¶ Intro
You can build something very big in about five to seven years, And the problem is most people spend that same five to seven years reliving the same thirty days over and over again. You have to stay in that painful place. Staying in the pain is what gives you the catalyst to learn how.
To get out of the pay Please welcome a serial entrepreneur, best selling author, and the mind behind a one hundred million dollar business portfolio, Alex Hormosis.
What's that number one misconception you hear when people are thinking about building a business, and you go, that's the issue.
I think the conflict sequence.
A lot of people who are wanting to make money believe that you're making money comes from investing.
In Vesting is the last thing you do, not the
¶ Get Clear on the Exact Actions That Drive Success
first thing you do.
How do you get over the block of I don't want to work for free?
I actually think it's entitlement. You're not working for free, you're learning and then you're earning.
Should you do what you love for money and love.
What you do? I think this is big myth. Number two.
People fail not because there's some magical list nobody has. They fail because it's an obvious list nobody does.
It's the obvious list.
If you were trying to get in shape, you know you should eat less than you should move more.
You already know what you're supposed to do. The question is why you aren't doing it.
What do you think is the number one emotion that people don't know how to control that leads to family fear? The number one Health and Well Inness podcast, Jay Setty, Jay Setty set Alex Almosey. I've been looking forward to this interview for a long long time. My friends are fans, I'm a fan, and I know we were in touch, like maybe even a couple of years ago. Now it's been but I'm so happy to be at the holy grail of acquisition dot com. I saw the big logo
when I walked in. Congratulations and everything you've been up to, and I'm so glad to introduce you to my audience, some of who I'm sure follow you already and love your work. And then I'm hoping you get a ton of new fans and a ton of new people being impacted through this as well. So thank you so much for doing this.
Well, thank you so much for having me, and I've been I'd say a mirror right back. I've been looking forward to talking because I think there's so much good stuff that I think is going to happen.
So I'm very excited.
I love it, Alex. I want to start with asking
¶ Why Most People Misunderstand How to Build a Business
you something that I've been thinking about a lot when I'm talking to people today, and it's when I think about my community, my audience who's listening right now, what are you going to unblock for them? When you if someone read all your books, listen to your podcast, listen to today's podcast, what are they going to unblock that's been tripping them up, keeping them behind, or holding them back.
I think they would have clarity on what actions were required to get what they wanted, and then at that point they would only have to just think like why am I not doing it? Which is a separate conversation, but there's a lot of confusion. I would say around like what are the things that are required in order to create a business, in order to create an income? I would say that I'm an objectivist, and so I just look at what are the things that are observable?
And I think a lot of time people spend inside their heads trying to think of about manifesting and energy and all of this stuff. When it's like, we got to let people know about the stuff we have, we got to have something to sell, and we got to make sure that what we're charging costs less than it costs to deliver it. And we try and do that
as many times as we can. And so each of those pieces obviously as frameworks behind them, but they're all tied to one thing, which is just what actions are required. And that's been the single pervasive frame in my life that has made navigating reality significantly easier for me, because I was very confused coming up, and I was like, I don't know what any of this is. And I read all these self help books and I felt more confused after the tenth book than I did in the
first book. And then it's just like, Okay, what do I have to do? And then that is kind of what has started this journey for me.
What's that number one misconception? You hear what people are thinking about building a business, making money, changing their financial situation. What's the number one thing you hear and you go, that's the issue.
I think the conflate sequence is probably the first and biggest thing because a lot of people who are wanting to make money believe that the making money comes from investing, and investing is the last thing you do, not the first thing you do. And so one of the things is the look at people are at the end of their careers and say, Okay, well, these guys are making all these these bets. Right if I just bought this mean coin or I just bought bitcoin and twenty thirteen,
I'd be super rich. But it actually doesn't take into consideration what a decision making process like that would create, which is if you took a swing at every type of bitcoin, because you can't just say I would only pick this one. You'd have to say I pick every single super long shot. It's like we probably would have lost them ninety nine of the other bets, and so
¶ Is the 'Get Rich Quick' Model Really Possible?
it's like we have to take it an aggregate. And so I would say making active income cool again rather than the passive bed and really just gambling. Is Probably the first thing that people mess up is that they're they somehow think that working or active income is not scalable, when in reality, the people who have the most money typically have tremendously high incomes, and it's because of the
excess of cash flow from that income. Are they able now to make big swings with riskier bets that sometimes pay off and sometimes don't. But you can't take those swings unless you have more cash lots coming in from the things you do every day.
You know what, no one's ever said it that well, like from everyone I've spoken to, And I'm so glad you pointed it out, because I completely agree. I have so many friends who, when they saw the rise of crypto or whatever it was, jumped in with a large sum of their life savings because they heard of a friend of a friend of a friend who'd made a killing, put it all in there. A week later, it dropped
by like ten k, they pulled it all out. The next week it went up double and it was just a mess, and so many of them lost like ten twenty thirty forty pounds dollars. And it's all because you're thinking that's the way to get there, and it's cooler and it's smarter, and like you're a genius, and you're right. Actually, everyone I know that's made amazing money on any of that already had tons of money and it was play money for them. So it just changed into this. So
what's happening there? Why is it that we've been led down this thought process, and how do we get out of it?
I mean, I think it's fundamentally something for nothing fallacy of like how can I get rich quick? How can I do it really easily? And basically, the more it feels like luck is usually where you should have your first red flag if you I mean, I have a belief that if you control all the variables, then you can predict the outcome. Now, we don't always control all the variables in any given situation, but the greater number of variables we control, the greater influence we have over
the outcome. And if you're getting into something like this and you're like, I actually don't even know what the variables are, then it's like you are one hundred percent gambling, and so this is your life savings. Would you put it on black at the casino? Probably not. This is really not that different than that, except at thexino you have no nods at least.
Right here, it's like you have no idea.
And typically by the time especially gen pop kind of retail investors find out about something, it is the peak and it is too late, and so you have to be at the very beginning of these if you want to be speculative, which I whoheartedly am not a big fan of speculative investments in general, because it's basically the greater fool theory, which is what they called in the investment world, which is just like we just keep selling to the greater and greater fool until sometimes somebody is
the greatest fool of all and then it drops.
Right.
And so I prefer to think about instead of thinking of investments and active income, I think of the just money per unit of time, and that kind of takes out this binary what I would consider a false binary if active and passive and think well, and I feel like I can prove this pretty clearly, which is we live in time and we collect money in that period of time. And so fundamentally, all we want to do, if one to increase our income is just think what
are we earning per unit? And this is where again bad piece of advice is like never sell your time. It's like, okay, well, if someone give you a billion dollars for an hour, would you.
Not sell that?
I would, right, And so it's a question of how much is your time worth? And then that creates a
¶ The Five Emotional Stages Every Entrepreneur Goes Through
much more actionable decision making framework of is this worth it or not? And to ladder up to the active versus passive, it's how active is it versus how passive is it? And it's my belief that nothing is passive because there's always going to be a certain amount of if you're doing it right.
Let's say, if you want, you made one passive.
If you're doing it the right way, you probably should have looked at a hundred deals and all of that took time, and all of that takes diligence, and then after doing all this analysis, then you decide to make this investment. And so to say that it's passive, it's like it doesn't take into account all of the research that goes into ahead of time, which is absolutely still
work now after the investment. Sure, but there's still time that you're trading by first breaking that idea of like if we're in order for me to get rich, it must be something that I don't trade my time for. I think is like big myth number one. So if we assume that, then we say, okay, I have to trade my time for money because money comes in over time.
What are the things that I can trade my time for that will get me more than I'm currently getting, which is a much more solvable problem that also is significantly less risky. And so especially when you're trading time, we have some and so we don't we really just risk the time to be like I would, I never want to I don't want to sell them. I'm I'm not a slave. It's like calm down, where it's a voluntary exchange and if it's and here's the thing is, if you don't think the price is worth it, then
don't make the trade. And that's one of the beauties of capitalism is it's two parties both saying they'll be better off. And so fundamentally, I would say the focus of the content and stuff that I put out is how can I equip people with the skills so that when they trade that time think it more for it, and then continue to trade up and up and up for the rest of their careers.
Yeah. I mean, that's actually such counterintuitive advice to what I feel has been spreading on the internet for the last two decades of every conversations around passive income. Yeah, I feel like every one of my friends is addicted to figuring out how they can make passive income and those are the same people that are not making any
more money than they already were. But it's this addiction and obsession with if I figured this out, then I won't have I can quit my day job and whatever it may be.
Ye, And I've had influence so that my neighbor is he owns Panda Express and so last time I checked, they did three point seven billion dollars in revenue and they have about a twenty seven percent that March, and so he took home nine hundred and thirty five million dollars in personal income, not investment income. And so people see his investment porfolio, which is impressive, as you can imagine be doing it forty five years, and so.
That starts to add up, right.
But the thing is you can only take these kind of bigger swings or bigger bets because he has this very regular cash. So they spent forty five years building, and I would say that what's interesting is that you can build something very big in about five to seven years.
And the problem is that I think most people spend that same five to seven years reliving the same thirty days over and over again, jumping from thing to thing to thing, and never actually getting the root set so that they can pay down their ignorance tax of not knowing enough. Basically, there's I would say there's five stages that most newer entrepreneurs are people who want to pursue income go through. So the first is what I call
uninformed optimism. So your friend tells you about this thing they made ten grand on and you're like, that sounds amazing. You're uninformed, but you're optimistic, right, and so then you get into it, and then all of a sudden you get to informed pessimism. So you get in and then
¶ Start Here to Learn the Skills That Actually Make Money
you put your money in and then it drops and you're like, wow, this sucks. And then you know, people are like buy the dip, and so you're like, OK, I'm gonna put more money in. And so then you get to kind of stage three, which is the value to spare, where you're like, oh my god, I've lost so much money. I have no idea what's going on
right now. And at stage three there's kind of a fork and so either people then go, well, my other friend told me about this other thing, and they jump back to step one and go to uninformed optimism, and then they just they funnel through that loop over and over again. Now to break through that dip, you have to basically get to stage four, which is informed optimism.
So now you understand the rules of the game, you understand the variables at play, and it's not as good as you thought it was, but you at least get it, and so from there then you can get to achievement.
Right is the fifth step.
But the thing is that you have to stay in that third painful place, because staying in the pain is what gives you the catalyst.
To learn how to get out of pain.
And so rather than trying to pull your parachute, it's like, I have to trudge through this so that it forces me to learn the individual skills, the individual variables that affect this outcome, and that means I might have to take twenty more lashings to finally get it, and then point it starts to tick up, and then that's when you start to.
Become more of an expert, more of a master at something.
Yeah, and if you don't send that pain, you're gonna keep repeating that cycle with something new. So it's crypto, then it was nft IS and it was whatever else just keeps going around and around around is that system in this new book.
So this is probably for one trunk above that.
Okay, got it, gotta got it? No, because I was I love the way you break down the journey that we go through in our mind, and you do that with multiple things, because I think we don't even see it, Like that pattern you just explained is a pattern you could live for three decades. You've just saved people three decades of pain by pointing it out and saying, well, this is what you're doing and here's how to shift that.
And I think people make the mistake where we go, I don't have time to learn, so I'm going to learn from someone who makes me feel like I can learn it in an hour, and then I'm going to do it, which still is uninformed optimism. So how do we learn? Where do we go? How do you build that time to say? How many hours do I need to even learn about this? So I'm going to put
money in it? How would you calculate that If someone is like I'm going to put in a thousand I'm going to put in a ten thousand dollars, how much time should they put to value that amount of money?
So great question. I would reframe the premise, which would be we'd still be operating under this as I'm going to put money into something, And so I would reject the original premise and say, well, if you want to get really good at something, then why don't we start with the skills that generate income. And so if we follow kind of the three elements of a business at its most basic form is you have some element of promotion, so we got to let people know about our stuff.
The second element is we got to have a way to convert them, so we have to be able to
¶ Should You Follow Your Passion for Income?
sell some sort of exchange mechanism, and then finally have to deliver right. So track, convert, deliver very easy, well, easy to easy to say, harder to do right. Within each of those things, it's like, okay, well how do I let people know about my stuff? Or even before that, what stuff do I sell?
Right?
And so that's where I like to think about it as people trying to think, man, there's so many people and try to boil the ocean, like it's impossible to try and think what business could I possibly start because you're trying to address the world when it's much easier to say, what are the problems that exists? In my life, and I kind of think about it as the three p's, Like, most businesses come out of a passion, so something that you're just inherently interested in.
They come out of a profession.
So you currently exchange Right now, you have a job whatever it is, and you get paid, maybe not as much as you want, but you do get paid for exchanging some sort of value with the business. And the third is P, which is pain. Right, so there's some deep pain that sometimes you went through. So maybe it's a mom who had to figure out how to create non allergenic food for their kids, right, It's be something
as small as that. And so from that, those three kind of buckets is I think the best starting point for most people who want to start making an income. It's like, okay, well, if you're inherently interested in this topic, it's like, can we make Can we let people know about stuff around that topic, Can we create solutions around
that stuff? Can we create services? Which is where I prefer most people start, which, to be fair, in the United States, seventy eight percent of businesses are service based businesses, and I think it's because they're the easiest to start.
You just trade time for money. Low risk.
You either get rich of it or you don't. But like your base is zero.
Have you seen any metrics in success rates between passion, profession, and pain.
No, I haven't. That would I really want to know now.
Yeah. The reason why I ask it is because I've been thinking about this for so long and I want to go through each of those because I think they're really I think it's really sound advice. I used to really believe that everyone should try to do what they love and love what they do, and I've changed my
mind about that. And I used to believe it very strongly, probably like ten years ago, only to then realize that that works great for the one to ten percent, but for the majority of people, that's going to be really,
really hard. And recently I was giving the Princeton commencement speech for their graduation, and I was thinking about it a lot before I gave that speech, because it's like, wait a minute, these are like the most talented, smartest people in the country who have everything at their disposal. And I know that even some of these people may not get a job they love or may never ever build something they love. But guess what, everyone needs money
to survive. So the question is, and I want to hear your take on it, and I'll reflect back, is should you do what you love for money and love what you do?
