period versus going, it's January 1st talking. I didn't lose any weight yet. You know, it's January 3rd, I should be down some pounds. It's like, you're not going to see all those results right now. It's going to take a while. But you're. If you do the activity, you will see the results faster than you think you will, just not as fast as you think you should, if that makes sense.

[A]

I love that phrase that he said. Long term sounds good. Until you realize.

[B]

Until you really realize what long term is. Except for the inverse of long term. And what I mean by that is, how many times have you thought about something and I don't know, Joe, I walk a lot. I make phone calls and stuff. Doug's a recipient of those walks and phone calls. Sometimes he doesn't want to be. But I was thinking about your series of time when you ran a mile a day. You ran a mile a day for some insane amount of days. I don't remember what it was. A thousand days or something stupid.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

I mean, not stupid, but like crazy. Like insane. Something stupid hard.

[A]

It was close to five years.

[B]

Yeah. You know when you think about something and say, I mentioned the remarkable tablet for 90 days. Right. It's hard to commit to doing something for 90 days until you look back over the previous 90 days and then you go, oh, that was just October. Oh, my God. Yeah, I could have done that. I mean, it was just October. But now you look into January 1st and you go, can I, could I really walk 10,000 steps every day for the next 90 days?

[D]

Oh, my gosh. It would be crazy.

[B]

I can't necessarily commit to doing that so hard. And then you get to March 31st and you go, well, I mean, that was just yesterday. I mean, I can't do it in the future, but I could have done in the past.

[A]

We're going to hear this a lot in this interview. Some of the stuff that isn't said that's in the cracks. Taking all the stuff that we just said. What did Alex really just say? We evaluate too much and we do too little. We don't take action enough, and we evaluate every single little action instead of just continuing to get out there and do it and do it and do it and do it. Let's jump back in talked in the past and the reason we wanted to kick off 2025 with you is because Stackers, it's our $100 million year. In fact, I brought some of this. Look at these, huh?

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

So if in 20, 20, 25, we're going to get some of these, I think we've got to talk about the type of stuff that you do, because a lot of our stackers, Alex, they don't think that they're in sales. I firmly believe that we're all in sales. Whether you're the CFO of a $5 million company, you're like, nope, the sales thing is down the hall. Or you're the stay at home dad who's helping his family, you know, get dinner on the table. You're always in sales.

[D]

Yeah, I agree. I mean, fundamentally, if you think about the highest leverage skill that you can have, it's to get other people to do stuff for you. And so if you only had that one skill, then you could use that one skill to get everything else that you want in life.

[A]

You have said this publicly. By year number two, your top line revenue was $26 million from Gym Launch.

[D]

Yeah, for Gym Launch.

[A]

To 26 million for Gym Launch. Now we're looking at nine figures. How has that changed your life?

[D]

I mean, Layla buys more expensive stuff. I think, honestly, though, it's like the things that we could afford at that point. There's nothing that we buy now that we couldn't afford. Then I think, honestly, to some degree, you have to grow accustomed to wealth. And then also you probably heard this saying, like, over $70,000 a year, there's no increase in subjective wellbeing. But I think that there's a problem with that study, and it was that it requires more skill to know how to spend $10 million a year and enjoy it.

[A]

Almost like the old Brewster's Millions movie.

[D]

Absolutely. If you have no skill above $70,000, then you won't spend the money. Well, but if you know how to spend money, then you can continue to make more and get incremental returns in terms of increases in subjective wellbeing by making more. And so I'd say that my life is Certainly better from that perspective. I do know that I have significantly, I mean, I don't really have any anxiety around money. Some people, I hear that they're like, man, I always feel like I could lose it all tomorrow. Like I don't have that. I really don't.

[A]

Has that always been the case? I mean, was that confidence with you even when we'll talk?

[B]

No.

[A]

A lot of our audience hasn't heard your story. They don't know that been broke what, twice?

[D]

This is my third run.

[A]

Yeah, I think Walt Disney's like at five.

[D]

I think it's unlikely that I go back to zero again. But what's interesting is that like when I was at zero, I was also still pretty okay. You know, the downside is being pretty okay. I think that that has helped me take bigger shots.

[A]

What I love about this for. I'll get back to what we love about that. By the way, I was showing him when I said, look at these. I had a stack of fake hundred dollar bills that we had found in their offices clock and we're showing.

[C]

I knew it wasn't your biceps.

[B]

Look at these, Alex, look at these cannons.

[A]

Look at these. There's a lot to unpack there. Also, OG let's talk about this idea of knowing how to spend money well, because like most of his points, he makes these points very quickly and then he's on to the next thing. But this is a huge point. If you know how to spend money well, you can deploy that money, still enjoy that money. And also that money is bringing in more money. That's, that's a big aha. Like knowing how to spend money. Well, we've talked a lot about how it's about the income side of the equation versus the expense side of the equation. Sometimes that expense can also lead to bigger and more revenue.

[B]

I guess I would think about it as being an investment then. Right. And maybe that's what he means about spending money is how to wisely allocate it. Maybe is a good way to think about it. That's how I internalized it. I was having a conversation a couple of weeks ago with somebody and I said that I can simultaneously hold these two thoughts in my head, which are, first, that money doesn't solve problems, but you can arrive at them in a limo. So you can arrive at your problems in a limo. Okay, I get that side of it. And then I also appreciate the side of if you have the money, then you don't have any real problems. You can pay your way out of whatever problem it is. And obviously there's some circumstances there where that's not true. Health, perhaps, or something. But I know this story of there's not incremental happiness over 70,000 and things like that. And maybe that number's been adjusted now. And I think there's a very real scenario around the stress around money. And I appreciate what he said very quickly at the end where he doesn't, like, worry about money anymore. I would wonder how many people or at what level people have to be at to literally have no worry about money. Because I think in my experience, there's different stages that people go through in terms of thinking about it. Anything under 70, $80,000. I think that most people budget the heck out of their money, right? You know, where every dollar goes. I think that as you go from 80 to 150, you start loosening the purse strings a little bit. And as you get to 150, maybe you don't have as much around a food budget, you know, and food is one of those, obviously a staple that you have to have in your. In your life. But maybe you're not shopping always at the discount grocery store, or you're not paying attention to the price of eggs. You know, you're just like, hey, I need a dozen eggs for the refrigerator, and you buy them. And I feel like that happens in my experiences around that 150 range. And then I think as you get closer to 300,000 of income, I think people start not caring a lot about spending on some luxury things, whether it's travel or whatever. But that doesn't mean that they're not worried about it. I think it takes a special faith in the future in your brain to not have any worry about, you know, what the future might bring, especially if you're an entrepreneur.

