Be Ruthless About the Life You Want - Alex Hormozi (4K)

today we're going to go through as many of your lessons as we can in about three hours and we're going to see what we can get through first one a friendly reminder that in three generations everyone who knew us will be dead including the people whose opinions stopped you from doing what you wanted all along imagine that someone you know achieves every dream and hits every goal they have years later they get old and die two years after that how much do you care about as much as everyone else will if you accomplish your goals and dreams do it for you so I think about death all the time because it's it's probably the central theme it's probably the thing that I think the most about and I think that influences how I see time and also how I think how how it influences agency like what actions I'm willing to take despite the Judgment of others and so a lot of times and it might be because I have more insecurity than everyone that I think like man I want to do this thing and then I hear all these other voices of reasons why I shouldn't do it or why somebody else will say like that's bad or you'll bad or like that's wrong whatever and so I think I've had to come up with a lot of these devices to get around my own insecurities to take action despite those insecurities and the biggest one that I think about is that it doesn't matter whether I achieve all of my goals or I don't achieve all of the goals in three generations I'll be forgotten and the only people who were naying against me will also be dead and so then it's like just do it for me and then when I wake up every day there's only one voice I have to listen to but that means that you need to be able to work out what to do from first principles you now no longer have societal Norms or assistants or Role Models or archetypes or expectations and that's also difficult in a different way I think that the more you Flex whatever that muscle is of like independent thinking the more it becomes the default way that you think and then everyone else's actions just start looking more and more insane to you what like what's an example of that that you can think of I mean shoot just the most basic ones of like living the life that you don't want not wearing what you want to wear not dating who you want to date um not living where you want to live like you're living at home and you want to move and your parents say no and you don't make the move or you're dating a girl because she's socially accepted you know by your friend group she's safe but like there's always some distance in between you but you're like I don't want to risk it right or like you're in the the job and every day you go there and you're like I mean it's okay and the idea of just living an okay life just sounds so terrifying to me that the freedom to fail over and over again is still more fulfilling to me at least it feels like it's real than walking through kind of on autopilot and so I think that's a lot of the choices that other people make that seem insane to me now but didn't didn't seem insane to me a decade ago you know I mean I think it's just like as you practice taking more agency taking more responsibility for the decisions then you just get better and better at it and then it just seems more and more ridiculous you're like they're like I just can't quit my job and you're like why like no physically why like why can't you quit your job like like you know what I mean they start hyperventilating it's like you could could you move in with your parents could you move in with a friend could you split rent I mean I could but I mean other people who are going to die in a hundred years would think what and one of my favorite ones is um and I say this all the time to Lela like whenever we're getting to some sort of like mini complaint it's like you know if you zoom out far enough you can't see the Earth so we're talking about like oh man they're going to mess up this order on this vendors I like you know if you zoom out far enough you can't see the Earth it just like it just puts everything immediately into perspective of how ridiculous some of the things that we're concerned about are Sean puri's got this thing where he says don't follow what most people do because you don't want the results that most people get the average person is obese likely to be divorced and has less than 1K in the bank it feels safe to do what everyone else is doing but it's actually a terrible decision it's like the best way to guarantee to not have the life that you want is to do what everyone else is doing unless you want what everyone else has with no one which no one does yeah it's um being able to think for yourself and and treating it like a muscle I think is a smart way to consider it because in the beginning it's really really hard you've been resting on societal norms and the way you've dealt with past trauma and your parents expectations and what all of your friends do and what's accepted and all of this this stuff for so long that when it first comes to you needing to step on that muscle it's like trying to move your ears like all humans have got muscles that can move their ears but because no one works it as a child they just atrophy away uh and this is the ear muscle of personal growth I think I had a lot of practice with it because I had a so like a lot of people have many voices that they hear that they feel are judging them right they have their friends they have their uncle they have their siblings they have their cousins co-workers whatever I think I had just one voice that I heard really loudly and I was was I was talking to one of our one of our employees the other day and I was trying to put it in perspective younger guy and I was like I imagine how much you care about your mother's opinion and your father's opinion and your s and all of those other people I was like and now imagine that there's literally only one because I had no siblings I basically had no mother I had just a father and so like his approval was literally everything and he disapproved of the path that I wanted to take in my life and so I think a lot of these mental faculties or these little Frameworks or these isms just came from like how can I combat this incredibly booming voice in the background because like when I look at what I was doing at the time like I was a consultant I you know I graduated in three years I took the consulting job I did all the things but the craziest thing was that the moment that my father was most proud of me and he approved of my life the most was when I was the saddest and so that's when I was like maybe his approval isn't the right way to feel good about life and so that that started basically the six-month journey of from when I decided that I wanted to change my life till when I changed it and I think that like as you become more able or more potent or higher agency that timeline between when you decide you want to do something and when you actually do it just continues to compress right like now if I want to change something I'm like let's change it like done I like I we walk out of a thing I like we're never going to do that podcast again or I don't want to talk to this person again or whatever it is right whereas before it's like okay I have to I have to sleep on it I have to really think about it and like how am I going to it's like why do I care about how I'm going to say it this is what it is done and it's just like that timeline is compressed but the hardest one for me like the first one was by far the hardest and everyone since then the nice thing is that no matter how difficult your circumstance is if you have like the bigger the wall that you have to get through is as soon as you get past that one big wall you then can use that wall as the evidence for why you can jump over the next wall because that will be the biggest one and so like after I did quit my job and left my house and and left Baltimore and didn't tell my dad until I was across the country cuz I was so afraid like people think of me is like some big Alpha whatever do I was like I was such I was so afraid of my father's disapproval that I didn't tell him until I physically left the state like like I'm not like think about that like I wasn't even just one state over I was like five states over and then I was like hey by the way I'm going to California and he was like well let's come over we'll talk about it and I was like I'm in Ohio already then obviously he had a different reaction right but like but then after that it was like what do I have to do now it's like oh I got to I got to sell strangers and I was like I told my dad I didn't want to do what he wanted how hard could this be and so like it it then becomes this one huge proof point so the bigger that the dragon is that you have to slay the more evidence you have that you can slay the next dragon and I think that is if there's ever been a good point for why getting over the one first hard one is so hard is that it will then give you the reinforcement that you can do whatever you need to do next yeah the life you want is on the other side of a few hard conversations and you're living a life you hate because you're too afraid to have them I think about that a lot because like whenever I feel anxious or insecure or angry or sad I'm like what conversation do I need to have that I'm not having and so then and usually if I just think for not that long I'm like this is the conversation I've been putting off and then you know I'm not the the the the poster child of mental health and so um I'll just call myself a pansy for not having the conversation and then and then I just have it and so again I think it's like I need to have this conversation and the time between when I have it versus or when I when I know I need to have it when I actually have it just because continues to compress and if you've ever had like a a breakup or employee firing one of the or quitting if you're an employee like these things that you dread I don't know if you notice it but like the day you do it the moment after you do it I'm like how many other conversations can I have like I want to be like I'm like else talk yeah totally serial killer for awkward conversations when I so like the next series of hard conversations that I had after I I left home was actually like years later so I had I had multiple partners in I said I had a I had a partner in one of my gyms I had a partner in four other gyms I had uh a partner in a Cairo and dental marketing agency and all of them relied on me to make money and so all of their livelihoods were still dependent on me but I was splitting everything and it was just it was it was horrible for me at the time and so I remember when I I ended up getting in a DUI and you know I talked to a a performance coach or whatever and he was like your stress and these conversations could literally kill you he's like they almost did so I I got in head on collision at 60 mil hour and I walked away no injuries um but it was like my wakeup call but not to stop drinking it was my wakeup call that I needed to have these conversations and that's what I was avoiding when I was drinking it wasn't alcohol is what were the things that I'm avoiding that I'm using alcohol to get away from and so um the next day I had the first conversation with the first partner and it was horrible but the moment I was done I was like I got to call the other guy and I called the other one I was like this is how it is and the thing is is I had this back stop of my death of like you almost just died because you wouldn't have this conversation and so then it just gave me this courage to just be like like and whatever the reaction was I was like I'd Rather Be Alive like that was it it and so it's it's weird though because death has been this really recurring theme in my life that like the same thing happened when I was like the only thing that gave me enough balls to stand up to my dad to be fair from a distance from the car when I was driving halfway across the country like let's not make my let's not make me into a too big of a hero here um was the idea that like I started thinking like every day I was like I hope I don't wake up you know what I mean um and that was the that was that was the thing where I was like this is a big enough problem that like if you don't want to wake up then what have you got to lose exactly and that was it and it was like I have nothing to lose and that was when that was when I think in the last podcast we talked about this where it's like if everybody who's like at the bottom and feels like they have nothing going for them reframe that as I have nothing going for me which also means that I have nothing to lose by taking action it makes you a much more dangerous person and I think that was the flip that I've had repeatedly shown to me in my life that allowed me to take the step that I was afraid to take have I told you about the region beta Paradox have you seen that one okay so this is interesting so uh imagine that you had to go a mile or less and if you did a mile a mile okay if you had to travel a mile or less you would walk it and if you had to go more than a mile you would drive it okay so paradoxically you would go two miles quicker than you would go one mile uhhuh if you follow that rule the important Insight here is that if you only take action when things cross a certain threshold of Badness mhm sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things oh yeah so if you look around and you see that people are stuck in region beta this zone of comfortable complacency right it's the guy that sticks and his just okay job because his boss isn't too much of a dick but the pay isn't that good and he's not really that passionate but it's all right whatever whatever the person that stays in the acceptable relationship they're not that fired up but they're not really in love and their partner's not really got much alignment with their interest or the person that stays in a crappy apartment and there's a bit of mold in the ceiling but it's cheap and it's in a good area of town or whatever all of these people would be better off if their situations were worse because it would give them the activation energy to kick them out of the bottom and their only regret would be not doing it sooner dude I love that when I so it's funny because if I look back on the instances that were the most painful in my life every single one of them without fail has created a disproportionate gain right like the most painful thing early on was for me was quitting my job and leaving you know leaving my dad basically and then that created the you know my first my first business and the gyms and all of that stuff um you know getting into the DUI the head-on collision um and like that whole situation got me out of all of these failed Partnerships that I wasn't willing to do but in the in the moment I was like I'm such a failure like I suck at everything but that gave me the springboard when I lost everything the first time after that um that then gave me like the idea that I needed to change the business model around right and that's what switched me into the licensing model right and so like each of these time and then that became you know the the first forun this is kind of like Alchemy yeah like turning something which is worse than useless yeah into something that's as precious and useful as possible you know I'm I'm sure you know the terrible of the you know the man and his son and he like buys the son a horse and then it falls he breaks the leg and then they're like oh it's so sad and then the Army comes and the son doesn't die and then it's like oh H great right and so it's one of those really interesting ones where like whatever negative situation and this is probably good for the audience but like if you think back to all the negative situations you had like the really really bad ones when you expand the time Horizon most times they become net wins and so then it just means that like if you're in a really tough time right now you just got to wait and then you get and then you get your reference point back on all the things that changed as a result because most times when is bad it can't get worse so then you feel like Well it can't get worse than this and then your action threshold decreases and you take and you do all the things you know you should have done anyways and so it's like we have this big stack of should do and we just wait until it's two miles yep and then you just you're like you just like the firing conversation and you're like well I just fired one person or like I just ended one partnership I just broke up with one girl or whatever it is and you're like who else do I need to talk to today like and then in like a per like you have these rapid periods of growth that happen and then you have the next web of comfort because it's way better than you were before Y and I think it's I wonder this this is more just like an open thought but like I wonder how long like more successful people stay in that next Plateau like I wonder if their threshold for Action yeah they Med like oh like I'm getting com like how quickly they get comfortable into like I need to change I need to get better next one the heaviest things in life aren't iron and gold but unmade decisions the reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make and you're not making them it's a good quote you said it you said it I think a lot of times the decisions that we make are predicated on the on the conversations we need to have because usually like the and what's interesting is like you can Define commitment by eliminating Alternatives so if you committed you've eliminated alternative actions right like you can say I'm committed but until you eliminate other options you're not committed there's always a get out of jail free and so a lot of people make decisions to end relationships to quit their job to start the new thing but they don't become committed to the decision until they remove the other options and then you're forced to take action on it and so I think actually defining those two two different things now you could Define you know decision is to kill off like diader from Latin but from a from an from a colloquial thing I think there are two different instances it's like I need to change this and then I do change it um and the making the decision is when it becomes a commitment why uh unmade decisions so heavy I think at least for me it's because I have this hamster wheel on the my back of my mind where I keep playing out different scenarios and so I keep thinking like well maybe maybe I need to change what I'm currently doing maybe maybe if I just rethought like cuz I'm I'm a big frame guy so I'm like maybe I just need to be thinking about this differ right maybe if I zoom all the way out the Earth doesn't exist so maybe this doesn't matter or maybe I'm just making a problem that doesn't exist maybe the best action I should take is nothing right like I you know I reframe all those things um but usually it's just because I'm afraid of something and then that's why I'm not making the decision and I think once I name and put a face and it's usually not even a thing that I'm afraid of it's one person's judgment I'm afraid of and then when I name the person then it becomes then it becomes real instead of being this amorphous like people societ judgment it's like Tom like do I really care what Tom thinks I guess so it seems like I'm not making this big change in my life because of Tom looks like Tom's more in control of my life than I am dude so I remember this when I was 19 years old I was super angry like all 19-year-old men right that's the the standard default right I was angry at both my parents for who because I was 19 right and I remember blaming them for everything blaming them for my life blaming them for not being a better person I literally blame them for being a bad person and I remember realizing that when I blamed them that I gave them control over my life and then the idea that the people that I hated the most at the time were the ones who actually were controlling me was the thing that most sickened me to then actually flip my narrative to actually taking control like that was the one thought process like my mother I'm giving her control over my romantic Rel like my mother controls this that I was like No And so like just the idea that somebody who I I was disgusted by at the time um had that much power is what gave me the power to start taking action so this hamster wheel thing that continues to distract you I've got this concept called anxiety cost so kind of like opportunity cost um when you have an unmade decision every single second that you spend thinking about the unmade decision could have been gotten back had you just made the decision oh yeah and realizing that it's it's a justification for eating frogs earlier in the day I need to answer that email the longer that you wait until you answer that email the more times you will think the thought I need to answer that email yeah and if we assume that what truly truly matters in life is the time and the attention that we spend within that time your time is being captured and your attention is being captured by a thought that could have been gotten rid of had you have just done it had you've just had the conversation broken up with the relationship left the job told the father whatever done your stretches cleaned your teeth had a shower whatever it is that you needed to do all of that anxiety cost could have been gotten rid of had you just gone and done it you can move through life at seven times the rate of other people by simply changing when you say you're going to make a decision from end of week to end of day so think about how that Stacks up so it's like let's say that there were four decisions that you needed to make if the normal person takes a week to make the decision and then their mind moves on to the next thing that they have anxiety for and start making that decision and decide another week decide another week decide another week it's a month to make those four decisions whereas the the super the Superman that takes one decision day one one second decision day two third decision day three fourth decision day four they aren't even finish the week yet and they're where the other person is at the end of the month and like that speed of decision- making like not paying the attention cost the opportunity cost of your time I think it's really profound in terms of how quickly people move through life in terms of achieving the goals that they set out because people are like how did that how is that guy so young and he's achieved X Y and Z it's like well what takes you a month to make a decision we make it an hour and then the next hour I make another decision that takes you your next month and so like that's how you can go 30 times or hundred times faster than