I think this is big myth number two, So if we have we start with, you know, passive versus active is big problem Number one. Number two is follow your passion. I think the reason that this is so espoused. I'll start where I think the idea comes from and then kind of break down from there. I think it's because most of those commitment speeches are billionaires or very successful people,
and they say, follow your passion. But if we think through, what other advice could they give that would be socially acceptable. They can't say, you know, I got lucky. They can't say I worked, you know, super hard, because we were like sure.
You know.
And so then it's like, okay, well, they're never going to get attacked for saying follow your passion. But the problem with that is it also assumes that your passion or your interests will never change. And I mean, anybody who's listening to this, just think about what you were really interested in ten years ago. It's probably different than it is now. And if you exrapolate that in another ten
years it'll probably different again. And so if we can think about the hypothetical extreme of a really successful person as someone who sticks with the same thing for an extended period of time, which is something that I believe because you learn all the lessons you possibly can in a very narrow field, right, and that you basically try and make as many mistakes as you can, and if you basically pay off all the ignorance that you can, it's like you end up just succeeding by default if
you just fail every other way. But if you try, and if you try to do too many things, you never actually get to push the road all the way, you know, trudge through the mud and get there, because you're only learning one or two mistakes in many fields and not many in one. And so the follow your passion issue is that, yeah, number one, the passions will change. Number two is that sometimes you're passionate about things that people don't value. And the thing is there's something wrong
with that. It's just that it will be very hard to make an income that way. The third thing is that I think that it creates an emotionality around business or income, which is at the moment it doesn't feel good that you believe the mid that you should stop when I think that if you and I were to talk about, you know, the business side of anything. There are elements that I love and there are elements that
I hate, and I see them as both required. You know, I would love to maximize one versus or the other, but it's just the cost of doing business literally. But I try to reframe that pain that comes from doing the things that I don't want to do to do the things that I do want to do as the price tag required to become the person that I want to become. And so if we think about the traits of any person, so it's like, if I want to be patient, then I can't expect things to happen faster.
Right Like if we were to go to the end of our lives and say, hey, I want these character traits, It's like, well, if you had to play a character, you know, in a video game and make them that way, It's like, well, what would you have to put them through in order to get those traits. It's like, well, if you want patients, then you're not going to get things quickly. If you want to have endurance, it's like
you have to be able to tlright suffering right. If you want to be wise, it's like you're going to have to get burned and you're gonna have to learn the value of judgment, and sometimes that means you're going to get betrayed in order to learn that pattern. And so it's like we lament the price tag for the
things that we want. And I think that at least for me, my ultimate, you know, long term goal is just to become the person the best version of me right, and I think that in order for that to happen, I will have to go through pain. And so the follow your passion, you know, moniker also creates this emotionality that gets you to quit when you really are on the right path, and it's just this is just part of it. And so I think those are probably the big three that I think about when it comes to
why follow your passion doesn't serve most people. And the other I would say, bonus four might be that you might be really good at something and people are very willing to exchange money for that thing, and it doesn't mean that you actually have to do the thing that you work on that you make money on all the hours of the day, right, Like you can work for twenty or thirty hours a week and then have the other one hundred and twenty to do whatever you want,
one hundred and thirty to do whatever you want. And that's I mean, not a bad thing in my opinion.
Yeah, that's the reason I asked. And I think even the advice follow your passion doesn't mean focus on your passion, right, Like there's this confusion with time. So even when I think about it in my life, when I left the monastery and went to work as a consultant because I needed to pay the bills again, a very real decision because I was twenty five years old living in my loft room in my parents' house again and that couldn't last very long. When I went into that work, I
was teaching meditation by lunch. Like in my lunch breaks in the evenings, I would teach meditation to my colleagues. There was no demand for it. Two people would show up twenty thirteen. This was meditation and mindfulness were not this global movement, and I was just enjoying it because I was following my passion. But I was making money by being a consultant, which was trading my time for money. As I followed that passion more, I got more confidence
in it. The market changed. We're in a very different landscape today twelve years on, for there being business opportunities and wellness and health that didn't exist twelve years ago. And so now, following my passion for all of that time meant there was a time when I could focus on it. But let's say I had another passion that
wasn't monetizable people weren't interested in at all. I could follow it for years and bring it into my work and bring it into my life, and it would beautiful and I'd be more fulfilled, But it didn't need to be my thing, right And so I really really like that advice, and it's something that I almost want to propagate so hard right now because I feel just responsible that for so long we've been telling people to, you know, just do what you love and chase what you love.
And it's like, yeah, in your private time and personal time, you should, but don't think that that has to be the thing you make money from, especially if you have a really obscure, oh.
Yeah, gift.
I one hundred percent agree. I mean, I'm a utilitarian. I tend to be very I've probably edged too much on pragmatic. And maybe that's just the immigrant upper of just like.
How are you going to pay your bills? Yeah, that's all I cared.
All The funny thing is I had that too. Yeah, no, for sure, immigrants too. But I think that there's a I think I got really lucky to figure out what I loved really early, and I got really lucky that I got to get really good at it really early.
I had this mentor really early on in my career who said, never do what you love, because then it becomes work. And so just to completely countertake, and this guy was a guy who just had a normal He had three or four stores that he ran, and he retired at age twenty eight, and not as a gazillionaire. I think he made something in the impater, probably like thirty forty thousand dollars a month, you know, take home.
And for twenty years he did nothing besides collect his money once a month, and then he played golf five days a week and he got to hang out and watch and basically be there for the entirety of his kids. And he loved that and that was that he accomplished it. He used to tell me He's like, I slayed the dragon of life. And so what's interesting is that now that his girls are out of the house, he now is going back and he's back in door.
He's like, well, what am I going to do now? Right?
I wholeheartedly agree with the not following your passion piece. The practical translation might be at least my third myth that I would probably tack onto this as we're building these is overbelief in idea and under belief in execution. And so there's two almost of this. So one is that I think many people who are intimidated to start believe that they have to start the next Facebook. And you know, the Zuckerbergs and the basis of a world are so incredibly rare. The vast majority of people who
¶ How to Make Your First Dollar from Nothing
gotten into business have many many failured and many many failures, many many failed businesses that led them to fail into success, right. And so one is that the idea has to be this big, amazing thing. And the second is that you shouldn't that the idea itself is the success, right, because they'll share with as many people as they can, and they almost scratch the itch of starting when you haven't done anything. I say, there's basically four steps of starting
a business. It's like, you have to get an LLC, you take the LLC to a bank, and then you get a bank account, and then you connect that bank account to a payment processor, and then you go ask a stranger if you can do something in exchange for money.
And if you do all four of those things, you have a business.
That's it, right, And so a lot of people like spend years being like I'm going to start a business. Fun day, it's like, you can do it tomorrow. You literally do all of this tomorrow, and then it's like, okay, well, then how do I get the person to exchange money? It's like, well, you reach out to the people you know, right, you open your phone, you look at the four hundred contacts you have there. You open up your Facebook profile,
you have three hundred friends. You look at those friends, and then you just say hey, you send a personal video, send a personal text, and say hey, I am starting this thing. This is what we're doing, this is what I'm solving. Do you know anybody that's it? And so it's not even like you're asking your friends to buy
something from you. What's interesting, though, is that ninety percent of the time, the person who respondses is, oh, you know, you could do that for me if you want, But that just gives you the easiest way that costs zero dollars. And because we're all connected with the Internet and phones, it's like the bearer to entry has never been lower than it is now. It's just the problem is that the barrier to distraction is even lower.
What stood out to me there is the personal text, the video and the email, and then the fact that you're asking your friends to introduce you to people who may want to, not asking them directly. That first part. The amount of emails I get and I'm sure you get as well of people pitching their services to you, but none of them are personalized. Yeah, walk me through the difference of that personal video that personally because it's life changing, like when it's done right, So.
I mean, these are your friends or at least your context that you've met at some point in your life, and so trying to recall when you met that person literally just stating their name and asking that it's hey, I'm going to be doing this. And I would say consistency is the currency of credibility. So what people don't want to do is refer a friend as somebody who's
fly by night. But if you can actually just demonstrate that, hey, he's still doing that, the likely that they're going to refer someone goes way up because the relational capital is not nearly at risk, because if I'm going to introduce somebody to somebody else, I'm risking my social capital on the hope that the third party or whoever is sending this original text is actually going to do a good job.
So you can also include a little bit of risk reversal in that, which is like, hey, I'm doing the first ten for free, and the reason I'm doing it is because I just want to get some testimonials, get some reviews, and also just so that I can learn too. And I think just being really upfront and really being really honest about it makes the stakes feel a lot easier. And so then those first ten people, you do exactly that, And the thing is is that you're going to be
better off than they will. For those who are like I don't want to work for free, it's like you're not working for free, you're earning, and then you're sorry, you're learning, and then you're earning. And so we got to go through the learn phase first, and the best way to do it is people who aren't direct connections of yours maybe one step step removed, and then at that point they're going to give you very real feedback.
And if you do a good job.
Then after a certain point, my goal is to get people to basically shift supply demand in their favor. Like I say, the two laws of business that I am the most moved by are supply and demand, which is this X ray, and then leverage. So it's a full come for leverage, and so I see those are the two biggest forces in business, and so I want to create artificial demand for somebody who's starting out by just
say we'll do a lot of stuff for free. What happens is when you have no more time to give, and if people still want you to do stuff, and you say, hey, I can't take any more people. If you want, you can pay, and people are like, yeah, that's fine, and then boom, and then you make your first sale and so and you'll have confidence because you're like, well, I just did it twenty other times and look at the results from those people. And the first one you'll
be embarrassed about. The nineteenth one, You're like, Wow, you're going to already pay down sixty seventy percent of all the mess ups that you were going to do, and then at that point you're going to start feeling good. And then from there my way of doing it is just you just keep bumping the price by twenty percent every five people until eventually people start stop saying yes, and then apper're like, Okay, this is the price I
can do for now. And that's basically a very seamless transition into how do I go from nothing to making my first dollar?
How do you get over the block of I don't want to work for free?
I actually think it's entitlement. I think it's believing that you deserve something for nothing. Like to flip the flip the roles in reverse. Imagine somebody comes to you they've never done anything ever in this particular space, and they say, hey,
¶ The 10 by 10 Strategy to Build Proof and Confidence
will you pay me.
To do this thing? Would you immediately?
Now, maybe some people be like sure, then it's a charity thing, which is different, But would you be like, you know what, I really believe that this guy is the best person that I can get this problem solve from probably not, And so to carry some of that risk for yourself. You say, I'm gonna front this, but if you want to not do it for free. Thing number one is that you're getting educated, so like you're
getting free education, which I see is absolutely valuable. The second thing is that you can make terms that don't necessarily mean that it's free. Like there's the price, and then there's the terms. The terms of the agreement can be.
If you do this with me, you have to give me feedback throughout the entire process, and at the end, if I do a good job, you leave a review right and on three different formats, and leave me a video and leave me, you know, a text version of it that's now absolutely like I'll say it differently a business owner, they do illegally, and so therefore they are
very willing to pay people to leave them testimonials. And so if you'd be willing to pay five hundred dollars to get an amazing testimonial, then they're basically you're the We've paid you that five hundred dollars, but I promise you those first five to ten reviews will make you so much more than they could ever have paid you
and not given you a testimonial. So if we flip it and say, hey, would you rather get one thousand dollars from this person and have them not leave a review versus free and a glowing review, I promise you you will make so much more from one glowing review than you.
Will from the thousand dollars long term.
So you're just building up the stockpile of the foundation to then build whatever you want to build on top of it.
Yeah, it's really strong advice. It's I hope everyone who's listening watching right now is like going, this is what I'm going to do right now, like ten hours for free, because that's where we're blocking ourselves. We don't have the experience, and therefore we don't feel comfortable selling more because we don't even know how this service will look.
Right.
So you're trying to sell a service, and maybe you sold one, but you haven't been through the full life cycle of what it feels like to deliver that service. Now, you don't know how many website revisions or edits there's going to be, you don't know how many app updates they're going to be. You have no idea, and now you're actually less likely to go sell another one because you're scared that you don't even know if you can do it, and I feel under that entilement is an
insecurity totally. I don't actually even know how to do this. I've got a lot of friends who are like really talented, really skilled. They actually would do a great job, but because they've never just done ten clients for free, they don't know how it's going to be if they went and got one hundred clients tomorrow. So they're scared of getting one hundred clients, not because they're not capable, but because they haven't taken ten clients through the process.
So I want to give get some super tactile for the audience. Please just ten by ten. So give ten people ten hours and so you can say, hey, I'm going to do ten hours of work for free. That is a really compelling offer, and you're going to do it one on one and ideally with them. And so if you want to build the website, build it in front of them for the ten hours so they can
give you real time feedback. If you want to write email copy, you still meet with them once a week or not ideally multiple times a week during that so you can pay down that. But ten hours faster, and if you're worried, you can do you can do five people for five hours.
That matters less.
But it's more that one on one, So the least scalable thing possible, and it's free labor that they can track. The reason that such a compelling offer is that everyone, even in every country, even minimum wage has value. Anybody can understand that five hours of work is a material amount of work that you're choosing to give away for free. And so even if you have no expertise, labor at base price is still worth something, and so if you
add on expertise, it becomes a very compelling offer. But the beauty of that setup of having five or ten hours that you choose to spend is that there's basically, if you're doing a one on one, there's almost no technical you know component to it. You don't have to
like build all these calendaring and schedule. It's just like you're just going to text those five people, hey, you want to do the same time tomorrow, very simple, and then for each of those you know calls that you'll take with them by the In the very first call, you just say, hey, I want to just be clear, what's the problem. What do you want to you know,
what do you want to solve? And do you mind at the end of the five hours we spend together if this was good, if I can tell you about what I do, If you just set that that pre frame up front, and then you do the hours. On the fifth call or the fifth hour or the tenth hour, you say, hey, remember I said at the beginning, I was like, has this been good so far? It's like, awesome. Let me just recap what we've done, what we've covered and the progress we've made. You feel happy about that?