[A]

And that's what struck me, was the confidence, just the fact that he's been bankrupt twice. This is his third go at it. And even when he was at those low points, he didn't lose faith in his ability to make it happen. And I think this is a core thing when it comes to money. It isn't about the money, he said. He also said, we don't buy anything now that we couldn't buy back then when I was broke. So, a, he's not a big spender. He doesn't. We're going to talk to our frugal friends, Jill and Jen from the Frugal Friends podcast on Monday about frugality. And frugality is not about cheapening your life. It's about establishing these Values about what you're really interested in. I get this strong feeling that he very much has those values. The huge 26 million for gym launch by the end of his first year. $26 million at the end of a year. But before that he'd been broke twice and he still was able to grow this thing. I think that no matter where you're at on the spectrum, this self talk that we have, that I can't do it, I'm not in the space. I, I just. This is for other people. Making money's for somebody else. I think to some degree that's between our ears. It's not always completely 100 between our ears, but I think there is a lot of self talk that's negative. Where Alex when he was broke was like, nope, it is me, it is my time. 2025 is going to be my year. I can make it happen.

[B]

I like it.

[A]

Let's get into what I loved. So I started this sentence with what I love is. What I love about this for our stackers is that it's this confidence that you can do it again. And it's not, there's not this exterior thing going on. It's all inside of you.

[D]

Yeah. So back to my 22 year old self, my pithier thing that I would tell him, besides, you are on the right path, continue would be to continue to invest in the S&ME 500 rather than the S&P 500. There's a lot of what I would do with a thousand dollars if I was 20 years old or whatever. It's like, well, if I. I mean basically the first hundred thousand dollars that I would have, I would reinvest all of that into skill acquisition. And that seems like a really amorphous thing. Like skill acquisition. Like what is that? And so that's going to courses, seminars, tutoring, mentorship, whatever it is that you can to get more skills. Like I'm very much a product of the alternative education system.

[A]

You're not. Yeah. You're not talking about traditional four year college degree.

[D]

No. Yeah. I would like go take a course on how to run TikTok ads, go to a sales boot camp for eight weeks. There's so many opportunities that exist. And I use this very simple example which is like. And the numbers may change but just go with the concept. So like a friend of mine has a daughter, she turned 17, something like that. She started working at a bowling alley, like the front desk or whatever.

[A]

Right? Yeah.

[D]

And so. And he's a multimillionaire, but he's like, okay, it's a job, whatever. She's, she's worked, she's out of the house. But he's like, you know, if you take a week or two and just do the phlebotomy certification, you can make 25 an hour, at least in the city that they were at.

[A]

Like that.

[D]

Yeah. And the cost of that, I think again, rough estimates, 500 bucks, something like that. And so for $500, she could triple her earning capacity in a matter of weeks. And so if you think about that, that's where like that is a microcosm. Example of what investing in skill acquisition does is that it just simply increases your ability to time, trade time for money. And I think there's a lot of pushback on the idea of trading time for money, especially in the finance space. I fundamentally reject that concept, mostly because all of us spend time for money. It's just that we are not exchanging based on that unit. And so it's like. And I could prove it, which is just, you live every second of the day and money comes in over seconds of the day. Therefore you trade money for time. It's just that, let's say I make an investment, it's like this thing makes me money. It's like. So you don't count the other 20 investments that you looked at and then decided not to do. And then the time it took you to vest this investment and then make. It's higher leverage. Absolutely. And that's the point. It's a higher leveraged investment. You got more for the time you put in, but you still absolutely traded time.

[A]

He, he, the, the time and money thing obviously rubs him the wrong way. I want to focus though, on this idea early on. And he again seems to be talking more about an entrepreneurial spirit. OG that she gets a job at a bowling alley. It's Guy's daughter. If she just went and spent $500, she could make that back up in a hurry. Just getting a quick certification. Now she's got a job, has a skill, trading more money per hour than she was trading before. Still trading time for money, but trading on a much higher number. You know, he talks about TikTok ads because again, he talks to entrepreneurs.

[D]

Right.

[A]

But when you look at designing yourself a curriculum, no matter what your job is, I think his bigger point is look around at the skill set you have now and how much money would it take to invest in the next area on this career ladder that you're on, even if you're working for somebody else and you're going to find that there are ways to multiply whatever current number you're at today.

[B]

Well, it's kind of, you know, he said the S and P versus the S and me. I think about investing in the context of like capital market assumptions and we've talked about this on the show before around if you invest your money in the S and P, you know you're going to get a 10% return if you don't touch it for 100 years. You know, if you're going to invest in the smallest companies in the world, you're going to get a 12 to 13% return if you don't touch it. A lot more volatility. And if you're going to invest in a small business, if your brother in law says hey let me sell you shares of my ice cream shop, he better be modeling out a 20% return. It's way riskier to have that little, little teeny tiny business than to give your money to the best investment managers or the best corporate managers in the world a la the s and P500.

[A]

But at 22 years old.

[B]

