Debunking Success: Alcohol, Laziness & Social Media Addiction Isn't Holding You Back | Alex Hormozi

you can drink and do drugs and watch porn if you still do this that's all that matters I want to do the formula and then live my life how I want to live each of us gets to make a daily choice to play the victim or play the game and if you're gonna play the game I suggest you play to win and like all games life has a set of physics there are things that work and things that don't work your job is to experiment until you find the vein of Effectiveness to that end I bring you Alex hormozzi the man with a proven system for identifying destructive habits and turning success into a repeatable process you are ridiculously good at writing instruction manuals for how to make money literally you are singular in that way but if people think poorly or they do dumb things they're never going to make progress so what advice do you have for people that are wasting time on things like porn social media or even just a friend group that is going nowhere fast if you it's my belief that if you could control every one of the variables externally to an organism you can control Its Behavior so one of my favorite quotes from BF Skinner who is a behavior psychologist from way back in the day was uh the old saying is you can lead a horse to water but you can't make a drink he said well if you bleed it out enough and you starve it and you leave it in the sun and you put the water right in front of its mouth he's like I can invaritably guarantee that I can make a drink and so if you were to think about yourself as that horse then it's like okay well what is the equivalent of the the bloodletting the dehydration the starving that you can put yourself into get the behavior you want so starving has a negative connotation but we can also starve out the negative things in your life like you can starve the alcohol you can starve the porn you can starve the friends and I think the easiest way to do that is to get out of the environment you're in because like I'm sure you heard about the I think this was in atomic habits um in Vietnam I think it was like 10 of troops or something we're taking heroin um when they were there in the 70s they thought there was going to be this massive problem when they came back to the States but when they came back to the States almost no one continued the heroin habit and so going from Vietnam we were doing heroin to the U.S what you're not doing taking heroin how to had a 90 success rate whereas the inverse is true of recovery centers in the United States today people go there and 90 of them relapse when they go back home and so the difference is that people were doing heroin in a different environment and then they changed their environment and then they never went back to the environment that they did heroin in and so it's like if you have these behaviors that have cues from the people the surroundings the colleagues family whatever I think even if you can't afford to move out of the state like almost anybody can move across town even 30 minutes away to just make it a little bit more inconvenient for your drug dealer for your bars that you know for the friends to say you know hey we're doing fantasy whatever on Friday and it's like I can't make it right you just make it inconvenient to do all the things that you don't want to do and make it more convenient to do the things that you do and you'll do more of them all right so the interesting thing for me about the Vietnam heroin thing which I've heard before is and this relates to why I think people might be struggling now is there's an underlying thing that's happening that the the heroine or the porn or the social media or whatever is trying to mask and cope with what what is that today like we have things amazing things could not be better yeah but you've got people doing things to numb themselves out to what's that thing they're afraid to face I think it's their perceived judgment their perception of other people's Judgment of their failures that haven't existed yet and so when you're when you think about constructing a mindset that is going to allow somebody to be successful like when I think about your blueprints if you had to prep somebody to be ready to deal with that blueprint what are some of the either core beliefs or habits that you would get them in the routine of doing so that they could actually deploy the things that you teach I think some of the things that I'll say might sound repetitive to some folks but I'm a big believer in a lot of the stoic virtues um and a lot of that just comes down to having your opinion of yourself be all that is required and so um it's like it's like living for the future version of yourself and letting that person be your ultimate judge and no one else's voice and I think that obviously it takes practice for social creatures we learn how to behave from other people and their judgment of our behavior when we're kids and then we have to unlearn it as we're adults because we find out that the people who are giving us feedback actually have no idea what they're doing so but like it's super ingrained in us and I think it just it's a long process but like how do I prepare someone for that foreign it's like everything is removing the limitation right it's like I want to get to here and so getting there is usually straightforward it's the obstacles that are all the things that people put in their own way so it's like what are because the obstacle might be have a different name for every person and and then trying to pull apart like why is this thing like why am I putting weight on this thing because you had a strong drive when you were growing up right and you wanted to get into Film School you had this thing like I don't know what that snap point is for me I just like my fear of disapproval from you know my dad was my big was my big driver and so that was the thing that could get me to quit whatever it was you know what I mean to do the one thing that mattered more and I think that's at least for me that was I don't know how to find that for someone you said something in one of the interviews that you were doing leading up to your book launch that really hit me and that was um you rewrote the book something like 19 times and when you got to a point one time you're like look they're gonna be able to get this and the guy we were working with said look there's a guy in Iran and he has one goat yeah and he's gonna sleep with a copy of this book under his pillow yeah do it for him yeah and that somehow sparked you yeah so my question is given your response to that given everybody needs that thing are there some people that are Beyond reach no I don't think I mean unless you have like mental disability I mean like I think that barring biology right um no I don't think so I think I think I'm a big behavioral person which is like anything can be trained um even like ah man he has such a great personality it's like what is personality well personality is probably 170 individual skills and so if one of them is when someone walks in the room you stand up I can train that if it means that like when someone's talking I need you to nod your head like this when the other person talks I can train that and if we just had to make a checklist it's just because it's hard to describe doesn't mean it's that's impossible to teach that's interesting okay so the the spark the thing that causes somebody to finally get into it um can be translated into a set of behaviors totally and then if you get the set of behaviors then you're going to be in a position to go right right so um what are some of the behaviors that people are doing now that you think are destructive and what do we replace them with a lot of it is inaction right like it's I'd love to say like all these people are failing and this is the thing that would fix it it's like most people just don't take action to begin with and so I think a lot of it's between their ears um to your point which is why I talk a lot about fear of failure um being being the actual enemy rather than failure itself and really even like even the idea that people are like I'm afraid of failing no one's afraid of failing people are afraid of other people's judgment about their failure if you could fail in private no one would know like when you play video games and you lose the level you're not embarrassed right like interesting so I've heard you say that before yeah and I've always agreed yeah but I do think that there is something that will chip away at somebody it so it comes down to what do you build your self-esteem around this was the big breakthrough in my life was the day that I realized I got to choose what I built my self-esteem around and I had been building my self-esteem around being smart and so I was constantly putting myself in a position where I could prove to myself and others that I was smart I began to realize we are both the shout and the Echo and I wish it weren't so I wish we weren't the Echo and what I mean by that is you're what you do but you're also what other people say about what you do and as a just unimaginably social creature it is baked so deeply into our DNA right I don't think there's any escaping that so you come into whether it's playing video games or trying to build a business or whatever with a lifetime of being both the shout and the echo yeah so you have a sense of who you are you've mapped your self-esteem and now if part of your self-esteem is I'm good at this thing yeah after a while like you're way happier to fail in private because nobody sees you so there's no new Echo reinforcing what an you are but I don't think you have unlimited failures on your side before you go maybe I'm really not good at this thing and if your self-esteem is about being good at that thing then it really will begin to erode you do you have uh assuming I'm right about that do you have a thing that you encourage people to build their self-esteem around to avoid the kind of traps that will make them afraid of failure I think it would be around the traits which can be evidenced by the things you do which I think is probably where you made your shift unless there's me assuming here but um like it's not about being intelligent about being like hard working right it's like if you if you build your identity around that trait then you can always do more of it like you always work harder you can always do X put extra reps in ETC um and I think yeah people build build that trait as their as their identity and where they get their self-esteem from then it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle but they're the ones who are in control of it rather than the outcome and so that way it's like all of the variables of your identity and your self-confidence are under your control which I think is cool which is very cool so have you identified the trait Smorgasbord that people have at their ready to be thoughtful about so for instance being smart would be a trait being honorable being honest being hard working um what should people be building their self-esteem or what traits is there one is there a magic handful I think the ability to delay gratification and from a behavioral perspective it's being able to continue to act on a longer extinguished curve which is like if I knock on a door so if I knock on a door and nothing happens how many more times do I knock on the door before someone opens so like if you if you if you fire someone and they're like wait I I want my job right you can you can measure what someone's curve on how many times they will try again on something before they move on and give up right and so the longer you can make that curve on someone the more likely they will hit the jackpot which then extends how many more times they'll go the next time which is basically how addiction works too but you can also use the same concept for good things so number one is being able to delay gratification um the second one is uh I think it's it's vision of what you actually want to do is like where do you want to go because you can have somebody who