than the quote average person who's overweight has ,000 in their bank account you know and is going to die at 70 can you just go back to before you made that first decision with your dad because you've mentioned it you know people might look at your I would say ruthlessness at least in some regards with decision- making you know hiring and firing and making these business decisions and there's all of these great stories about and I had this thing and I realized that partner wasn't right so I got rid of that business and you know that's the sort of thing that would tear most people up for six months 18 months maybe forever yeah and to look at that degree of cutthroat or at least um decisiveness I think is almost unfathomable for a lot of people are you a representative Avatar is pre leaving Baltimore Alex a representative avatar for the average person I think so I mean I was high achieving you know I I mean like I did well in school I tried hard I did those things but in terms of my risk tolerance and my fear of failure and my insecurities yeah abely absolutely I mean if anything real talk I'll bet you that I have more insecurities than most people because those insecurities are what drove me to do well in those things not because I cared about school but because I cared about what other people thought about me yeah yeah I um I've spoken to hundreds hundreds and hundreds of high performers on balance people are driven way more by fear of insufficiency than they are with some well-balanced perfect desire to just maximize their greatness in life like the activation energy for almost everybody is I'm scared I might be a piece of what hang on oh God I might be a piece of I genuinely might be a piece of I need to go and do something so outrageous that I I can't be a piece of I there's no way that it could happen I might be a coward oh my God what what can I do to stop myself from being a coward that's the activation energy it's funny because if you regress fear to its most basic form it's death and death is the greatest motivator and like you can prove it in a simple example it's like if I all of a sudden go up to anybody on the street and I put a gun in their head and I say you know point a gun at their head and I say go do this thing they'll go do it but if I say you can have anything you want if you do this they're willing to go 10 times harder with a gun in their face to not die and so if you take fear and aress it all the way down to its basis form like that's what the insecurity is like if they they think I won't be enough and if they don't think I won't be enough then this won't happen if this won't happen this won't happen I'll be alone I'll be dead right like if you just regress it all the way down like that's all it is and so like the biggest Achievers in life I think have have most directly tied them not doing whatever it is that they want to do to death whether they're consciously aware of it or not and then that's what motivates them harder well get back to talking to Alex in one minute but first I need to tell you about element element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't it's a healthy alternative to sugary electrolyte drinks and it's how I've started my morning every single day for over 3 years you do not need to have coffee first thing in the morning CU your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active but your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenal system element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium that helps to regulate appetite curb cravings and improve your brain function but best of all tastes phenomenal this orange salt is unbelievable in a cold glass of water first thing in the morning and they have a no BS no questions asked refund policy if you don't like it for any reason they'll give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box that's how confident they are that you love it head to drink LM nt.com slod wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box that's drink LM nt.com slod wisdom you're not afraid of failing you're afraid of what other people will think of you if you fail but if you're afraid of that imagine what they think of you when you aren't even trying oh yeah they aren't I'm such a dick sometimes um does it is it is it strange to hear your like Angry toilet tweets read back to you now in the cold harsh light of day God that was a particularly difficult poo I was cracking out that you know real talk the the tweets that I have people don't know this but the tweets are notes to self y so they're just directed at me so that I can look back on them and like be reminders of like hey don't don't do that and so like I think to myself man I'm afraid afraid of doing this and I'm like no I'm not I'm afraid of what this person's going to think about me because if I were to be able to fail in quiet and complete isolation then I wouldn't care and then I think well what if I what if I what if I don't succeed in public what do they think then nothing right they don't think about me at all and so obviously that comes from the perspective of uh seeking to gain approval and attention from others anyway so it's like listen if you're insecure which everybody is let's be real um you might as well use the insecurity to get something out of it right like one of my one of my favorite things about entrepreneurship is like use what you've got and so a lot of people think that they need to fix their conditions in order to get like the perfect conditions before they start but the perfect condition is whatever one you're in because it gives you whatever assets you have that's the cards that you're dealt and so you just play the hand and a lot of people have great cards it's like man I'm so afraid of it's like use it it's like I have nothing what makes you very dangerous because you have nothing to lose right like one of the um really interesting things about I think about from a business perspective but it probably applies to everything is that there's always an advantage and a disadvantage from every position right so like I remember when I mean gym launch is still a big company and still continues to grow but in the gym licensing space there's not many people who can compete with us there right and I would talk to guys who are in the space you know I would talk you know talk at a conference whatever and you know younger guys would be like well I want to I want to be in this space too and it's not fair because you know you have this big advantage and I was like you have a way bigger advantage that I do I was like cuz if I were in your position I would go to every single gym owner and be like you don't want to be with gym launch you don't want to be with Alex you're just a number to him like you're never going to talk to him like you're just a cog in the wheel there with me you're going to get my personalized attention there is just some employee down the chain that's following some process right I was like but on the flip side if I'm talking to that same gym owner then I'm going to say you don't want to talk to Jimmy he lives in his mom basement he has no proof that he's good at what he's but he's that the reason that we're number one in the space is because we've done it so many times and we have a system that we know that if you go on this side you will get this result on the outside I was like there's always a position and there's always an advantage I was like you just have to play the one you've got and most people just look at what everyone else's advantages and don't think which one do I have when you're talking about it's not you that's afraid of failing yeah you're afraid of other people's opinions about why you're going to fail like the reason I think that cynicism is so popular on the Internet is that the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure yeah that's fundamental it's sour grapes at an existential level right it is a cynicism safety blanket it is protecting you from ever having to feel the downside of anything I will assure my own failure in private so that I never have to face my failure in public it's kind of like investing like everyone's afraid of losing money when they invest but the only guaranteed investment that doesn't work is never investing to begin with and so it's like they take the long failure rather than the short one right I mean it's what it is right you just fail long and they're like I'd prefer that um that's I mean that's yeah I it's it's like you and I are going back and forth on trying to figure out how many different ways can I say that either the people that you're worried about judgment are going to die or that you're going to die or that even if you do achieve the thing they won't care anyways or if you don't do anything they won't think about you to begin with and don't you want to be thought about to begin with like don't you want some level of significance I just you're going to die and I think like I was I was very grateful so one of my biggest Inspirations or whatever you know influences when I was in Baltimore was I would have lunch with my grandfather three times a week so he was 90 old guy so I would go to the nursing home and we'd have lunch three days a week and listening to him talk about the regrets that you had in life it's so much more painful to watch someone who has no options left like he's going to die and he's die tomorrow and he died a couple years later I mean like and he he lost all his mental faculties you know almost sadly basically when I stop when I left Baltimore one of the sad parts is I was one of the only people that kind of like kept him Lucid you know what I mean and after that no one really no one really visited him no one really did anything and so I think he he just rolled downhill I think the lunches might have been the only thing that he looked forward to and um seeing someone old with no options and nothing but regret now not that he had everything to gret he had things that he did really well and I took those things from him um he would he would repeat the same lessons you like every lunch the were a lot of older people kind of repeat a few key lessons and everything that he had he flew during he fled during the um during the world World War II uh you know he fled from the Germans and all that stuff because he had a a Jewish sounding last name um he wasn't but he it was enough that he was fleeing right um and he always used to say he's like you have two hands and one brain I was like use them that was always this thing that he said to me and um I think just like when when I would think about the things that he was going up against compared to the things that we're going up against now it just made me feel like all right like this is not as big of a deal as I really think it is I don't have Germans at the at my door you know what were the regrets that he had him yeah you would have spent I mean again there's deathbed regrets and then there's real life regrets but there's there's things that he would have done differently in terms of the business there's things he would have done differently with his wife he had he got divorced um that you know uh he would have done things very differently with his kids so my mother um and her sisters um which actually talking to him about how he raised my mother helped me in some way forgive her for some of the things that I felt were wrongdoings that she had done to me and so it's funny because you know one of my favorite quotes from Bla Pascal is to understand is to forgive and like when you when you I think there's another saying that I like a lot which is it's really hard to hate closeup it's like if you really see someone and you see all the things that they went through and the things that they that happened to them to become who they are then you understand them and then you understand why they did X Y and Z because if we don't understand we assume that it's because they're just evil people and most people aren't that way they're this way because they've been reinforced or punished for doing something like that in the past and especially for her she was reinforced for acting a certain way over and over and over again to the point that it was it was core to her character and so when that got put on me I was like I hate you you're terrible you're like blah but like when I looked at it on much longer time Ron of like she was 4 years old when she came here she couldn't speak English she got beat up as a kid like all these things I'm like you know what maybe give her a little Grace you know and I remember when when I came back and it was right around that same time where I realized I was giving this person all this power she yelled at me for something when I came back home from college my freshman year and it was a standard fight you know like here's the button that I press to get into the normal fight that we get into um I just remember she hit the button and I just like wasn't that upset and I it's like I felt nothing she like hit the button she like it again harder and I was like and I just remember looking at her and be like I get it I'm sorry like you had a tough tough life and then she just broke down and you know started crying because it was like she felt understood and I think um I know that was round about way of getting back to regrets but he regretted how he had raised her but his through his regrets I got to see why she was the way she was and then it diffused the bomb that was between me and her did that tell you that story Douglas Murray told me about regrets from Christopher Hitchin brilliant so Christopher Hitchins one of the new atheists uh was sat in some British pub with Douglas Murray when Douglas is Young and you know you can imagine it's some musty Chesterfield sofa he's probably got a cigarette in his mouth and a glass of scotch or something and uh Douglas is vacillating between these two different choices that he needs to make and he is um complaining lamenting the fact that I have this thing but I have this thing and if I do this thing I can't do this thing and and what what do I do and apparently hitch like sat back and Douglas in life we must choose our regrets and I was like so I'm three Manhattans deep in Douglas Murray's apartment in Manhattan at 2 in the morning and he sneaks off to the toilet and I quickly write this down cuz I know that my like half cut alcohol brain isn't going to remember it so note it down that was all the trigger that I needed which is also a good argument for noting things down and I reflected I must reflected on that for a year I must thought about it for a year in life we must choose our regrets what the does that mean okay first off in an existence where opportunity cost is baked in because you don't get to split test life and by doing a thing you can't do a different thing I have the choice between going to the gym and going to the theme park if I go to the gym death or I can't go to the theme park even if the decision of going to the gym was the right call I will always have the open loop of yeah but what if I'd gone to the theme park you can't ever know right okay so that means that fundamentally regrets are baked in to our existence and I'd always thought that the reason I had a regret was due to some suboptimal decision I'd made if only I'd made this decision better I could have ameliorated the regret okay so regrets are an unavoidable part of being a human and they're a byproduct of opportunity cost which you can't get away from but what does it mean that you have to choose your regrets okay well if regrets are inevitable if they're going to happen no matter what an easy way to look at the decision is rather than which do I want to do which regret could I live with mhm because there are certain regrets that you can't bear living with now you can bear living with them but they're going to be worse than other ones yeah so what is the difference between I need to have a difficult decision I need to have a difficult conversation with my boss about leaving to go and do this thing or I need to that's the regret that's one regret of the sitting down and seeing them face to face and telling them you're going to leave that small mom and pop business and you're the main salesp person and it's going to be terrible and they're going to cry and you're going to feel like a piece of that's one regret another regret is looking back at a decade that you waste in a job that you hate yeah so in life you have to to choose your regrets I love that as a decision-making frame because it also jump starts our fear engine because rather than saying like what do I want it's what do I what do I hate least and so we get to run it so then you get to use your run away from engine rather than you go towards to Mouse and the cheese again yeah and was it you was telling me that uh with a cat yeah I mean y so I'm just going to butcher what you told me um why don't you ass sh that like how much yeah yeah this was on our last episode so this is sequel for the people that were listening um John Peterson talks about the study where they starve a rat and they put it into a tube they WAFF the smell of cheese in from the front and there's a spring attached to the rat's tail so they can work out how hard it's pulling how hard it's pulling is a proxy for desire for how much it wants it you'd think this rat is starving it's going to pull as hard as it can so it wff the smell of cheese in and it runs towards it and whatever they do another iteration of the study this time they W the smell of cheese in from the front and the smell of a cat in from behind yeah it pulls harder yeah why because not only in life do you want to run towards something you want but you want to run away from something that you fear and this ties into your the three most common traits of yeah very successful people superiority complex uh massive crippling insufficiency and impulse control so superiority complex I can achieve this thing that's the cheese um crippling sense of insufficiency I fear the cat impulse control I'm in a CH there's only one direction I can go I don't need to make a choice yep I love this a lot as a frame for for for decision-making because that like think about the decision that we were just talking about right so it's like I'm I'm the sales guy and I stay and like if you were to frame it in upsides it's like upside is I keep these friends right um and but I want to leave so that I can start this business right those are the upsides but when you think about it in terms of like I waste a decade of my life not living the life I want to me I mean even when I say it it sounds more motivating even though it's the exact same thing it's like losing $100 versus gaining $100 people have three times higher loss aversion and so it's like if you can't get yourself to do something think about it from the perspective of what you have to lose rather than what you have to gain you've got a quote that I love my biggest fear is getting to the end of my life and thinking I wasn't good enough what's that mean and I'll Define good enough is I could have tried harder like I want to leave everything on the field and one of the things that has helped me a lot I mean in the quote that went unbelievably viral um show me to do it again do I need to do it again you don't gain confidence by saying shouting affirmations in the mirror but by Stack giving yourself a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are outwork yourself out and again a lot of the tweets that I have are notes to self because like like I have a you know I have a big presentation coming up we got 500,000 people who are registered for this book launch um that are coming out and I'm thinking to myself it's like how can I guarantee that when I step off stage no matter what happens I feel like I've accomplished that I've done a good job that I can look at myself in the mirror and say good work and when I was younger I used to have no way to do that that's cuz I measured everything on outcomes but I feel like because I've gotten a little bit more experienced I do have way to win now but it's hard and the way that I win is when I finish and I say that there's nothing else I could have done and so that means that like the reason that I feel confident about this book that's coming out is I wrote 19 drafts of the book four full rewrites end to end to make the book I did six hours a day my first six hours from 6: a.m. till noon every day for two years to get this book to where it is now and when I was done with the book I was like there's nothing else I can do to this like this is it there's nothing else like I can't make it simpler I can't make it shorter I can't cut it I can't add an visual that I should have added it's done and so to the same degree with the presentation that I have I gave myself this framework of like okay well if I were to speak in front of 10,000 people I would probably spend a good amount of time prepping the presentation to make sure it was good I was like why am I speak in front of 500,000 I was like so I can I can rationalize spending 50 times the amount of work and effort and time to make this thing exceptional because I mean the numbers are hard to Fathom but that is the numbers like if I had a 10,000 that's what I would do and so it allowed me to take a presentation and you know I have 900 slides that I'm going to get through in 60 minutes and I have now every single day I do a full draft of the you know I I i' say the say the presentation in my head and then I do a second run where I say out loud and I record it and then after I record it I play the recording with the slides up and I fix or add every slide where I Stumble or there's something that should be there or Visual and I keep going until now right now I'm a week can change out and there's there's not much else I can do to it and so I'll still continue to do that from now until the day that it happens but I probably won't have as many changes because I should just keep nailing it and then when I get up there it doesn't matter if the tech doesn't work or if the you know the the book shopping page cart you know doesn't you know doesn't work or whatever it is because I'll be able to step off stage and look in the mirror and be like you did everything you could and the thing is just like no one else will know that because I know that like I could not do that and I Pro like you know a lot of people were like dude you have so much good will you could probably just say like here's you know here's the book um but I would know and if I if I believe what I say I do which is that I'm the ultimate judge jury and executioner of my own self-esteem then I'm the only person who can say good job or not and unfortunately I have incredibly high standards and so I can either just always feel like a failure because I always fall short of my own standards or I can create a standard that I I willingly and consciously accept