That's what I'm saying. But the return on yourself if you think about it in terms of capital market assumptions is a hundred x or 10x or 2x. It's not 10%, it's not 0.1x. You know what I mean? If you look at your. Even if you're working for you say well this is great if I'm an entrepreneur and yeah, I can go learn how to do TikTok ads. That's great. Sell my business. No, no. Find what your company sucks at. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who runs a business and he was talking about sales in particular around business development and we were talking about the industry he's in and I said is there any concern that you have around, you know, the industry over our lifetime, like disappearing, like kind of, you know, whatever. And he said, well maybe, but if you can sell, you will always have. If you can develop business and it doesn't matter whether you're, you could do that with washing machines or computers or TikTok ads or whatever. Like if you can. Alex said, get people to do stuff for you. That was his definition of it. You will always have a place. So look at your organization and see what they suck at and see how you can be useful to that organization. If the marketing process sucks at your firm and you can go, well, wait a second, I'm pretty good at this TikTok thing. I bet I can like put it together, run the proposal by the boss, go, hey, let me run this for a while, pay me on the results. Like tell me if this works for you. I need your okay to do this because it's your company or I need your, you know, your department. I need your okay to run this program. But let me try it and see if I'm successful. And to your point earlier Joe, about try things, experiment, fail, try again, whatever. If you're constantly providing value to the people around you, you're going to get exponential returns on that because other people aren't going to take the thousand dollar course to run TikTok ads. You know what I mean? And you go, well that's a thousand bucks. It's like, yeah, but that might get you a hundred thousand dollar pay raise. That's a hundred X return. Because you're the only one in the company that knows how to do the stupid marketing program because nobody else wants to focus on business development or whatever. And you don't have to be an entrepreneur to be able to do that. You can do that in your own organization. Or we had another example of, I mean this was more of a return on life. We had another example where somebody in our kids school, it's a private school, they just sucked at brand awareness. There was like there's no social proof around our kids school and that, you know, and obviously if you're a private school you have to have enrollment to have resources, to have more enrollment, to have more resources. Right. It's like this self fulfilling prophecy. One of the people in our friend group ran marketing for a big Fortune 500 company. She goes, well I mean I can do that for you guys if you want. It's, she's going, this is a no brainer. This is like the easiest thing in the universe. Why aren't we doing X, Y and Z? The whole rest of the world on that side of the equation was like, yeah, it's too complicated, we wouldn't know what to do. And here's this woman going, it's like take me two minutes a day, I can, you know. So she took it over, doesn't get paid for it, but got an ROI for the organization. So because now there's brand awareness and people are enrolling in the school which higher tuition, higher, you know what I mean? Like all these programs are now waterfall.

[A]

But if it were a for profit concern.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it was in an organization like she, she would have found the opportunity and then she could have charged for that.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. My point is, is that it doesn't have to always be about money. It can be ROI in terms of experience or in terms of something that. Ben, it benefits us to have this woman running this program, even though financially she's not getting anything out of it, nor are we, because more enrollment equals more opportunities for my kids, if that makes sense.

[A]

He thought, I could tell at the time that he thought he was going to get some pushback from me, you know, because he sees this as a financial show. And when I didn't, I'm like, yes, 22 years old. Build that curriculum. Heck, it does. 45 years old. Part of your budget should be on. And this goes back to spending money. How do I spend money? So it returns me more. I invest in the s. In me.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Let's go back to Alex.

[D]

Looking at dollars per hour is actually a wonderful way to continually measure what your intrinsic value is in the marketplace. And so it's like, look at what you made last year. Divide it by 2000, assuming a 40 hour workweek, and that's going to give you a rough estimate of what you make of what you make per hour. And I think that's actually really valuable because in some instances it's very humbling. If you divide by 8,000, you get all hours of the day. And that's super humbling. But with that, it's like, wow, I could make this number go way up.

[A]

I think it's a great way to think about it. If no matter what her Mosi says, no matter whether you say you're not or. Or you are, you are trading hours of your life for money coming in the front door. Even if you're just evaluating investments, one investment versus another, how much time did you take? If you divide the amount of money coming in the front door by the number of hours in the day, you're like, oh, my goodness, wasn't there a.

[B]

Movie about that where you had to trade time? I never watched the movie, but I've seen it on YouTube where you'd go to the coffee shop and it would be like, well, that'll be 11 minutes. And they had little timers built into their arm and they had to scan their time.

[C]

I vaguely remember that they had to lose time.

[B]

Yeah, that was the medium of exchange, not dollars.

[A]

Wasn't that part of that? What was the new show? That was. And by new, I mean it was like the Twilight Zone, but a newer kind of incarnation of it. It was called oh, Black Mirror. Wasn't that a black mirror episode where you had to trade time?

[C]

It would Fit. I don't remember that as a Black Mirror episode, but it would fit with that whole meal.

[A]

You.

[B]

Yeah, that's what you're doing, right?

[A]

Tracking that, though, immediately. Oh, gee. Gets your subconscious mind going, oh, how do I make this better?

[B]

How do I eliminate the things that are below that?

[A]

Right? Yes, absolutely. 100.

[C]

So many of us are locked into thinking our work week is 40 hours. When I'm done at 6 o', clock, then the rest of this is me time. And you don't really realize me time takes on a lot of different forms, not just television and couch.

[A]

I love that, Doug, because think about him. Think about him challenging all these assumptions.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

A dollars per every hour that I exist. Investing in myself versus waiting for my boss to design a curriculum. I'm not going to wait for my boss to design a curriculum. This is my life. I'm going to figure out where the opportunity is and I'm going to go make more money. I'm not going to take the job at the bowling alley. I'm going to take the $500 course so I can now get $25 an hour versus 10.

[C]

The first thing that I thought of when you said, you know, wait for my boss to design a curriculum. One of the things that would get my dander up so much when I was leading teams was people who would say, what's my career path? When they would look for some defined, documented career path for the role that they were in that you're going to tell them and that, that, yeah, either me or the company was going to document to say, here's the board game that we've predefined for you. If you roll the dice right, you'll get to move to this next step. Oh, my God. Why would you limit yourself that much? Why would you expect anybody else on top of limiting yourself to a career path within your existing role and within that company, why would you do that to yourself? And then to make it worse, why would you want somebody else to define that for you?

[A]

As part of our January extravaganza, we're going to talk to Anthony o' Neill about that specific thing. Doug, He's a guy that used to be with the Ramsey organization. He talks about getting your seat at the table. And if you're not working on your own priorities, you're by default working on somebody else's priorities. If you're asking your boss to define your career path, your boss will define it according to whatever the hell is their. Their dream. Right? Oh, here's what I'd love for you to do for me. Why do you want to not work on what lights you up?

[B]

Didn't Arnold Schwarzenegger just write a book called Be Useful? I thought that was the name of it.

[C]

Arnold Schwarzenegger can write.

[B]

He's a pretty. I was going to say pretty well known guy there, Dougie.

[C]

I know.

[A]

Yes, it's called Be Useful.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, basically what you're saying, Doug, is just find a way to be successful, be useful in the organization, to find your own path and don't limit it to what they want for you.

[A]

Let's go back out to Vegas. I can't figure out why so many of us think that we can't design our own curriculum.

[D]

If you think about how can I increase my earning capacity. So it was funny, right before we started this, we were talking. I was like, it will be kind of interesting to be on here because I know just about nothing about Roth IRAs and 401s.

[A]

And I said, that's two of us.