works really hard at building a restaurant like one single store and you work really hard at building uh an app that's going to change the world the amount of hours and effort that go into building an amazing restaurant and that are probably about the same the amount of impact is disproportionate on something that can go to gazillions of people so I think you have to have some level of vision um and that comes from the people that you're around the third one is is having some level of drive and I think that you can have either pool or or away from Drive pick which one or whichever one you've got more of I would say start with that one and I think it does shift over time because many entrepreneurs have away from Drive in the beginning we're afraid of failing we're afraid of not being enough you know we hate being poor whatever your thing is um a lot of times especially I get a lot of DMS about this it's like I'm trying to find my passion I'm trying to find my purpose my thing and um I don't think you find it I think you make it how do you know if you're going to like anything without trying it you don't and most people hate things that they suck at and how do you stop sucking at stuff you you do stuff that you suck at a lot until you suck less until you're eventually good and so it's like so you so you're not going to be passionate about anything that you suck at which means that it's a fallacy of thinking I have a hypothesis that haunts me and that hypothesis Is For Real partly because it applies to me uh that hypothesis is that people have a very hard time holding sophisticated ideas in their head part of what I think makes you so amazing and PS I would like to say that almost a year ago I said within the next five years you'll be one of the biggest uh names in social media and I think you crushed the timeline Just monstrously You Killed the predictions hey there it is uh just really really um crazy but people really have um just such a a difficult time holding sophisticated ideas in their head the thing that makes you as amazing is that you are able to hold sophisticated ideas in your head and simplify them so that people can understand and they can deploy them and actually use them but the inability to hold the sophisticated idea in their head is going to create a tremendous amount of problems so when I think about okay you're going to have to to pick something for your identity that's going to allow you to face failure to go into that Loop you know to be able to tear yourself down and not have your desire to push forward extinguished you already have to be able to conceptualize that idea that you're going to be fighting against your neurochemistry so you're going to knock on that door it is going to be brutal it's it's going to feel so bad like death and you then have to do mental Jujitsu to translate that into ah but I build my self-esteem around being the person that can have this long extinguisher that I can knock on a thousand doors when anybody else can only knock on Two And I worry God is my big fear that I do think some people are Beyond reach I think that is my big fear and I do impact theory is predicated on the idea that as long as somebody meets minimum requirements that they're going to be able to do it but press on this point because I'm deeply optimistic and so Lord knows I hope that you convince me but the more I do this game the more I realize that people get trapped in things like um I'm trying to find my passion yeah and that the emotion of nothing feeling real yeah is and and what you have to do to build a connection between I choose to make this my passion and how you make that emotionally resonant is so sophisticated that most people won't be able to pull it off yeah you talk about stacking Pennies on the evidence what evidence do you have for all of us that it anybody really can turn a lack of belief into simple rudimentary Behavioral things that they do to get those wins yeah so I'll make a statement and then I'll I'll answer that which is um I think like confidence without evidence is delusion and so the idea that you aren't confident if you don't feel confident right now is okay because the question is what are you trying to be confident about like confidence as a word right if we can Define terms is uh you're the own percent how the percentage likelihood that you have that what you think will happen or will happen right like in statistics like what is our confidence score on this metric right and so the same thing applies to a person what is our confidence that when Johnny says he will do this it will happen and so we have our own confidence metric for ourselves which is a percentage likely that we will do what we say we're going to do and so the way that you can increase that confidence is to have more evidence that you've done things when you said you would do them in the past and so I think it's about looking retrospectively and thinking you know what story can I tell around this data that would give me more evidence that I actually do have some of these trades that I didn't think about and I'll give you a funny little clip on this so when I was selling weight loss memberships way back in the day I remember a common thing that would come in uh would you know a lady would come sit down and say you know um I haven't worked out in seven years and I know I need to be going to the gym and I would say that's amazing and they would just be shocked what do you mean I'm like you're so consistent I was like so you already have the trade of consistency we just have to flip it I was like it's way harder to learn to be consistent then I was like if you were just yoyoing back and forth all the time I was like it might be way harder I was like but you actually stick with what you what you said and they were like never thought about it like that and so it's just like and I say that a little bit tongue-in-cheek but to the same degree it was really just a reframe for these people and whether or not you know people want to take that and run with it in whatever Direction though like for me I just wanted this person to believe they could do it and so I think to the same degree it's like well if every day you didn't make 100 reach outs right or you didn't make the piece of content that you wanted to but up until that point you've always like been able to like make a cup of coffee and like sit down at the computer rather than uh going to the arcade you know figuratively or you know playing video games or going live video games as much to you Alex no going to the arcade boys and girls back in the 1980s yeah and so and so it's counting the win sometimes of losses that didn't happen which is like what could have gone worse which is also a stock frame but it's like what could I have done to mess this day up more than I did it's like well I could have I mean I could have taken five shots when I woke up I didn't do that it's like okay check great I okay I haven't I haven't started my day with drinking uh have I started my day with drugs no how many days in a row have I not started my days with drugs you know drugs and drinking it's like know a whole year it's like okay well like let's just basically chunk down a level and then you see all of a sudden you like peel back the onion and you're like oh I have tons of evidence that I can be consistent on things I just need to add another thing on top of those behaviors that I already have proven that I can do and so now when I make this prediction of my confidence that I can do this like you just take one step at a time and I think that the the big meta skills um come from those what we call virtues but virtues are just behaviors which can be trained virtues are behaviors that can be trained it's really interesting man I I very much like the way that you look at the world and I think I've tried to um articulate a similar idea and the way that I approached it was it doesn't matter if you think negatively and um act well you'll still get the success out of acting well if you act poorly but think positively you'll go nowhere and this is why it drives me crazy when people's advices look in the mirror and say that you love yourself and all that it won't work and at the end of the day success really is just it's doing the right things um another killer so I I do look out at the world right now and I see where Building Products that squeeze our dopamine has created amazing products the iPhone is incredible and I'm very glad that it exists but I also see it having a very negative impact on a lot of people that simply uh pull the dopamine lever and for people that aren't familiar with there was a behavioral study done in mice or rats and if you let one you're putting the mouse in a cage so you're already as an artificially limited environment but if you let it tap the lever for cocaine yeah it will tap it until it dies yeah now the fascinating thing about cocaine is that it's dopamine it's the basically the potential for for reward more than the reward itself and so I think that we have a lot of products that do incredibly well because they're all about squeezing that dopamine release and therefore for people to do what you're talking about like if let's just embrace the frame for the rest of this conversation and I hope the rest of my life that truly nobody is beyond this barring you know some um a mental problem that makes it impossible for them to move forward so that you really just have to find those behaviors so if you understand that the world right now is designed to get you to be watching pornography to be playing on social media to play mindless video games I will say as somebody making video games I'm well aware there there's usefulness and then there's is waste um but understanding all of that that the world is set up against you then you have to have a technique that's going to allow you to get into these habits that are going to be effective now one thing that was absolutely transformative in my life was of rules to just a an absolute binary and so um this this will be a hot take that will piss some people off but I've always said I do not understand how people get addicted to drugs because if you just have a rule in your life that says obviously I will exclude pain management right if you just have a rule in your life that says I don't let's take drinking I don't drink more than twice a week period so if you've taken a drink for the third time in the week you've violated your rule you know that you're out of bounds you need to immediately correct course do you leverage rules or things binary things so that you know like I give myself 10 minutes to get out of bed that's like my big rule do you have anything like that that allows you to I probably live the exact opposite way you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today not as a contrary point just um I I hate rules all rules and so um how do you stay on the right behaviors I I do the things that have rewarded me in the past I mean that genuinely like when I wake up earlier better things have happened for me when I do more work before I have my meetings better things have happened for me when I eat a certain way I look the way that I want and better things happen for me and so um I just I I Buck against rules really hard and I don't know why that is but uh like the moment someone's like you can't have chocolate or you can't smoke or you can't whatever I'm like why not I'll do it and then still win at the thing to prove that that's not the point which is why like I get I get annoyed with a lot of the Superstition around uh routine and what I mean by that is like you know we've got I mean I remember there was a guy message me he's like dude I'm doing my my morning routine he's like and I have a cold plunge a red lights on a ground outside and then I do my gratitude journal and then I like this list it was like you know he was taking like three hours to get his routine done or whatever in the morning um I was like you know you could just not do that and work for three more hours every day I was like I'll bet you'll make more money and so I think there's