Great?
So this is what I think it would look like because also you spent those five or ten hours getting as much information or ammunition from them all the other problems that you could potentially solve, and then at that point says, hey, I think that I can solve problem.
One, two, and three.
It'll take me maybe six months, but this is what kind of engagement would look like.
How does that sound to you? That's all you have to do.
And the thing is that after you give someone five or ten hours, there's so much reciprocity that's built up.
¶ Your Product Must Solve a Real Problem
They're like, well, shoot, I mean sure, now if somebody on the first call says no, I don't want to. Then it's like you don't even need to continue. And so one of the big things that I'm a big proponent of is absolutely give stuff away.
For free two people who are qualified. Yes, And so we're like.
I don't want a lot of tire kickers. It's like, for sure, neither do I. But if I had a room of one hundred of the most qualified people, which if you're like, what are a qualified person?
It's bent.
So IBM made this figure this alex seventy years ago and it's really never changed. So bant's budget authority need timing. Do they have the money to spend the ability to make the decision? They need the thing right now? And now is it now a priority? And so if we had a room of one hundred people who met all four of those criteria, wouldn't you want to do something
and spend five or ten hours for free? I mean, my god, like if you could sign Like the reason they sell time shares over six hour blocks of time is because it just takes time to build trust for a higher ticket sale. So if anything, it's like you're choosing to say that I'm going to give you five hours, but they're giving you five hours to influence them to ultimately prove that you're good at whatever you do. And so I think that is the easiest way to get started.
You can make that your front and offer, you can put that in the video, and I think the beauty of that specific offer is that you don't need to even figure out what you're going to sell because you'll figure it out during the time you spend with them, and so you can figure out the offer in real
time with them. And also because you're doing it one on one, you can basically you can you can permutate it, you can tweak it every single time you pitch it to somebody on the fifth or eighth call or whatever. That ultimately gets you so many faster iterations that are low risk.
Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from our sponsors. Thanks for taking a moment for that. Now back to the discussion. You know, talking to you today and Alex, I watch your stuff all the time. The thing that's standing out to me is you're super tactical. There's all these methods, there's all these systems, but then when you were talking about your life, you're like it's all about who I want to become. Is there a number that you stop at, or is actually who you
want to become? That's your north star.
I see entrepreneurship as the single greatest path for personal development because if we define you know, learning as fast feedback loops, there are very few other professions that give you that much feedback that brutally, brutally on his feedback, as the market will do. And so at every point where I get stuck in a business, I think to myself, like, what skill do I lack?
And I define everything by skill.
So even traits, which is just you know, a colloquial term, which is really just a bucket of many skills, I just think, okay, well, in order for me to appear confident or be confident, it's really like thirty eight things that I have to learn, and all of these things, if I break them down easier, I can do them. So it's like, Okay, when I shake hands, I make sure that I web the middle of my hand and I squeeze firmly and I look at the person in
the eye. It's like that's thing one. Thing two is that when we're talking, like you not because you've been doing this for so long. But some people who don't know how to have conversations just stand like this, But somebody who's an active listener will not. They'll say, oh, that's a great point whatever. And so it's like, that's the second thing. When I walk into a room, I'm going to call people by name. It's a third thing.
And so when I try and think about these traits of who I want to become, it's like, can I break these down into actions that I can actually do? And so I think that there has been a large part of the growth that I've hopefully, you know, been able to achieve. But in terms of the ultimate goal for me, it's always just been to be useful. And
¶ What No One Tells You About the Trade-Offs of Business
if I think I just do that, then I like that as such a simplified goal because being useful has it actually includes multiple parties, because you cannot be useful unless there's someone else you're being useful too. And so it gives you something controllable, which is that I have to learn skills so that I can serve someone else, and that is how I can ultimately be useful. And so even when we're you know, we're making content or whatever it is that we're putting out.
I always try to think like is this useful? Like can someone.
Actually well this change one's behavior. I'd be like, I want to educate. It's like what is education? It just means same condition, new behavior. So if someone has that there, same day over and over again, then they're not learning. So if your day looks the same every single day,
you have learned nothing. And so that means that if you listen to this podcast and then nothing changes my behavior as a result, this was just entertainment, not education, And so that has been just It's a very sobering point because you realize, oh, I have to change my behavior in order to.
Demonstrate that I have learned.
Now, the second component of this is like, okay, well what's intelligence then? So intelligence, as I define it is rate of learning. So how quickly do I change my behavior in the same condition based on some stimulus? And so if you in a very real way, you can influence your intelligence by being willing to change faster. And so if you've heard ten podcasts and then you eventually change firsus somebody who listens to one and then changes,
that person is more intelligent than you are. And so I see that as actually really encouraging because it means like, oh my god, I have an active control on how quickly I can learn simply by changing my behavior. And so so that has been kind of my my modus operator for how I how I live life.
Yeah, I want to dive into that, but as an aside, my no, no, no, the reason why you'll you'll get in a second. As an aside, I've been really embarrassed in my handshake lately. It's because I've got a really bad case of tennis elbow. I've been playing a lot of pickleball, and so my elbow is destroyed. And so every time I've been I was on tour for the last month, and every time I've shook someone's hand in a meet and greet, my hand was just like just
like literally and I felt so embarrassed. But every time I did a proper handshake, my elbow would her anyway. But so you just you just brought back all that trauma. I really appreciate that mindset because it's what you said earlier that it actually sets you up for long term success even when things are not going your way, when the results may not go your way, when you're having
to do the things you hate. Like it's only when that's your north star that you can do all of that, Whereas if your north star is just a number or just an exit or whatever it may be, it's really really hard when you feel like that exit is just further and further away, and that numbers further and further away.
And I'm sure that you've met, I mean, so many entrepreneurs that they have their exit, and everyone almost has invariably the same story. I went into a beach, I drank my ties for a month, and then realized that this wasn't for me. And so one of the refrains that I have in my head all the time is you are the problem, like me talking to me, but like we are the problem. And so we have this issue where we fundamentally just always want what we can't have.
Single people want to get married, married people want to be single, and so it's more that we just want something different almost all the time. And so it's that desired. You're the monk here, so you know more about this than I do. That's the issue. Like that's the core problem.
And so even everyone right now who doesn't have a business, it's like, man, I would like to start a business someday, and then all the people who started businesses are like, my god, I can't wait to get out of this thing, right, And so it's just there are pros and cons on both sides. There are trade offs, and I would say that if there was a fourth myth that we would tackle, it's that people want the benefits of multiple paths without the trade offs speech and so I think one of
the reasons. So there's lots of you know, content of like you know, talk to eighty year olds and they'll tell you, you know, their biggest life regrets. But what I find really interesting is that typically what they will do is they will assume all the benefits of their current life and say, I also wish I had the benefits of this other path, yes, without the costs of that other path that are unknown. And also they don't they forget to subtract all the benefits of their existing path.
And so I like to play it out. It's like, Okay, well, if I were to do this other path and make that trade, would I be better off? And most times it ends up just being like I probably be not as happy as I am now, Like it's like, oh man, that the.
One that got away.
It's like you probably be about just as happy as
¶ How to Turn Your Job Experience into a Business
you are now. As soon as you play it out a couple of years, it's like you probably be about the same. And so that's actually dramatically reduced my kind
of regret analysis from from a living perspective. But I think the trade off part is so important because especially when you're starting out or even when you're more advanced in business, there's a what I call the fallacy of the perfect pick, which is that we overalize things because we think that we have to get it just right, because we think that if we pick just perfectly, we'll find a way to get only benefits and no costs.
And it doesn't exist.
And so instead people just stay stuck thinking that there is some pick that they're not seeing, but it's just not true. And so I think the faster you're willing to make the trade offs and actually spell them out, like, these are the things I'm willing to trade, because I think a lot of people when they want to like pursue any endeavor, they immediately think, and I think it's a little bit more Western, is that they think about addition, they think about how many more things can I do?
How many more things can I add to my calendar? But most like, right now you currently have a quote fool calendar. You live twenty four hours a day and you do stuff, And so I think it's more valuable to think what am I willing to give up?
What am I going to sacrifice?
And because we have to create space, we have to create this vacuum so that we can put this other thing in.
And so those are the trades.
And I think in the beginning, the trades are sometimes you know, more emotional, because in the beginning it's more you know, my friends will think this is weird. They don't want to get this text. What if someone says, oh, yeah, you're starting your business. I forgot or oh you're not coming out with us? Are you really doing thing again? Dude, it's not going to I mean, hey man, I love you man, like I'm supporting it, right, or your mom's.
Like, are you really going to pursue? Podcasting is a thing? Right? Right?
I think like the you know, the first rule of entrepreneurship is use what you got, right, It's not waiting for some perfect condition, because starting is the perfect condition.
Yeah, that's where the profession part comes in going back to where you are, like going back to passion profession pain with profession, that's use what you've got, Like you actually understand this industry. Maybe you even worked really hard to get a degree in it if you went to college, or you've had work experience since you were sixteen, But you kind of want to disregard that because you think there's the perfect pick yeah over here and potentially the
passionate pick over here. How do you turn that profession into a service aside us or a real businesses? What does that look like?
So what's really nice?
If from the profession of the three is by far the fastest angle for sure, because you already have the thing that's valuable because you already do exchange it for money, and so the only thing you actually have to add at that point you're promotioningsion. So you have to say, how do I let people know about this thing that I'm doing? And secondarily, how do I get these people once they find out to give me money?
Right?
And so from a letting people know about it, I gave one of eight ways of letting people know. So there's warm outrates. So that's letting people know one on one about your stuff. There's cold outreach, which is one on one to strangers. You've got paid ads right which you can run on any platform, or you've got posting content. Those are the only four things that one person can do. Now that's a great breakdown.
There's only four things because you start thinking there's a million things I have to do.
You've got strangers and people. You know, you've got one on one and one to many. That's the four box. Now from those core four, you then unlock four others, which is that I can do one on one outbound, or I can do or can post constant, or I can run ads to get customers who then get me more customers, to get affiliates or partners who get me more customers, to get employees who will then do these things on my behalf to get me more customers, or to get agencies who will then do it as a
vendor on my behalf. And so the first is the everyone must start with the for. Even if you get you know, a bunch of you know partners who then promote on your behalf, you still started with a message that you sent to somebody, right, And so the core for is the first activity that you must do in order to promote. These other things are higher leverage. That makes sense, but this is the core four that you
start with. Once you have someone who's responding to you and say hey, I'm interested in your stuff, which takes someone from a contact to an engaged lead. Right, they've shown interest, then we basically have to take them from engaged to ideally somebody who's gonna buy. Right, And so that process, at the most basic level is going to be a conversation that leads to a conversion.
Right.
And so I have a very simple framework that I that I encourage people who are starting out to follow, which I call closer And so it's an acronym so it's easy. So CEE stands for clarify, which you begin the conversation like, hey, why do you respond to my thing?
Right?
And the nice thing is that whenever you promote, you only are really going to have a conversation with someone who engages back, right, So you always have the reason why right.
At the front.
So what made you what made you comment on my post? What made you DM me after that? What made you respond to my ad? What made you even respond to my original message?
Or call? Right? So that you have that reason, so what made you do that? Clarify?
Then you have L, which is you label them with a problem. So okay, so what I'm hearing is this is a problem. This is we're trying to solve. Is that's not about right?
Okay? Cool.
Then we go to O, which is overview their past experiences. And so here we're simply asking them more or less the same four questions, which is, Okay.
What have you done so far? How did that work for you? What was good? What was bad?
And then we try and tie that to our solution, the pieces that we can solve and say, oh, well, I think you might like this because we have this other element. I'll get to that later, but okay, this is great. What else have you done? What else have you done? And so that's kind of a pain cycle.
And the reason the pain cycle is important is because in order to increase motivation in the short term, we have to basically expand the deprivation around the thing that they want, and so we have to we have to increase its priority in the short term to get them to take action. And that's why that that cycle is
so important. The fourth is S which is we sell the vacation, and so we want to talk about the outcomes of what the experience is going to be like once the problem solved, rather than just having some long winded pitch. And what's very interesting about the sell portion is that most people talk way too much. We try and get it to under three hundred and twenty words.
So it does it like people if you can, if you can very accurately describe someone's existing condition to them and say, so it sounds like you're struggling with this, and it sounds like you're struggling with this, and it sounds like you're struggling with this. And if we solve this one, this is what's unlocks. We solve this one. This is one locks, and we solved this at this
one locks. Is that about right? They're like, yeah, it's like we can totally help you a lot of times you actually don't need to sit if you nail the pain part.
The pitch is very easy.
And so I am a big believer in having three points and whatever pitch you have, so you can always chunk it up, you know, like I have our attract convert deliver, you have, Okay, how do we get people find out how do we convert them and.
How do we give them the stuff? Right?
Having three elements of whatever it is. I mean I used to do sales scripts for you know, different companies back in the day. So it's like I had a mortgage lead company and they're like, okay, well the leads are you.
Know, timely. You want them to be qualified and you want to be exclusive. Okay, great.
If you're in fitness, it's like you need you need, you need to work out, you need to eat right, you need to have accountability. If you have all three, then you can't fit right. And so there's always three. And then with each of those three, I have kind of in the back pocket a little anecdote that to give an example of that. So that way it makes it more real for the person. Rather than explaining all the sets and reps and all that stuff, no one cares.