[D]

I have no idea. I've spent all of my effort on try to make more rather than try to optimize everything that I have. Because optimizing typically gets you incremental returns, not order of magnitude returns. And so I'll give you like a business example. So if I'm going to optimize a webpage, like, you know, I might be able to get 20% lifts here, changing the headline, change the opt in, whatever. But I'm not going to get a hundred times more. But I can get a hundred times more if I crank marketing and I know how to make content or I know how to run ads, or I know how to scale an outbound sales team. Like those things, if I increase inputs by a hundred x, I can get a hundred times more throughput. And I think a lot of people spend way too much time on the how do I optimize the 10 or 20% rather than like, how do I 10x, how much do I make? I think about things in order of magnitude. So When I started acquisition.com, i spent about a year thinking, like, if I could only do one thing and I only accomplished that one thing, what one thing would make the remainder of my goals or problems irrelevant. And so at the time it was, okay, so we want to start this family office. So for those who don't know, we'd taken probably 40 million in distributions from Jim Launch, which is the company we were just referencing, and then we sold for 46.2 million in a cash deal. And so we had some money at that point and I'd made a few investments that had worked out really well. And so I said, okay, this is what I'm going to do full time. And if that is going to be the plan, I could become the best investor, I could have best access to finance. There's all these things I could do. But the one thing that I came back to is if I just simply had more deal flow than everyone else on earth, then I could be an idiot and have no access to capital, but I would still have the best deals coming to me on the best terms, wanting to do deals only with me. And if I only did that, nothing else would matter. And so that was kind of the pretext to making, you know, to building the brand and making the content.

[A]

The question this is, I'm gonna stop right there because, man, he just, he just said a lot right there. OG But I think the key point there is why are we spending our days, our hours at X amount per hour, and we're optimizing to squeeze out another 20 cents, we're clipping coupons, we're asking for cost of living raises, we're doing backdoor Roth IRAs. And there's nothing wrong with any of these things. But he's like, I could do that or I could use that same time to think about. And I love this phrase, if I do this one thing, it makes all the other problems go away. That's astounding. Thinking about how carefully he's monitoring his use of time.

[B]

Yeah, and kind of taking this to the financial planning space or to your personal investing space. This is the conversation of, well, how much allocation should I be at 8% or 11% small cap value in my portfolio? It's like, I don't know. Or should I DO PRE tax 401 contributions or Roth contributions? You're asking a question that's unknowable about tax rates. 25 years from now, you're 40 in the future, you don't know what they're going to be in a quarter century. So instead of obsessing about that, why not figure out how do I save? And by the way, generally speaking, the person who's worried about the pre tax versus Roth is doing 3% in their 401 or 5%. Not throwing shade. I'm just saying that's where they think the leverage comes from. But the reality is the leverage in this whole operation comes from not saving 5% in your 401k, which is 5 grand a year, but figuring out a way to save 24,000 a year in your 401. That's the order of magnitude savings. Then all the other stuff doesn't matter. If you have $10 million in your IRA and no money in your brokerage account and no money in a Roth, I think you're doing pretty good. I think you can figure out a way to make that work. You know what I mean? Now, there'd be plenty of people that are like, well, but technically, if you had 6 million in pre tax and 2 million of Roth, and it would be the same dollar. Well, yeah, if you can predict the future tax rates, sure, but nobody can. My argument to you is, put your foot on the gas, keep your foot on the gas. And Alex says it way better than I can. In terms of order of magnitude returns versus incremental returns. Getting an extra 10% ain't going to hurt anybody's feelings. That's totally great. That's awesome.

[A]

He said very flippantly, yeah, we sold it for $46 million cash. Deal.

[B]

So we had had 40 million and then 46. I had some money. I had 86 million some money.

[A]

He's looking at $46 million and somebody else is going, okay, I've got 120,000. If I make that $124,000, like I. And don't get me wrong, we got to start somewhere, right?

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

But he's thinking on a whole different scale. And I believe it's just the nature of his thinking that's changing the game for him. I'm not going to worry about a 4% safe withdrawal rate. I'm not going to spend that. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make my number so ridiculously big that I can withdraw whatever the hell I want to spend A. Because I'm not focused on consumption and spending. He said that earlier. But number two, because I'm going to be working on these ridiculous numbers that, that are going to make it irrelevant. And the key is also, you know, there's this thing, the time box that we talk about. A lot of people think expanding the time. In fact, Doug even said earlier, you know, what are you doing with that extra time? We think about our 9 to 5, and certainly at the beginning of your career, expanding the time box makes sense. But if we take that away and we just make different decisions inside the time box that we have that are more impactful, what's the one thing I could do that gets rid of these other five things that I need to do? How do I make sure I don't gotta do five, I just gotta do one.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

What a. What a phenomenal place.

[B]

This is what I love about the 10x is easier than 2x book. Going back to Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy's, I don't know, second book, maybe third book, something. Yeah, the whole idea of that 10x is easier than 2x concept is once you start thinking in 10x numbers instead of 2x numbers, you have to change the game. You cannot do incremental returns to 10x. And that's what Alex is talking about here as well. It's like you have to think a thousand times differently to have 10x multiples in your life, whatever that looks like. You know, if you're looking at your health and you're going, I weigh 2:20, I need to cut some weight. I'd like to be 2:15. You know, you can do that in a week if you just don't eat, go on a starvation diet. You know, I mean, like, that doesn't change anything. But if you're like, how do I look? Like Mr. Olympia? That's 10x thinking. It changes everything. And you go, well, I have to have this food plan and I have to. You know what I mean? Like, you start exploring all these different things. Your brain is so super powerful to solve problems. When you ask really good questions and changing the question from like, how do I make this incremental change? To how do I? What's this one thing to do so I don't have to have any problems? Like, your brain goes, whoa, okay, one thing.

[A]

That's a whole new game.

[B]

Yeah, well, I mean, you could do a whole bunch of little things, but you didn't say that. You said you want to do one thing. You know, that's exponential. Thinking is a fun experience.

[A]

First question then is, how do I make the deals come my way versus going to somebody down the street to.