a lot of superstition right now especially Entrepreneur Space around routine as like if I don't get my morning routine and I'm just useless and I'm like man I'd love to compete against you right because like you have one bad night of sleep and you're I was like I will continue to work because working has worked for me in the past but I love what you were saying earlier with like success doesn't really care or the result doesn't really care one plus one if you still do the addition it equals two whether you're a good person or a bad person if you make 100 calls or you you know make 100 pieces of content the likelihood that somebody will find out about your product is greater than if you make zero period fight me and so you can do those things and be you could you can drink and do drugs and watch porn if you still do the that's all that matters now those things might make it more more difficult but I I always came in from the perspective of like I want to do the formula and then live my life how I want to live and if that means that sometimes I drink more and sometimes I drink less or sometimes I work out more and sometimes work out less sometimes eat dessert sometimes I eat really small desserts um that's fine and so I it's just like what like what are the what are the actual things that matter and if you look at and I know you have a lot of wealthy friends like people the way people work the routines that they have are so varied which to me means that they don't matter because if there were something that absolutely has to be done then it has to go down to First principles of okay in order for people to find out about your stuff you have to let them know great so you have to advertise it in some way for people to find out about it to buy period no like anybody who has a business that rule applies now some of them are you know don't drink some of them drink a ton some of them watch porn some of them don't watch porn at all and also make tons of money and so I I try to have as few rules as possible to give myself as much latitude to live my life that is um that's really interesting and I will no no for sure I'd love that and I think that's one of the most interesting things about the era that we're living in is people get all these different perspectives um so for I the thing that we agree on is that there are physics to everything so success has physics and if you're not trying to do something that violates physics then you're going to be fine and so how you get there is somewhat irrelevant yeah um I I have a feeling speaking to the people that are caught up in the um they're they're wasting their time they're not doing the things that they need to do they're they're going to need to create some structure now that structure may be as simple as what you're talking about which is because if if from my frame of reference the way that I would put thoughts in my own head about what you're saying is I have a rule and this is a literal rule of mine I only do and believe that which moves me towards my goals which sounds very akin to what you're talking about it's like if I do this thing I get this output uh when I wake up early I've had better things happen when I'm in shape better things happen than I put in the work better things happen um and ultimately that's the thing that I'm trying to get people to Anchor around is their everything you do as a test your test will have results it's what I call the physics of progress so to make progress one must have a hypothesis know where you are know where you want to go understand the obstacle between you and that come up with a hypothesis about how to overcome that obstacle run that test look at the data very frankly don't BS yourself and then come up with a more informed hypothesis and try again over and over and over and over but ultimately you're steering by results and I think very often people either don't know how to in fact I think there's a few things that will happen one they don't know how to conceive of the problem so they don't understand the obstacle two they don't know where they're going or three they cannot break themselves out of the dopamine cycle they haven't identified the pain they're moving away from whatever insecurity they have and so they end up in that death Loop of um feeling like they don't have enough time when in reality they're the same time as hyper efficient successful people they just don't use it in the same fashion I think Seneca said that we all think we don't have enough time but it's really we just don't use the time we have well um and I think I think a lot of it is around like how we how we choose to pick our identities to your point earlier like someone might say like man I'm lazy I I would say like that's amazing like a lot of great CEOs are lazy that's fine um let's use that and so let's just make working more convenient than the other thing and then your laziness will take over or you don't mean just like in terms of how we can frame the problem right like is a as an example you're saying earlier with the iPhone um like scientific study anyone can do this you can decrease your iPhone usage by simply going to grayscale like across age groups if you switch your colors on your screen to grayscale you'll lose use it 30 less than you normally would it's like great for most people that's like an hour plus a day 30 is an hour plus oh my God yeah well I think it's way I mean I think average iPhone usage is probably like I mean I think one hour is like conservative on that I think it's like like might be even two yeah hours it's like there you go found your time you can make all your content you get all the stuff you watch a movie at the time that you have from saving it but like anyone can do it and so just like how many how many of these little things can I make convenient right so like if you're like if you're trying to eat healthy right I mean obviously you guys like we both came from that space it's like well you just make it more convenient to eat healthy than need unhealthy it's like okay we'll remove all the stuff in your house that you don't want to be eating make sure all the snacks you have are protein related snacks um you know anything that has calories in it that's a beverage don't include it right like just the just simple things that all of a sudden you're like I'm hungry and you're like you're like I've got cucumber slices and uh and protein chips you're like what do you think will be more effective that or dehydrating the horse I think that is dehydrating the horse interesting that one's never spoken to me one because that's not my problem you can fill my house with snacks and if it either violates one of my rules which I'm obsessed with because I created them and they're designed to give me the results that I want or they violate my identity I'm not going to do it yeah uh that's unique to you I don't I think that's like a Tom like one percent thing just me from the outside I think a lot of people have a hard time following rules you don't think people will drive 30 minutes to gorge on something I think they could but they're just as likely to break a rule and I think it'd be I think it's it's more likely that they will break a rule because it takes less effort to break the rule to themselves than it does to drive 30 minutes and so I just want to make it as inconvenient as possible to do the wrong thing and as convenient as possible to do the right thing that will clearly be advantageous so in no way is what I'm about to say arguing against that uh so huge love that total support on board now uh having said that I have a feeling that the thing that people are up against and and I thought a lot about this with food at Quest I wasn't thinking oh I need to make this convenient that was part of it and we certainly were not blind to the fact that giving somebody a package good that they could carry in their purse was going to be really helpful yeah but the Mantra I kept saying to myself was I want to make food that people can choose based on taste yeah and it happens to be good for them because I think people will go way out of their way violate rules all that uh to eat something that makes them feel the way they want to feel and if I had to Anchor all of my fears around people not being able to accomplish what they want to accomplish it would all be around the things you're going to need to do don't feel the way you want them to feel and because they don't feel the way you want them to feel you Veer towards the things that do make you feel the what the way you want to feel now part of that you can accomplish by reframing but part of it I think is inescapable you're going to do what feels good and you're going to avoid what's painful for the most part okay I love this so one of the one of the big misnomers in my opinion about discipline is that people who who like some people might look at me and say that oh Alex is really disciplined but I actually really do what I want to do every day and it just so happens to be work that is productive and makes money but that statement that you made earlier that uh people shoot what do you said you said people do what makes them feel the way they want to feel right and then they you said well oh it's because it's not making them feel the way they want to feel and my only addition to that would have just been yet just yet and so it's usually because their Extinction curve is too low right on the behavior and so if I go let's say I'm the best door knocker in the world best door knocking sales guys and I knock on Five Doors I might not get an answer from any of those five doors and I walk away and I say I guess door knocking isn't for me and I might be the LeBron James of door knocking right but if the sample size is too small because my Extinction curve just cuts off really fast I'll never know and so that's why it's like if if you can give the thing the opportunity to reinforce its own behavior then it goes from external to internal we're like video editors for example like there's people who love I mean we're going to film school right um in the beginning you suck at editing film but then you like make the letters appear and you get instant feedback and you're like whoa that was rewarding right and then you do it again and then you learn another technique and another technique another technique and so then the behavior itself becomes rewarding and you begin to like work right you begin liking your work and so I think it really is that just getting over the hump in the beginning of knocking on a thousand doors rather than five and realizing that it would make sense that you would suck because you haven't done it before um but knowing that if other people have done it too that there is a reward that will eventually come and it will reinforce me just like it has every other human before me who has done this and I think just like one of my my core you know assumptions um as I like to say um is that if if somebody else can do these behaviors I can do these behaviors and get the same outcome you know barring external environments or timing and things like that but you know assuming that those are the same like they're not going to sell solar today is the same as it was last year and if I see somebody who's number one in solar and I do the same behaviors as them I will likely get an outcome that is decent and so I that that's what gives me uh confidence going into a new environment is modeling somebody and just being like ignore all of these other things what are the behaviors how many times this you know is this person you know how quickly do they walk from door to door do they only go to apartment buildings are they you know like what's their what is all the steps that they do operationalizing success um rather than kind of like the theorizing that I feel like happens a lot and I think that's to be fair I think the reason a lot of people kind of like some of the content that I put out from a money making perspective is how can I operationalize this word right so like patience for example is when people throw out a lot but for me defining patience