which is that that I will do enough work that there is nothing left to be done and that means that I can also do fewer things which means I have to be more selective about the things that I choose to do but when I do them they will be done well and they will be done right they say that true hell is on the person that you are meets the person you could have been yeah and a lot of the time I think we look at uh sports stars I'm watching this quarterback on Netflix at the moment and is Patrick Mahomes is just this artist you know he he's he's a halfway between a warrior and a Sant and and an artist and a musician and and then everything rolled together right the reason that we love seeing behind the scenes with stuff like that is it is somebody at the absolute Zenith of their capacity Y and they are putting everything that they can into making this as good as possible and I think that I sometimes find myself getting I I I certainly did before I had the podcast I was wistful that I have the raw materials to work very hard at things and I'd never had a Pursuit that I could have applied it to there was nothing I remember the first time I ever heard Peterson say work as hard as you can at one thing for a year and see what happens yeah and I'd never had a thing that I could work I I could work hard at business but the line between your inputs and your outcomes is so Meandering and messy that I can always excuse away good or bad performances as not being on me and for the most part I would take responsibility for the bad ones and not take responsibility for the good ones because that's I'm wide but I I never had something that was linear close to linear I'm like I put an hour in and I get an hour out or more than an hour out yeah and it's direct and then about three years ago I had this conversation with Dean my video guy I was like I want to turn pro I read Steven pressfield war of art then I read turning pro I want to turn pro with the show what's that mean what would it mean if I treated this Pursuit like an athlete does so an athlete they review gam tape and they do mindset work and they've got a sports psychologist and they look at what they eat and they look at what they drink and they go to bed on time and they're hanging around with people that are growth-minded and they're getting the right coaches and all the rest everything is done in order to facilitate performance in the thing that they say they care about mhm but everybody has the opportunity to do that you just need to Define what the thing is I'm never going to be Patrick Mahomes right yeah I I no but I managed to find my thing and then nearly kill myself in dedication toward it there's a a photo that I put up on my Instagram a little while ago uh two weeks after I ruptured my achilles yeah yeah I saw that and I'm in a boot and I've got the laptop on my lap and we've created this arm that'll bring the mic to me because I didn't want to stop doing the podcast because I'd made this commitment I'm going to turn pro and for three years we haven't missed a single episode three times a week three times a week three times a week for three years now and before that it was two a week for a year and before that it was one a week for a year and it just keeps on ramping up and the the opportunity to commit yourself fully to something that you care about is beyond a blessing and when you do it the way that you feel once you know that you've worked hard is great and we said before we started you got this big thing coming up which I'm super proud of you for managing to achieve even though it hasn't happened yet um the difference between being nervous and being excited before you do something is your level of preparation in advance of it if you step out on stage or in front of half a million people on a webinar which is the craziest sentence I've ever said if you step out on stage in front of half a million people and you've done absolutely everything there's nothing to fear and that's why it's not about what everyone else will think because when I'm on stage making that presentation the only person whose voice I'll hear is mine and I will know if I have done everything in my control to be prepared or not and what what's the best thing that comes out I didn't do everything that I could to prepare and I managed to fluke my performance right I managed to like close my eyes throw the dot and oh wow it hit the ball ey you'll even know that they'll even be guilt you won't even be able to fully enjoy your success because you'll have tarnished it with your lack of input and what's interesting is that when you start defining your own success that way um it actually starts to feel under your own control but the downside is you realize that you can do very few things and then all of a sudden life feels very short because you're like shoot there's like not that many things I can do before I die if I'm going to actually do my best and what was interesting is I was talking to a CEO friend of mine he's a public CEO um and he was like I need to start making content right I'm like d like managing a billion dollar company I was like you're doing okay man but because of that type of person he's like I need to be doing better with my content right he's got a few hundred thousand followers anyways and so I was like all right well how many pieces of content you're putting out a week and he was like well I mean I put out one a day and I was like dude I was like we put out 300 a week and he just he didn't even respond he just took he just like pursed his lips and nodded he was like thank you for resetting my minimum standard it's always like thank you like and I'm sure like when you talk to Phil Heath and he talks about the volume that is required in order to gain muscle and how much how how D how dialed in he is with food and all the other things um just the amount of sheer work like the biggest change in or I'll say biggest reason that I've had significantly larger returns or outcomes that have happened later on in my career and they continue to get bigger and bigger is because the minimum standard for how much work I know I can do on something has has multiplied hundredfold like I look at the first presentations I was telling Quinn this earlier I look at the first presentations I ever gave and I remember thinking to myself when I had this I was like this is a good presentation it's like 25 slides with like a heading and like three bullets on each slide and being like man this is good I'm like this is a this is this is a pittance this is like an afternoon but in my mind if I spent a whole day on something that was like a lot of work now it's I you know I like using this term like measure in hundreds which is like measure in hundreds of hours how many hundreds of hours have you put towards something if you do that I promise you the thing that you're making will get a lot better and you'll also see how much more you're capable of which is what I think like my undertone of listening to what you were just saying with the podcast is like the more you do the more you realize you can do and so what happens is you're actually even though you're you're going pro right now you're like dude next year I'm going pro yeah because this is now just a minimum standard of course I work out three days a week of course I do three podcasts a week but dude once we have the the reality TV show and we have the full crew we have the headquarter like cuz then the path gets lit of where you're going to go because you're so singularly focused and you know you have no other distractions the attention cost isn't you're not paying that down anymore and you're just like how many times can I repeat this effort and then that's when you start unlocking Mastery right like I I have this process for creating presentations and before we turned on the mics uh we were talking about it but it's like I've done a handful of presentations in my life and I've gotten decent at making them but the the process now is so refined which is like it is game tape it is I make the thing I do the thing in my head I do it out loud I watch the recording I edit the thing I do it in my head I do it out loud I watch the recording I edit the thing and I just keep doing it until it's glass dude I listen to I listen to every podcast that I did for probably the first two and a half years I listened back every single every single time but at the time I didn't cringe cuz I thought that oh you crushed it anybody can go back and listen to episode one with Stuart Morton in my old office in Newcastle upon and you'll notice every other sentence that he says I go mm mm it's infuriating it's absolutely catastrophic my accent's terrible the C everything everything everything about it is is awful and yet at the time I thought it was great here's another interesting thing I've been thinking about recently um when you don't have anything to say no to it's easy to focus on one thing as success begins to get you more opportunities yeah your ability to say no becomes increasingly important and that's something that I'm feeling now yeah just more attention there's we hockey sticking quite aggressively and I'm not anywhere near like even middling Zed list Fame but it's enough for people to see what they think is a penny stock and decide that they're going to try and throw the hat in the ring which means that there's like 20 things I need to say no to every single week from new people that want that want to do a thing they why don't we try this thing and why don't we do that thing and why don't we do the other thing it was a piece of piss five years ago to say oh three years go in the middle of to go like I'm going to go pro and I'm just going to focus on this one thing cuz what else am I going to do all of my nightclubs have been shut down I got nothing else to do with my life now oh you said you were going to go pro interesting yeah let's see what happens when you have 30 other things every single week vying for your attention now let's see how committed you are this is my favorite analogy for this which is the woman in the red dress but you know every many people have seen The Matrix if you haven't seen The Matrix you don't need to have seen it to understand the analogy so Neo is going through the training program the protagonist Morpheus is his his educator his his teacher and the education program only has one objective and so he's walking through the city people are going left and right he's he's bumping into people going through like crowded New York and then all of a sudden it's kind of a black and white palish look it's green black and white but it's still black and white and then all of a sudden this woman in in a red dress enters the frame and you can't help but stare at this woman in the red dress and she's a complete knockout and morphus is talking to Neo trying to teach him something and as he's talking he's like Neo were you looking at me or you looking at the woman in the red dress and he says look again and he looks back and it's agent Smith holding a gun to his head and he says freeze and then everything freezes in the frame and he's like if you're not one of us you're one of them and I see that as the opportunities that we have to say no to every day is like another woman in the red dress and it's become a term that we use internally right it's like it's a woman in the red dress and the thing is is that the the more uccessful you become or the more able you become the hotter the woman in the red dress is right like you you got a homeless girl that you're walking you know past on the on the street she's like all dirty but she's got a red dress on you're like the thing is is that that Homeless girl when you were in your apartment actually looks like yeah right she's like you know I'm not you know I could you know right um but then the better you get the the bigger the opportunities and that's where you have not your hypothetical 10 but what about your hypothetical 100 yeah and I had a mentor say this to me right as we sold uh gym launch he said Alex that you know now that if it's not a billion it's not worth your time and that was such a single a great razor for all decisions and so people they're like hey we should do this endorsement hey we should partner with this whatever I mean think about it like we're in the deal world so how many deal we get we have 3,000 companies a month that reach out to us to do a deal that's 100 a day currently and we've done 13 deals in two years and so like you think about from acceptance rate it's like you know and I'm not saying you shouldn't apply by all means acis.com and apply if you have an awesome business um but but the point is is that like your no muscle isn't really a no muscle it's just a yes muscle for the one thing that matters most y we'll get back to talking to Alex in one minute but first I need to tell you about the number one e-commerce platform Shopify when I was a nightclub promoter in the UK I started an online apparel brand with no experience no coding ability no marketing background no inventory management and after a ton of research I decided on Shopify Shopify is the Commerce platform revolutionizing mil ions of businesses worldwide you've probably already heard of it in fact a lot of your favorite Brands still use Shopify including gym shark one of the biggest sports apparel brands on the planet Shopify is the only tool you need to start run and grow your online business without the struggle what I loved about Shopify was that as we added in new lines and different verticals it grew with the business it required zero experience every single time there was a problem I was able to sort it myself that's how simple it is there is a $11 per month trial period that you can sign up for right now with the link in the description or by going to shopify.com slod wisdom or lowercase that's shopify.com slod wisdom to take your business to the next level today heroes and villains always have the same backstory pain the difference is what they choose to do about it villain says the world hurt me I'll hurt it back the hero says the world hurt me I'm not going to let it hurt anybody else Heroes use pain villains are used by it and F Kos here this is a permutation of what uh Donald Miller said um who's a great writer and he has a number of books and he he he talked about the first element the second element of that quote is the part that I added to it um about heroes using pain and villains being used by it and so one of the things for people who are not where they want to be is that they have pain like Oodles of pain and I remember when I was starting out I was looking for passion I was looking for purpose I was like I just want to find something that I'm motivated by but it's the it's the cat and the cheese it's like we're looking for cheese but we have all these cat behind us and all we have to do is look and remember that they're behind us and chasing us and so if you have the cat and you're staying in your current situation you're being used by the cat right you're being used by the business owner who you know it doesn't treat you well and is you know and you're in this job they don't really want to be in right or you're being used by the situation or the context of the relationship that you're in with the girl that you're like not that into right versus saying like this is terrible and because of this terribleness I now have something that I can run away from and then and then and then like rather than not looking at the knife or trying to take painkillers to not feel the pain it's like completely sobering up taking the knife and twisting it in your own heart and being like I'm going to do something about this and I think that that's that's what the heroes like if we're heroes in our own story it's not avoiding pain it's choosing from the very beginning the Alchemy which is like you have these terrible situations it's like and you have the opportunity to turn turn them into magic and and and Skip or shortcut all the growth you're going to have in a really short period of time simply by twisting the knife and being like I'm going to do something about it yeah I think because people presume in the beginning that passion and purpose and meaning and joy and and fulfillment are the things that get people going but as I've said of all of the high performers that I've spoken to the vast vast vast majority of them are driven by insufficiency and resentment and terrible parents or terrible upbringings or a chip on their shoulder about bullies in school pick your poison they have decided to use that to create the activation energy right you can lower your action threshold and increase how many points you have to prove it's like oh I want to live a better life yeah that sounds good it's like I want to prove the bullies that said I was a worthless piece of in school wrong it's like that's some potent fuel I do believe that scaled over a long enough time it's toxic and I don't think that it's necessarily how long question like a lifetime right like but I mean it'll it'll fuel you for a decade pretty well yeah and I think that I look at me I look at you know I was bullied pretty badly in school and was an only child and had expectations from parents and and you know I combined all of those things together and I did have a chip on my shoulder and I did want to prove to the world that I was worthwhile and I did want people to to realize that they had doubted the wrong person yeah yeah damn right I do I think being really specific about your pain is helpful so like even being specific about the cheese really specificity in general is helpful but like even more so like what is the twisting the P what is twisting the knife like what is how do you operationalize twisting the knife right instead of being like I hate my life right it's I hate the way Andrew makes me feel when he says that I'm a piece of and I'm not going to amount to anything comma because he's right like why does it hurt me like if someone says Alex you're a piece of you're not going to out to anything if someone accuses you of being poor or fat right I I would have I'd be like I have evidence to the contrary so this will probably not bother me but the things that bother us are the ones that you know have an element of Truth or sometimes not an element are comprised almost entirely of Truth and we just don't want to look at it and so I think it's it's the the twisting the knife is looking in the mirror and saying what if they're right success is the only Revenge as you expand they shrink into irrelevance as you get louder no one can hear them you don't beat them you cast a shadow so big no one can see them to begin with when people copy they copy the wrong stuff because they don't know why it worked to begin with and when it breaks they don't know how to fix it because they didn't build it so don't sweat it copycats will always be behind good but success is the only revenge is such a lovely there's that um let me tell you the story behind it damn right yeah so I was 15 years old so this was really early in my life still jacked still jacked always jacked Perma jacked and I uh this is sound so lame so I had this teacher so I'm freshman in high school and I might have been 14 whatever the age is and I'm walking through the hallway and this this teacher is like an admin of some kind walks out of his office and he's like he's like son and I was like I'm like you're just in trouble what am I going to do he's like you work out and I was like no he's like why not I was like I don't know how he's like I'll show you he's like you got the jeans and so that teacher Mr given um ended up working out with me every day in high school and showed me how to work out and he probably saw on some level that I was some angsty teenager that felt angry about whatever and I during our workout sessions would be like this guy said this to me like he you know you know like this bull whatever and I was like man I'm going to come back at our 10-year reunion and I was like I'm going to show him I was like he's going to be working for me like blah blah blah blah right and he's like no he's not and I was like what do you mean I was like let me just have my moment he's like no he's not he's like and you're not going to do that not if I have anything to say about it when you come back for the 10 year reunion and I was like what do you mean he's like because if you come back at a 10-year reunion and say hey John like everything I have look at me now he's like the guy's going to laugh and be like you did all of this to try and prove me wrong man I feel sorry for You' and when he said that when he actually played out what my like Revenge fantasy was in real life I realized it looked it looked stupid yeah I looked like the beta in the situation right and so he was like the only thing that you can do is win so big that all of them constantly compare themselves to you and then you'll forget they exist and he and that's when he said he said success is the only Revenge he's like it's not the best revenge he's like it's the only one there's no other Revenge because everything else is petty everything else does show that you were thinking about these people all day long which means they win by default he's like all you can do is think about your goal and winning he's like and when you win that's when you become so big that they shrink into irrelevance you cast a shadow that no one even can see them behind you this is the Nuance I think on on the previous point when we were talking about the toxicity of that fuel long term you can see me light up yeah yeah yeah well I think that when you think about um the activation energy of using the things that you don't like yeah you have to be careful that you're using them and that they're not using you still and a lot of the time I get this and in my more juvenile moments I I see myself do this where I'll know that there's a game that somebody else that I don't like cares about yeah and I'll imagine myself playing that game to beat them so that I can Stick it to them right purely for the reason of sticking it to them let's say that there's someone that really cares about being in shape and I'm not in as good shape as I have been in the past and I know that with muscle memory if you give me 18 months and a good amount of testosterone like the thing that they care about I would be able to make them feel really bad about right okay so I would hijack my own Direction yeah purely to try and prove somebody else wrong in a desperate and somehow believe that that's me taking control of my life are you kidding me I'm allowing them to ventriloquize me yeah through pain that they didn't even mean to give me yeah the woman in the black dress uh the black pill equivalent right well like now it's like not even a distraction from your main goal it's like I'm going to make a new goal just to wrong this person and then somehow make make up the