That's why it's selling the vacation, not the plane flight. We're not gonna sell how we're gonna ge there. We're gona tell where're gona go. And so once we do S then we go to E. So at that point we ask for the sale. If they say no, then E and are coming to play. E is explaining to with their concerns. There's only five. Right, They're going to have a timing issue. I've got a lot going on right now. They have a money issue. I don't think
it's worth it. They have a decision maker problem, which is I don't have the authority to make the decision. I need someone else's permission. They're going to have a stall issue, which is let me think about it. And then there's fifth is preferences. So I don't like this particular thing about your product or solution, which is just
saying that they want your results a different way. And so basically, once you understand how to overcome each of those five issues, which they are all actually just fallacies in decision making. So if it's timing issue, it's not really a time thing. It's a priorities thing. If it's a money thing, it's not really a money thing.
It's a value thing.
If it's a decision maker thing, it's really that they need support, not permission. And then we rely on past agreements in order to say, hey, well, your husband knows that you're overweight, right, do you think he wants you to stay overweight?
No?
Then why would it be against you doing something to change that, right, So just walking through those and.
I go through all of them, but that's enough.
Yeah, this is it.
And then from installing perspective, it's actually helping someone make a decision because a lot of people don't know how to decide. Because you will have this conversation far more than every person you talk to. People maybe only have five ten sales conversations a year. If you are selling it for a business, you'll have four or five a day. And so you should absolutely always be more equipped than
they are to solve the problem. The one that I skipped with preferences, which is you know, I like, hey, I really want you know, my friend Charlotte, she lost thirty pounds doing your thing, But.
Can I just keep eating the food that I'm currently eating?
And so they want their results your way, And so the easiest way to explain around that is if you change the variables to change the outcome, do you like the outcome? Yeah, well, then don't change the variables. And this is the only thing that I can give you confidence in. And the question is is you eating the food you want more important than you look in the
way you want to look? And that's a real question and if the person says yes it is, and it's like okay, well then nothing's going to change if you don't change, and so then you get to have a real conversation. But each of those those are the fundamental kind of ways of getting over them. And so once you explain away the concerns, after each explanation, you always ask again, so does like does that?
Does that help that? Does that? Does that? Does that? All that for you? Great?
So ready to move forward, You're ready to do whatever the next thing is. And then finally it is our And the R actually happens after the sale and is something that I added years later in my career.
It used to just be close. But the R is reinforce the decision.
So in the twenty four hours post purchase is when the vast majority be either have you know, cold feet or they regret or you can reinforce it and becomes a super positive right and so people believe it or not. There's tons of research that supports this is that they will make a decision about your business based on the first twenty four.
Hours post purchase.
So it's this huge moment where you can make a first impression that preframes the remainder of the of the relationship that you have with them and so being incredibly died of Like, hey, so you bought. Let me tell you what the next steps are going to be. We're going to take these steps and we're going to tie that to goal. Right, so you said you wanted these three things. The way that we're going to solve these three things is these three steps. These are the actions
you take. We're gonna meet tomorrow at this time, I'll see you there, or if you have a you know, onboarding rep, then you'd go from there. But that fundamentally is how you'd have the conversion conversation. And so to loop back to if I'm a professional, how do I do this, It's like, well, you're gonna.
Use the core four. You're gonna reach out to people.
Once they respond, you'll initiate the conversation where you go through the closer framework and then you make them an offer to do your stuff, which will be either moonlighting or you know, in the morning. And what's really interesting is that people think that they're nine to five is getting in the way of their dreams, when it's really they're five to nine, and so five am to nine am it's like your's four prime hours, and then five
pm to nine pm it's another four prime hours. So it's like you've got eight You've got a full work day that you can work, which I strongly recommend. I think a lot of people are big on the burn the boat's thing, and I think there's a time and a place for that. But if you have a family and you've got a mortgage, I would recommend you keep
your job and then supplement your income. And then at the point where your supplemental income in your off time surpasses your full time income, that is when I say make the jump. And for me, because I actually believe it, I tend to be relatively risk averse person. I would say, if you do that for six months, because there's going to be volatility in the business, and I'll also just play out the next.
Problem they're going to have. If that's all right, I.
Go for it. So so much value, so much value.
So volatility is a symptom of insufficient volume. And so if you feel like you're like, man, you know, I got a couple of customers and then you know the lead stop coming in, it's like, well, you're doing insufficient volume. You're not doing enough of the core four. We have to post more content, we have to post more ads, we have to do more reach outs, right, That's what
we have to do. And so if you think, okay, well I've been doing these reach outs and you know no one's responding or things like that.
One we need to make.
Sure that the offer that we have is good, which I think we started with the five hour thing. I think it's a great first offer. But you know, under that assumption, if we do this, I have a rule of one hundred, which is that you do one hundred per day. So that means you're doing either one hundred. It's that you're putting into posting content and you post, and you post it to be very clear, and you post. You spend one hundred dollars a day on ads, or you do one hundred reachouts and if you want to
be crazy, you can do all three. And so those in those in those scenarios, the key is that you have to keep going. And so if you get let's say you do the rule of one hundred and you get one sale a week, okay, then if you want to that would give you four sales a month. Roughly, if you're like, man, I want to go from four
sales a month to sixteen sales a month. The nice thing is that you actually have a clear input output equation, which is that, Okay, it cost me seven hundred primary efforts to get one sale, and so that volatility feels like it's only one, but it's because you're not doing enough. If I take that seven hundred and do seven hundred per day, then all of a sudden, I'll be making
one sale a day. And fundamentally, that little compression process is the only thing that separates very small businesses from very large businesses. Most small business owners have no idea how much more volume the guys who are ahead of them put out. I'm ride a conversation at the very beginning of me deciding to make content after I sold the company where I said, hey, you know, I really
want to learn this Instagram game and content game. And so I talked to somebody who's a big, big influencer, and I said, you know, can you can you analyze my stuff and tell me what I'm doing wrong? And he said, dude, you're not doing anything wrong. You're just doing too little. And so he said, he said, pull up your Instagram and I pulled it up and I think I was doing like a post every other day or something like that, and.
He's like, dude, I got four posts a day. And
¶ Redefining Success: It's Not About the Outcome
I was like, whoa.
And then he said, pull up your LinkedIn and I don't think I've posted on LinkedIn. And he's like, I got ten posts a day. And he's like, pull pull up your Twitter. At the time, now X is like I had nothing right. So he went side by side. He's like, I'm putting out seventy eighty a day and you're putting out one every other and you're complaining. And I was like, got it. And so the most people
dramatically underestimate the amount of volume that is required. And that volume has a great feedback loop for skill because you do these iterations and you will suck. And that is okay, and as long as you like. The process that I have for improving any part of any system is just do a tremendous amount of volume. Let's say we do one hundred whatevers. We look at the top ten percent of the ones that got the highest response rated, the ones that got the most views, or the ad
they got the most clicks. We say Okay, what was different about these top ten percent compared to the other ninety And so the next hundred we do, we say, let's just try and just do the thing we did in the top ten percent, we do it again. And that continual refinement process has been the key to all the stuff that we've done.
It's just look at what worked, do more of that.
And so if you were in the professional bucket, that is more or less kind of the approach that I would take to get that first dollar.
Everyone needs to listen to that fifteen minutes every day. I'm not kidding. That was the most amount of value I think has ever been back and at fifteen minutes that I've ever heard in my entire life. And I'm not kidding. That is such brilliant, brilliant advice, totally broken down step by step. I mean you could, I mean you can make like seventy posts off of just the
last fifteen minutes. It was so no And I mean that I'm not just saying that because right now as you're speaking, I've got so many friends that I've got in my head that are exactly at that point, and it's the volume that's messing them up. It's either not having the plan to how do you pitch and convert two questions? The first is how do you stop being scared of sucking? Because a lot of my friends are
scared of sucking? And the second one is why are we so uncomfortable selling and promoting and showing our work?
So the first one, what's really interesting about the question is that I think that most people are actually very okay with sucking. I think they're very not okay with being judged for sucking. And so I think that at the at the onset, we have to redefine success as trying and not as succeeding or at least getting whatever desired outcome there is, because failure and success are salt and pepper.
They're married.
One leads to the next, and so the idea is we want to get as many failures out of the way as fast as possible, and so it's like we want to pay down that failure that again as soon as we can. And so the very tactical thing that I would advise is think about there's we think, don't I don't want people to think that I'm a failure. It's actually not people. There's like two people that you hear their voice in your head. And so when you actually get really clear on whose voice is that, because
I'll say, I'll tell you a real world example. So for me, when I say this just sounds ridiculous, but just but just to show you, hopefully how ridiculous whatever you think sounds, I'll share one of mine. So when I was thinking about selling my company, the offer was for forty six point two million, and I was afraid that it wasn't enough to impress the people that I wanted to impress, and so and I had to figure that out. I was like, I don't know, I mean
it's worth it. Maybe I should hold on to a longer and grow more and I want, you know, back and forth. And when I thought more about it, I was like, actually, there's only one person whose opinion I'm concerned about.
And then when I named it, when I was like, oh, it's Tom.
Tom's the and like I'm not even that close with Tom, but tom my envisionment of Tom judging my my my egg it is not good enough for their approval. I was like, wait, I'm letting Tom have this much influence over my life.
¶ Listen to People Who Are Where You Want to Be
That's absurd.
And so one of the big reframes that I have in my head is that if you don't know why you believe what you believe, it's not your belief.
Ats someone else's.
And so if you can't explain, like why am I not doing this, If you can't actually explain it, it's because there's someone else's voice that is influencing you that you're not aware of. And so I try and name it. Yeah, the naming is the key part, because as soon as you see that, you're like Tom, You're like screw Toom. We're like I want to do say it's like, is Tom's approval worth more than the dream that you want to pursue?
And as soon as you get that, you're like, well, hell no. And then you move forward.
And I can tell you just from the other side of this, and I want to unders want to be really clear.
I understand how scary it is.
It took me six months to quit my job, and I talk to my friend every single day saying this is the day, this is the day, this day. And when I did finally quit my job, I drove across the country and I only called people from home when I was already halfway across. I didn't tell anyone I was leaving because I was so afraid of what they would say.
So I say, this is somebody.
Who absolutely gets it, but I just want to see you from the other side of it. It's you know, this is a Layla quote, not me, but you know, fear is a mile wide and an inch deep, and so it looks like this vast ocean of like I'm going to drown. But as soon as you take the first step, you're like, oh, this is a puddle. And there's a quote from Jocko Willick that I love. That's recent that's been top of mind for me, which is,
besides death, all failure is psychological. And it's just when you the longer you think about it, the where you're like, wait, all failure is just me drawing an arbitrary line in the sand that I say anything that does not meet the standard or force me to be upset. And so it's like, okay, well, if I don't die, then I can keep going. And if I don't die, then it means I can stand it.
Yeah, And I think a big part of it when I'm listening to you is because it's psychological. Let me know that it will happen.
Yeah.
So I remember when I put out my first video, which I didn't tell anyone I was going to do. I spent two years watching videos before I made one and put one out. And when I put out my first video, I remember my friends saying to me, you talk too fast, the music is too loud, it's edited badly cool like, it wasn't received with praise. Now, I didn't think about that too much. And now if I go back to advise someone, I'd say, anticipate that, because
if you anticipate it, then it's okay. Then it's in steep, right, You're like, oh, okay, Well, yeah, they're probably going to tell me that the editing wasn't great or whatever. But if I followed Alex's advice, maybe I have sent it to a couple of people, you know, not friends, but people who actually know what they're doing. I've got some insight. I've studied it well enough, and maybe I'll avoid some of them. But guess what, I won't avoid all of them.
There will still be someone who criticizes the tone, what I'm wearing, how I look, whatever it is. And as soon as you know that, you go, oh, that's all it is someone's going to look at it and be like, yeah, I'm not sure, and it's like, oh wait, their reaction doesn't change my reality, Like their reaction will always be. Then I think what we're trying to do going to you earlier as well, is we're trying to avoid the reaction. We want to create something that has no negative reaction.
And there is not a single class on planet Earth that has created a song, a movie, podcast, or whatever it may be that has had no negative reaction.
So I have so many quick thoughts on this, yea. So number one is that if you do nothing, people will criticize you. If you do something, people will criticize you. So criticism is a fixed cost period. Number two, it takes about twenty hours to become proficient in just about anything. You want to play guitar, like proficient in just about anything. It just takes people ten years to get the first
twenty hours, and that's a huge issue. The third is that when you're thinking about feedback is one not all feedback is created equal. You don't want to listen to the people who are closest to you. You want to listen to people who are closest to your goals, and so listen to people who already at your goals, who
already achieve those goals, and listen to their feedback. Because I'll say, for example, for me, like if I if I, I mean I rarely do, but if I post anything of me at the gym, the only people who comment are.
People who are smaller than me.
No guy who is bigger than me ever has talked a bit about you know about my you know my fitness stuff. And so to the same degree, anybody who's an entre who's a real entrepreneur is going to be like, hell, yeah, man, you got out there.
Oh of course you failed. Obviously you failed.
But that's okay, right, everyone falls the first time, right from the matrix, and so expect failure. And I think that if you can play it out, there's a there's a really wonderful stock frame around this, which is the frame of the veteran, which is, if you were to imagine whatever bad experience occurs happening a thousand times more in a row, how would you feel in the thousandth time.
And if that's how you're gonna feel in a thousandth time with the exact same condition, you might as well feel that way today, and it's just been a really like a like if you're like, man, I hate traffic, It's okay. Let's assume traffic is a constant and it happens for the next thousand days. You'll probably be like, well, it's just how it is, right, and.
So this is just how it is.
That's the feedback that you're gonna get from videos, and it's going to keep happening, and it's okay.