was helpful which is figuring out what to do in the meantime like that's patience like you're like I'm not patient it's like no you just need to figure out what to do in the meantime that's all like you and I are being patient on all the Investments that we made last year while we're having this podcast like they are happening we're figuring out what to do in the meantime so we're being patient and so it's like if patience feels bad when you're focusing on it but if you're not focusing on it then patience happens by default um like sadness for example like that was really helped me to find uh figure out just even defining the word in terms of operational perspective help me get out of those phones faster which is um sadness comes from a lack of options a perceived lack of options which is why it feels like hopelessness but if it comes from a perceived lack of options then it means that you solve that with knowledge because it's perceived lack of options which is an ignorance problem which means it's solvable which all of a sudden gives me something to do so then all of a sudden I do have an option and you can get out of the funk and like anxiety is the is the reverse of that which is I have many options and I don't know which one to pick which means I don't have priorities so like you solve sadness through knowledge you solve anxiety through decisions and so like helping me just spell those out to myself I'm like I feel anxious okay that means that I have lots of paths and I need to make a decision so which one am I going to decide so I can get out of this bad feeling if I have sadness great what do I not know okay now I have to go figure that out great I have something to do and so that like you can I think these are like mental models around using emotions to fuel the behaviors that you want I didn't want to say a word during that because I think um what you're talking about is so I'm as as you're talking I'm trying to map [Music] um my fear about people not being able to make the change um and I the more I think about it the more I think this boils down to people feel the way that they don't want to feel and they don't know how to handle that yeah and you just without me even thinking to ask you um you were going through how to deal with different emotions and by having a plan by having a procedure which I think you're going to call operationalizing yeah um then you know what to do oh when I encounter sadness then I do this when I encounter anxiety Then I do this and so it's a very action-oriented plan so I want to plant a flag in that and then I want to follow up with how one goes about operationalizing something okay so I'm going to lay out a thesis you can push back or whatever uh people one of the the things that you and I have both said historically that I think is maybe the most powerful thing we will ever say and everything after that is just what you do once you get over that your life is an exact reflection of your choices you're not a victim and even if you are it does not help you to think that way you have to break through that and one of the intros to this episode that I considered was that every day each of us has to make a choice whether we are going to play the victim or play the game and if you're going to play the game play to win it's the only thing that makes sense but that is um negative emotions can be so gnarly that we need to make it somebody else's fault that to point all ten fingers back at us and this is one of the things to get higher to impact Theory uh you're going to be asked the question along the lines of something horrible happens to you how many fingers go outwards and how many fingers point back at you and the punchline is if all ten are not coming right back at you it's just disempowering it doesn't mean that bad things don't happen nothing you can do about a tornado et cetera et cetera but still to realize that you can make different choices and get a different outcome but people don't do that a lot because to do that if you don't have the right frame of reference if you haven't leaned on the right traits if you aren't building your self-esteem around the right thing in that moment to say that it's your fault fault fault is just emotionally devastating and people have not operationalized their encounter with negative emotions and therefore they will do anything they have to do completely unconsciously to not feel that way now if that is uh doing drugs they'll do drugs if that's drinking masturbation cheating whatever they will do all of it but it really boils down to what's your relationship with your emotion now to push us farther and to really um make clear what I think I don't think emotions are objectively real I don't think that people ought to believe an emotion I think people think because they feel it it is the right reaction to objective truth rather than a subjective reaction to perception sure and if you can understand that all of your emotions are a subjective reaction to perception that you can take control of that that you can reframe things you can have a different emotion and now in that moment instead of doing something that moves you away from your goals you can replace it with something that moves you towards your goals okay so that's my thesis as as I really think about boiling it down to what messes people up it's that if I'm right about that how do you operationalize anything like what does that mean because I have a feeling the thing that makes you phenomenal is the ability to operationalize everything so if I love this the conversation just a side note um so in my opinion a lot of things even huge Apartments practices in business and medicine and everything come down to learning and communication and so let's define terms so learning is same condition new Behavior so to the point I felt sad last time I learned this new thing from this podcast on impact Theory which is okay if I feel sad then it means that I don't see an option which means I need to get more education or knowledge on the subject so that I can figure out what to do at least deciding that I need to learn more gives me the next step that I need to do and boom I'm not sad and so you've been sad before and then it took you five days to get out of it and you're sad now and it takes you five minutes to get out of it same condition new Behavior so you learned and so if we go one degree move from that I'm going to circle back to the original point if we think about intelligence right um like what is intelligence as I Define it from an operational perspective it's rate of learning right so somebody who learns really slowly is less intelligent someone who learns really quickly is more intelligent but that means that intelligence is just a rate it's a measurement of how quickly you change your behavior in the same condition and so if you continue to listen to podcasts and you're wake up in the same exact conditions every day and your behavior does not change it means you learned nothing which means you are not as smart as you think you are but it also means that you can influence and have a direct influence on your intelligence by increasing or decreasing the time it takes you to actually act on the knowledge you have when the same condition presents itself and so for me that's incredibly empowering because it's like I can be smarter by simply hearing what this person says getting the same condition and then immediately changing my behavior wow that's cool and so that then like from the fingers perspective it's like okay all 10 fingers are on me of how I can influence my own surroundings and do the things that I want to do um so to to Circle back to the original question I think which I probably dovetail a little bit was can you repeat it one more time how do you operationalize things what does that mean so okay so it's breaking down what does this word mean from a behavior perspective so it's it's it's it's really hard like I think the reason that so many people are confused and they have a hard time remembering things and understanding complex topics is because they have lots of words in their heads that they have not defined I really mean like I I truly believe that which is why every book that I have begins with the definition of terms just like this is what an offer is this is what a lead is right these are these are what this means right um and until you have that you're just you're basically making face noise right like if I say leads and you perceive that as something different then we can't actually have a conversation because we're not talking about the same thing and so a lot of people have a lot of words they've heard other people say that they not along to and some people are like makes sense and they say yes but when someone says does that make sense we have been trained as humans to nod and say Yes it doesn't mean it makes sense it means that when we have that cue that's the behavior we do right because we know that we get punished when we say no because then it becomes all this big thing and then you know you dovetail into all these other conversations and you get punished for it right and so you learn what's reinforced and most people say makes sense and then you say which means nod your head when I say this and you're like I nod my head great and then you move on and so I think that's why a lot of people don't learn because they actually don't know what the words mean and so to operationalize something it is simply going back down to when I say I'm confident what does that mean it's not a feeling it's not a what other people say about you like none of that is measurable like how much like what is measurable it's a percentage of likelihood that what I say will happen will happen period that's what it is now what you'll also find is that there are a lot of words that mean the same thing and that doesn't mean that the the concept wrong is just the fact that English or whatever language you learn usually has a Melting Pot of like well this is the version of the Nordic word and this is the version of the Hindi word and this is the version of the French word and they're all in the Lexicon but most of them more or less mean the same thing and so getting away from words meaning what the the dictionary tells us it means and just say what does it mean to me in terms of what I can do with it then I think makes navigating life a lot simpler because the only thing we can control is our behavior and so if we Define the words in terms of what we do about it then these all become things that we can control and and can change our lives with yeah okay that I think is super important um one of the things that that changed my life and the easiest way to explain it is how it manifested in my marriage was to Define terms and because what Lisa and I were realizing is we're saying the same words but we don't mean the same thing totally and that's creating a lot of confusion now as a leader in a business this becomes problematic often because you will say something that to you is self-evident exactly what it means people do the it doesn't make sense yeah not and um they do that a lot and So Lisa and I started defining really simple words like what when you say you promise what does that mean when you say something's important what does that mean yeah and so like in our marriage if we use the word important it means stop whatever you're doing I don't care if you're with the president of the United States you will immediately get up leave that and deal with this thing because it's important so if it is Meaningful but not important then fair enough it's meaningful but I'm in the middle of something I'll get to it later doesn't mean that it's you know not something that needs to be addressed but it isn't important cool now we have a shared lexicon yeah um and I think that going back to my thesis around emotions emotions are the subconscious's way of communicating to the conscious mind so when you think about and this isn't I mean this is me making things up this is me connecting dots that Behavioral Science has made abundantly clear but I am admittedly connecting