[D]

Circle back down to? Like, okay, that's clouds. How do we get back to dirt? It's thinking, what's the highest leverage thing that you have that you can put your time into or effort into that will get you the highest return? And so if you're in a selling situation, then fundamentally, the salesman who sells the thing with the most zeros makes the most money. That's it. If you look at law of sales and making money, the more expensive the thing you sell, the more money you make. If you're selling gym memberships, you're not going to make a ton. You could crush it and make 100 grand a year if you Sell cars, more zeros on it, you can crush it and sell, make 400,000 a year. If you sell luxury, sometimes high end or higher volume, you can get maybe a million dollars. And that's if you're total savage. But that's kind of where you're at. You sell companies, you can make 10, 20, $50 million a year. The limit does not exist from that perspective. So that's on the sales side. On the other side, you have the promotion side, which is letting more people know about your stuff. If you're in business, that's kind of like the front end thing. So we can optimize lots. But like, wouldn't it be cooler to just have a hundred times more people who are knocking at your door?

[A]

Correct.

[D]

Because I think that if there's only one law. So acquisition.com's logo actually has some thought behind it. But there's two things that I care about in business. One is supply and demand, which is these two curves. I think it's the fundamental law of all things. And then this triangle here is basically a fulcrum leverage. And so it's how do I get as much as possible for the effort that I put in? And how can I shift supply demand in my favor? And so back to the value creation thing. If I am, I'm employed, right? And I want to make more money, then I see the amount of money that you make as the amount of value that you create. As in financial, how much money do you bring in and correlate to that? How closely tied to that, how directly do you impact that? And is it clear? Number two is your ability to negotiate. So it's like, okay, value is the size of the pie, negotiation is the slice of the pie. And then the third piece that influences that negotiation is supply demand in terms of your replaceability. Well, you're a sales guy, you do 10 million in sales for your company. You're like, they should be paying me more. And if you have a great negotiating skill, maybe you could get that. Except if there's 100 guys who are just as good as you, who are willing to do it for less than your commodity. And so trying to shift supply and demand in your favor does have elements of just how do I become unique? How do we become a market of one? How do I have a skill stack that makes me different? And where you get outsized returns is adding skills together. That's what creates unicorns. Like if you had at the most basic level, you understand how to do math, it's like, okay, that's a skill. Hard to really trade for money, but it's a skill, kind of. And then you learn bookkeeping, and you're like, okay, that's something else that I can do.

[A]

And I go from math teacher to, I can do books for 50 clients, whatever. Different people.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

So you learn bookkeeping, and then from there you get a master's in accountancy, and you're like, okay, now I can become a director of finance. There's things like that. And then all of a sudden, you learn about tax strategy, and you learn about insurance. So maybe you become a VP of finance, and then you learn about mergers and acquisitions, and you learn how to raise funding, and you learn how to do diligence and financial diligence. Then all of a sudden, you're a CFO or an M&A CFO, and now you're making millions of dollars. But fundamentally, each of those is a skill that if you only knew taxes, that's it. You have to know math. And so oftentimes, when we're starting out, we feel like the skills that we're learning aren't as valuable, and they're not. But they open the doors to the next level. And that's why college classes have requisites. You have to do algebra one before you can do Algebra two. And I think a lot of people look at Calculus seven, and they're like, well, that guy's making a ton. It's like, yeah, well, you got to start it out arithmetic or algebra. And I think that basically carries through in business. And if you have that cfo and all of a sudden he also knows how to advertise. Whoa. And they know how to negotiate well. And so each one of them actually gets an order of magnitude improvement on the remaining skills. And so the more skills that you have, the more of a weapon you become. And so I think fundamentally, my wealth plan has been to learn as much as I possibly could about all the skills that are required to make money.

[A]

I'm going to stop him right there for a moment. I think the idea of skill stacking, you did a good job there. I don't think we have to rehash that OG But I think what he's talking about here that's really important is going back to the beginning, there's two pieces. Number one, the size of the pie. What size market are you working in? Unfortunately, there are some people that are working in a market where your ability to make a ton of money, and I've had this personally before, where your ability to make a Ton of money, you realize, Podcasting. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, we're in it right now. There's going to be difficulty making money because there's nobody in this business making money. And even if you're a unicorn, you're going to be the person that maybe makes mediocre money versus big money. So if we're talking about making $100 million, which is the title of this show, this episode, you can't be in a market where nobody even has a shot at doing that.

[B]

Well, I think about this in the context of the time trade of money for time, in addition to the market and the pie and all that sort of stuff. You know, it's just you, you know, if you're, if in using his selling example, if you're selling things that everybody has, everybody can do, everybody can get, and they're all a dollar a piece, you're gonna run out of time before you get to the spot where you've made enough money. Because it's such a low outcome per. Per sale or whatever you want to call it. The widget is so inexpensive and there's no. He used zeros. There's just no zeros on it. And you only have so much time in a day. It's like you can only trade so many of those widgets for time. And since each widget is relatively low cost or low value, there's not enough hours in the day to trade that many widgets away. Contrasted to in his example of, you know, if you're the best company seller in the world, those are all have tons of zeros attached to them and there's not very many of those deals on a daily basis. So you can put a lot of energy into it and get all the zeros.

[C]

Basically, there's two things that I don't know if I want to disagree with or refute, but there were two notions that just came up in that last segment that I didn't love, one of which is the use of the word pie because it implies that there's a fixed amount. And I don't like that notion because it's self limiting. If you're going to say there's no money in this, I can stack all these skills in this industry, but there's no way to make money in podcasting. I disagree. We haven't figured it out yet, but somebody will, somebody who knows how to stack the right combination of skills and have a vision for where there is some willingness to invest in this new way of either subject matter or delivery mechanism or something around Media transmission, in this case podcasting. Somebody's going to figure it out. So I don't look at his.

[A]

But hold on, Doug, look at his. Look at his attention to tracking and to numbers. Right. And two, okay, the data. If he looks at the amount of money the average podcaster make versus the average. He used car sales. Right. Versus the average car salesperson. Just the average person in that arena, it's very easy to figure out that one of them has a higher number on it than another one has. Like, for the average person, they are making a different number. Somebody who's selling companies versus somebody who's podcasting. Take the number of people divide by the average income or, you know, the income they make. Find the average income. You're going to find that selling companies. There is a bigger pie than there is in the podcasting world.

[C]

Of course there is. But what I'm getting at is you can use that information to inform yourself to be redundant there, to inform your decision on where you apply your time. Yeah, but you don't have to. If you are super, super passionate and you have a skill set that says, I think I can crack that nut, don't let that average income, average pool of money, don't let that dissuade you. If that is your passion and you think you have a way to solve that puzzle, don't say, there's no money in that pie. There absolutely is. Somebody else just hasn't figured it out yet. So that's my first thought.