story that I'm in control of my life when I'm I'm really just acting in complete re action to this person and so in so doing in beating them at their own game they've already won by default yep because they got me to change the game I was playing forget about who won it's like dude you were over there and now you're over here I see this with a lot of people I I I think that it contributes to a lot more of why and how people adopt societal Norms that the resentment that they have it's it's not just other people want this thing therefore I mimetically want to do this thing too it's I know that other people will respect me and my resentment will feel Justified and manifest if I win at it and that's really compelling that's like a motivational spit roasting coming in from both ends and it's it's really really powerful and you need to be careful I mean I think you know one of the really early blessings and I'll be hon like this is where I think I was fortunate right like I I realized when I was about 28 right um that I had been trying really hard to beat I mean you'll notice a common theme with a lot of my stories but I have one Central person that I was trying to prove for a very long time which was my father um and we're on good terms by the way because I always get that question but uh this was after I left and he disapproved of my whole thing and for five years we didn't talk very much and so he calls me up um to he says hey you're going to want to sit down for this and I'm like okay what are you pregnant you know um so and so he says I'm sorry and and I was like for what and he was like for everything right now mind you like he a middle eastern father born in Iran to a middle to a middle eastern father there who was even more legit like when where my father was born women weren't allowed to drive cars cars came with drivers with them when you bought them the driver came with the car like he was born in a very different world like fathers don't apologize to Sons it just it was it just wasn't that way and I have a little bit more a little bit more awareness than I did then and I can see that now but for me I was like now you apologize you know what I mean um and so rather than take it for the Olive Branch that it was uh I said I didn't care about your opinion five years ago when I left and I was like and I don't care now and he was like well we'll see how long your success lasts and so could have been a really nice exchange ended up becoming pretty pretty ugly but the the main point there was that I wanted to in the beginning like make as much as my father then it was make more than my father and then it was make more than my father had ever made in his entire life and once I had achieved that I realized that as much as like it sounds terrible to say this but like I was trying to beat him at his game and and this is pretty alive in a lot of a lot of Asian culture same thing making money is a big you know like when my dad would introduce somebody he'd be like this is Sozo he makes this much a year like it so it was just really clear like this is how much status someone has and so like it was really deep for me um but it was only when I realized that I had won at his game that I realized I never even asked the question of like what game am I trying to win and I don't know how many people are actually trying to win at a game that they didn't even set the rules up for so many when they're in it and that's why I say like I think I was fortunate that I you know I hit a a really tough goal because my dad was is is a successful man um relatively early on um but that that that exchange and then think like and then reflecting black and feeling terrible about myself from like saying what I said that and then I was like I I did everything that I've done to this point to beat him beat my father the man who actually raised me who tried to make me the best man I can and when I think when I really start thinking about it I'm like I like who I am he raised me so doesn't that mean that he might have been the perfect father and then that really messes with me and so yeah so go ahead well it's just it's hard to think that the people you used to have contempt for or distaste or hatred or whatever shaped you in a way that you couldn't have been and I often think about how the things I'm most proud of in myself are the light side of something that I was so embarrassed about so ashamed about um you know being an outcast as a kid meant that uh I love or I'm capable of being on My Own Way Beyond how anybody else is yeah so far beyond it I I can work on my own in solitude for an endless amount of time I I can outwork anybody in solitude why because I spent almost all of my time between the ages of six and 16 in my bedroom listening to audio tapes right listening to audiobooks and like throwing like a tennis ball against the wall or like playing with my like Mighty Mouse from Mars or whatever they were called what was it called bik a ice from Mars that was it um and that was what I did yeah so but all of that discomfort and all of the challenges that I went through there are the thing one of the things that I'm so proud of myself on now okay so what if I look back and I said well all of the the um the bullying that I went through and the challenges of feeling alone and being on the outside of social groups meant that I developed such attenuation and attention and focus and an ability to distill down what's happening socially which is why I became one of the best club promoters in the UK for a decade and a half right because for all of my school life I'd been obsessing over how Alex wears his tie maybe that's why he has friends and I don't have friends or the particular brand of shoes that he's wearing or the like he carries his bag on that shoulder and I car carry mine on this shoulder because I couldn't deconstruct why I didn't have friends and everybody else did right okay so looking back would I have rather had the friends right and had the brother or sister and not develop this skill I can't split test life so I don't know right but my life's ended up pretty good and I'm happy with it so I need to not only look back at that stuff as something not to hate but something to genuinely be thankful for and that is frankly something I'm still working [Laughter] through well yeah it goes It goes back to the the first thing which is like the most traumatic events that happen in our life you know they happen for us not to us but when you expand the time Horizon like those things and to be fair there are people who do have really crappy things happen to them and then it destroys them and then that's it and then they're just done and that's all it is not everyone has like a moderate amount of childhood bullying and an only child with like parents that care about them or whatever because you were a child coping with the world with the coping skills of a child I'm still largely that as an as an adult infant right and so um but I think that I mean the keepy at least for me you know my my key takeaway from both both of these kind of stories is more that all of the all of the the negative things that happen on the micro have the opportunity if double down on to be huge wins in the macro and sometimes in ways that just a micro win would never have the ability to be doubled down on and become a a capital w win in the macro this is probably one of the heaviest hmer blows I think for today this next one this is a real anger tweeting great no it's not it's an existential one oh fun you've already achieved goals you said would make you happy yeah you've already achieved goals you said would make you happy Alex's notes to self right um because we all know the happiness formula which is um when this happens I'll be happy right when X I'll be happy or if x I'll be happy um and so we you know I I've set up that equation I'm sure I know you've never set up this equation for yourself in your life but you know I I've set that up and I think that just serves as as my my biggest reminder um but it's also why I probably am a pretty existential nihilist overall um because I I've had so much evidence that none of those things quote brought me joy but the things that we were talking earlier about anticipation being kind of the hot button on Pleasure y I feel like the hot button on Joy for me is what I'm doing right now so like I haven't done the event yet right I haven't I haven't given the presentation but when I'm in the Rocky cut scene of like of beating I'm not gonna say beating the cow carcass I'll say it that way um I trying to avoid certain words anyways um that when I'm when I'm when I'm when I'm putting that work in and doing the Reps like that's when I'm actually my most in flow and enjoying myself the most and so it's actually a lie that I've been telling myself that like once the presentation goes well I'll feel good because in some ways now I feel like when the presentation happens I'll be disappointed because I won't get to do this anymore I'll have to find something else to pick as a Target so that I can get back into my Rocky cut scene and so I think that that that has taken some time and I've gotten better at it I really do think I've gotten a lot better at it um at least recognizing because the more the more times I've I've had ws and then realized that right afterwards I felt nothing I had to think back of like what are the things that I enjoyed most in my life and it's always in Pursuit and I'm like well then why don't I set something really big really far so I can be in Pursuit for the longest period of time possible and that's where I think a lot of people from the outside you know they cast their expectations of Life onto me and say I wouldn't live my life that way you're always you're always working you're always doing these things but it's like I'm actually always spending my time in Pursuit because in Pursuit is my button for enjoyment well what about if it wasn't achieving the thing at the end if the reason that you set yourself goals is exclusively to motivate yourself to enjoy the route toward those goals and I know that it's not the destination it's the journey is kind of cliche and I think this is is slightly subtly different which is that it's actually about setting the destination without the destination you wouldn't do the journey yeah like the way that you set goals and then achieve them and the the dopamine and the the trigger that you get um I often think about the balance between like serotonin Chris and dopamine Chris and I I don't even know the difference between that it's like am I feeling sort of lovey and present and and and wanting to connect with people or am I driving toward a thing because I have a goal that's in front of me and I'm very sort of dopamine Chris a lot of the time um but I genuinely think that if you remind yourself these are the golden years like this right now yeah this when you look back these will be the golden years right when I had my health I had my full mental capacity I had control of my bladder I had all of the money that I needed to do the things that I wanted to crush it with my friends to fly around America and film these podcasts or to launch this book that I spend all of this time on and you can even see it in the micro you can even see it when you look back on stuff that you've done in your day-to-day business or when you what you did at University what were the times that you enjoyed was it when success success came to you easily or was it when you stayed up and ordered dominoes because you had that project that needed to be in at 6: in the morning and you ran an all nighter and and John slept under the the table and and everybody ordered monsters and then the next morning we got it done what was good about that was it when you submitted it or was it the dominoes and the 3:00 a.m. sleep under the table because I'm pretty sure it's that I love this as a side note um but one of the things that really motivates me or one of my most powerful motivational frames is thinking about the person that I want to become as the destination and thinking like I want to be bulletproof I want to be bulletproof in these ways I want to be bulletproof in my marriage I want to be bulletproof in my business Etc and I think about that man whoever I want him to be like we said hell is when you look at who you could have been and realize that you're not that person and then I think if I were to make that man what would I put that man through to make him who he is like it wouldn't be easy times it wouldn't be quick wins it wouldn't even be easy wins it would be the the toil and the struggle of achieving and reaching for things that are right out of grasp that are right above my threshold and continuing to do that to like lift the weight to build the muscle to break it down and do it over and over again because like that's what creates the character traits that are the man that I want to be and so when I'm going through those like really harder times I like to think of like looking in my mental mirror of like I'm making you I'm not there yet but I'm making you and that has helped me get through some of the harder times and from a gratitude perspective my my most powerful frame for gratitude has been thinking about my 85-year-old self waking up as my 30-year-old self and all of a sudden looking at Lea and be like man I remember when we were this young and then looking out the window and like man you know Vegas wasn't even developed like there's no flying cars yet like man they were still used gas like this is so cool and I get out of bed and I'm like and my elbows don't hurt my knees don't hurt right because I'm thinking about what my 85-year-old self would think and you know we're talking about whatever but it it it it allows me to enjoy the mundane in a way that I know that I would give everything that I had when I was 85 to enjoy again and it's just it's a it's a Trippy frame but like if you can think like what would 8 85-year-old me would be like I'm just not my body doesn't hurt you know what I mean like I actually have energy like I can think clearly I don't have brain fog cuz I'm 85 right and that has been probably my single most powerful frame on feeling grateful and allowed me to feel more present at times when I start like when I start to feel like I'm going through the motions and just like clicking in the routine and just like day after day after day and they feel the same that's been my biggest slowdown where I can pull the reins and be like just and mind you it lasts a few minutes but when I think back on the days where I where I use that frame the part of the day that I remember was just a few minutes that I use it so I did this episode with Sam Harris a lot of people have problems with Sam Harris I found the time that I spent with him unbelievably enjoyable I sat opposite him and a couple of times caught myself thinking I am having so much fun doing this and he said this thing and I really wish that I'd asked him another question I should email him about it um I was talking about presence and and the importance of presence and you could use it as a proxy for gratitude and he said that what you're aiming to do is find small moments in the day when you just open up and realize what's happening yeah right Conor McGregor won the featherweight title twice because he won the interim MH because Aldo was injured right and then he won against Aldo and somebody asked him what are you going to do differently this time again before the Aldo fight that you didn't do against the me in the Mendes fight he says this time I'm going to be present and there's this photo of him and he's stood yeah like this at the weigh-in and you've got this entire yeah stadium in front of him and he stood like that he said the first time he did it he couldn't remember it because he was just yeah drowning in the in in what was next yeah and what I really loved that Sam said and I think that you know you look at somebody that's a master meditator or you set yourself High bars for what it means to be mindful and you realize that you can be present with a sip of a coffee okay I can be present with this one sip of a coffee and then it like sand in your hands or like trying to remember a dream it just evaporates right okay well what if your goal was just to try and get five of those a day yeah what if that was it what if being mindful was just five moments when you allow yourself to be where your feet are where your feet are underneath you and then what if you tried to just string like two of those together five times a day like just this first Sip and then as I put it down the view out of the window oh my God like that's two things in one and then I can do that five times and it it if I'd asked him I would have said really is the path to just increase the frequency of the times that you are where your feet are underneath you uh and one other cue that I love that I got from an embodiment coach is the times when you see in your peripheral vision you're looking and the way that our vision actually works you're focused so heavily on what's directly in front of you if there's ever a time when you see what's out here MH you realize that you it's impossible to see all of that and not be in the present moment because You' naturally just opened yourself up and I love that cue so during the times when I'm doing things like that Sam episode I'm like the next question and there's millions of people watching and all this stuff and there's this guy in front of me and he's super smart or whatever this is cool just that one moment and that when I look back on that episode that's what I enjoyed that's what I enjoyed about it so I think that being where your feet are underneath you and allowing yourself to open up and stringing those together largely allows you to enjoy being whilst you're in the process of becoming it's also interesting those moments you can capture a moment independent from your surroundings because a lot of times those moments you're not thinking about the goal that you have the meeting that you have the the prep that you have to do for some talk or some podcast or whatever it is and I can't remember where I heard this but they were talking about Gladiator the movie and the film opens with this like little bird on a bow right with like the the leaves and whatnot and then they zoom out from that little bird on the on the on the bow and it's this disgusting war scene right and so it's kind of like micro macro micro um of how no matter how tough whatever the moment that you're going through is if you can just take a picture of the corner of the room and look at the beauty in that right of being present in that moment even if it's the suffering right like you get punched and you're spitting blood out but it's like this moment that you capture then all of a sudden like everything Fades away and you are present and so it can take this what would be a brutal war scene of death and dismemberment and the thing that makes it memorable is the zooming in on a detail and so it's like if we're going if you feel like you're going through life too fast it's like just look for a detail whenever I wanted to try and get myself back into the present I used to have brain fog a lot in my 20s oh really and maybe not brain fog maybe just the clarity of my thoughts now is so much better than it used to I don't know maybe I was hung over yeah that was a big maybe it was just the drugs I don't know um but one of the things I used to do I used to have this I still have this BMW sat on my drive with a perforated steering wheel and I remember that if I ran my thumbs across the steering wheel and I really felt per really felt it do it with a leaf i' Pi a leaf up and I'd really feel the Sens of the leaf I couldn't think about anything else you can only have one thought at one time you cannot think two things right you have a super computer inside of your head and it's got one megabyte of ram yeah yeah so just think the one thought we'll get back to talking to Alex in one minute but first I need to tell you about surf shark VPN if you're browsing the internet without a VPN it's like dancing in a muddy field without any shoes on you can do it but it's not good for you if you're using a public Wi-Fi network the internet admin can see all of the data going back and forth between yourself and the internet all of this is protected with surf shock VPN plus it gives you access to the entire world's Netflix Library any territory that you want if you're anywhere outside of the US you can access way more Marvel series and movies over here than you can in your domestic territory and if you're in the US maybe you could watch some Japanese anime or get access to The Inbetweeners best of all it's available across unlimited devices your laptop your iPad your phone even your smart TVs and and there is a 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 29 days if you do not like it they'll give you your money back you can get an exclusive offer from surf shark today 3 months free and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to surf shark. deals slod wisdom that's surf shark. deod wisdom okay so this next one me and you text each other pretty frequently about we've seen this cool thing and someone's repurposed like one of the things that we've done which is cool and it makes me feel good that things that we've said or that you've said largely uh get repurposed um this is something that hadn't happened before which is you misquoted me but improved the quote so this was like the human centipede of content creation and then I named it okay so this is fame's seesaw when you're on your way up everyone roots for you because you remind them of their dreams when you're at the top everyone tears you down because you remind them that they gave up on them and you have one which is for anyone who needs a reminder no one is going to hate on you for doing worse than them and this is interesting because kind of like the challenges you face in the beginning you don't have anything to say no to therefore the woman in the red dress is easy to say no to or there a fewer women yeah this is a challenge that nobody is going to give you any sympathy for yeah it's a very unique category of challenge because the total addressable market for sympathy is basically zero because almost everybody is on their way up and very few people are at the top and the people that are at the top are seen as having a degree of privilege that almost legitimates you twisting the knife or you poking the finger this is how public figures can have normal everyday people on Twitter say unspeakable like heinous things to them dehumanizing things because they do not see them as human they don't see them as a person there is no person on the other side of this there is it's they're a representation they're menery of of of ideas mhm therefore I can say whatever I want to them because