dots but uh Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote a whole book on this called how emotions are made so this is not me just shooting from the hip but I'm putting my own words to it um the the way that you feel is the subconscious mind which can process information uh faster and faster as they say so it's a a much larger number of data points processed much quicker but when you bring it into the conscious mind you're going to think either in images or in words most people probably think primarily in words and so it really Narrows down your ability to deal with a lot of information and because emotions are coming from the limbic brain which we had before we had the higher level cognition that humans have that other animals don't have you're going to be in a situation where oh snake and you just jump you just have the emotion and you move um most people leave things there and so they're never pulling that into the light to say oh why do I feel so uncomfortable in this moment what what is it and if they would take the time to Define what the discomfort is then they might be able to operationalize the response that they should have to this predicated on at least from my perspective what's your goal so I feel some kind of way but I have a goal my goal makes demands which is something I don't think people think about very often to achieve your goal just hey there's physics to it so certain things will move you towards your goal and certain things won't so my goal makes demands but I feel some kind of way that make me want to move in the opposite direction of the demands my goals make so now using your words I have to operationalize my encounter with this emotion Define it Define a response and then actually adhere to that response in order to move towards my goals and that the the moment where you pull the emotion into the spotlight of your conscious attention and Define it in a really simple way I think it's where the vast majority of humanity get lost so I do something called impact through University and I answer some of the same questions over and over and over and they often have to do with that moment somebody does not understand their own emotions and therefore they cannot operationalize the next move I have so much to say I will keep it short so so I wanna so in reference back to what I was talking about like with sadness and anxiety and patience like these are all well patience is more of a behavior sadness is a feeling that and then how do we translate that right um I want to be clear that I use those terms because I want to meet people where they're at me personally and if you look at it from like the the Behavioral Science perspective you have stimulus and you have response what happens in the box of like what this person feels right like if I hold up a red flash card to a random person and then I slap them and then I hold the red flash card again like all of a sudden some of them might feel anger some of them might feel fear like what they feel when they see the stimulus which I've now paired with a response right is going to be different and so I think a lot of effort goes into people and even people in our world trying to help people describe their feelings talk through things blah blah and I I just genuinely think that it's a waste of time because not who cares but why does it matter because you can do it when you're sad you can do it when you're angry you can do it and you're fearful and again to the point is if 100 people more find out about the thing that I'm trying to sell or whatever I'm trying to do then I'll have a greater percentage likelihood that I will get this outcome that's it and I think a lot of people they just get into this cycle of trying to analyze their feelings and then they're like oh it's because I had this trauma when I was a kid and you know because my dad didn't hug me enough and like blah blah it's like the because for most people's explanation is irrelevant because I get like I had a podcast question the other day that asked um do you feel like uh uh trauma you know is is something that creates success later in life among entrepreneurs blah blah and um I really thought about it I was like I think people suffer and some people become successful so do I think that suffering creates success no I think that everyone suffers and some of them become successful and then they attribute their success to make it feel worth it to have gone through that suffering because they have an outcome but I don't think that they're related in any way because like you were successful because you did the thing how you thought about it is completely irrelevant and I just think that there's so much effort that gets put into that conversation um which is why I have really contrarian views around like therapy and things like that but um I think like if you keep opening a wound like what does it help you I don't know like you still didn't make the calls so like let's let's let's create an environment where it's more likely that you create that you do the calls that you need to make and it just it simplifies the variables that we can control because no one knows like even even adding the because to things like I did this because it's like you don't even know why you're doing what you're doing and so when people are like Tom what's your number one reason for success we're making it up we're making up our response I mean it's what it is we're like how do I there's a hundred things a zillion things I don't know like is it because my dad didn't hug me enough is it because my mom like who knows maybe if he would have been president it would have been fine like it could be completely irrelevant but we just choose to give this thing that some percentage of the audience then says oh that's like me and maybe then I can be successful too and that's fine but I think the the boiling it down to the absolute Basics or not even Basics the absolute truths of it are that there's a stimulus and there's a response what happens in the Box inside of your head does not matter if you respond a certain way you have learned and if you continue to see the same stimulus and you don't respond the way you want to you have not learned so you need to learn I love how direct and simple that is see a red card get slapped see a red card duck yeah you learned or block right even better right you preemptively slapped and if I have to show the flash card to you 7 10 12 times the person I showed to once and then Ducks the second time is smarter more intelligent than the person has to show it to 10 times before they react in a different way than standing there and getting slapped dude I love that um I will I will say for all the people that uh because the the people that I have um maybe I glom onto because of my own hat here's me making up a reason that I've gone on to because of my own sort of a the journey that I've had to go on everything I've had to deal with is that I think where people fall down because you are right there is no in no uncertain terms if upon stimulus you do the right thing for goal attainment you will attain your goal right like that's just how it works uh but then the question becomes why do the vast fast majority of people never reach their goals and I think it's because they're not able to either because either will work they're not able to either stop caring about what the reason is or they never take the time to figure out the reason now given that I think most people struggle because they just don't have Clarity yeah I do think people are going to need to they might not need to understand why they feel that way but they're going to need the very thing that leaves them uncertain about why they feel that way is the thing that leaves them uncertain about what they want to do with their life or how to achieve what they want to do okay I really I love that okay so the first part of the statement was uh people aren't doing the thing and then it was because and then the second part of the statement I would posit that with the because I would put the reason they're not doing the thing that they want to be doing is because they've been rewarded for doing what they're currently doing in the past and so all they're doing is continuing to do they have learned works and so it's like if you are continually rewarded because like there's a reason that you do what you do right which is that you have been trained to do it Now train is a you know the environment can train you which is what most of us switch to over time you have an external stimuli that wants to pair a new Behavior with a stimulus right if you want to teach someone to duck right you share the red card and eventually they learn right but at a certain point once you do the red card and then eventually you pair the red card with a fist then all of a sudden uh the person gets into fighting right and then you don't need to pair that anymore because the environment will self-reinforce and reward the behavior of ducking and will punish if they don't get if they don't duck right and so if you just think about that as like a really simplistic microcosm of how we learn thousands of things like even even the concept of speech is a million reinforcement points from the time a baby is alive right so if you think about a baby as stimulus response so they're alive they make noise reward they're here right if attention infection approval right reward and then they make no noise and they make noise again reward make make noise again reward reward then once they learn to make noise consistently we then start rewarding noise that sounds like words so it's like like right and they're like whoa It's like that's We're Not Gonna reward that one and then all of a sudden they start approximating the first word and so all of it is is this continuous feedback loop of me doing something and it having an Extinction curve because nothing happens or me doing something and I get a reward and so that is the that is the micro and so you can apply that to everything that's happened so like when you when you start seeing the world in that way it becomes much simpler to navigate because you don't need to find the reason you just say like I do this because I've been rewarded in the past cool so I just need to reward myself in the present for this new behavior and like how can I pair this new Behavior with something good which is like as a total side note for me a little trick like when I go to the gym I always get a little Shake even though it's a little bit more expensive at the gym because it's like a little reward that happens immediately after I left and I look forward to that and so it's just like little things that you can do to reward yourself to to hijack that cycle that changes Behavior and so it's like we want to change our Behavior I think we have to define the terms of what behavior is to begin with um and how we Define learning uh because that's all it is you know learning is pairing a stimulus with a response and so if they want to learn things that's what they have to do all right if so many people fail so many people have a victim mentality what reward are they getting that reinforces that so it could be that they're because uh a reinforcer can be both a more of a positive or less of a negative right so if I remove a slap that's a reward in its own way or I add a positive and so they may be avoiding punishment in certain ways by staying in this place because in the past because everything's extrapolations from the past in terms of how we see Behavior because that's our pattern right like we look back at what like we use our history to make predictions about what's going to happen with when I when I try to turn this door knob to get into the room I turn it and I turn it because when I have turned doorknobs in the past it worked and the first time I encountered the door I was like what do I do now what I probably did is I looked at somebody else and when they turned it the door opened so I know when I see this thing now if I made that thing solid and it can't be turned I would like and then I would think what other types