[A]

If.

[C]

I mean, just don't let the averageness of what are most people making in this space. Don't let that slam a door shut if you don't want it to. The second thing is about skill stacking. I think you have to add something to that, which may have been mentioned, but I just want to really call it out. So maybe this isn't an absolute me refuting something, but you can stack all the skills you want. I had somebody working for me once who had seven master's degrees from Ivy League institutions, and they were working for an idiot like me, which should tell you something. They weren't selling those skills the right way. You can stack all of the skills you want until you figure out how to sell them 100%, then that's not going to do you any good.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Be careful about just taking classes. Taking classes, taking classes.

[A]

And how did he couch it? He couched it. And that's why I love these breakdown sessions, because he couched it under negotiation. He didn't couch it under just learning more Skills. He said, seconds. Your ability to negotiate for more of the pie. And to do that, you have to stack more skills. One of those skills is going to have to be negotiation, which was the first thing he said.

[C]

Yeah, and that's why I said, maybe I'm not flat out refuting something. I just really wanted to call it out.

[A]

That is fantastic. How many times have you seen that person that you're talking about? You see it all the time. I'm just gonna go back and get.

[B]

Another degree before I can get started. I need to read the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, that was our industry, right?

[A]

And how many people that were, that were broke? I remember John Hance, the leader of our area of Detroit, when I was with American Express, John Hance said one day the secretary accidentally left everybody's paychecks on the copier when I went to make a copy. He goes, so I got to see. Didn't really want to see, but I got to see what everybody was making. And obviously when you have that information, you're not going to not look at it, how much everybody the office is making. He goes, and then I realized the guy two offices down from me with stacks of books all over his office, who I went to about every question, right? I was making like three times the amount that guy was making. And that's when I realized that knowledge didn't pay. Knowledge didn't pay. Hustle paid. And knowing where the knowledge. Where I can find the knowledge.

[B]

Knowledge transfer.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. If I know how to find that knowledge from this guy and then give it to the client in a timely manner, that pays. But having the knowledge, this dude's not getting paid a thing. Yeah, great point, Doug. Coming up next, Harmosi's knowledge bomb train. I hate that phrase, but it true. But it is true. Here continues. Can't wait to hear what Alex says next. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info.

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[A]

American Skyjacker tells the story of D.B. cooper, copycat Martin McNally, who hijacked a plane and jumped out with $500,000. But that's just the start of this epic true crime saga. Now American Skyjacker is an action packed documentary available on all major platforms. Go to americanskyjacker.com to subscribe to the podcast and watch the film. And look out for a new bonus episode of the podcast coming soon. American Skyjacker. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.

[B]

Hey, this is Jen Pilcher, Navy Spouse of 23 years. And when I'm not helping military spouses connect in our digital community, I'm stacking Benjamins.

[A]

Alex Harozi now dives into. Well, another fun topic.

[D]

The more you learn about it, the more different ways you see to make money. And then all that exists around you are just unlimited opportunities. But when you have few skills, there are few opportunities. And so if you're like, man, how do I get that big bet? How do I back the truck up and like really go all in on something? Well, if you can't see opportunity, it's because you have no skills.

[A]

You've got a bunch of brilliant individuals in this office today. As I walk through, you've got all these entrepreneurs here talking, collaborating, learning from your team as they're learning. I'm wondering how you help these entrepreneurs. And much like you said, even if I'm an employee working for somebody else, I still need to know how to negotiate, I still need to know how to sell myself. Do you start with them on what they're best at and then that's the next skill that I go to. So you're talking about, hey, I'm good at math. So then next is bookkeeping or do you say, well, to make more money, I gotta know. Xyz, like the curriculum, is it predefined or is it defined on what your strengths are?

[D]

Kind of neither actually. I operate everything off of the theory of constraints, which is that every system will grow until it's constrained and then it will grow no further. And so adding other things to a system, that's not the constraint. So if you think about this visually, like a highway, right? So you've got like a two lane highway. Let's say that there's a bridge and then there's two lanes on the other side, right? So if there's a one lane bridge, that's going to be the constraint. Doesn't matter how many cars you put on one side, you're still going to slow down to the rate of one car crossing the bridge.

[A]

This is the classic book, the goal.

[D]

Yeah, you're talking about that 100%. I've actually never read the book, but.

[A]

Oh, I think you'd love it just based on this so far.

[D]

And so if I were to add lanes on the other side of the bridge, it would add potential to the system, but not throughput. And so a lot of people spend a lot of their time adding potential to the system, but not throughput, being able to identify what is the actual constraint of the system. And the system can, if you're an employee, can be you. You are the system. You have inputs, and the inputs is going to be the time that you allocate towards whatever endeavors you have.

[A]

Where is my biggest roadblock?

[D]

Yeah, what's the thing that's limiting me now in that instance? It's like, okay, well, if did just need to learn tax and I could double my income, then that's the constraint. Now this is where it's like 201 version of this, which is if we think about strategy as prioritization of resources, ideally limited resources against unlimited opportunities, that's all strategy is. It's like, I've got this much stuff and I've got all these things I could do. How do I allocate that stuff to get the best returns? Sometimes the best strategic move is something that's not on your to do list. That's where the order of magnitude increases happen in people's lives. That's when somebody walks in your life and says, hey, I don't think you should be, you know, a cfp. You should consider making a podcast and doing this whole other thing. It's an order of magnitude change in terms of the opportunity. Now there's also a huge stack of skills that you have to learn along the way in order to do it and unlock that. And so those are almost always.

[A]

Alex. During my 56 years on this earth, the times when there were huge breakthroughs in my life, it was never on my to do list. It always came from Seth on your team. And I were talking last night about this, about, and it's always right in front of me, and I didn't see it.

[D]

And so one of my favorite sales closes that I heard at an event years ago is this guy wrote a million dollars on the whiteboard. He looked out in the crowd and he pointed to a lady. He's like, how much do you make? And she said, $50,000 a year. And so he wrote $50,000 underneath the million. And then he drew a line and he subtracted 50,000 from a million. And he said, $950,000 per year is what you pay in ignorance, not knowing how to make a million dollars a year.

[A]

Wow.

[D]

And I.

[A]

That'S a slap across the face.

[C]

That's a little harsh.