they're not they're not really a person but they are and the fact that before there is any status associated with tearing you down no one is incentivized to tear you down and you haven't changed dude the ls Capaldi documentary I've watched this twice now know L Capal is the singer Scottish singer amazing dude really fascinating story suffering a lot with mental health makes this first album and billions billions of streams World Tour phenomenal and he playing songs that he wrote in 2017 and played in working men's pubs around Scotland the same songs go to number one so not just that he's become better he's the same guy yeah the same guy maybe his production's improved maybe his recording quality is improved he's got better mastering and his voice is voice coaching's got a bit better but he's largely the same person he hasn't changed and he has this this quote halfway through and it really spoke to me and he said Fame doesn't change you it just changes everybody around you yeah and that when you're on your way up everyone roots for you because you remind them of their dreams when you're at the top everyone tears you down because you remind them that they gave up on them that really yeah that spoke to me I wrote an essay on this because I'm a psychopath yeah yep when I was a gym owner so a lot of people don't know this but I got I got a writing scholarship in college like I was a vice president of the newspaper I was uh editor of the creative writing magazine so like I've been writing for a long time I enjoy writing um and I wrote this essay I said I think the title of it was um everyone believes in the American dream until it comes true and I remember because what had happened was everybody when I when I was sleeping on the gym floor right like you know I was the I was the underdog and everyone you know my clients were all like oh good for you you know you're going after your dream they'd see my blank kid in my pillow in the corner of the gym and they knew I was sleeping there and it was evident you know I I lived there um I didn't have a shower didn't have a shower to go to the YMCA to go shower um and that everybody was like Pro me and then people would come in they sign up like I'm gonna I'm going to support you right and then within nine months I had hired people and I had a manager and I pulled up and I remember I walked in the lobby and all the same the same people were like ah boss man's here oh you're you're not too good for us now right and I remember being so Jarred by the experience and I was like you guys rooted for me and I was like and now I I did what you said you were rooting for me to do and that was when I realized that people want you to do well but not better than them and I was like I had gone from Underdog to the man and I was like when does that happen and the litmus test of when it happens is depends on who the person is cuz for the person who was working at my gym who you know was was a janitor or a cleaner it happened really quick right for the people who were more successful uh it took longer and then you know the only people at the end who would still root for me were the business owners who were doing way better than me right who were still members of my gym and so that was a really interesting experience that happened when I was 23 and that was the first time I went from Underdog to the person that someone would want to attack but I had a performance coach tell me this he said hatred isn't isn't something you avoid he said it is a requisite for Success he said if you get no hate you are not successful and for some reason that just like really stuck with me because then it just like rather than it being this thing that I was trying to avoid it actually became a leading indicator or an indicator that I was on the right path in achieving things and so I think that's why I mean I I I don't want to I don't want to toot horns or anything um but in terms of like my ability to deal with the naysayers and things like that I feel like I'm pretty good at it like it doesn't really bug me very much um and I think in large part it was because of how it's framed at least how you know in this discussion how it was framed for me early on which is that no one hates you from above and even you know even when I think back about like the bullies and whatnot that you had earlier like even in Middle School like there were things that I had that were going for me that I couldn't recognize because of course everything that comes easy to you are things that they're easy to you so you don't think that they're you know new or interesting or or or cool and but like at the same time I was like i' Advanced a grade in multiple in multiple subjects I had you know straight A I worked really hard I was in shape right and I but I had these people who would hate but I I you know you internalize it but like now I can look back and be like it's kind of like the the parents who are like it's because she's into you right no it might not be say that way but but just thinking about it as an indicator that the hate is actually the light that you're on the right path we spoke about this last time that nothing is going to be worthwhile that doesn't come with an Associated amount of discomfort therefore when you start to feel friends around you and the people that you used to be able to speak common language with start to push back and start to make the quips of oh not drinking tonight yeah oh you must be too cool for us now I know it hurts I know it hurts that is the lead indicator not even the lagging indicator that is the lead indicator that you are doing the right thing and a lot of people listen to this podcast I get messages from people like hey man I'm a 22-year-old rugby player from the northwest of of the UK I live in Cumbria none of my friends uh understand me I want to do personal growth I don't want to live in the UK uh and when I listen to Modern WIS I fear less alone and it it it makes me tear up because I'm like like I see me in that person I see me in that and the it's so hard to reframe it the push back you are getting is the indicator that you are doing the right thing it is and if you can reframe the distaste that you get from other people as the same as that because they're projecting the things that they know they should be doing that you are doing that they're not doing and you remind them of that and so it's that it's even so even though the mountain that you're climbing is actually a smaller one than the one that you ultimately want to climb you're actually at the top of their mountain and so they start tearing you down so like that's where the the Underdog Story that we said at the very beginning of this with the quote which is like on the way up they root for you and then when you're at the top they trying to tear you down because you remind them of the dreams that they couldn't accomplish right and so you quitting drinking or you staying in to work on your side hustle or your project or the business that you want to launch the podcast that might be you might be at the top of their mountain and so they are tearing you down because now you remind them that they haven't done it and it's purely a projection of them onto you and it has nothing to do with you and that I hope that that Comforts someone because what you said I think is like if you're going through that right now and like and I promise you every single person who wants to do something with their life and has done something with their life has gone through the exact chapter that you're going through and it's the lonely chapter it's the chapter where you you're you don't fit in with your own friends but you don't have the outcomes yet to fit into a new group of friends and you're doing this thing you're consuming content on the internet you're you're doing these free tutorials online to try and figure out how to set up a podcast and where do I host this thing and then there and and and you're going through this and you're like am I is this even worth it because you have no signs of success right but if there's anything that you can take away from what we're saying right now is that the sign of success is the hate that you get along the way and what you can't do is bend the knee to their hate and fit back into the Conformity because it's comfortable and it's warm because like in The Matrix when Trinity opens the door when when Neo's about to go take the red pill and he wants to get out of the car she says Neo you've been down that road and you know exactly where it leads and I know that's not where you want to be and then he closes the door like right now now this moment that you're going through is Trinity opening the door and being like you could go back but then you'd have to remember exactly what the reason was that you decided not to go out to begin with just because you listen to this podcast and you consume this content you're like I can do more than this like because you are starting to live in some of that hell where you look in the mirror and you're like I can do more and you start to see the person that you could be and you're like this does start to feel like hell the reason that it's uncomfortable and the reason that I do have sympathy for the people that see this is is ignorance in some regards is bliss as soon as you begin to posit an ideal yeah you then begin to compare yourself to that ideal yeah and the Gap in potential between you and the person that you could have been begins to get more stuck and even the slightest glimmer of wow I can I can read a book or follow a course or listen to a podcast and then work really really hard on one thing and change the thermodynamics of my mind change the texture of my own existence dayto day because I worked at a thing and now I understand nutrition you I know Kung Fu like I I understand nutrition or I can I understand how to sleep well okay as soon as you know that sleep is important and what you need to do to do it every single night of bad sleep that you have is on you yeah yeah because before you had the excuse that you're ignorant yeah and guess what now you're done every worthwhile goal is worthwhile because it has a cost associated with it and so the cost that you're going through is what makes the goal worthwhile to begin with because if what you are were setting out to do were immediately available to you then it would mean it would be immediately available to everyone which means it wouldn't be worthwhile so the very fact that it's difficult is why it is worth doing and so like we can't resent the price tag of the shoes that we want to buy we just have to make the decision of whether or not we want to pay it there's another real blow you don't get very touchy feely with with like you know I live in Austin now so I'm like in in the Psychedelic Mecca of the United States and people talk a lot about like trauma and and and Improvement and stuff like that selflove is holding yourself to a higher standard than anyone else does that's really interesting to me I think it's believing in the 85-year-old version of you who's exactly who you want to be and then ruthlessly looking at the discrepancy between the the pittance of a human that you are now compared to that man or that woman and then step by step breaking down the many differences and starting on the first one and pulling the thread I love the idea that you know truth Tru self-love a lot of the time is wrapped in acceptance and uh a degree of belonging I reject this entirely I just want want to I just want to throw it out there that doesn't surprise me the idea that self-love is holding yourself to a higher standard than anyone else does you believing in you more than anybody else does is such a first principal way of looking at self-love okay so I'm supposed to love myself I'm supposed to support myself and be my biggest fan but I don't have the most belief in me so I'm supposed to have self-love but I cap my own potential have so many thoughts so right off the bat even the concept of fan was something that I I if I was if if I was talking to 2013 2012 Alex I would have rejected that notion not like the the concept of even being a fan of myself was so foreign to me it wouldn't been real to me and so I'll tell you what that internalized which was that I didn't need to deserve success but I could still have it if I did the things that created success and so it felt like a cheat code where I was like I can actually be a shitty person and horrible and suck at everything but if I still work out and I still eat this way I can still look this way even though I don't deserve it and that was like the first it actually felt like I was like and for anybody who hates themselves you can hear me um that was like my first big shade my first Solace my first foothold that I started getting on successful was that I didn't need to deserve it I could still have it anyways and that was like very empowering for me the other thing that you said about acceptance so there's this big movement around self-acceptance and I want to say that I wholeheartedly reject it I you accept outcomes and you accept circumstances you accept the fact that you were dealt whatever hand you were dealt you accept that you're 58 you accept that you're black you accept that you're a woman that's accepting you trying to rebel against that is you trying to fight the universe and the universe is going to win every time but in terms of you framing acceptance as saying that I am comfortable with who I am and I cannot be better and I must be satisfied with that is the biggest embodiment a failure that I can imagine is that it's almost it's almost it's almost egotistical to say that there's a difference between saying I am good enough and I am good so you could say I good enough for my current state based on the work that I've put into it but I could be better and so like you can accept that the work that you have done has created the outcome that you've created but you do not need to accept that the outcome that you've created is the end all be and the last outcome that you need to need to have and so for me like the only version of acceptance that I have is that I accept that the version of myself that I want to be is is so far from who I am that I have this massive discrepancy that I have to overcome and then just breaking that down one step at a time and thinking I don't I don't deserve to be that man but I can still do the things that can create it and it also means that I have to go through the circumstances that that would create that man which means that if I have unbelievable Big Dreams and big goals then I have to go through hard times it's like hate the hard times are a requisite for success and so if you're going through hard times right now it means that you're on the path to success and it's not that you're on the wrong path it's the feeling of being on the right path and one of the things that I talk with with the CEOs in our portfolio company and I'm I'm going to bring it back one of our companies they were struggling with growth big company and he was like I honestly the issue that I have right now he's like I I don't know how many locations I can open every month he's like based on the Casual that's coming in and out and I was like this is kind of like the Morpheus free FR and I was like I need you to freeze this moment I was like the feeling that you have right now is that you are missing a finance function is that they didn't have a good Finance leader and you're like why is this relative to what we're talking about I'll bring it back which is that if it's the first time you're going through it you can't recognize the science because you don't have anything to compare it to and so hopefully listening to this podcast and listening to other people not just you know not me and Chris but like other people who are even even more successful whatever they can at least tell you what it tastes like they can tell you what the room looks like they can tell you what the temperature feels like they can tell you what it feels like in their body so that when you are going through it you can say okay I haven't been here before but this sounds like ALU K this sounds like a missing finance and that's why having like and if you're in an early on stages and and and and you're going through the like you're going You're consuming the free content and stuff it's like use this because the most valuable thing you can get is the context of what the experience feels like when you're going through it so someone can describe to you their experience so that you can relate it to your present and be like okay I'm on the right path yeah it's the feeling of loneliness and uncertainty hang on what if this what if this is a sign that I'm not supposed to be here what if this is a sign that I'm doing it wrong right and relinquishing that the if there was a big meta indicator that you're doing the right thing doing what everyone isn't doing is already probably the big the single biggest indicator that you're doing the right thing like it's it's the if if if I could wish nothing else on my child whenever I choose to have them in the future is that they have high agency which is that they are they make decisions independent from the opinions of other people and when we hear words like authentic and original and things like that it's because the person starts at squ one and says well what do I want and then they start building from there I had a conversation with one of my one of my teammates um who runs our my LinkedIn and he said you know Alex it's easy for you to always always a really great start great way to trigger really good please tell me more why do you go on he said it's it's easy for you Alex to create this personal brand he's like you have so many interesting things about you he's like you dress a certain way you act a certain way and he said it's different than everyone else does right and I said I don't think that's true I think that everyone has a personal brand that is unique and different but everyone doesn't look that way because they conform to what what they think everyone else wants them to look like and so the fact that they are boring and they resent the fact that they're boring is because they are living out reflections of what what they think everyone else wants them to do and so all you have to do is start at Square zero and be like what do I want CU I realized after I got out of gym launch that I mean I dressed a certain way for gym launch because I was the head of an entire community of gyms and it made sense for me to dress that way because I needed to I needed to look that part right but when I was at Ground Zero and I was like okay what do I want and I thought about it for a long time and I was like well what would 85-year-old me wear I was like 85-year-old me would wear probably the most functional thing he could wear cuz he just doesn't care what hiso look like he doesn't care what his shirt looks like he just wants to be comfortable and so I just started trying all the things that I could possibly imagine for shoes shorts hats whatever to find the thing that I was like you know what this is the most comfortable and this allows me to do the most things in the most rooms without changing and so people then are like man that's so unique but it it was actually just saying if I were to if everyone was gone from existence what would I do what would my work be right how would I dress who would I date that's a real one who would I date if no one else told me what they thought about it maybe someone different than you're dating right now and if the person that you would want to date isn't the person you're dating right now and the person that you would want to date would never date you then maybe rather than dating these mediocre mollies or mediocre mats you take the period of time you go on the untrodden path you have people reject you and say oh you're not coming out tonight you're going to the gym again right oh I can't eat with us right she's on a she's on a diet again how long you going to stick with this one right because the thing is is that the stick to it it must itself is something that you work on because if you started diets and you failed you started working out and you failed if you just make it longer every time before you fail you're still making progress and you're still doing something that everyone else isn't doing yeah and that is the biggest meta indicator that you possibly can is if if because everyone sucks like so many people are mediocre like half of the United States is in debt they don't even have a do like they they're they're negative net worth and so like just saying different than that like the bar isn't High we talked about this dude go for it I know I know go for it the bar has never been set lower to separate yourself out from the pack never being set lower and this is for you know the black pill internet what black pill by the way it is supposed to be One Step Beyond The Red Pill to see that life and dating largely for men is there's an uncomfortable reality that if you aren't blessed with the right physical attractiveness status or money uh LSM looks LM mess looks money status if you don't have the right prerequisites you're you're basically doomed you're a genetic dead end and eat um yeah is that a bad thing according to them I so okay I'm gon I'm gonna zoom out real quick and I I know I know we're gonna go on this so if we're looking at a species right let's look at deer right A lot of people have deer in their backyard right well what is natural is that one Buck inseminates 50 D and he competes with all the other deer and the reason for that is because then it actually allows the quote Best genes to proliferate now best is determined by what actually continues continues on getting perilously close to Eugenics here Alex well I'm just talking about I'm just talking about deer right I'm just talking about deer if anyone I'm just talking about deer I'm not saying this is what it should be but the the the point that that I wanted to make was not I think where everyone thinks I'm going with this which is that a lot of the you know the black whatever you just said right black pill um I would imagine are casting an expectation on the universe that it shouldn't be this way why not and this is exactly like the hater who says you're not going to amount to anything and the reason it hurts is because you're like what if they're right and then like staring at the mirror with that question of like what if they're right what if I am out of shape what like because the thing is is that like in order to be the top quote 1% or even the top 10% shoot or even just above average right you just need to not be overweight dude the ball you need to not be overweight weight right you need to be gainfully employed the bar is so low the bar is so unbelievably low uh I got this idea I got to I got to teach you about uh the alpha history