of doors are there and then you'd be like is there another handle in the store like and so you go to secondary and tertiary behaviors whereas the most likely one that's going to work is the first one you start with and so we have these behaviors that let's say laying on the couch and watching Netflix has been rewarded watching Netflix is a rewarding experience it's I mean like it's it's more positive and it avoids negative but then you get into short-term and long-term reward and Punishment right which is why it's harder which is why I think it's the meta skill which is on top of those things which is that I know that I can delay a short term for a long-term payoff um and I think that's where that's where the big leap has to happen because if you can train yourself to know that like I know that if I do one workout I'm not going to look different and I know if I do six workouts I'm still also probably not gonna look different right but if I do 600 workouts I probably will and as soon as you have that one first thing where you had to delay gratification you got a much bigger payoff you start to associate the behaviors in while you're doing it with reward and so the difference between experts and beginners is that experts find more ways to reward themselves while they work on whatever the thing is and so it's not that they are more disciplined which is the finally the full 360 on this is that experts are not more disciplined than you they've just found more ways to win when you're pushing yourself to reach Peak Performance nothing is more frustrating than hitting a plateau having low energy or the worst brain fog you can overcome those setbacks though with wild Health wild health is revolutionizing the health care industry with genetics-based Precision medicine premium memberships include over 15 super specialized testing options like a full body MRI or dexa scan and a full care team dedicated to optimizing your health and improving your well-being wild Health has clinically proven outcomes with members seeing a 69 reduction in inflammation and a 58 reduction in risk of heart disease wild Health just opened 10 spots in their premium program for impact Theory listeners visit wildhealth.com impact to apply for membership reach your Peak Performance with wild Health today so how do we effectively take control of the process of rewarding punishing ourselves to keep us on track towards our goals I think being cognizant of it at the absolute base layer you start to see the world through very different lens and you're like okay that was punishing huh like that was rewarding great I'll do more of that but then you start to think you're like why do I do that you really start thinking about you're like well because I it sometimes it's so funny like I'll have um because we you know we we invest in buying products and whatnot and so I had two different products that were in the same category because I liked the category that I was looking at and one of the products had a better result like it had a better better end outcome when the customer uses it and the market leader and this is who they were trying to disrupt um had a slightly inferior result um but it delivered the result almost instantly and the other one took like five minutes and this one was like five seconds and the other was objectively better like even like like science it had all the stats and everything like it was objectively better and they wanted me to invest in this company and um they're like we have a better product I was like no you better resolve you're a better product the reason these guys are still number one is because uh latency matters more than intensity when it comes to the reason that a little icon on your phone is because it's a media right and then it goes away right like you have this immediate feedback loop whereas um you I don't know if you've heard this okay so I'll sorry I love this stuff so if you're trying to train a dog right they uh there's this I wish I could I'll maybe send it off the show but like a graph that shows how you can train a dog to sit with like a treat and so if you tell the dog the command and then you wait and you immediately reward it it learns faster if you wait 30 seconds it learns you know it takes more tries to get it to learn after a minute the dog's untrainable a minute and so it doesn't know why it's being rewarded now the thing is it's not that you aren't training the dog because whenever you have some sort of reward you're training it you're just not training what you think you are so you have to look at what happened immediately before you gave the reward which happened a minute later right and so we think because it's like it's at I'm going to wait a minute and then give it the cookie but I'm not reinforcing the sitting I'm reinforcing the thing they did right before they got the cookie and so as a as a as a zoom back out here when we're thinking about like and the reason I brought up these two products was that the the the original product the one that was the the market leader was better because it gave even a smaller benefit but it gave it immediately and so people will probably it seems silly but when you really try and be honest with yourself like why do I why do I go to this gym instead of that gym because I have a bunch of gym memberships like why do I because I like to think about this I'm not surprised about that right I'm like why do I go to this place I'm like because the other place has better equipment and I'm like the person at the front always says hi when I walk in immediate reinforcement for walking in the door I was like I think that's what it is so I like it like when I come in they always say hi and I have like a two minute conversation and like I look forward to that I drive 10 minutes further for that I'm like how silly but when I think about it when I'm really honest with myself and so to go back to the person who's on the couch it's sometimes the rewards are minuscule and then when you name them they feel a little bit less powerful but it also means that you can say how can I make another minuscule reward in another direction that gets me moving towards my long-term goal and then I can kick start that cycle where I start to learn like a master does because Masters enjoy love the process it's like easy for a master to say because you're good at it easy for you to say right like when you're you know if I'm right like I write my 19th draft of the book I've now written a decent amount you know I mean like I've I've spent a long time writing and so I the act of writing itself is rewarding for me like you must work so hard which I do but it's not that I'm willpowering my way the whole way through not always of course there's times where it's like not the most fun but big picture the process is rewarding because I've gotten good enough that is rewarding and so um the more ways you measure the more ways you can win which is like one of our one of our little monikers and so it's like how many different ways can we measure so that we can make progress on these little things and have wins as quickly as possible in the direction you're trying to go and then start the loop okay so um to say that really succinctly to make sure I understand no no the exploration was amazing I just want to make sure that I understand it um I think we've covered the reward part so I'm going to do something measurable and see my growth and that starts a positive reinforcement Loop that's going to send me down the right path okay so that makes all the sense in the world uh proximity the rate at which you get the reward is really going to matter that's really interesting from a product perspective you're the first person I've ever heard talk about that super interesting but now how do I punish myself do I like I'm a big believer that you need to punish yourself but when I say that sentence out loud I know what people hear and it feels icky and weird but it's been incredibly powerful for me so do you believe in the power of self-punishment and if you do how far do we take it so um I will just uh just for sake of everyone I will just State this as my opinion and we'll just leave it at that so you have praise and you have punishment or you can have rewarding of punishment whatever you want to call it punishment is more effective to change behavior in the short term like if I hold a gun to somebody's head I can immediately change the behavior right reward is more powerful over the long term and so like if you look at an environment so we think we talk a lot about this that acquisitions.com because it's kind of part of our mission internally is to create a culture of reward non-punishment uh and the way that we think about this is if you have like let's say Goldman Sachs or McKinsey some of these very big organizations that attract some of the best and brightest and are renowned for having relatively terrible or punishing cultures right they work people to death and blah blah so what happens is if you if you put an animal in a cage and uh they can't escape then they will revert to the law of least effort so they will do as little as they can to not get punished and so then when you're in a punching environment you all you have to do to get them to do more is you just raise the bar for what they have to love least effort do to not get punished and so in an environment of high performers that gets everyone to raise the bar but then quickly burn out now that model works if you have an endless supply of bodies but if you are the person who is being burnt out then that works for two years or whatever Praise on the other hand or reward can unlock in my opinion discretionary effort so the effort beyond the law of least effort required to keep your job and not get punished and so the issue is that the people who are the most able are the ones who are able to work the least and still keep their jobs but they're also the ones who get the absolute most upside on if they work because they want to not because they have to and so that is kind of our our our thesis of how we try and build companies at acquisition.com and we're not perfect we you know believe me there are plenty of times when I want to choose someone set off but we really try I know my teams are nodding but like we really put serious effort into saying like so if let's say like I find out the dog shits on the on the carpet when I get home I hit it it doesn't learn all I'm doing is hitting a dog like if it was less than if it was within 60 seconds from the time that happened it's not going to learn and so like if you know that and then you hit the dog anyways what does that make you interesting right and so um now obviously if we're like punishing ourselves and whatnot um that might be somewhat different I'm talking about how we relate to others um but you can either avoid punishment or you can seek reward and I think both of them are powerful uh motivators avoiding punishment is powerful more powerful in the short term to change Behavior it's faster a reward is more powerful in the long term to keep Behavior going because eventually you uh like kind of like hedonic adaptation you get used to a punishment and then it no longer works so you have to have you have to increase the variety and intensity of punishments in order for it to continue to be effective do you punish yourself honestly not a ton I have super high standards but I don't know if I punish myself I don't know if I'm like Alex you're a piece of I don't not really because I you know Layla and I are kind of sitting on opposite sides like I'm like some people have like a base of anxiety that they like work through I don't come from that side I come from probably like a base of laziness like and just you know like and that's why I have all these things to get myself to do stuff um but punishment just like it's also just never been effective for me like when I get punished I I want to just figure out how to avoid punishment not do what they want me to do right like when you when you use punishment to like train kid you get them to sneak out more right um not like they