[A]

What you pay in ignorance, not knowing how. But the difference is. And I thought it was harsh, too, Doug. But the key is she wanted to make a million dollars a year. If she didn't want to make a million dollars a year, she didn't care. It isn't harsh. If she didn't care about making a million dollars a year, that's super harsh. But the fact that she cares about it OG and she doesn't know, I think that's. That's really what he's getting at in the most Gordon Ramsay way possible, according Ramsay.

[C]

You stupid.

[B]

This is not how you cook an egg. It's like, I'm sorry.

[A]

It's just because it is ignorance. There's a way to get there. She just doesn't know what it is. So if you think about it, it's a cost. And what did he say earlier? Leverage. And in this case, you're trying to leverage yourself. The knowledge is out there. Somebody's already doing this. I don't have to reinvent the wheel is the other assumption here. Somebody's already doing it, and I'm paying this cost of ignorance because I don't know what it is. I got to figure out what it is. Going back to again, setting up your own curriculum?

[B]

Well, I think it's to piggyback a little bit off of what Doug said earlier. If it's already existing in your space, right. If you're selling cars or you're selling houses or you're a tech manager or whatever the case may be, the highest paid person in your world exists. And if that person is an aspirational thing, right. If you look at people who are realtors, there are plenty of realtors. One of my good friends is a realtor, and he has all these stats kind of off the top of his head. But some insane proportion of realtors who start being realtors don't actually finish being realtors and close one or two deals a year and barely kind of keep their lips above water. But then you see the television shows of the person who sells the $100 million houses in Beverly Hills and they're driving Ferraris and flying private jets, and you go, well, is that person that much more talented or skilled or whatever the case may be? I don't know. But it exists. And the model for being successful in that space is very easy to find. It doesn't mean it's easy to do, but it's easy to find. And learning how to do that or copying the recipe card or however you want to think about it as exists in that space. Now, there might be an industry that you're in that doesn't have that and you're like, I would love to make a million dollars a year and I bag groceries at Walmart. But there are no grocery baggers at Walmart who make a million dollars a year. There's not a path for that. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't do what you're doing. But there's just not that thing that's out there to model after or to do. So in some respect, kind of seeing what Doug was saying earlier, it's like you're your own limiting belief there. However, you have to kind of look at the total available market. The other thing I love is this concept of constraint management. And so many people in so many things say the answer is do. I mean, he even said it earlier, do more. It's like, well, you got to do more of the right stuff. Because if all you do is shove, you know, if you're in sales and all you do is shove more leads in the funnel without having the ability to process that or without having the. The system behind that to run that through the funnel, so to speak, you're only as fast as that one lane highway. It doesn't matter how many cars you pack up behind that, you're still only going to go one car off per bridge, you know. So if you haven't read the book, the Goal, that is a great holiday read. Well, I guess we're past the holidays. It's a great.

[A]

It's a fun story. It actually is just a fun story.

[C]

It's a story.

[B]

I love parable books. For whatever reason, I can play along with the story. Like you said, just kind of. I'm reading it like I'm watching a movie versus a book that they're just shoving data in your face or something like that. I love Herbie. Herbie's my boy. You're my boy, Herbie.

[C]

The other great thing about that book is it's a walk back in time because it was written like 40 years ago. And when they talk about the guy's drinking in his office.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And they've got these new things called fax machines. It's like. It's like reading the Mad Men.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But as a business book, it still all applies.

[A]

I went back and read it with my son two years ago. Nick and I read it together and we loved it.

[C]

Yeah, it all applies.

[A]

Yeah, it was a great time.

[B]

Read the goal.

[D]

All right.

[A]

We're gonna go back here in episode one of two. We're gonna go back to Alex here for just a minute longer before we say goodbye.

[D]

Fundamentally, you can make a billion dollars a year. How do I know? Because there are people who make a billion dollars a year. So it is physically possible. It is doable. You can do it. The discrepancy between my earning and that is two things. Skill and time. If you have a clear path to like, how will I get to a billion? Then it's time. If you don't know the path, it's skill.

[A]

It's funny because we open this by you talking though. It's gotta be skill for most of us because on a day to day basis even you said you're working in fog.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Do you got to get comfortable with the fog?

[D]

Oh, yeah. We were talking earlier about the kind of like the value of like, okay, we create this value. That's the pie. Negotiations, the slice of the pie and then how replaceable you are. Right. And I said there was one other caveat I was going to make, which is perfect timing here, which is risk. The one thing that trumps all of that is risk. You can make outsized returns without having been the one who made the value, without having tremendous. I mean, you have to have some ability to negotiate if you're going to take on risk. But the reason Eduardo Savrin is worth 15 billion or whatever he's worth now. So if you don't know who he was, he was the guy that put $30,000 into a checking account for an LLC called Facebook.

[C]

Never heard of it.

[A]

What's that?

[D]

Right. And so he ended up doing, from what I understand, almost nothing with the growth of Facebook. But he was the one who took the risk. And so because of that, he was compensated. I had a conversation with an entrepreneur not that long ago who was taking home probably like two or three million dollars a year personally. And he wanted to join us [e-mail] he's like, well, this is kind of what I make now. So I kind of have to make that as my baseline, although I can afford that. That's fine. The issue was he wanted to make the same income he was making, taking 100% risk, taking none and have upside. That's where it doesn't work. And so if you want to make more within a business, you need to take on more risk. The people who are most highly compensated in any business are the ones who incur more risk. Sales guys incur risk. They have commissions. Some people are only Commission, you take on more risk. Like, you know, if you're an insurance sales guy, you work within an organization, but you're very much an independent. You're like, you're a mini entrepreneur, if you will. And so you can pretty much look at compensation based on all the variables I said earlier, comma, with a massive caveat on risk. And risk is kind of the force multiplier across all of that. You can have all the other ones almost irrelevant. But if you're willing to take on risk, you will get disproportionately rewarded. And I think me personally, where you get the real outsized returns is where it looks like risk to other people, but to you, you understand it, and then it's not risky, and then you just get the outsized returns without the risk.

[A]

It looks like risk to other people.

[B]

Seen mic drop?

[C]

Yes.