Yeah, your point just now of the problem is it takes us ten years to get the first twenty hours. Is so true. I know something that I've biggest people are off something like that to me, Like, Jay, how do you solve a problem? I'm like, if I think something's a big problem to solve or a skill to learn, I will cancel every evening planned this week and I will cancel my entire weekend. And all I'm doing this
weekend is figuring out that skill. I'll get a coach, I'll commit to the time, and I'll be around that community of people. Those are my three practices or things to develop a skill. And then this weekend is dedicated to getting good at X. And it's like, if I don't get enough hours in this weekend, the next four weekends are dedicated to that thing, and all of a sudden, in a month, I've solved a problem that could have
taken me six years. And so I love that piece of advice because I think it's the same advice when you give people like, hey, just try three things out, and then they're like, okay, I'll try three things out one a year. And also when you give it twelve months to try one thing out, you actually never know whereas if you did something for a whole day. Like I remember when me and my wife were in Hawaii. We both grew up in London. We never went surfing,
more skiing and things like this. Right we're in Hawaii, we try surfing, we do it the whole day. I knew I was never going to be a surfer and it's the last thing I want to do. And I don't care at all about surfing. It looks good, but
¶ Overcoming the Fear of Selling Ourselves
it is not fun to do, Like I didn't enjoy the process, And I'm like, but if I went like for thirty minutes one day, then I'd be like, oh, well, maybe I just didn't do it right. And then you're like, Okay, I'll go thirty minutes next year, I'll do an hour next year, And so we just keep elongating the kind of failure rate or knowing how quickly something's important or not.
I think it's getting completely immersed and just soaked in whatever the thing that you're trying to pursue. So I'll tell you a comparable story. So when I was when I had my first business, I was I've never been a tech oriented person. Now I try not to speak that over myself, but like, I'm working on it, and so I was like, I have to learn how to build by pages. I hate relying on these it guys. They're slow, they don't build it the right way. And so this is right as some of the early kind
of software say come out. And I had put it off and then I finally said, both days this weekend, I'm locking the doors, I'm closing the frames, I'm turning off my phone. And I just had a simple page. I said, I'm just gonna copy this page. I just want to see if I can figure it out. And I set two full days aside and I finished it by noon. Yeah, but I had put it off for weeks, and so most times it's almost like fears them all wide and an inch deep. So is ignorance. It's like
it's more than you expect, less than you think. Right, you get in and then you're like, oh, there's only four parts to this, Okay, I think, okay, now you want to wrap your arms around it. And I think that's why having these kind of longer inten sessions you kind of drink all of it up, because if you did multiple thirty minute sessions, for example, it's like it'll take you the first fifteen minutes to get back into what did I just learn last time? And then it
just it's very hard to get make progress. And so I'm a massive advocate of full shutdown days. I mean, drink your coffee, get your good night's sleep, and then put your your plugs in and then like lock in.
Yeah, absolutely, before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from our sponsors and back to our episode. Absolutely. And then the second question was why are we so uncomfortable with selling, promoting ourselves, putting ourselves out there?
So I would put this two separate buckets.
So one is the promotion, which is kind of public of embarrassment, public harass, you know, that's not right.
Yeah.
The second one is why am I scared to ask
¶ How to Influence Without Manipulating
this person for money?
Right?
And so I think on some level it comes down to some people feel like impostors. They're like, you know, I don't deserve this, and things like that. But I think that there's a there's a very tactical way to overcome that, which is you outwork yourself doubt. And so if you if you've done those twenty and I think it's people who haven't done the twenty who feel like impostors.
But if you've done it twenty times, and you're like, I know what's going to happen next, and I know what your problem is, and I also know I can solve it, and so your conviction goes up because you're not you're not exaggerating anything, you're not puffing your chest. You're just one of my big rules of persuasion to state the facts and tell the truth. And so you're like, listen, I've done twenty of these. You have the same issues as these people. This is what I did for them.
I think I can do the same thing for you. We're not exaggerating, we're not claiming anything. We're just saying, like this is, this is what's happened, and so I think that that will dramatically decrease the anxiety around the conversation. The second piece is the fear of like rejection in the micro and so.
It's it's always.
Overstated because the worst thing they can say is no, and then you say, okay, fine, no worries, like, not a big deal, I'll just ask somebody else, right, like if anything, the sales is like dating, it's a numbers game, like you have to be willing to say I would. And this is why I like rule of one hundred a lot is have a hundred conversations, and I promise you your anxiety will go down because you'll just habituate. And so everyone like, and this is the psychological way of
actually curing phobia. Is if you're afraid of spiders, the fastest way to cure spiders is locking in a room with spiders.
You'll have a couple of panic attacks.
You'll you'll you'll pass out, you'll wake back up, the spider's still there. You wait, pass out, wake back up, and eventually you're just like, all right, I'm used to it. And so that's also one of the telltale signs of an experienced salesman is that in the clone, when the stakes are high, their pulse.
Is the same.
It's because they've done this before, and so we just have to get you to that we've done this before part as fast.
As we can.
Yeah, what about people who feel like the approach is are manipulative? Okay, well, these tactics are like you're preying on someone's vulnerabilities and insecurities, and of course that person wants to lose weight for their partner, and you're playing to that. Like what about someone who feels that way and that's what gets in their head like, Oh, I know I have a valuable service. I know I want to help people, but actually, like they should want to do it themselves. I'm not going to convince.
Them, So I'm going to I'll define two things. So one, I see the process of selling as arranging the variables to increase the likely at a sale occurs. That is a selling process, and so we want to use all the variables we can because if we can control the variables, we control the outcome. And so I see then underneath of that, the difference between help manipulation is intention, and so you use the exact same variables to influence someone's
purchasing decision. But if your intention is to scam the amount of money and not help them, then for sure you should. I hope you feel all the feelings that you have right now. But on the flip side, if you know that you're going to do your absolute best and you have not misrepresented something, and I think this is the key part where people feel the imposter syndrome is because they misrepresent.
If you state the facts and tell the truth, most of your anxiety goes away.
And I have this conversation sometimes with entrepreneurs, even at a million dollars year, five million dollars year, and they're like, I just feel this imposter syndrome with my business. And I was say, are you stating anything that's not true? And then they'll kind of look at me and they're like, well, you know, I teach agencies how to grow their customer base. And I'm like, okay, and why do you feel like an imposter? They're like, well, you know I had an
agency and it just really wasn't that successful. And I'm like, okay, are your client successful? They're like, no, the clients are successful. I'm like okay, so what do you teach them that you were not able to do for yourself? And they're like, well, I was actually really good at the sales side. I was really bad at the delivery side. I said, if you just say, hey, I had an agency, I was really good at selling customers, really bad at delivering on them.
But if you're good at delivering on them and you need a sales process, I can help you. I was like, would you feel like you're being an imposter? And he's like no, I was like, and believe it or not, that's actually more compelling because you have a damaging commission, which actually makes you It's one of the components of persuasion, right, Like you just just tell people all the things that are not good, because when you tell them the good things, they'll actually.
Believe them more.
And so I would tell you know, I was in the gym space for a while, and so you know, a gym owner would have, you know, a bad location and bad parking and they're like, you know, I don't, I don't. It's it's embarrassing, And I say, included in the ad. Just say hey, by the way, we have the we don't have the newst equipment. Our parking is terrible. We have a tiny location, but we have the best workouts on this side of the Mississippi.
Right.
And if you say that, then it's like people are like, I love that guy, right because he told the truth, and so you'll be significantly more persuasive and have less anxiety. I just stayed in the facts and tell the truth, and if the facts aren't compelling enough, do the free work.
So the facts are compelling.
Yeah, Oh, I love that so much because I'm thinking of Rents right now, who has a service offers and he's always scared that he's a one man band and he's scared that company is going to ask for a service, and he's almost embarrassed of saying, well, I'm just one guy, and he wants to present himself as a company yes, And I'm always well, no, tell them. Because you're one guy, you can actually be there. You're present, you're doing all
the work yourself. You're committed, You're not just rolling out something that everyone else is doing.
So I have an awesome frame for this.
So when we had our software company, Allen, which we sold in twenty one, it was a software that helped agencies kind of made his schedules. It did automated texting stuff back before all the new stuff, right, And so I actually had agencies that's sold to gym owners. And I also owned gym Launch at the time too, which is which is the category you know, king in that space, right, It's the biggest company there. And so they're like, how do we how do we compete against you? And I said,
every position has an advantage. And so you are going to say, man, Alex, Alex isn't gonna be the one take you know, he's not the one taking your calls. He's just gonna you're gonna be client number seventy seven.
He's not gonna know your name. You're gonna be assigned to some account rep that he pays you know, nothing to And of course we paid well, but like I've like, I don't know, you know, he just pays way less that he onboarded in two days, and like that's the level of service you're gonna get, whereas with me, you get the highest person, you get the CEO, and you call me, I'll respond immediately. I'm the one working on your account. So don't compare the size of gym wants
the size of my company. Compare the person you're actually gonna work with, and am I gonna be better than his Rep?
Number seven? Yes, that's a compelling pitch.
Now, if I'm flipping the table, I'm gonna say, listen, this guy is in his mom's basement. He hasn't proven
¶ The Difference Between Criticism and Insults
any track record. We've been here for ten years. And the reason we've been here for ten years and we've gotten so big as because we're actually good at what we do, and if we work at it what we do, we wouldn't be this big and we wouldn't been doing it for this long. This guy has no process. He might be gone tomorrow. We both have advantages that we can cater so there's no position on the board that doesn't advantage.
She got to play what you got again? All number one? Right?
Yeah, And the idea of pointing it out, yeah, is just so masterful because that's what's blocking us. It takes away We're all trying to be everything to everyone, right, and we want to portray that we've thought about every part of the puzzle and we're the one stop shop.
And I feel like whenever anyone says they're the one stop shop, there's nothing there right, because it's like, well, wait a minute, there's no way you could have figured out this and this and this and this and this just you, with just you, and you've been in the business for two years, right, Like it's it's just not possible. And so and that's so freeing, Like I'm hoping people hear that and just feel so much lighter and go tell the truth, state the facts and that's it, you know, And if.
They say no, that's okay because honestly, if they say no, then they weren't going to be a fit. Yeah, And so I can promise you some of the best deals are the ones you never do because right now, any business are I can tell you this, like there are customers that you're like, I wish we did not ever talk to this person, right, and so like you're just avoiding some of these things that are going to be calamities later, so you might as well just get it
up front. And the thing is that when you set those expectations, it just it creates such a clean relationship from there on. It's like, these are the expectations you can set. This is what I will do. Anything outside of that, I'm not going to pretend like I have done it. Now if we want to figure this out, I'll be figuring it out with you. And if you if you like the stuff, if hear I can apply some of those principles. But I haven't done it. I want to be upfront about that. And so where's the
imposter syndrome? Where's the fear? It's like there shouldn't be any and it's all about this option piece, and I think that's where that's where people get in trouble.
The other thing I've learned about that is that I feel like people who win watch winners, and people who fail watch losers. And so when I look online or even if I talk to people that I get a lot of this where people will be like, I can't believe this guy is like one hundred thousand followers. Have you seen his stuff? Like it just sucks, Like, oh, I can't believe that this guy like has a business making a million dollars, Like I mean, he hasn't even
got you know. And so there's a lot of this where you find people who are not winning are constantly whereas like I'm sure if me and you were talking about something, so people be like, dude, did you see what this guy is amazing, like do you see what you know? Whatever? And and so I feel like there's that ideology that we get stuck in where we're like, I know I'm better than that guy or whoever, that girl,
whatever it is. I know I'm better, but I'm not doing anything about it, and that hurts me even more.
Can tell you a story about this?
Yeah, so I know I think you've had Kylie Jenner on this. I kend that's different. Well, then I'll I'll tell you the story.
So oh I know the Kylie story from you?
Okay, yeah, very right?
When she give a billionaire Yeah, yeah, I've bought the video at.
So Kylie became a billionaire.
I'm twenty seven ish at the time, and I'm making i would say, very good money.
And I thought I was.
I was, you know, the man, right, and then the care comes this girl who's seven eight years younger than me.
And she's crushing you know, she crushed it and she was better.
She was better than I was and I and you know, my first response was ego being like, hey, Christians, her mom. She's had her life set up since day one. She's been on reality TV for you know, I had all that, all that narrative, and then underneath it that I was.
Like, chill, what can I learn from her? Right?
And so I have the fundamental belief that if someone makes more money than you, they know something that you don't know, and in that you can learn of them. And I think that that allows every single person in the world's success to serve you.
Yeah.
Literally, you just flip the world into like, these are all the different lessons I can learn from all these people. And I think one am I it's the sort of gryffindor, But I love this quote that was on it.
Okay, but it was.
Made of you know, the goblin steel or dwarve of steel, and it was it only took you in that which made it stronger. And so you you know, hating on somebody in no way makes you stronger. And you're trying to point out all the deficiencies. It's like you're you are the thing that you are afraid of for yourself, Like you're you're gonna pointut all this person's efficiencies, and your big fear is about the fact that other people
want to do that to you. So first start by stop doing it to other people and start trying to find what are the things that they're because the thing is it is a fact they are better than you at something. And I think like you have to accept that as much as you're like that guy's got one hundred thousand follers, well and he only had one viral video. It's like, well he's got one more than you do. What was it about that video? Now, let's start tackling that.
And so like from Kylie, the thing that I learned was brand. I was like, she's got a big brand. And then that was like, okay, I need to start looking at that. And that's what That's what kicked off this entire journey for me, even making all this content stuff. Was that Forbes cover. That was like that was the thing for me. And so you know, Kylie, if you ever watched this, like you're a huge in flo my life.
I love that. We'll get it, We'll get it, We'll get it.
I love that.
And what I like about that is that criticism doesn't cure envy. And also success doesn't kill envy. It's only study that kills envy. Like that appreciation, that admiration, that's the only thing. And envy is that thing that when I coach people, and I've been fortunate enough to coach musicians and access and whatever. And the two questions I always ask people is the first thing is who do you envy? And there is no person on the planet, even in the zero point zero zero one percent, who
doesn't envy someone that I've met at least. And then the second one is who's your God or what is your god? Whether it's money, time, energy, whatever it is. And those two questions sum it up for people. And what I've found is that success just doesn't take away envy. So even if you had become a billionaire in the next twelve months, that still wouldn't have taken it away,
because she did it twenty one and exactly. And so it's like that, that's what's so fascinating about it, is that we you become successful by what you get, but you become fulfilled by what you lose, and losing envy and losing comparison and losing criticism leads to happiness. So when people say money doesn't buy happiness, it's not that money's not portant. Money makes you successful and it's great you should get it. Happiness was never in the equation
with money. That wasn't the point of it. Like, I love having awards and accolades, but they were never in the equation of happiness. They were in an equation of success, and the equation of happiness was envy, ego, illusion, lust, anger, all of this stuff. And so it's funny how the equations get like, you know, crossed over.