just find other ways to get out of the house quietly they don't necessarily change their behavior but if you reward them for staying then they never want to leave that kind of idea the reason people leave when they're younger is because there's more reward outside of the house than inside the house and so if you want to fix in the long term make the reward for beings home more than leaving home it's interesting so uh this is probably one where defining the term would be very meaningful um I I personally use what I call self-punishment yeah now to me self-punishment is to force myself to acknowledge that I said I was going to do something that I did not do that's normally where this will come from interesting I would call that stating the facts interesting I would call that punishing so oh and this is very important so I understand why people always react so negatively when I say that you you are missing out on an incredibly powerful tool yeah if you don't punish yourself now just to acknowledge and you've said this as well we we are all speaking from this is what works with me yeah um so this is the experience that I've had the comment section exactly uh and there so getting out of bed in 10 minutes or less is I I struggle with it every day of my life it's it's hysterical to me that even now all these years later I still have to be like you said you'd get out I stay in bed for like 45 minutes almost I can't allow myself immediately well if I'm doing something in bed I suppose I should change it to working um then I have 10 minutes to be productive is probably the right way to think about it um and because there are times where there's something that I can do in bed like this morning when I could start researching you the second I wake up then then I would still call that a win but if I don't do the thing that I said I was going to do then I forced myself to to acknowledge to myself with no I don't let myself run yeah so I don't let myself be distracted I'm just like you said you were gonna do something you did not do this thing and therefore you should not feel good about the behaviors that you enacted in this moment okay and then I will often confess to my wife or my employees or my community so that I am holding myself accountable and now I'm sitting in something that I do not like the way that it feels I'm not letting myself run and so then I'm like I don't want to be back here yeah so next time I'm going to take a different set of behaviors that has been transformative for me interesting and that not using that for me would be to miss out on a huge motivational I love this and I want to draw similarities for the audience because and I think I think this is why I think this stuff's kind of interesting for anybody who's listening is like is there are different ways this is why like there there are only a few things you need to do to win and the way you do it is entirely up to you which is why I love boiling things down just like what are the few a few things that everything has in common everything else is preference but with what you just said I think I have like the first thing we do is we State the facts is that I said that I would wake up within and do something within 10 minutes observation that did not happen then comes the third step which is that you this is me putting words is that you label that as bad and then maybe label yourself as bad depending on you know that I don't do right yeah but for the for the audience just to be clear um okay I need to not say so one so if one wakes you know doesn't wake up in 10 minutes and then States the facts I did not do what I said I was going to do um then uh labels the the thing as not good and then says I am also not good then that becomes trouble now one degree before that is just labeling the behavior is not good or not ideal for the outcome that I want um but I'm not sure how much it matters to feel bad about it again with the behavior box of like stimulus response because once you feel bad about it right and then it's like well what what do we do to increase the likelihood that next time it increases now because we could feel amazing about it we can feel terrible about it we can feel neutral about it but all that will matter is what Behavior we change in order to increase the likelihood that we do what we want next time at least as as I see it and I found that I put for me a lot of energy into trying to understand things trying to label things as good or bad trying to label myself as good or bad as consequence um and the only part that mattered for me to actually get what I wanted was the last step which is what am I going to do about it and I can also just skip these I can just skip these other three steps and just go straight from I always said I was going to do this thing observation I did not do it what is the change in my behavior or my environment that I'm going to do next time to increase the likelihood that I do it and then even with the binary thing that we're talking about earlier with rules I'm actually more of like a weighing system of okay over the last 60 days I got up within the first 10 minutes 60 of the time okay next 60 days if I can do 70 of the time I am making progress and so rather like because most people will fall short of perfection and so I feel like it ends up setting up a an inevitability of failure if we Define it as binary just my own perspective so how do you then deal with people that are not hitting a standard whether it's you or somebody else I have found in business if you let people get away with low standards not only will it devastate their performance it will begin to drag down the company and and it really matters totally so um do you stick to only rewards do you call it out like what do you do yeah so we absolutely we State the facts and then we say what we're going to do about it and then if someone consistently cannot do because at some level there's always there's always a chunk down skill someone doesn't have right so if I say hey can you send an email to so-and-so we have assumption that they have a stack of skills before that I assume that they can read I assume they can write I assume they can use a computer I assume they have from an environmental perspective they have access to Internet they know how to use a word processor like they know how to open up an internet route like I know where this sounds silly but we make these assumptions but for some people they're missing one of those and so they have all this failure because they're just missing one link on that chain and so try to identify what is the skill deficit and then is it a skill that I'm willing to invest time into teaching somebody and so we want somebody who have as many base skills as possible that apply to many scenarios so like if two people go through the same training program right and one person gets the outcome the other person doesn't it's usually because the training program doesn't account for every single skill that is required to get the outcome there are certain assumptions that come in like if someone reads my book I assume that they can speak English I mean I'm saying as simple as that sounds right but there's a hundred other skills and the people who are successful faster just have more of those skills stacked up so that when they get the right information they can immediately use it and some people still need to go back and learn how to wake up on time and like have someone say no and not cry right like these are these are other skills and so um in the environment of work how do we address somebody who is not performing we State the facts we recommend a course of action that can help increase the likelihood that they do it again in the future and if that doesn't happen then we say like this is what will happen as a consequence neutral of you being good or bad or this situation be good or bad it's just these are the standards that we will accept and you are beneath those standards based on these facts that's it like you showed up to work late okay just to be clear you understand that our expectation is that you show up on time yes I understand great you also understand that that what you did was not to that expectation cool so let's do this do you have an alarm on your phone yes do you use it no do you know how to set an alarm on your phone yes great so why don't we do this from here on out let's hit two alarms five minutes apart at this time that'll give you ample time to get up clean your face whatever and then get on camera does that work yes and then we measure and if it doesn't happen again if it does then it's like why did that because then you get into the base skill being do I adhere to Authority like can I listen to instructions like those are skills and if someone nods their head and then doesn't do that then they don't have that skill and then the question is whether I'm am I willing to take the time to invest in teaching someone this skill when the opportunity cost of that time could be allocated to somebody else who might already have that skill or Suite of skills that's how we think about it so one of the things that is a recurring theme is the idea of extending the time to extinguish what if we're going to operationalize that what what do we do with people and um if I were going to personify the the length to extinguish I'll give a historical example and then I'll give a more modern so historically uh Winston Churchill dude I don't know if you've read much about him unbelievable uh what that guy was able to pull off and how long he was able to delay gratification yeah and then a more modern example would be a David Goggins yeah so um how do we operationalize it what do you take from those guys I think it's the the Master's thesis of those guys are Masters at whatever the thing is and so they find ways to reward themselves in the meantime and so we only think that they have Supreme Ultra discipline willpower because we are measuring what we can see as the outcome of running a race you know 26 miles or whatever it is but if they are rewarding themselves throughout the entire process then if anything the end of the race might be uh a removing of a reward and might be actually anticlimactic which is what happens with most athletes after they compete in the Olympics or they win the championship or lose the championship um the build up is where they have all the reinforcement and then when that thing actually happens then they have to get right back on the the horse of where they get their reward from which is the work to get there because they are good enough at it that they can win in more ways and so just the more you know about something the better you are at it the better you are at it the more you can win the more you can win the more you want to do it how much of that do you think is identity like when I look at somebody like um a Churchill or a Goggins it that feels to me like a game of who am I or who do I want to be one of my favorite Churchill quotes um is well so quotes failure is the ability to go from uh sorry success is the ability to go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm speaks directly to this but one thing that I got reading his biography is uh he said to his mother when he was really young that uh this is a paraphrase not exact quote but I yearn for a reputation for physical courage um more than anything I mean it was and and this is a guy that's for people that don't know a story that sent himself into war zones multiple times in his life when he absolutely did not need to do that including World War One when he was like he was basically the equivalent the British equivalent of a senator yeah now imagine you have an active senator who felt like he had let people down and so he said send me to the front lines and they're like whoa why would we do that like you do not need to go to the front lines even if you want to engage yeah with the war you certainly don't need to go to the front lines and he said nope I want to be literally where the bombs are falling in the dirt with the men um and that was somebody who had such a strong internal