[B]

I mean, this is the thing about being an entrepreneur that people who are not entrepreneurs don't get. It was interesting what he said about the person who wanted to join him, who wanted to get the same amount of money for taking no risk versus taking the risk. And these are conversations that come up in our business with our clients, and they're, you know, how do I design comp plans and things like that? I talk about it with my friends who are financial planning firm owners like me, and just the range of expectations that people have based on their level of exposure. And Joe, you were in this business, and I know you remember that it's really the only business I can speak to, but I know that you remember periods of time where your staff got paid and you didn't. I mean, that's happened in the podcast business with us. Right. There's been times where the teams got paid and you and I don't necessarily, because that's the risk we take. And I had an interesting observation about this a couple weeks ago. I was having a conversation with one of our team members, and I said, out of curiosity, would you rather have above average guaranteed income or median income with above average, significantly above average upside potential? Like, I. E. Do you want the guarantee that's really good, or do you want the potential. Not guarantee, but the potential of Amazing. Right? Whatever those numbers mean to you. And she had an interesting perspective on this. What she said was, I know what the answer is, what it's supposed to be, but I can tell you where I am today. And I think there's one piece of this that Alex is kind of glossing over, which is it's easy to say, I can take a lot of Risk. When you've got 40 million in the bank, it's easy to go, well, I'll just be all risk. But when you're 22 and rent's due and your car payment, you got student loans, you have to temper that risk with some sort of non variability too. And as time goes on, the more that, and then maybe this goes to spending and kind of the whole story arc of this whole thing. The more that you can keep your guarantees low and continue to work on the upside of being variable or continue to have the upside be the risk part of it, the higher that that goes, the faster that that goes, right? If you're, if you have lifestyle inflation, you make a hundred grand a year and then you make 150 and then you make 200 and that's your lifestyle number that keeps on growing. And then you go to a new job, you're going to say to your boss, I need to make 200. But if you can keep your lifestyle at 70 and your income goes to 100 and your income goes to 125 and your income goes to 150, you can go, hold on, time out. Can I keep my salary at 125? Can I get more RSUs instead? How does that work? How can I be rewarded for the growth of this organization? Because I want a piece of that as opposed to you just paying me another 3% cost of living raise. And maybe this all kind of ties together with all that.

[A]

Absolutely. No, it 100% ties together. And you could see just the difference in his thinking versus the average optimization thinking that we'll see all the time in the personal finance community. I wanted to also draw back to this idea of risk. Like how do you mitigate that risk? When he says something that seems risky to everybody else, but it's not, I think that's where we get back to his skill acquisition. The more you make yourself a unicorn, the less risky it is for you, it is for everybody else. Because they don't understand the skill set that you have. They totally don't get it. To them it looks like magic. I mean, I'm sitting here with him in Las Vegas personality, right?

[B]

I mean, like to me it seems risky to have a W2 job that's just in my soul. I don't know where that came from.

[A]

But that's also your perspective because you've been there since you were born. You know, I mean, that's what I mean. An entrepreneur since then. So for you, you're like, oh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do that. There's a ton of people.

[B]

It would be risky to take a guaranteed outcome.

[A]

Yeah. There's a ton of people listening to this, though, that are completely. Their whole life existence has been working in some other capacity for somebody else. So for them, what you do seems like magic.

[B]

Yeah. Or risky. And I think it's not.

[C]

It's easy to forget about the risk that that W2 job can go away immediately without any cause. So many states are at will employment states, and you don't think about that risk because of the. The lull that you get into with that check showing up. That's true two weeks until one day you're like, what the f? I just lost my job and I was doing everything right. You don't think about that risk until it happens. Where you live with the sense of, you, OG and Joe, you guys live with a sense of risk every day because you're entrepreneurs. That becomes your state of normalcy. And so that's normal to you. And it's terrifying for a W2 employee because they don't want that sense of risk hanging over there, that feeling of risk hanging over their heads every day, because that's not the environment that they've put themselves in. But they're both rich. It's just choose your risk.

[A]

Choose your risk. Yeah. I remember there was a real estate guy, Doug, Robert Allen, who very famously said that there's two doors in life. One says opportunity, the other one who says security. The person who chooses the security door gets neither. Limiting your opportunity and your boss can get rid of you whenever you want.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

I mean, it's not for everybody. Look, I was. I tried being an entrepreneur a couple of times. It wasn't for me, but I was fully aware of the security door that I picked when I spent most of my career in more of a W2 environment. But I knew what I was getting into. I didn't about it.

[A]

One thing I saw, though, from you, Doug, over a long period of time was what Alex said about increasing that skill set every time you truly were an intrapreneur, because you went from a job with this company to a job with this company for more money, to a job with this company for more money, to a job with this company for more money, leveraging your unique unicorn talent. You don't have to be an entrepreneur for any of this to work. And that's, I think, actually probably a good place to leave this, is that if you've made it through this episode and you think this is just for entrepreneurs, you're crazy because this is all about just taking your career path. And even if it's going to be working for four other people and designing that career path so that you can do what I saw you do, Doug, during your. Your career, how can we do that? How can we do it better, faster, stronger?

[C]

Most of that was through my skill that I developed for selling to convince people that I was not as irritating as I come off.

[B]

Negotiation.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Yeah, negotiation and selling.

[A]

And then the reason he lost that job was it turned out he was. He totally was every bit as irritating as people thought. Okay, we've got the groundwork, everybody. In the first half here on Friday, we are now going to take that groundwork and we are going to see Harmozi take it. And now build the machine. And it's going to be super fun. But most fun is how do we make a hundred million dollars? Part two, Doug, lot to unpack there. What should we. What should we have learned from today?

[B]

Hope you were taking notes. I've got two pages on the tablet, so that's where I am.

[A]

There's so much my head hurts. In the best way possible, Doug, what should we have learned?

[C]

I don't have that much. It's pretty simple today, Joe. Want to be more profitable in 2025. Build that skill set, learn from our mentors right here all year long and we'll fight fear, kick self sabotage to the curb and begin stacking those Benjamins. Do we even need two more? No, I don't think so. Special thanks to Al, Alex Hormozi and his Las Vegas based team for helping make our 2025 kickoff possible. Especially the amazing Seth Silvers. You'll find more on [e-mail] this show is the property of SB Podcasts, LLC, Copyright 2024 and is created by Joe Salsihai. Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You'll find out about our our awesome [e-mail] along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[C]

And before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don't take advice from people you don't know. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I'm Joe's monster neighbor, Doug. And we'll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin show. Steve, I would like you to just grab that little audio clip of Joe saying, great point, Doug and play the out of that whenever you can in the future.

[A]

Great point, Doug. Great point, Doug. Great point, Doug.