fantasy right modern men who are angry at a world they feel has rejected them mistakenly believe that they would have somehow done better in medieval times they are adamant that the chance of them being genas Khan is greater than the chance of them being Canon fod a peasant number 1, 373,000 whose flla was sacked and destroyed and it's this wistfulness for the past and dude I get it like if you feel lost and alone and like nobody understands you and like you've been forgotten and things shouldn't be this way guess what they've always been this way and right now the bar has never been set lower if you have the opportunity to sit down and listen to me and Alex waffle on for three and a half hours you have the capacity the conscientiousness the wherewithal to be able to go out tomorrow and take one thing that you've hit from today this is this is something that I wanted to get on to which which I think is important which is sorry avoiding the mental masturbation you know we can do this thing and and like speed quotes Into The Ether and like a like an Uzi right just unloading all of these different things and I think that a lot of people feel uh a general overwhelm of indexing of information and oh my God I'm I'm learning all of this stuff and I don't feel like I'm making any progress and I really wanted to try and cut through this at some point in the conversation today as well which is Tim Ferris has an idea called the good sticks okay I when I first started out on this journey of personal growth felt guilty because I didn't have a perfectly curated Evernote external brain with nested folders and all of my book summaries and I was supposed to keep all of this thing and how am I going to remember it and blah blah blah five and a bit years later people come up to me and ask one of the most common questions I get asked is how the do you remember all of the things that you remember two things first off I don't remember anything that I don't care about and the second thing massive amounts of exposure those are the only two things that are going on I've done 670 podcasts in five years for hours and all of the reading I had to do beforehand and all of the listening I had to do beforehand as well and I didn't stress myself about what I had to remember so if you listen to this three and a bit Hour podcast and you go they talked they said a lot of words there Alex said a lot of words Chris said a lot of words what's the one thing that you couldn't stop thinking about and there may be nothing fair play we failed if there's one thing that you can't stop thinking about that story about the kid from Cumbria that time when Alex had to drive across the country that's the thing that is the thing and allowing yourself to naturally select whatever the most important learning is from the content that you consume is the best way to work out what what is going to resonate and it's the best way to act on it as well if you can't stop thinking about it when you go to bed tonight and you can't stop telling your friends about it in the morning and you've clipped it from this podcast or any other podcast or any other book or whatever whatever the thing is that you keep sending photos of and you keep on reciting to people and you try and tell your mom about it and she doesn't care that is the thing that you need to work on and you don't need to do if you take half a thing from this podcast or any other podcast that and you work on it for a month you have made so much progress and do you understand how blessed you are to have this opportunity you could have been born in the Middle Ages before the Gutenberg printing press when they wouldn't even give you the Bible in the common language so that you had to go through the priest to be able to have a relationship with God right now you can search for whatever it is that you're dealing with find the greatest Minds on the planet listen to them and then the next day implement it and you move not only yourself but you move the world around you you get to nudge yourself and the rest of the world in a direction that you want to go and you get to feel proud about it and it's within your control you have never been more blessed there's a there's a quote that I want to that I want to hit here that I think would be relevant to we were just talking about with the people who were sad and alone and one of the one of the biggest breakthroughs that I had from a from a mental perspective was actually defining emotions for what they are operationally so sad sness comes from a lack of options or rather a lack of perceived options and that's why it feels like hopelessness because you don't know what to do when I realized that sadness meant that I didn't know it to do it meant that another way that I could Define sadness was ignorance and that is solvable and so whenever I feel sad now it's been my trigger to immediately think what do I not know what option do I not see because the opposite of that is anxiety which is you have many options and you have few priorities looks you have many paths that you could presume you just don't know which one and so being able to operationalize what these emotions felt like so if you feel sad it just means that you need to go learn more and that you can do and then all of a sudden the learning more becomes the option and then you don't need to feel sad anymore and that was like one of the biggest breakthroughs from my like mental health or whatever you want to call it mindset um that Set Me Free and I've taken a lot of effort to try and operationalize emotions so that I can either get out of them or lean into them so like patience for example right I'm only bringing this up because I think it might be relevant to some people is that most goals are attainable if you expand the time Horizon even enormous ones like you can do anything in 10 years you could walk to the Moon you could do there you go you can do anything and so for me I am I would say a naturally impatient person like I tend to want things immediately now and you know what you probably are too but once I def find patience as figuring out what to do in the meantime it allowed me to control what I did because now like you and I are being patient for your stock Investments right now as we're on this podcast we're being patient for that because we're doing things in the meantime and so whenever I felt impatient and wanted to change course I had to just redefine what do I need to do today and if you are sad and impatient then it means that right now you need to learn what the option is that you need to go pursue and then that makes it very much under your control and so step by step each of these emotions over time I spent a lot of time trying to Define them out so that they no longer control me and I know how to solve them and then and then now it just becomes a faster and faster muscle like oh I feel anxiety that means that I have many options that I don't have priorities okay what's my priority and then all of a sudden what used to take days of anxiety and feeling this you know frog in my throat was just oh I need to make a list of all the things that I'm looking at which one's the most important ignore the rest and then I'm good and what you just take days takes minutes one of yours is choosing the plan isn't hard doing the plan isn't hard sticking to the plan is hard Charlie Monger said the money isn't made in the buy and it's not made in the sell it's made in the weight and that that like I just feel like that's such an elegant way of thinking about it it's like the hard part about the plan is sticking to the plan like the plan wasn't bad your first plan was good because it's easy to go say I'm going to work out three days a week for the next year and it's a good plan good plan it's a pretty good plan and the interesting thing is that like a mediocre plan that's stuck to always outperforms an amazing and perfect plan that you never stick with to begin with and I know this obviously from the fix Fitness world but applies to everything and so like the stick to it muscle is the one that you have to flex and that's why like if you're going through things you have especially in the earlier days like I remember I used to start and stop and start and stop and I try this thing I try that thing it's normal because you haven't you haven't been reinforced enough of s with something right but the thing is it's like you have to stick it out long enough that you get that first carrot you get that first cookie and then all of a sudden everything that you did to get there you're like oh more of that will get me more cookies and that's and and then and then it just becomes this self-perpetuating cycle and then you get addicted to working yes and and and and then you do a launch to 500,000 people and you lock yourself in a closet six hours a day for two years yeah that's exactly that because I've been rewarded in the past because the first time I actually spent a lot of time on a presentation and I felt good when I walked on stage and didn't feel anxiety I was like oh I want this every time yeah and then I had this the second thought which is the much scarier thought which is now I have to do this every time this is the new bar this is the new bar I want to round out something on that sort of black pill side which is if you listen to this and you think must be nice or easy for you to say I get it like I I get it and if you feel like there is something that you can't get over some genetic societal cultural defect that means that you do not have the same ceiling that you think that you should or that other people appear to have I get it and the question I would ask is what do you want like do you want sympathy because I will happily give you sympathy I know what it feels like to be someone that has no belief in themselves and that believes that you are fundamentally a loser and that nothing is going to come to you and that you deserve for nothing to come to you I understand what that feels like but what does that mindset get you like fundamentally what does that mindset give you okay so let's say let's say that you have been dealt as difficult of a hand as possible and yeah and to quote you to you I can promise you that there is someone who has had it worse and has done it better I put this clip out a while ago this like just random talking about a morning routine thing it was pretty basic but it went Interstellar and the real internet got a hold of it you know like not your fans but like the real internet like the general public internet got a hold of it the most common comment was something along the lines of tell me you don't have kids without telling me that you don't have kids which is must be easy for you to say I have a daughter to get in the get up in the morning I'm like okay tell me what that mindset gets you genuinely tell me what that mindset gets you it says I'm in a situation which I cannot get over and there are things in reality imposed on me which stop me from doing something there is somebody out there who has three times as many kids as you and they still do it so what is it that they've got like what is it that they're doing have they got an unfair Advantage what is it tell me it's also if you take down if you walk down the natural logic of that statement who do you blame if you're saying must be nice or tell me tell me that you don't have kids without telling me that you don't have kids then does that mean that you blame your child for all the things that you don't have in life it's a tough tough weight to put on a kid because I mean I would hope that they don't see that comment because then they'd be like wait mom dad like you didn't live out your dreams because I exist tough another one here a sequence actually that I love you don't have to feel good about it you just have to keep going the feeling will pass but you will remain you are greater than your feelings going to bed late and waking up early to work for a few days won't kill you you're not going to burn out you're doing what it takes if you're one of those people that push work life balance just remember the people who like working a lot don't care I've never regretted trying harder at anything ever hard times last long but an epic story feels like a lifetime nailed it yeah I just think when I look at you in particular and I I realize this during our second conversation at the start of this year the reason that people get confused about your motivation and your workload is that they don't realize that the thing you do for work is the thing that you do for fun that's the fundamental misunderstanding that people have and because of that you're prepared to work hard and working hard doesn't feel like wasted time lots of people associate working hard with not making progress therefore working feels wasting so the idea that working hard doesn't make progress is one of the biggest farces that exists in humanity because at the end of the day whatever you amount to isn't going to matter anyways right and so if there is anything that's Eternal for us at least as individuals it's going to be who we become in the process and so one of my favorite quotes is the work works on you more than you work on it and so if you want to be the best in the world at something you do the work to become the best in the world and the work works on you and so I mean there's a there's a a Biblical proverb I think it says like um there is there is profit in all labor and that means that even if the thing that you're working on right now doesn't amount to the outcome that you expected that it would it doesn't mean that you don't become better through doing it and so I'll give you a very real example so I spent five years building a chain of gyms so I had six locations and after that I sold five of them I shut one down and then I transitioned to doing turnouts in the transition between shutting my gyms down I got a big payday because I sold my five gyms big for me relative I took all that money and I put it into the next thing the partner that I had in that next thing ended up taking the money and disappearing filing bankruptcy and sending it to his girlfriend in Sweden I couldn't make this up so there's no way I could get the money back and he had filed bankruptcies there's no there's no course of action for lawsuit and so a lot of people would probably go through that mental situation and think and I went through this was thinking I just wasted the last five years like I literally started a chain built like put everything into the second location put everything in the Third location the fourth location it kept kept going right I kept doubling down and then I get my big pay in I put it all all on black and then it disappears with one spin of the roulette and so here I am and I'm like I have nothing to show for The Last 5 Years of work but in the next 12 months I made more money than I'd ever made in my entire life up to that point the five years I made I made the I made more profit the next 12 months than I made in the last five years times like five and it was because and this is only I was only able to real realize this in retrospect which is why I'm sharing it which is that the thing that was the outcome of those five years was me and the skills and the experiences that I possess through going through it and so whatever the next Mountain that you're trying to climb is of course it's going to be be higher but it's going to require you to go through the smaller mountains to get to that point because the more able you are the more able you realize you can become and you will get way bigger outcomes from the things that you have like the path that led you here then than you then you think you can and so that's why since that moment where I lost everything and then I was able to make more in the next 12 months I realized that no work is wasted because I am the output of the work not the outcome and that was one of the biggest frame shifts for me in never thinking that work is wasted because the more I work the bigger my work ethic the more my work capacity increases and to give an exercise example because I think it's it's cool and interesting is that a lot of people talk about this concept of overtraining don't worry I'll bring it back all right they talk about this concept of overtraining I remember I was talk I had this woman that uh Lea and I friends with very successful business owner had a boy toy with her and he was like aren't you concerned about training and I was feeling a little pissy that day and I said bro once you start looking like you work out you can worry about overtraining I was like until that point you don't need to worry about overtraining I was being a little bit mean but I think he he did remember it and he did change the way he trained and he did gain muscle afterwards so I felt okay about it now the point of that little quip right was that what I explained to him is that your ability to recover from working out itself is trainable so when you do more volume your ability to withstand volume your work capacity increases and so to the same degree people are like I feel burnt out the thing is is that you either die or you adapt that's it right and in the Fitness World you either die get injured or adapt right and since you're probably not going to die you really just need to make sure that you don't get injured and if you don't get injured and you don't die you get better and so that mental process in terms of how I see work has been like the most self-fulfilling prophecy that I've had because the more I work the better I get it working the more productive I am per unit of time and so and then I get the outcomes that happen eventually but the point is and you prob I mean I already know you know this but the outcomes become so irrelevant compared to the reward that you get in the meantime because the people who are experts and this is from my my good friend Dr cashy people who are experts at any skill become experts because they learn how to become rewarded from the work itself and so like they don't actually have something that you don't it's just that they measure success differently judge yourself by your actions not by your thoughts I became significantly less disappointed in myself when I started judging myself only on the actions I took not the thoughts I had so patience is a virtue that I feel like I haven't had and it's been something that I've spoken over myself for many years I was like I'm an impatient person I want things fast Etc but when I realized that I should use the same lens that I judge other people on when I judge my myself which is someone might say I'm a really honest guy but if I have no evidence that you're an honest person or when I put you in a situation where you could be honest and you're not I would say no you're not now that person probably thinks of themselves as honest or to the same degree I'm a really loyal guy but as soon as I put a 10 in front of you and you've got your your girl at home you jump you're not that loyal you just haven't had the opportunity to show that you're loyal and so for me my thoughts about what I thought I was were actually really negative but when I try to think okay well I can be patient if I act patient even if I don't feel patient and then that allowed me to start giving myself a stack of undeniable proof that I am who I wanted to be and I don't believe in binary traits meaning like he's patient or he's impatient or he's loyal or he's disloyal it's the question is how loyal are you how honest are you how patient are you and by switching the character traits that I wanted to have into progressions or continuums allowed me to make progress on them simply by giving myself more proof or one more Penny on the scale that says I'm a little bit more patient than I was I'm a little bit more patient I'm a little bit more patient to the point where I have so many pennies on the scale that I can say I think I am pretty patient even though every time I put a penny on the scale I don't want to put a penny on the scale I want to get the thing to happen today I want it to happen yesterday because why is it taking so long it didn't take that long for this person I feel like I feel like I work harder than them and I feel like I'm better than them why am I not doing that but I put the penny on the scale well ultimately what is patience is patience feeling patient or is patient doing the thing that is patience so Sam Harris in his first conversation with jocker willink about 10 years ago they talk about how courage is an unfakeable emotion and it's such a good frame you're going to love this so he said if you do the thing in spite of being fearful of doing the thing that is courage and if you don't do the thing even though you felt like doing the thing that is cowardice and I think that motivation and Patience are exactly the same if you're patient despite not feeling patient that is patience yes that is how it works and that was that realization that you just said was the reason for that quote because it was me realizing that I can actually have these traits even if I don't feel like I live those traits and so that's why probably at least for me when people are like whatever the trait is like he's so humble he's so whatever like you probably will never feel like you have the trait but you can still have the trait based on evidence rather than emotion and I think that frame of evidence has been I mean if I had a a North star of personal development for myself it's been just give myself proof and I mean in so many ways like the reason that I I didn't I mean I'm going to go into tangent but again I'll bring it back I didn't talk about how to run gyms until I had six gyms because I didn't feel like I was qualified enough to talk about it and I only started talking about gyms when so many people were like dude how do you run your gyms how do you run your gyms and if I rewind even before that I didn't feel qualified to talk about Fitness but I had a six-pack for a decade you know what I mean and I had multiple State State records but I still didn't feel qualified to talk about Fitness until everyone was like dude how do you how you do this how do you strength train how do you how do you eat this way whatever it is right and so if you if you can give yourself evidence the world around you like Fame like your evidence will change how people treat you independent of how you feel about it well this is why the must be easy must be nice is so flawed because what you're saying is I see the outcomes and I have no idea of the difficulty of the inputs I have absolutely no idea what barriers you need to get over you could be you could find it 99 out of 100 difficult to be patient and yet you are must be nice for you you've got that patience Gene you go eat eat you have no idea how hard it is for people to do the things that they do and the people that make it look easy in some regards contribute to