Yeah, I just I loved everything that you No.
I just it really resonates hearing about it from your story and also just like breaking it down for people and making it really simple and going like, let's stop demonizing people are selling well or making money and doing this thing, because it leads to a certain part of the puzzle. But then let's also remember that you wouldn't be who you are today if you hadn't got over that envy right at the beginning.
So let me toss this in that I think be helpful. So one of the quotes that I don't like is comparison is the thief of joy. And I'll explain why, because so I think comparison is an incredibly valuable feedback tool. Now, what we want to be clear is the differentiation being criticism and insults, and so insults are attacking someone's character saying, and I'll give you an example, and a criticism is a difference between expected and reality or desired and actual.
So I expect you to be on time and you
¶ How to Break Repetitive Negative Behavior
are five minutes late. Okay, cool. So I say, hey, you were five minutes late. This is the expectation, this is what happened. That is criticism, right, insult and you're lazy. And so if we can pull those things apart, we can take the good of because I think our brains are comparison brains, Like it's how we orient ourselves in the world.
Where am I and very tough.
Maybe years and years of monks study can maybe get you out of it, but I think for the vast majority of people, comparison is going to be fixed in their brain.
And so it's like we want to use that.
We want to use that skill of learning to point out the discrepancy between where they are and where I am, so that I can create steps so that I can get better. I want to completely eliminate in a race insults and also on the flip side, if someone insults me. This is a side note, but like if the big fear that many people have on promoting or selling is that someone's gonna say something bad about them and so
that they're gonna get insulted. And the biggest reframe that's been helpful for me is simply translating all hate or insults into he lives his life in.
A way that I would not prefer.
And it just comes down to that I can't believe he's married to this person he makes his kind of why does he think? He like he lives his life in a way that I would not prefer, And that is just it has really boiled a lot of the hatred down to like, oh, well, I mean you live your life in the way that I would not prefer.
And that's fine. That's why you've your life and I have my life, and hey, more power to you, man.
And that is just like really quelled a lot of the concern because I'm sure, like you, I get an unending you know, the deluge of hate commish just because if you put yourself out there, like if again, if you do nothing, you will get criticized for doing nothing, and if you do something, you'll get criticized. So criticisms fact is a fixed cost.
Yeah, and then yeah, and that's why I like, I agree with you on the comparison point. And that's why I look at comparison has two kind of brothers, study and envy. And so that's that's the choice you have, like we have to compare. Comparison is a fixed like you're going to compare because the brain is wired that way and it's either I compare myself with envy or study, and those are my two choices I'm going to compare.
And so this idea of never comparing yourself to anyone is actually a lie, a myth in and of itself, because if you never compared yourself to anyone, you would have goals, you would aspire for anything. You wouldn't become better.
There's no feedback because you can't say, well, this is where I was and this is what happened, Like that is a comparison. And so I would I say that because one of the things we have is feedback is fuel, right, and so it's like I want as much fuel as I can.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, And that's that's such a you know, you've said the word feedback has come up so many times today where you've mentioned it so many times, and to see feedback as fuel is the only way to have an iterative, constantly evolving process, and I find that. You know, there's the famous quote from Albert Einstein where he said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. And feedback is the way you don't do the same thing over and over again.
You can change it every time. But so many of us keep doing something even when it doesn't work, hoping for that different outcome. Why we don't change the email copy, we don't post it a different cadence, we don't up the volume. It's just like we're just you know, I've got so many friends who upload a video, delete a video uploaded. You know, it's like, we don't change that, and then we're still going, wait a minute, what's going on here?
So my worldview on why anyone does anything is that they've been rewarded for doing that in the past. And so, you know, one of the really difficult things with language in general is that there's descriptive and explanatory language. And so for example, I'll give the simplist example. You know
Timmy stall a bike because he is dishonest. Okay, Well, if we define dishonest, we would say, well, dishonest people steal things, But that's a circular definition doesn't actually help the explanation of why did he actually steal?
It is because he's been rewarded for.
Stealing in the past, and so he repeated that that action because it got him something good. And same thing goes for lying, same thing goes for cheating. All of these things like why does someone do it? It's like because they've been rewarded for doing so in the past. They've been reinforced, and so why do people Yeah, why
do people do anything? That is and and you know, my world views somewhat different than I think of many people's because I come from everything from a behavior's perspective, but it has made me significently better at business because I get better at predicting behavior. And so I'll give you a simple example. So, you know, there was an executive, you know, one of the companies, and I was talking to one of the other owners and they were like, hey, you know, this guy said that he would leave if
we changed his title or whatever. And I said, okay, well, how many times have you changed his title historically?
And he said plenty of times? And I said, okay, has he ever left?
And the answer was no, and I said so based on his history of behavior, I would say that he says these things to decrease likely that you do it because that's his preference, but so likely that he quits as a result is low. And so it's like those kind of deconstructions. Some people just take things at face value. It's like, well if we look, if we actually try and find the explanation rather than the description of the event, we can get way better predicting behavior, including our own.
And I think that's where like people like I want to get back to the trauma of whatever. It's like, maybe, like, can I go to this because I think this this might be helpful.
So I love the direction you go.
Okay, So many people will use trauma or some event and they will create a narrative around why why haven't I started? It's because my dad didn't hug me en off as a kid, and I don't have this confidence. So they just create this big story and then they're like, I need to go see a therapist so that I can,
you know, untangle all of this. But if I were to say, hey, I'm going to teach you how to how to serve in pickleball, right, we wouldn't have the first session be hey, do a serve, and then you would serve not ideally if I'm a pickleball coach, right, and then I'd say okay, So for the next few weeks, what we're gonna do is we're gonna try and go back in the past. We're gonna try and figure out why your serve is so bad. And no, we're just gonna say change your risk like this, this is how
you do it. And so it's so much more productive to just focus on what do we need to do instead rather than trying to figure out why you did it, because the reality.
Is you're never gonna know.
It's a convenient narrative and it might make sense, but at the same time, it could just be that you're rewarded for doing something like this in the past period. Now there might have been conditions that created that reward, and you can lament the person, but at the end of the day, the only thing you can do about
is change behavior. And so trauma, which is tossed around a lot, I define as a permanent change in behavior from an aversive stimulants some I'm a bad thing, so you permanently change how you act because of something bad that happened. Now the question is is trauma bad? Well, did the change in behavior result in increase or decrease
and likely to achieving whatever goal we have. And so if a kid touches hot stove and they say ouch, and then they never touch hot stoves again, then that was a traumatic event by that definition, and it's probably good trauma because they never touch hot stoves again, increase.
The likely they die in a fire. Great.
And so sometimes it's like, well, then maybe we can be grateful for some of the quote traumas that we've had because it permanently changed my behavior in a good way. Now, if we have quote trauma that that primally changed my behavior in a negative way. So I had, you know, bombs and saw someone die in front of me, and the next time I hear loud noise, I you know, I freak out and I can't perform my job, then
that would be something that decreases likely it. But then at that point, rather than trying to figure out the triggering event in the past, we just think, Okay, how can recondition this person under similar conditions so that they can act this way instead? And so trauma, what ends
up happening is it becomes an accelerated learning event. And so something bad happens, your brain's like pay attention because it's like I'm going to learn and I'm going to permanently change our behavior to make sure this doesn't happen again.
And so it's not this.
And I hear this because a lot of people will answer promorphize, you know, make human, or you know, try and biologize. That's a word, go for it. Something that occurs, it's like it's stored in your body. And I was like, we're not computers, right, It's just that you have a behavior set. All we have to do is change these behaviors and then it eliminates. And so the reason so this all started with feedback, and so the reason feedback
is fuel. And what makes feedback good versus bad, or rather useful versus non useful is the latency of the feedback. How quickly do you get it and how specific is it. And so if you say, hey, that sucked in the moment, not helpful, I will be less What it will do is make me less likely to do the thing in
front of you. Right, if you said that, on the flip side, if you were to say immediately, hey, real quick, when you do your intro, raise your tone a little bit at the end, because I think it'll actually create more curiosity.
People want to stay longer. Okay, do the intro again. There.
I have a very specific piece of feedback, and I did it immediately, so that the likely that you change behavior is really high and maybe that it sticks. And so the reason feedback is full and ideally, if you're trying to change someone else's behavior or even your own, it's like, I want to seek out very fast feedback that's as specific.
As possible to the behaviors.
And so I tell the story a lot because it's a story that we tell inside of our companies.
It's almost become lower.
But we had a director, super proficient, very competent in his role, really high performer. The problem was that everyone said he's such a dick. And the thing is is that I really like I liked his performance, and I want to decrease the likely that I get complained to about him. And so he had four different people in the company have like one on ones with him, being like, hey, I need to stop being a dick. And the thing is, this behavior didn't change. And so I was supposed to
¶ When to Keep Pushing and When to Pivot
be like final boss in this situation and be like, all right, let's let's let's have the sit down. And so I said, hey, I don't care if you are a dick on the inside. I would like to decrease the likely that other people describe you as one. And so I want to be clear, I have no judgment. I just want to change this likely of this outcome. And so that kind of took the personal tax out
of the conversation. And then it was like, okay, so what are the behaviors you do skill wise as minutely as possible that get people to say this about you? So it turned out it was you interrupt people on calls, you tell people how to do their jobs, and it was two other things, whatever it was. And so I said, so, next time you have the you know, desire to tell someone what to do about their job, you have two options. Either say nothing or say, hey, I heard this thing
that might help. Do you mind if I share it? If you just say that first, and if they say no, then just be like okay, no worries. Or they say yes, then now you've permissioned to share it. And when you share it, shared in terms of behaviors, criticism, not insult.
And so I just had to change a couple.
Of those things, and then within a week people are like, oh my god, he's aid night and day, he's a different person.
They create all these narratives.
Maybe it was because his mom did hug him, she called him, or because we told him what to do instead. And so I bring this up because I think many people do not take action around pursuing their dreams because of narratives that they create about their past. But the reality is that none of that matters, because all we have to do is just say what do we need to do instead under these conditions? And if we take that premise, then you need to learn, and learning means
same condition, new behavior. And so if every day is the same for you to your point of insanity, then you have the same conditions. And if your behavior has not changed, then maybe you are insane or at least for at least for expecting a different outcome. And so that I think makes it significantly more palatable of like, just change this one thing and then run it again.
Yeah, how does someone who's taking that feedback trying to get better and the results just not changing, they're not getting closer to the outcome. Yeah, two questions. The first is how do you know when it's time to give up? And how do you keep going when things are not working?
So this is so there's a like there's a handful of what I call like eternal questions that can I don't think they are more decoatives that be managed than problems to solve. And so how much should I consume today versus invest into tomorrow? How much risk am I willing to take? Which is the classic should I push or should I pivot?
For an entrepreneur?
And the answer that no one's going to like is that it's actually up to you. So there's kind of like good failure and bad failure. So good failure is like I tried something and I saw that it didn't work,
¶ The Four Ingredients of an Irresistible Offer
and I realized what I need to do instead, and I'm going to iterate continuously.
Bad failure is where I have.
An assumption that the world of the conditions were going to be this way and my assumption was false. And so if I believed that people really wanted to have dog zoom calls or whatever right zoom zoom made for dogs, Let's just take a ridiculous example. Well, then I would have to take a couple of need to believes. If like, in order for this to be successful, these four things
would have to be true. If I find out after starting submiterations that one of my three or four assumptions that underpin this being successful long term is not true, then I should not keep trying to pursue this. And that is where I would say, we need to pivot. In a situation where none of the conditions that I are, none of the need to believes have changed, All of those conditions are still the same, and it's a it's a it's a deficiency and skill, then.
That is where I would push.
Now, how long will it take is going to be completely predicated on how quickly you can learn and the quality of that feedback. And so to your point, I think you said coach community.
And what was the other one commitment? Commitment?
Yes, and so the commitment part if you want to increase your commitment anything, So I define commitment by the elimination of alternatives, right, So marriage is the ultimate commitment. You eliminate all alternatives, right, And so it's like, we want to get married to this opportunity. We get married to this business. We have to liminate alternatives, which means when your friend says, hey, I'm a ten grand dow this thing, you say, that's amazing. I don't know anything
about that. And I know I know two months of suffering from this one, and I'm going to start at zero there, so I'd rather be two months in on this one. But with that push or pivot, we have to just take things to the natural extreme, which is how I like to do it, which is okay, Well, if I do this for ten years and I keep getting better, do I think it's.
Likely that I'll succeed?
And the answer is usually yes, And so it's like, well, then I just need to keep paying down those iterations. And I think Navall said it's not ten thousand hours, it's ten thousand iterations.
And I tend to believe that.
Your new books quote one hundred million dollar money models. Yeah, it's like, you know, I think there'll be people listening who like, I just want to make one hundred k. Yeah, there'll be people saying I want to make one hundred k a month, and then there'll be people saying, we want to make one hundred million dollar business. What's the difference at each of those levels, and what do you share in here that you haven't shared in the hundred million dollar series before.
So I'll take those questions one at a time.
Yeah, so I'll start with the second question, which is what's different about this book? So offers answered the question what do I sell? And so as an offer so good people feel stood saying no. So basically broke down the components of an offer. So we give a little
example of one five hours for free. That's a very simple offer, right, But there are offers that you can include guarantees, you include scarcity, you can include urgency, you can include bonuses, and then the actual core value of itself.