this problem like I and this is why I really love I'm a massive fan of of a lot of your work and I think that one of the reasons is that it's so honest and and self-facing about the challenges and about the steps that you have to get through and because the journey is relatively well narrati and you can you can track it step by step and you've created a kind of a cohesive timeline of how the all of this stuff worked there is a point along specifically your journey but hopefully mine and other people's too where people people can inject themselves and say oh I'm at that bit I'm the 15-year-old that I'm at that bit I resent my parents I've just lost all my money I I feel like I need to you know like you have every different problem that you can encounter in life is present in Alex's timeline and I think that that's really important I think this this is one of the I would say this is a criticism that I have about some of the personal development self-growth and a lot of the business advice as well even the bad times are romanticized and they're not romantic like it feels like hell it feels like to do the thing to fail to not feel like anybody cares about you to not even know that there's going to be glory in retrospect yeah it feels despondent and destitute and sad and alone and I get it and I think that the more visceral that we can make these stories the better it is because I know that that's what would have resonated with me CU I would have gone that's an undeniable stack of proof that you were where you said you were I'll tell you one that maybe will resonate with somebody in the audience so I remember when I decided to move so I moved to California to start a gym or get into fitness and I got there and the guy who I said I was going to Mentor under was like where are you staying and I was like I don't know I just got here and he's like what do you mean you don't know I was like I I don't know I just I just showed up and so he went he said I could sleep at his place that night the next morning went to the gym and he got on a chair and said hey who here is going to house this kid and one guy came up to me he was like I'll give you a room so I rented one room in a house for 400 bucks a month and then when I left that room to start sleeping at the gym which was an hour away because I couldn't make the commute so I save 400 bucks a month I remember being actually kind of excited about it I remember being like man this is going to be a SI story yeah this is going to be I'm going to be this is my Rocky cut scene right the thing is that the rocky cut scene last 30 seconds in the movie but it can Last 5 Years in your life and when I was sleeping on the gym floor I'll give you a detail that that'll tell you that the UN the stack of undeniable proof um was that I my first gym was underneath of a parking garage and so there's these metal dividers in the ceiling and so cars would drive over this and it's a Concrete box and so it sounded like a gunshot like and it would happen at all hours of the night and probably the most painful from an emotional perspective experience that I would have on a regular basis was that it was also abandoned enough parking a lot that college kids kids my age would go up and party on the roof and so like while they were partying literally above my head and making noise that would prevent me from sleeping I would be down below in an Inc in a dark Warehouse in a city that I knew no one like I was from Baltimore I drove across the country I went to hunting to beach I literally knew no one and no one knew me and so I'm sleeping there and then I realized that I can't really sleep at night and so I'm I'm taking basically I'm living on naps for the first 6 months of the gym and like homeless people are sleeping in my parking lot and I have to like go out and tell them to like go away and then I get back lock the door and I go back on the astr turf which is where I slept with a blanket and a pillow and I I bring this up because like the visceral feeling that you go through when you're going through the mound of period or the eating what feels like a marathon is that it's it becomes 30 second sound bite in my story yeah but it was years and so like even to the same degree people like man you're such a natural salesman the first job I ever got offered out of college was a sales job and I said I'm not a Salesman I'm an academic G and then as soon as I opened my gym I was like oh how do I pay rent and someone walked in the door and I was like please give me money uh I promise I I had no equipment in my gym because I I couldn't afford any so it's an empty gym with just Turf and I was like I promise you I will get you amazing results and they were like are you going to be here tomorrow and I was like I I sleep here I have to be here I promise I'll be here it's impossible for me to not be here I can't live I can't leave right and so the early people took pity on me when they literally paid the first the first 29 members I signed up in the first two weeks before the gym opened was from pity it wasn't from Charisma it was pure pity I'll be real with you and it was the exact amount that I needed to pay rent and I remember the first month of rent that I paid with this is actually wild I only only looked at this in retrospect I made exactly $4,975 my first month of my gym my rent was $ 4,972 and I remember working like a dog to get that I'd never made money in my life like I'd never like really asked anyone for money and all of a sudden I had to come up $5,000 in a month and then at the end of the month I watched it go to zero and then I was like I have to do it again and that was when like the reality of the situation of like there was no Escape there was no one who was going to come to save me and there was I couldn't blame my dad I couldn't blame my mom I was the one who had chosen this life but the alternative was that I had to go back to my father a failure and have him look in look me in the eyes and say I told you and come here come here don't worry about you know I told you this this gym stuff this Fitness stuff this starting your own it's it's for later it's fine just go backy you you've got this you've got this great degree you've got just go to the go to the business school do the thing and I knew exactly what would happened but what would have happened after that is that for the rest of my life he would have had absolute authority over everything that I did and that felt like death and so that was what I ran away from when I was in that moment like whenever I felt like my back was against the wall and I didn't know what to do and it felt like the Instagram reels of like the motivation weren't going to get me through what I was going through because no one cared that I was sleeping alone I let them know I'm sleeping on the floor and a month later when you're still sleeping on the floor everyone's like don't care like great you're pursuing your dream right early days but despite that the the mustbe easy Mantra is the easiest indicator that you have a victim mindset because what it means is I can't achieve this thing because on some level you say it must be easy there's some level of desire that's there you're like I'd like to achieve some aspect of this and then rather than feel the pain of saying that I'm inadequate or I'm not taking action we we cast our our inadequacy on some outside object or some outside circumstance and by doing that we remove all agency and all power that we have over our lives and for me I would rather be somebody who has absolute power and have nothing to show for it than somebody who has all the all the the things to show for it but know that I'm life's life being one protracted training montage is a really important lesson to learn the fact that in the Rocky movie it is 90 seconds and then everything is fixed and that can last for decades that can last for years and I think that the lack of Glory the lack of certainty yeah it makes it it it turns it from worthwhile Majesty into it's it's not even sufficiently triumphant to be called sad like it's just like weak and pissy and you have no idea if anything's going to work but what's the alternative entr is going to come and get you so what's the alternative like my Twitter bio says locally reversing entropy and I I I think that that really is what you should try and do because it's going to come for you the lack of certainty is what actually makes it worth it and so here's my point let's think let's consider the alternative which is that you are on the path and you are guaranteed to know that you're going to get the outcome all of the mystery is gone there is no excitement which is why they said you know in the an ancient Romans or sorry ancient Greeks would say that the gods always envied The Mortals because their life was so ephemeral they had so much chance that could happen to them right where the gods always knew that they weren't going to die and it was completely guaranteed and so what we do is we basically have this wish that if it actually came true we would hate it even more than our current circumstance if you knew that you were going to succeed it wouldn't be worth doing to begin with the fact that you are uncertain when you start is what makes it worthwhile and the fallacy of being in the pursuit is the worry or the concern that it won't amount to anything because who you are becoming is the thing that you are amounting to in real time every day this was something that Mark Manson tweeted he put it in his newsletter actually and it made me think of a lesson that I learned a long time ago stop complaining about the results you didn't get from the work you didn't put in the only way to become more successful than most people is to be willing to do something most people aren't willing to do and this is that leanin mentality again it's like look it sucks it's shitty you're tired everybody says that you're leaving your friends behind leaving your family behind betraying your culture betraying whatever expectation it is that they have on you you need to do something that most people aren't willing to do because as we've said the average American is obese in debt and divorced like is that really oh brilliant fantastic I'm in the center of the bell curve distribution here that's really congratulations and then the other side stop complaining about the results you didn't get from the work you didn't put in okay so you didn't lose weight this month did you follow your diet well I did for half the month okay so is it any surprise that you didn't lose any weight how's your content creation game going well I I you know I spent a lot of time planning for the podcast that I'm going to release or for the Instagram that I'm going to start or from the substack that I'm going to begin writing on okay and what did you actually do it comes back to like the work doesn't care yeah Charlie Munger in one of his seminal speeches he talks about how to guarantee failure how to make sure that you are a failure and he inverts the the concept of success it's like what could you do to make sure that you were a failure it's like well you would definitely get involved in drugs drinking he says was it leverage liquor in women that's you know the Charlie's Charlie's big one right but one of the ones that he has I think he has seven in his in his in his speech is consistency he's like you have to make sure sure that you're inconsistent he's like because if you are consistent and you have none of the other attributes he's like it's you still might be successful he's like it's it's very tough for people who are consistent to not be successful and he makes an especially pointed point about consistency because in my opinion it's one of the most difficult of the virtues for humans to do because we're so attracted to novelty and so like I mean I used to De with this with you know people on their diets all the time I remember I ran gyms and so someone would come in and I would always ask the question so have you been following the meal plant and then they would say yes and so then I started changing the way I asked the question so I'd say out of the 21 meals that you were supposed to eat how many of the 21 did you have exactly the way it was on the meal plan and then they would be like oh I mean at least half and they would say it as though that was a mark of success and right now the meal plan could be your content plan it could be your it could be your showing up to work on time plan it could be the time that you want to put towards your side hust it doesn't really matter but if there's one muscle that you Flex it's learning to do the same thing over and over again like one of the one of the values that we had at gym launch is do the boring work because boring is what makes you rich right it's it's it's it's writing the follow-up sequence to your to the purchase page that you don't feel like doing but you know you should do it's running the split test for the 10th time it's it's actually going through and prepping for 20 minutes before you have the meeting because it's amazing how much smarter you can appear with 20 minutes of preparation like you can appear 50 IQ points smarter if you just prepare for meetings for 20 minutes I remember I did a Consulting day which I've only done three in my entire life and when I showed up uh to the day because I always want to make sure that everyone always gets more from me than I than they give me um I had taken I don't know four hours not a long time but a long time for I think some people but for me four hours is nothing I count in 100 so this was irrelevant and so I put like four hours and actually took the time and put it in to do research on the individual so I looked at every single page they had every landing page every offer every everything and I had seven pages of things that I thought would make them more money and so when I started I was like this is what we're going to go through today and I'll walk you through line by line and you'll have this as a take behind so you can execute it with your team it was a bigger company and the guy was shocked he was like never in my entire life has anyone had this much preparation and that's when goes back to like you need 20 podcasts to be in the top 1% the the bar for excellence like I have this timer that I have on my desk which it's it's the easiest purchase you can make I think it was like seven bucks on Amazon it's a little twist kitchen timer it's very easy and it's been probably my biggest Focus act you know to date which is I turn it when I want to start working and part of it allows me to think how long I I get better at predicting how long it's going to take me to do something so I think I think this will take me 35 minutes so I turn the clock to 35 and I click on and I start working on the thing and the moment my phone rings or I look at slack or whatever I stop the timer and so you actually see that your time on task is usually significantly less than you think it is and I think that in my early days I would spend a very long time in front of a computer telling myself that I was working with very few minutes actually on task and that's why I think that most things are actually significantly easier than people think they are they just don't know how to try hard because the harder you try the easier it gets and so it's like if you can just learn to love what trying hard feels like then all of a sudden it becomes unreasonable that you can't win so like for the presentation that I'm giving I explained a little bit earlier about what my process looks like if you were to say what would it take for somebody to be unreasonably good that it would be impossible for them to not be a top 1% salesman or a top 1% content creator and you said what would that person need to do a relevant from outcome what would be the actions or evidence that they would have to do prior to that thing that would make it unreasonable that they couldn't succeed and then you do those things what happens is you realize that it's actually not that hard because you put so much work into it and the bar from other people is so embarrassingly low that they then ask you how you did it and it must be easy consistency doesn't guarantee that you'll be successful but not being consistent will guarantee that you won't reach success you have a productivity hack an easy productivity hack instead of spending time getting in the mood to work just start working confront the work people think they need perfect conditions to start when in reality starting is the perfect condition I'm married to that I love that because if you think like I you know I obviously am somebody who always wants to optimize how much work I do per unit of time and so I I was you know there was definitely times earlier in my life I was really romanticized by these like very extensive morning routines and supplement rituals and like all this stuff of mental masturbation around the work that needed to be done but when I looked at two hours later and nothing had actually gotten done the moment you begin working is when your output per unit of time goes up and so that makes beginning the single greatest hack that you can have for everything else that you do and work because thing is when you start working you start getting in the mood to work right like everything else is procrastinating around the work that you think you should do but like I have noticed for me at least I have these I have some big mental tasks you know what I mean like big content piece or big thing that you need like you know it's going to take real mental effort it takes me like 5 minutes of actually being in it to then get a little bit of a lay of the land to then get into it but I used to take hours to delay to start the first five minutes and so my time compression of when I thought I should start doing something and when I started doing it over time it's just compressed to the point where it's like the moment I think that I need to start doing it sometimes I just start it because then what happens I get this open loop and so rather than complete work at like because a lot of people we like I want to complete it at this really nice clean Point stop halfway through the sentence cuz it'll drive you mad that's the zygon effect in full work do you know this story zonic oh wow this is way more than that's what you shut up that's what you're leveraging here so um the zonic effect was a study originally done on servers in restaurants okay and they realized you've ever being at a restaurant and a server comes up and stands with the hands behind the back go what would you like tonight sir and you say I'll have the lobster roll and a glass of red wine and a blah blah and you're like this is not he hasn't got a pen or a pad of paper he's crazy and then they go off and what they realized was servers in restaurants were unbelievably good at being able to recall exactly what a table's order was while that table's order was still open so uh guys in table 16 uh they want to swap the P's out for a little bit of extra rice and they're doing this thing as soon as the table was closed they couldn't remember anything so this is an open loop closed loop system and it's built into the brain the brain abhors an open loop it's the same reason why Netflix click hangers at the end of every episode guaranteed that you'll watch the next one because you can't bear the fact there's even novels in the dark romance genre that make guarantees that there won't be Cliffhangers they make they put it on the front or the back of the book and they say no Cliffhangers guaranteed which is people have so much distaste for it that it's a selling point that you get the closure at the end of it and finishing halfway through a sentence reduces the activation energy required to begin that sentence the next day and it keeps it in your mind too overnight so I think yeah whether you've stumbled on it or whether you knew about it you've managed to leverage a pretty powerful piece of psychology that sick going back to the work thing uh another one from you that I absolutely adore it just takes work shitloads and shitloads of work every time I try and dress it up or cut a corner I get brutally reminded the work just needs doing the work doesn't care who you are it just cares that it gets done I'm actually going to reverse quote David Goggins on this one but uh I love this quote that he has which he says there's no shortcuts for you David or there's no shortcuts for you Goggins I heard him say that and I just love that as a refrain which is that a lot of people look for a shortcut but the idea that you say like they're not for you you don't get to use them you are immune to shortcuts I just love it because then it it just further shortcuts the path to the work that needs to get done and I wrote that tweet on my I don't know 11th run of this presentation that I'm doing because that's a recent one y and so I was it was like 11 o'clock at night and so right now I'm working triple shifts which is not common for me I usually do two not three um so for me a normal workday is like I wake up uh I start working at you know 600 or 7 and then I go until about sixish so it's like 10 to 12 really concentrated hours work and that I can do six and a half days a week usually take Saturday afternoons off um and it's really just because at that point I I can't work anymore and My Brain Stew and then I I get my one half day and then I'm good to go and I'm rearing to kick on you know to work on Sundays my triple shift is I get I go to dinner and I come back at 7:30 and then I work from 7:30 until 11:30 or 1 or whatever right and when I'm putting in triple shifts is when I know I'm like really gassing it um and that's that's when I'm like repeatedly doing 16 17 a day of actual productive work and I I hear the same thoughts that everyone does which is like it's not going to matter like it's fine you've like it's good enough like I hate that like it makes me sick to even say that right because the thing that I like David goggin right he's got like there's no shortcuts for you I would say the one that I have two that are like my internal ones one that is probably the most common is I will do what is required and this work needs do it and there's just no way around and it's just it's just looking at the face of the work and it's like smiling back at me like no one else is going to do it um and like I love that one like when we're recording content in the early days we were doing like a hundred shorts every time we did it and it was direct to camera and it was the only time I could fit it in with all the portfolio stuff they were doing and so I was it was always like I will do what's required and that's been a really helpful refrain for me when I'm confronted with especially when you know what needs to get done and the second one is but I'll know and so like even if it does go well and even if everyone else