There's a way to increase the value of anything.
So we use something called the value equation, which is probably the most known framework I have, which is therefore people say like, create value, But when you say, how do I operationalize that? If I say to a five year old, create value, They're like, I don't know what that means, And so how do we break that down in behaviors? So one is that some dream outcomes are going to be more valuable to somebody than something else.
So if I go to a guide and say hey, I can make you rich or some or I say hey, I can make you good looking. Most men in general we'll say i'd rather be rich if you go to women and flips the other way. But for them that means that the outcome itself is going to be some outcomes are worth more than others. That's one element of value. The second element of value is perceive likely of achievement. How risky is it, how likely is it to occur?
So if I said, hey, I can make you rich and it's guaranteed, it's going to be significantly more valuable, then if it's you have to take age amount of rest. The third variable is going to be speed. So from the time you make the decision to the time you get what you want, Hey, I can guarantee that you're going to get rich, but it's going to take twenty years. Plenty of people make that, but a lot of people are like, wellw but now that's twenty years. I want
to get rich tomorrow, right. So time is going to be component of it. And then the fourth component is is effort and sacrifice, which is two sides of the same coin. Effort is all the things that you must do that you don't want to do as a result of this decision. And on the flip side, sacrifice is all the things you have to give up that you would prefer to do but you can no longer do
as a result of the decision. And so if we want to make the most valuable offer, then we want to create something that is a huge treem outcome that happens guaranteed, that is immediate, and that they don't have to do anything for now. No offer is that good, But those are the hypothetical extremes the ideals that we strive towards. And I think that's a beautiful thing for entrepreneurs is that all we try to do is just get closer and closer to all four of those pillars.
So that is the core of the offer's book. The leads book is the core four. So we went over earlier, So how do you promote anything? And so that book takes all eight of the component's core four you do, and then the core for the other people do on your behalf and breaks down in nittigrity totals by step how to do them. This book answers the question how
do I make money right? And so it's like, Okay, well I know what to sell and I know how to advertise it, but how do I turn that process into making money?
And so most people like.
The thing that separates when I look back on all the companies that I've owned advice sold, the thing that separated the businesses that were moderately successful from the ones that were exceptionally successful is that they had a better money model. And a money model is the core economic
unit of the business. So it's a deliberate sequence of offers that is ideally tailored to do one financial outcome, which is you collect enough cash from one customer in the first thirty days to get and service two more customers. And so when you have that amount of cash up front, then it unlocks cash flow for the business to grow as much as it wants or a least until the
next you can train of the business. And so when I looked at all the money models that I created is there's basically four different objectives to make that happen. So one is how do I get more people interested? So that's going to be the nature of the offer. You know, bui X, gety free giveaway, things like that like Okay, I can structure this thing in a way that makes way more petrol interested than just saying hey,
by my thing. The second element is, okay, how do I get those people to spend more money than they otherwise would, So there's different money models around that. The third is going to be how do I make them spend their money faster? How do I pull that cash flow forward? And then the fourth element of good money is a money model is how do I get them to do it again and again and again, which can either.
Be recurring in a membership or reoccurring.
Like Coca Cola, you still buy it again and again, it's just not on subscription. And so if you have all four of those things, then you have a business that can create tons and tons of demand, get lots and lots of money up front, and get people to buy again and again, which then creates its ability and cash off the business long term. And so that is basically the four pillars of the book, and it's broken down in those four steps. Of these are the front
and offers that do this. These are the transition points to how do I get something to take the next thing that's going to be more expensive, or how it gets to take the bottom thing, or how to create pain points, how to create down cells, all of those components which ultimately make businesses significantly more successful. And I started writing this in twenty nineteen. It was the first
book that I started. So it was actually called lead Life, The Generation of Monetization Structures, which you know, very very sexy name, but this was I had a mentor where it told me, hey, you're in the sale process right now. You should document all the artifacts kind of crystallized knowledge at that point.
And so that is what started that book. Now, offers and.
Leads were basically that book was like this thick, and I was like, this is I can't So I actually peeled off offers and then finished that first, and then peeled off leads and finished that second, and then finally I can get to the money models, which.
Is actually what I started six years ago.
And so I have not publicly talked about any of the structures in this book. And I feel like I'm
giving birth. I've been I've been pregnant for six years, conceptually pregnant, and I want to give birth to this thing because I think that this will make the largest impact on business owner's bottom line of anything that I've ever made, and it's been the source of the vast majority of my material success is being able to do this because when you have a superior money model, it gives you padding to be bad at everything else because you finally make more money per customer than anyone else
does in your space, which means your advertising doesn't have to be as good.
You don't have to be as good at sales.
You're like, the offer itself might not necessarily be as good. But when you sequence these things together properly the right way, then you can unlock skill on the business and then with that cash flow, buy down that ignorance stet and then give yourself time to get good at all the other stuff.
And what starting point would you say this book's aimed at, Like where is someone at in the gene You.
Can start at zero because you could start it.
So what essentially about those four things is that you don't need all four, You just need one and over time. Because if you were trying to do a business that had all for it, you had a recurring you have upfront, like, you would be completely inundated. So we would start with the first thing, which is some sort of attraction offer.
How do we get something that's that's more designed to get more customers or more people to engage in your original reach out, your paid ad, your content, whatever it is. And so I have the five most successful structures that I have used and detailed stuff by step exactly how
to excute them. And what's interesting is that this is the stuff that so the Offer's book when it came out, there wasn't a single other book about offers, which is interesting, and then it became kind of a household name, which is it was this massive gap in the space. But as soon as you you're like this is everything, you know,
¶ Focus on Who You Want to Become Not Just What You Want
like this is how all of it works. I think that money models will be that same thing where there's not a single book that ties those concepts together. And as soon as it I think it will, it will exist in that huge gap that once you see it, you can analyze any business in that same way, and specifically your own.
Yeah, I love it, honestly listening to you today, and I've consumed your content for a long time now, listening to you in person consistently for this long around. The models that you've built is a real treat man. It's it's so well thought through it's so systematic. I love the way you think, the way you've been able to train yourself to realize that everything's built on behaviors, and the ability to even something that you said to me, that's really going to stay with me because I think
about it in such a similar way. But it's so obscure, Like we have a lot of similarities in our beliefs, but some of them are a bit more.
Different angles, which I love.
Yeah, from different angles, but some of them are a bit more They're from different angles, but some of them are a bit more widespread held. But you're one thing you talked about today about how when you watch people say what they regret, and I think about that all the time. I'm like, of course you regret you didn't spend enough time with your family, but you're totally taking away from all the benefits you just got right now. And I'm not saying people shouldn't spend time with their family.
It's just when you said that today, that was one thing that I was like, I can't be like to have the ability to think it through to that level, to not just take something at face value. And I think that's that's the skill I see you have, Like, that's the expert you're at is that you don't take anything at face value. And that's hard because it requires you to dig deep to figure out, well, what is
¶ What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?
the behavioral science here?
Is?
What is the exchange here?
Like?
What emotions are we talking about? I picked out some of my favorite alex Monmose quotes because so many. But first, here's a quick word from the brands that support the show. All Right, thank you to our sponsors. Now let's back in. All right, you've touched on some of this, but it'd be good to get your reaction to them again. All Right, So this one I love because I think it's so true.
Most people want to become millionaires because of what being a millionaire allows you to do, not because of what you have to do to become a millionaire. What do we do about that mindset?
It's wanting the view without the climbs. Jimmy Carr has a great quote on this. It's everyone wants what you have, but not what you did to get it. I think that if we make who we become the goal rather than the thing we achieve, instead of winning once a decade, we can win every day because you can continually get better at being who you are, and then the achievement
is just one milestone along the path. But at least in my experiences, as I've actually approached milestones, when it becomes increasingly likely that I'm going to achieve it, it matters less and less. When I was in the lifting world, if I thought whatever my lift was and added one hundred pounds, I'd be like, oh my god, man, if
I lifted that, that would be insane. The time you actually do lift that, you also lifted five pounds less than that before, and you'll lift to ten pounds less than that before, so you're like, well, it's really not
that big of a stretch anymore. And so it actually, in some ways it's it's not even nearly as fulfilling as you think it is, because by the time it happens, you're so close to it it seems obvious, and so shifting from who I become rather than what I achieve or who I become as the achievement has been a wonderful reframe for like, sure, you want to be a millionaire, but we really want to do is become the person who can become a millionaire, and that you can win
every day, and then that takes away the I don't want to do the things that.
Yeah, and that comes to one of the things you talk about a lot that I love is sense control like that that to me. I think one of the earliest clips I saw of yours was someone had asked you something like, you know, what's a trait you see in successful people? And I think you said three things, and I loved hearing that that third one. The first one was, I think you said something like, you know, they're all people who who have high standards, so they
want to they expect a lot from themselves. Yeah, second was but at the same time, they're good at not being that hard on themselves when.
They don't get the emotional control.
Yeah. And then the third thing was like sense control, if I'm.
Not wrong, yeah, yeah. The other one was, so it's this one.
Did I get wrong?
No, No, You're it's like you have this inflated sense of self, so you believe you can achieve great thing.
Yes, that's it.
You have this crippling insecurity that pushes you away.
Yeah. And then the third is that you can control your emotions.
Yeah. And that that and I've always thought it's the high standards, high grace. That's been my language around it. But the third one of that self mastery. What do you think is the number one emotion that people don't know how to control that leads to failure.
That is such a good question, fear, because I think one of the one of the most one of the wildest questions that I read that you know, kind of stuck with me, was like, what would you do if you weren't afraid? And I think that it's just such a such a powerful question to ask, because every person has the fear is the thing that gives you the
hundred reasons. And what's really interesting about this is that we are our brains are exceptionally good at finding problems, which is why I'm a big fan of inverted thinking. So how can I think of it all the ways to kill my business and then do the opposite. You'll your brain is so much better at spotting problems than spotting opportunities, and so it's like use that problem, that problem finding thing, and then just flip it. And it sounds like, oh, well, I would just think of the
opportunities that way. It's like it doesn't actually work. You actually have to think for the threats and then flip them. But I love that it's Charlie Mongerus, that's you know, you know, rest in peace. But from a from a fear perspective, it's I think it's playing it out. It's like what am I actually most afraid of? And so fear typically only lives in the vague, not in the specific.
¶ The Simple Formula Everybody Has But Nobody is Doing
We tend to catastrophize to death.
So if I make this post and people laugh at me, I'll get shunned and then I'll eventually go alone and then die right, So it's like everything just goes to like death right, And so playing it out into the specific is like, Okay, well I make this post.
Some people will like.
It and some people and maybe I'll get some negative comments. If I get naked hommuts, I'll get more reached, so maybe it's not a terrible thing. And then and then that night I will have dinner right, and that night I will go to bed right, and so making making
it really really specific. And then just to add one more thing on that, the other really big downside of being human from an opportunity of money making perspective is that we underestimate the upside and we overestimate the downside, and that has been incredibly valuable for us to stay alive and not very valuable for us to make money.
And so when you if you're in the developed world, the absolute worst.
Case scenario is that you still have a say, fortress, you still have a cover, and you still have food, and you still have air, and you still have water, because in the developed world all those things are available to anyone, and so it's like, okay, so the worst case scenario is that I live and I'm completely free and no one bothers me. It's like, you know, that actually sounds not so bad when you actually play it
all the way out. And so I think playing it out and actually really thinking what would I then do. I probably reach out to say and she would let me sleep on her couch, okay, so, and I would ask her.
If you complain it.
I'd be like, hey, Sarah, if I were to do something and I were to fail, how long would you let me sleep on your couch. You're like, I'd give you six months, and you're like okay. So it all of a sudden it becomes concrete, and I think that that starts to really evaporate fear rather than like oh, I will die totally.
Yeah.
I remember that when I when I made the leap, I was like, and of course I was in a position to be able to say this, but I was like, Okay, well, I'll just go back to what I was doing and if this didn't work, I would just go back, like I'll figure out a way get the job back, and I'll get the job back and I'll go back to do it. And that was the reality. And of course it was still at the time when I felt this was taking up all of that. All right, another one
that I love. This, This one really really hit me and I feel it's going to resonate with a lot of people if you haven't heard it yet. People fail not because there's some magical list nobody has. They fail because it's an obvious list nobody does.
I'm so happy you like that one.
It didn't like I just just just to give kudos to Jay here. You picked out tweets that were not like super Bang or high performers, but like I wrote these and I was like, this is like, this is a thing.
I didn't pick them based on performance. I picked them based on like I was like, I read this, I was like, yes.
Like, I like that, So just kudos to you for that because it makes me feel good. But yeah, so, I mean this is a super known one, but like the magic isn't the work that we're not doing, right, it's the obvious list. If you were trying to get in shape, you know, you should eat less and you should move more.
You know that.
And so I used to even do these with when I would have a weight loss customer who come in the door and they'd be like, so, tell me more about the and I would just say, like, do we really need to get into it? Like you already know what you're supposed to do. The question is why you aren't doing it. That's what I'm here for. And so in a lot of these situations, like you probably know that if you're going to invest, you should, yeah, you know,
wait ten years. And if you're not willing to wait ten years, then you shouldn't buy it, which means that if you're like, well I don't have the time to do that research, then don't invest. Increase your active income, right,
¶ The Most Important Step Is Just Start
and so and all these things like okay, well how do I increase my activit? Well, I know I need to do more than I currently am I know I need to put my stuff out there. And so one of my favorite frames around this is it's the Solomon paradox, right, And so for theose W don't know. In the Bible, Solomon wise man, they called Solomon paradox because he gave
amazing advice, but his life was in shambles. And so the thing is that we're exceptionally good at giving advice and very good and very bad at following it for ourselves. And so what's interesting is that they actually did studies on this where they had people they whitewash someone's existing circumstances and their conditions and had the same people, not knowing they were criticizing themselves, give critiques to this person
what to do to improve their lives. And the thing is is that none of the people are doing it. And so the thing is, I like that frame because if you parachute your sorry, protect yourself in the future and look back and say, Okay, what would eighty years old version of me tell me to do?