says it's great but I'll know and it'll then rob me of all of the joy of all of those moments and that experience because I'll know that I could have done better and the thing is is like to to quote myself from earlier like I've never regretted working harder ever not once and some people were like on your deathbed you're like no CU I lived every moment of my day doing what I wanted to do and I remember I had a boss when I um my first boss after college she said this thing I had had a a particularly good weekend and she said I'm pretty sure happiness is stringing as many of those days in a row as you possibly can and although I hated the job that piece of advice has actually been probably what I has been my blue for how to live which is like my birthday looks the same as my Tuesdays which looks the same as my Sundays you know what the original name pool for this podcast was this is the only time in history I've done branding my entire adult life and with club nights all you're doing is coming up with Brands Paradiso oh it's it's tropical there'll be a flamingo skint oh it's a cheap night it's for people to get fingered in the corner like is we all I did was branding right I was The Branding guy I'm pretty good at copyrighting all I did was branding the one time I've had divine inspiration 3 in the morning wake up with the name was Modern wisdom the one time out of every business every night every brand I've ever come up with that was the one time but on the list of the others mind mind and matter was one of them the other one was a quote from Tim Ferris it's called crushing a Tuesday and he said that what you should aim for in life is for your average Tuesday not the spectacular one time jet with the friends to go for the whatever whatever not the UFC power slap launch party with staring at the back of Dan Bill's arean dirty mullet like not that you want your average Tuesday to look the way that you want most of your life to do and when I think about the days that I look back on at the end of my day and think like today was a good day invariably it's the same few things it's I worked very hard on something that I felt was worth doing I worked out and I spent time with people that I enjoy being around if I do those three things I had a good day and so that's been my you know Alex's simple blueprint for doing things and I think the point that you were making earlier I think it's worth hitting on again which is just that like most people's definition of work is a negative one which is why they abhor it which is also why they misunderstand so many people who quote I'll say quote here are successful ahead of them or whatever is that both people one person says the word work and the other person hears the word pain and so the first step to like becoming more successful is understanding the language that the people who are successful are using they're actually defining the word differently and so whatever that thing is that you actually enjoy doing where you lose track of time when you're in it even if it's challenging but usually it is challenging right like it's not easy because then it's boring right which is also why the uncertainty thing is so key right to not knowing if it's going to if it's going to work or not you are going to work though either way um is that the people who are quote addicted to work make it easy to be addicted to work because they do things worth doing and I think a lot of it is coming down to making sure that you take the few precious seconds that we have to do the few things that are worth doing for the rest of your life the more I listen to this the better my life gets if they don't have what you want don't listen to what they say there's no greater waste of time than justifying your actions to people have a life you don't want that was a message to my younger self but um I remember I got in an well I won't I won't call it out um let me see how I can say this the right way um you know what I'll just say it I'll whitewash the names so I was with a family member and we're all around the kitchen table it's during the holidays because I don't go home very much and they kind of started attacking me um and they're like I would never live your life you're so unbalanced like attacking and I was like what are you saying and she said I I just would never do that and I was like all right well what part of my life is unbalanced I was like do you feel like my health is unbalanced I was like do you feel like my marriage is unbalanced I was like feel like my finances are unbalanced I was like what part of my life do you feel like is out of whack she was like you you know I'm I'm not as good with words as you are and that was the and I was like okay so the fact that you can't make a logical argument I'm not going to continue how how that conversation went but the the tldr of that was I really thought a lot about it and it came down to I wouldn't live your life and my response to that is good don't it's not your life it's mine live yours the way you want and I wouldn't live your life either and so what ends up happening is they become these statements these projections that are not actually real now on some level maybe they were saying that because there was Envy in that aspect of like wishing that was there you know that they were living that life but in this particular instance I don't think it was I think they genuinely were trying to help it was a family member and they thought they were that I was being misguided this is this is an intervention let me hold the talking pillow Alex we've all come together because we care about you we really feel like we need to have a conversation here it's exactly what it was and I got so angry you no so angry no and you know you can hear Leela like patting my back like it's I'm like see you can feel the heat coming off of me as like I go upstairs and how how dare she you know but it really just came down to like her just saying I don't want to live your life and I think the answer to that question is good don't and I think that has been one of the things that has diffused so many of these like hateful comments where people dehumanize you or whatever and make you into this ideal that they reject it's like you're right one of the things that I had a mentor taught me to say is like when you're in an AR if somebody's like it's like you're you're a terrible person blah blah blah blah blah you just say you're right and and then they have no they have they have nothing to say and then you just move on with your life and so like in that way it's acceptance but of like your your idea of who I am that you hate so much I accept it I can live with that even but like we don't want to think what if I am I don't need to believe that but I can do that and I can end the conversation so I'm taking improv classes at the moment because I'm doing my first live shows in the UK and Island oh this live tour uh thank you yeah uh everything's this uh no solo stood on stage for 90 minutes comedy no just lessons insights and stuff probably some that I've learned today uh anyway we we released it and every show sold out and then got venue upgraded and then sold out again in less than 45 minutes across all of the dates which was great but then scary because I now had to speak to like three times as many people per night for additional nights on top of what I thought anyway I'm doing improv in improv there is one rule and the rule is don't punk the game so uh we're doing some exercise where we need to make silly noises as we pass this imaginary energy around and I need to go like Bo and send it back and you need to go whoosh and pass it on and all this sort of the one thing that you're not allowed to do is not make one of the noises that's allowed yeah and I really think about punking the game an awful lot and you see it happen in podcasts you see it happen on TV you see it happen and it can be uh both destructive and constructive but it's always destructive to the people that are trying to play the game and it can sometimes be constructive to the person who is punking it so what you did is you punked the game there we are playing a game of tennis we are hitting the ball back and forth here I go I hit the ball across the net and where is it is it hit it back hit it hit it back to me like this is the game that we're playing and you didn't move reciprocally back and forth you went orthogonally you went across on a different axis and you're like I'm not playing this anymore this is a different game I'm not bothered there's not even words to describe what that means now the way that it can be destructive is especially if you're having let's say a meaningful conversation sometimes people who are uncomfortable with getting into their emotions can use a variety of different things they can be scathing they can be mocking they can laugh you know because they don't want to sit with the discomfort of this particular part of the convers that's punking the game in a way that I think is destructive both externally and internally that was one that was destructive externally it broke the game but it was constructive internally and it is a way refusing to play by the rules that somebody else has set in a game that you didn't agree to is the best prophylactic against stepping into a situation that you do not want and it's one of the things that wealth affords and it's one of the things that freedom affords and freedom is often Downstream from wealth remember George one of my really good friends been on the show like five times George ma you'll follow him on Twitter he's phenomenal he was he was on Fox and Friends yesterday talking about his cocaine phone and his kale phone like what the what world is this yeah I remember before the first time that I moved away to work I've been I've traveled a lot but it was always in between work I never traveled to work Co happens world gets shut down just after Halloween Boris tells all of the UK we're going back into lockdown in 3 days time and all flights are cancelled so I messaged George and I was like I'm not doing this I'm I let's go somewhere he wanted to go to I can't I can't even remember some Island that has 300,000 people on it and I was like why don't we do Dubai it's a 5 hour flight the weather's great I know people it'll be fun it's not got 300,000 people on it it'll be the Uber and I'll never forget what he replied to me with I got up and I paid £350 for my co fit toly test before he was awake but he'd sent me a message the night before and this is what compelled me to do it he said what's the point in having you Freedom if you never say you and I was like I was so fired up reading that message and I was like yeah why have I put all of this work in why have I done all of these things if I don't ever Punk a game that I didn't agree to be a part of I think this is really big if we go all the way back to the earlier part of this podcast when you have the friends who are telling you oh um must be nice or you think you're better than us or oh so we can't drink anymore that's when you can be like yeah then what well then we wouldn't be friends you're not going to be friends with them eventually anyways I promise you anyone who says that to you're not going to be friends with if you want to ultimately become the person you want to become they're only going to reject you harder and harder until eventually you have nothing to share about and the only thing that you'll talk about about is the past which by the way one of the great leading indicators of at least in my opinion of a great way to know when to cut a friend is when they only talk about your past and so punking the game and it's it's one of those really uncomfortable things the first time you do it but then you get more and more comfortable with it because they're like I would never live your life and you're like I know this relates to another one of yours don't trade your self-respect for someone else's it's easy to lose theirs hard to get yours back yeah but I would know but you would know yeah uh related to the sort of cynicism thing that we were talking about earlier on I call it the cynicism safety blanket that sour grapes at an existential level um I had Shan Puri on the show you know Sean you've been on his you've been on my first million uh he casually dropped this I don't think this I don't think his episode's going to be out before this goes um but it's money and said the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich and from you I think the Winner's mindset sits in the uncomfortable place between two surface level contradictions extreme paranoia in the present and unshakable faith in the future the tension between the two makes someone hard to beat today and hard to outlast tomorrow the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich one of the biggest fallacies of the advice from people who are in your current situation is that that they are right most of the time when you bring a a girl home 99 times out of 100 when your parents say she's not the girl I don't like her she won't last they're right every single time except for the one time it matters and you end up marrying the person right like when they say like you're not going to succeed like this idea of yours it's not going to last and they're right every single time except for the one time that matters when you hit it big and so it's one of those things where they are right more times but they are not more right so good yeah I um I wonder whether it's a function of all of our opinions being permanently etched in stone on social media that it's very easy to seem smart to have a heterodox idea if you go against the mainstream because it's romantic oh I I I I had this alternative I I had this negative I'm not I'm not like one of those sheep I'll I'll I'll believe that things are going to be worse than they are and then if it turns out better guess what I set your expectations super low congratulations you can thank me later you're like that is distilled down British culture at its worst yeah is low expectations low expectations delivered through satirical cynicism yeah why are you doing that that's lame that's for losers that's something that we wouldn't do you should stop doing the different thing tall poppy you're the one that gets cut down and it's all that it's like all it it shows to me now is a kind of group think almost like the worst kind of mental telepathy where everybody believes the most unuseful thoughts that everybody else has yeah at scale and all it does is lower the bar that you need to get up I think it's that that you're right thing which is someone says that's lame that sucks blah blah blah and you just say like you're right it does you just keep punking the game like when anyone comes to try like like they're they're playing a different game than you so you shouldn't try and play by their rules because they're going to try and get you to play their game so that they can beat you at the game which is the status game of that little circle but you're playing a much wider game that includes more players and so even though locally you have these your your incoming information that you're taking in is disproportionate to people that you're not actually playing against and so it's basically just noise it's irrelevant because if you look on a long enough time Horizon the likel that you're act like I mean again I think about death a lot but the the idea that when I die people will be dividing up my assets arguing over who gets what there's going to be a caterer at my funeral some people won't make it because something came up and they got busy and then the few people that are there are probably no one that I have in my life right now and the fact that every single person that I have in my life might not even make it to the funeral to speak over me while I'm dead it's like why on Earth would I listen to While I'm Alive like they can't even make it to probably the single most important in you know personal day of someone's life is someone's funeral right the one time you can pay your last respect and they don't even do that and so it's like why would I give any weight to what these people are doing when they're not even going to be there on the day that matters most and 6 months later they're not even remember who I was and anybody who's had a death in their family recently knows that in the moment it's terrible for you and then six months later life moves on but the thing is is that we just never paint ourselves as the person who dies but to me that's incredibly freeing because then it's like if 6 months after I'm dead no one is going to say my name no one is going to remember what I did then No One's Gonna then it doesn't matter what I do today and I think that some people see it as really uh hopeless but I see it as very hopeful because it means we have absolute freedom and we can do crazy like why have you money if you can't say you yeah learning isn't a spectator sport it comes from doing which means if you're not doing the stuff you consume every day you're not learning you're just procrastinating oo this is fun all right so I'm going to Define some terms learning let me say this way intelligence means rate of learning like that's what that's how remember I talk about operationalizing words so rate of learning is intelligence so then you which means it's a rate not a not an attribute as an aside which then means you have to Define learning learning means same condition new Behavior so if I hold up a red card and then I slap you and then I hold up a red card again and then you duck you've learned if you wake up every day and life shows you a red card and then you don't duck and you don't change then you have learned nothing and so if you go to a weekend and you go to a workshop and then the next day you go back and you do the exact same activities in the same conditions and you have no new Behavior it means you learned nothing it also means you're stupid because it means your rate of learning is slow so if someone is intelligent I can show them the red card and on the first go they change their behavior and so by defining intelligence that way and defining learning that way it allowed me to start thinking well I want to be smart and this circumstance had this outcome last time and so the next time I see this circumstance this red card I'm going to change my behavior and so when we consume the information that you have on this podcast or whatever it is there's probably a circumstance whether it's a conversation that you're supposed to have but you're aren't having it's a decision that you need to make but you're putting off that's the red card it comes up again and the question is whether you're going to get slapped or you're going to duck and that's whether you know whether you learned or not and every time you get shown the red card and you do the same exact thing you just prove to yourself that your rate of learning is slower and so for me I want to have that evidence that I learn quickly and for me that's why like people see me as ruthless as you said because I'm willing to cut relationships because if I think that I'm going to eventually cut the relationship then why would I not cut it today because I might as might as well start enjoying the benefits of cutting that relationship as soon as humanly possible Alex hosi ladies and gentlemen dude I love you the bits I I genuinely do uh I I think the work that you put out the messages that you put out are very very needed and yeah I could do this for days we could run this back literally for days and days and days so uh this is going to go out after your big event where should people go to support you to learn more about the that you do and and what have you got coming up well I've got my uh my next book $100 million leads uh the first book is $100 million offers which answers the question what should I sell so a lot of people are like what should I sell it tells you step by step everything you do like worksheets I have a free course that goes with it you don't even have to opt in it's on my site acquisition. comom you can just start watching it um I think the Kindle for offers is $1.99 like try to make I mean our mission is to make real business education accessible for everyone um $100 million leads has been 6 hours a day 600 a.m. to 12 12 uh 12 p.m. every day for the last two years so the first six hours of every day has been dedicated to writing that book which is why I have 19 drafts four four four full rewrites there's 106 hand-drawn images um that went in the book that I put in there um and I'm going to be releasing it at this event that Chris and I were talking about um so you're going to be listening to this after that event um and so you can go on Amazon it'll be available there or you can look at acquisition. comom because they'll be a course and things that you can go through free materials and that the the100 million leads answers the question who do I sell it to and so you need leads right so you're like okay great I have the thing I'm going to sell who how do I go get people to find out about it and so a lot of the things that I have in the book are defining some of the terms that people hear a lot which is like what is a lead what is advertising right advertising is the process of making known and so if no one knows about your stuff no one can buy it and so the reverse of that is everyone knows about your stuff and that book will show you how to get everyone to know about your stuff and the reason I made the event as big as I did was because I used every advertising method in the book to advertise the book itself so offers was an example of a grand slam offer was how do you make something so good everyone feels stupid saying no which is the sub headline of the book and so offers in in of itself was a grand slam offer which is what I argue that everyone should have it was a $2 book that it comes with a course it comes with worksheets all these things and $100 million leads the way that I wanted to exemplify and meta show demonstrate that the concept of the book work today and will work tomorrow and will work in a 100 years is because humans haven't changed and so the process of making known Remains the Same because our hardwiring is the same so you don't need to know the Instagram hack because my first ever advertisement was on Facebook and I don't do anything on Facebook now and it doesn't matter and as soon as YouTube and podcast and all those things die the principles remain the same despite the platforms changing and so that is what I wrote each of these books because I want them to be around in 100 years and that's why I spent so long on them um but I'm very proud of the book and I think it's my best work to date Alex I appreciate you thank you man thank you oh hey if you enjoyed that episode with Alex hosi then press here for the one we did 6 months ago which goes for a full another 2 hours go on press it