For some reason, it kind of like.
Disembodies yourself a little bit, and you can get back and say, well, I would tell myself to do this, this and this, and the thing is is that you have complete context on your situation, and so sometimes it's some of the best advice you can get. And I know this is kind of like the inverted thing where you'd be like, oh, well, I just actually go through the process and say, I'm going to write down a conversation with myself that's eighty years old.
What would he or she tell me to do?
¶ Is Work Life Balance Really Achievable?
And it probably is that obvious list that no one does, not the magical list that no one knows. Because the thing is is that like the clues of success are in plain sight, it's just that the sweat that's required, the price tag associated with them is the one that people don't want to pay. So people don't really give up on their dreams. They give up they see what it takes to get their dreams and then decide it's too expensive. And I think that's the big thing is
is they think it's mispriced. And maybe it is, and I think that's okay. But my preference would be that many people say, you know what, that's not worth it to me, and then be like, great, you've won. Like you've won, you don't need to get anywhere you've already won. Where you're at So that's at least my thought on it.
Yeah, I love that. How does someone who listens to this episode versus someone who applies this episode live differently today or tomorrow.
Well, if someone just listens to the episode, tomorrow will be the same for you. So that's an easy one. This was just entertainment for you. Just define in terms of actions what you were going to do. I mean, that is really it. And so like you can prove to yourself that you learned something from this podcast rather than just being entertained by this podcast, by simply doing
something different, taking and action. And so maybe it is just recording that self a video and texting it to one hundred people.
That's it.
You could just do that and you would have I mean, you would be so much further ahead than you were yesterday. And what's crazy is that the amount of progress that you make in that first twenty hours is greater than any amount of progress that you will likely make over the remainder of your career, because going from absolutely terrible too proficient happens so fast.
Now.
To be clear, all of the gains come from going from proficient to master, which take a huge amount of time, but It's one of the most exciting times because like, all right, look I can build an app. Now, oh look I can build a web page, or look, I can show the people out of self stup, whatever it is. And I think I would just want to get to that, like get to that fast learning curve as fast as you can.
And the only we can do that at starting. I love it. All right.
Here's another one. I don't know if it's a popular one or not, but deleting work life balance for a season nets you more work life balance over a lifetime.
So I love this frame shift, which is everyone talks about work life balance, but no one talks about it over what timeline. Paul Graham said this from my Combinator. He said, in order to make a million dollars, you have to endure million dollars worth of pain. And so you might be able to endure a million dollars with a pain over forty years, or you can crunch it into four crazy years and then after that you can
have whatever you want to have afterwards. And so I think about life in seasons rather than on microcosms days and even weeks, and I think that shifting that perspective will really only solve one core problem for people, which is that they feel like they are doing something wrong by making a sacrifice today, and there's always going and again it's an eternal question how much do I risk?
How much do I consume versus invest? These are classic human problems that will never have a correct answer, And it's more what's the correct answer for you in your season right now, based on the goals you have? And so I think, if anything, I would want that quote to give some people permission.
To work a weekend every once in a while, to.
Take the five to nine on both sides of the day and say, you know what, I Am going to be unbalanced. And that's okay because at least in my observation and probably yours, I have yet to see a hyper successful person who doesn't have a wildly unbalanced life, or at least for a significant period of time. And we want to just make sure that we're not looking at someone once they are a billionaire and saying what
are they doing now? Because they might be in a different season now, and so don't look at what you know Warren Buffet's doing now when he says I have I make two good decisions a year I've had a good year.
Well, if you make two good decisions a year, you're.
Still probably not gonna You're not gonna be warm Buffett, right,
¶ Be More Productive by Eliminating Everything Unnecessary
And so I think about that as my as my frame.
Yeah, don't read someone's chapter twenty when you're writing your chapter one. It doesn't make any sense. I remember growing up, not growing up. I remember a few years ago when Gary Gary's version that I loved, which is like in his words and so I'll say each ship for two years and then eat cavia for the rest of your life. Yeah, And it was so interesting to me how much you could do in two years if you just went all in as opposed to this idea of like I'm gonna
be really balanced for ten years. And I was thinking about the other day and you said seasons. And I was saying this the other day when I was on tour storing to Jesse. It'sler and I said this to Jesse. We were talking about something similar, and I was just like, I would never want a day. A perfect day is not a day where it rains, snows, sun and fall, right, Like, that's not a perfect day. Like you wouldn't say that, you wouldn't say I hope it rains today. I hope
it snows today. I hope it's sunny, and I hope the leaves shed. Like that's not a perfect day, but that's what you want every day. And Nature's already showing you the cycles that work. But we're trying to go against nature by saying I want everything to happen today.
And I want all my days to be over the halfway line.
Yeah.
And so I think about this from a law of large numbers perspective, which is, let's say you have three hundred and sixty five days in a year, and there's going to be if you change nothing the bottom ten percent of days, you're gonna have thirty six days in the year that are bottom ten percent days. That there's nothing wrong with the day, it's just that this happens
to be a bottom ten percent day. And so I think a lot of suffering comes from just the normal volatility or variation that exists in life and then somehow ascribing meaning to it and saying, oh, and because this is the bottom ten percent, it is bad. Rather than it is sunny, it is rainy, and I need rain in order to appreciate sun, right, And so it's like we can't have just upside. It's the trade offs, Like I want all the good without the bad.
But the bad is what makes the good good.
Yeah. Yeah, and the bad is what sometimes what keeps you going. Yeah, because if it's just good, maybe you'd stop, maybe you'd yeah. Well, last one of these that I wanted to pick out, which I think is going to help a lot of people because I've been doing it a lot. I'm writing my third book right now, and this has changed my life. It's amazing how much you can get done if you work for twelve hours without your phone. So, I mean, it was simple yet so profound.
So I defined so that here's the number one the highest value productivity hack that I can give anyone. So this is the hack of productivity. Do nothing except for the task you set out to achieve.
That's it.
So everything that people do in order to increase productivity that is not working on the task at hand is by very definition.
Making them less productive.
Like period. And so I think people have these very long routines. I think they have these like I got to get in the mood.
I got in this.
But it's like, what if you could start taking action despite your mood and then get into the mood faster through taking the action. And so all of the things that have made me more productive in life have been through elimination, not addition. And so it is eliminating outside
stimulus besides the one task that I'm working on. And so if we think the hypothetical ideal, our hypothetical extream of the most focused person in the world is that that person would do literally nothing besides that one thing, which means the wouldn't eat, they wouldn't sleep. Now at some point they're like, okay, well, in order for it, he has to eat and he has to sleep. Okay,
So every other hour is just this one thing. And so if we take that as the hypothetical extreme, we want to approximate there or get as close as possible to that extreme as humanly possible. And so for me, it's good night's sleep knowing what I'm going to start on the day before. Caffeinate ear plugs, I double earplug. I put the plugs, and then I put the things on, and I work in a room that has no windows.
Now some people are like, that's depressing for me, But for me, it'll laws me to lose myself in my work not get distracted by something that's going on outside.
Well, I was just about to say, I'm glad you brought up environment because everyone has an environment they thrive in. So I'm the same. I need I need instrumental music. I don't can't have music with lyrics when I'm thinking that, I just can't do it. So I have some artists that I'm happy to listen to instrumentals of. It also can't be songs that I know. Trust me in music that's totally unpredictable and totally random because it helps me with creativity.
Interesting.
Then I do need windows, any natural light, but I need to not see anything real happening. It's like sky treat It's like it's nondescript and there's not like yeah, not people exactly. And I can't work in noisy coffee shop like I can't work in environments like that. And to me, the environment is more important than this whole mood builder thing because that's like deep work, like you're in the cave doing the thing.
Can I tell a wild example?
Yeah, So I believe you if you control the conditions, you can control the outcome, right, if you know all the variables and so if we want to be productive, we want to control as many of those conditions as possible. And so to take up hypothetical extreme power to say, hey, I guarantee that everybody who's listening to this, if we were all in one room, I could get everyone naked without saying a word. He would hear that and be like,
oh my god, that's insane. What I would do is I would lock all the doors, and I would turn up the heat to two hundred and then just wait and eventually everyone would get naked. And the point to that is that we can reconstruct the environment to get
¶ Alex on Final Five
the desired outcome if we control as many of those variables as possible. And so if you don't feel as productive as you want, you get distracted easily. You might not have even given yourself a shot. Right if you're trying to work while having your notifications on, while letting people text you and call you, and you're at you know, in an area where people are coming by and like is this chair free? Is this table free? And you're
constantly getting pulled. It's like you haven't even gotten a chance. And maybe you have a roommate who walks in and out and maybe they listen to music. And the thing is that many people are in those conditions and they're like, man, I think I think I have a medical condition. I think I need to get medicated. It's like, dude, you
give your self a shot. Like Jerry Soindfeld talks about how his writing condition is he has a desk in a room that has nothing else, and he's got a pad and he's got a pen, and he's he doesn't have to write, but he can't do anything else. And so if we define commitment as the elimination of alternatives, then we need to commit to the work. Right it focuses anything that is not the work, is not the work, then that's it. And so I think that we get there through elimination, not thro adition.
Yeah, I felt that. I think it's going to help a lot of people. And you're so right, Like even it's so funny you say that. Up until six months ago, I started to think. I was like, that's my brain just been rewired by TikTok, Like I was like, have
I really lost my ability for deep work? And I was having this thought probably like six maybe twelve months ago, because I was racking my brain about a new brook and it wasn't as clear as it used to be and whatever, and I just started to do what I always used to do, and all of a sudden, it's all gone away. And I was like, I'm writing, like for eight hours a day Saturday and Sunday, or a new book every week because I loved it in the zone. I'm in the room that I write in, and I
was like, oh, it's right there. I didn't give myself the opportunity because I was trying to do it with the other discission.
Trying to squeeze it in. So you can't squeeze in focus. Let's say it's a jealous mistress. It requires all your.
Attention, Alex. We end every episode with a final five. These questions get asked to everyone and so these are your final five. They have to be answered in one word, one sentence maximum. So question number one, Alex, what is the best advice you've ever heard or received?
Do so much work it would be unreasonable for you not to be successful.
Second question, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?
Follow your passion?
Question number three a piece of advice you wish you received sooner?
Find people better than you and do whatever you can to get them to help you, including helping them first without expectation.
Question number four A lesson that took you far too many times to learn.
Focus one thing all in and.
Fifth and final questions, And we asked this every guest has ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone had to follow, what would it be?
Everyone has to give all their wealth away at the end of their life.
I love that one.
Not to your kids, but it has to be yeah, exactly, has to be.
Given away to kids or ever or it doesn't matter. Yeah, not to your kids, Like yeah, yeah, are you saying beyond your kids?
Yeah.
My friend just told me the other day that his dad just took him out the will and his dad's given all his money away to charity and all the kids are our gayet anything. He was hot broke. He was like, oh God, I thought I was gonna pass them wunny.
So there's a sanscrit saying around that, which is, if you have a good son, there's no need to accumulate wealth. If you have a bad son, there's no point to
accumulate wealth. And so at the end of the day, that's I mean, that's my worldview, which is the reason that I want the reason that I would want the game to be structured so that everybody has to give all their stuff away at the end is because if you look at second and third order consequences of that, the people who are the best allocating earth aggregating capital, the people are the best at making money would be the ones who are also the best at allocating it.
And so you would actually have the best tools and the people who are best skilled to use them. And so if you know you have to give it away, then at some point near the later part of your life, you would stop trying to amass and start trying to you'd focus on giving. And I think most people who do give get addicted to giving because they realized that actually it fills a hole that the wealth never did right.
And so what ends up happening, though, is that from a societal perspective, is that if all the best allocators of capital then try to solve all the world's problems with the capital they had, so many fewer problems would exist.
That would the whole world would get better.
The other downstream effect of that is that it would get rid of a huge amount of the kind of the cronyism, the nepotism, the things where you know, these these seventh generation massive you know, wealth trust fund, you know kids who like it doesn't serve the kids either. You look at those families, they're a mess.
Yeah, yeah, on on so many reasons.
And so I'm a big believer in equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. And so if everybody's slate was clean day one, because no one got daddy's inheritance, then everyone starts at zero as close as possible. Obviously genetics, you know, can play a factor there, but I think that' says as equal of a start as we can get, and then everyone starts as zero, and and the ones you super win then turn into super givers.
And I like that.
Yeah, And if you don't One thing I've learned about that as well is if you don't give now, you won't give later. This feeling of like when I get a million dollars, i'll give more, it doesn't work that way. It's a purport, Like it will hurt ten percent at a million dollars, it will hurt ten percent at one hundred k. Like it's not that's not going to change. And another phrase that we'd always hear in the monastery was God doesn't see how much you give, God sees
how much you hold back. And so that's why I like your law a lot, because it's that feeling of like, hey, you know, at the end of it, I gave it all.
The book is called one hundred Million Dollar Money Models, part of the one hundred Million Dollar Series, Alex I hope this is the first of many many conversations we have online and Offlan truly loved our time together and honestly, I've become a bigger fan of spending this time with you and this This was a masterclass for so many I'm going to be sending this to a lot of
people I know who need to. There's some podcasts that you do and you're just like, yeah, I'm going to send this personally to people in my life who I think this is going to change for us.
So thank you so much, man, I'm super humbled and very honored. So thank you so much for having me.
Thank you.
Man.
If this is the year that you're trying to get creative, you're trying to build more, I need you to listen to this episode with Rick Rubin on how to break into your most creative self, how to use unconventional methods that lead to success, and the secret to genuinely loving what you do. If you're trying to find your passion and your lane, Rick Rubin's episode is the one for you? Just because I like it, that doesn't give it any value, like as an artist, if you like it, that's all
of the value. That's the success comes when you say I like this enough for other people to see it.