Compass of this is who I want to be or how men ought to be um same idea with Goggins right just felt like I'm a loser he's staring at himself in the mirror the accountability mirror doesn't like who he sees decides he's going to change or become a different person and I'm sure you've seen the clips of him screaming you don't know me you don't know who I am um that's an identity play so how do you see that is is extending the time to extinguish purely an an identity play or is there something else going on so I think I think the wording matters um but if you uh want to extend how long you continue to do something without seeing the result of you're doing uh you need to find a way to be rewarded in the meantime like that's that's what it is like that in my opinion and so whether we call it Identity or we call it a skill or we call it Behavior we call it character trait so saying like with the the many words that ultimately mean like what is the percentage likelihood that this Behavior occurs um that is really all I would look at and is it as simple as I I was today who I said I was like how do we make that I mean Not To Beat to Death the idea of operationalize but when I think about what I'm doing when I reward and punish myself is I am trying to feel the way I want to feel or not or make sure that I'm feeling discomfort so that I will move away from that behavior yeah so what is it or how do we leverage identity to feel the thing that we want to feel like is it just words in your head like how do you play that identity is really internal culture so if you think if you Define culture as a set of rules of behavior in a within an organization identity is just the rules of behavior within an individual and so I think to your point you have your rules of behavior that occur I would say that my rules of behavior even though I hate rules is the concept um when I do these things like when I see this this happens right I do have the these these behaviors that have been queued that I have learned um see now we have all these words that we've defined so now we can at least everybody can agree on what we're talking about which is why it means a lot to me um but yeah I just I think identity is just a big stack of Behavioral cues that we've said because people change over time and so it's really just like a mental construct of this is how I behave like what is an identity it is like and even if you want to say like I know this person what it really means is that I have a high predictive score on what this person will do or say as a result of whatever I do or say and so if that's the conversation that I'm having with someone it's like I know I'm really well oh he'll love that because I have a good predictive score that when this happens you will do this now somebody who's all over the place are super erratic right then or do they have a unformed Identity or do I just not know enough about them Maybe and so I it just that has just been my litmus test and maybe maybe it seems like oversimplification but um for me it has been incredibly fruitful to just because then for me it takes a lot of the the Superstition a lot of the magic a lot of the black box of feelings and emotions and and identity out and it's just Alex is a series of behaviors that's who I am that I that have been trained Into Me by my environment and that I have tried to learn myself and I will change in the future because if I get better then it means I can't be the same person I am today which means some of the things that I have learned now I will unlearn and learn new behaviors when I see a different stimulus or the same sorry when I see the same stimulus so interesting so um the way that I have always approached this is I I am trying to get people to change their frame of reference frame of reference speaking of things that need to be defined frame of reference to me are your beliefs and values okay and I didn't even think that's what you meant I thought I totally thought you meant something different so that's why yes exactly this is why you define things okay so um and and I will say all of this in what I just heard you say is that where I'm coming at things is from beliefs and values where you're coming at things is from behaviors and traits it's very interesting very interesting like I am going to think about this so much moving forward uh as to one is it is beliefs and values just particular to me and that is I try to help people make change in their life I'm wasting all my time because this is just the thing that resonates with me or is there something I'm getting to the thing that's underneath your behaviors and traits and that if people don't address this they'll never get to that or I'm just wasting my time yeah you were going to say something I think it's value so if we were to like when it's like I have these values a value is just a behavioral short code when this happens I do this someone who is loyal when he's out and his wife isn't there hot girl comes up and says hey want to get a drink value it means a set of behaviors I say no or I say I'm married or no thank you whatever and so values are skills because you can train them and interesting values are skills I would say the adherence to a value is a skill that you can train but if you have the wrong value that you adhere to you're going to be in trouble here's why I start with beliefs and values I think so much of the human animal is invisible to the person and that if they they'll never be able to control their behaviors if they don't control the emotions that drive the behaviors and I think emotions are an echo of your beliefs and values and I can change somebody's emotion like their cognitive um the way that they frame something cognitively will drive their biological response to that moment which is insane so the quote nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so the death of your mother is not good or bad totally thinking it's bad makes it bad now that is uh you and I think come at that from very different angles totally and so not a bad way I think it's great no no dude this is so intriguing one because all I care about is are you getting the outcome that you want yes or no and if you are amazing and so you're giving me new tools new ways to think about this um okay so just a quick breakdown of of frame of reference so my hypothesis is that everybody's life is entirely controlled by their frame of reference okay the frame of reference the best analogy would be to say that your frame of reference is a pair of glasses that you put on that distort the living out of the world that none of us have the um option of taking the glasses off taking the glasses off would be to exist outside of your biology nobody's going to be able to do that so you see the world in a hyper distorted way now all of us over a lifetime of reward punishment um oh God would you call it approval like there's all kinds of things approval yeah attention affection approval okay so all of us are getting that constantly from the time that we are born until now and we choose who to value that from and you've talked about your parents and all that like so anyway you can choose but you most people never become consciously aware of what's happening and so they're the Distortion of their lens happens slowly over time in ways that they simply recognize mistakenly as objective truth so they think they see the world as it is not through the Warped lenses of their frame of reference now once you realize that you can change the way the lenses warp the world now you can start to shape your lenses based on action outcome I did a thing and it had this outcome and so it all becomes about your ability to predict the outcome of your actions which is yeah and we will get into sort of the physics of making money but um to me that's all about the ability to predict like what tests to run and how to interpret the test and all that so It ultimately boils down to your frame of reference and if you don't get your frame of reference right the world will be so warped you will not be able to predict the outcome of your behaviors most people end up in the mistaken Loop of my emotions are the the correct which one needs to Define and they don't my emotions are the correct response to this stimulus even though it does not lead me towards my goals and they spend their whole life spiraling in emotion and that's why they're never able to get out of it and begin to polish the lens in a way that actually gives them um something useful and what you're saying is none of that matters all that matters is whether they do the thing that's going to yield the outcome or not I think it just I think it just saves a lot of time and a lot of because when we try to name these emotions like you know what am I feeling I'm kind of it's like this whole conversation of not this but like that self-conversation it's like what does that accomplish until you then decide to do something the real world like nothing matters and from a from an outcome perspective but I'll just share something with the audience because I have a my my first really big viral video was me just talking about like what how you scale companies and I first thing I talk about scaling the entrepreneur and I have four frames that I go through in the video and I used to believe that uh entrepreneurs get limited by skills what this is this is what I used to believe which is skills uh character traits and beliefs those are that's what I used to say I now believe that character traits are another way of saying when this happens they do this which is trainable which makes it a skill and then beliefs are when they are presented with this information they then make this decision which is yet again another thing that can be trained because if you can learn it and it's a skill between the just comes to as I see the world it just comes down to skills and just because it's harder to Define uh Charisma because it might be 20 things because we have a term that buckets 50 behaviors or whatever it is just because it's hard to describe doesn't make it not a skill and that's why I like the soft stuff in business like we probably agree that the Soft Stuff matters a ton in building a big company the culture right McKinsey did a big study on this Layla sites a lot more than I do because she's usually on the people side um but uh in a normal business two out of three strategies fail like new initiatives fail in businesses where they have the soft stuff down one out of three strategies fail so two out of three succeed so you get twice the percentage likelihood of success on big strategic initiatives if I guess why why is beyond is beyond me I that was just that was the yeah I don't get it about that yeah I don't get into because it's right this is that yeah Dr cash is my my closest friend like a brother he jokes about he he obsesses about why things work I just care that it works um and so um anyways to Circle back on this is that people consider like leadership to be like a Fufu or like communication skills it's like soft stuff right sales metric you know like we have all these metrics driven things versus this and it's just because it's harder to measure it doesn't make it less important and that was that was a big realization for me is that it was just because it was harder for me to measure but it doesn't make it less important and so these skills that we're talking about um we try to find ways to measure them by saying when I'm when somebody walks like I'll give you an example with our video team um we realize that we have much better direct camera work for our content if because we were like man we have this one guy on our team he's so good to film with and some of the other guys are just like not as good I'm not like as amped about it like why is that so we could control the things that we're going to walk into the into the video session with like okay am I did I sleep well did I you know all that stuff if that's controlled and I still change then it means there's something in the environment and so we then observed actually to be fair we asked the the Superstar to observe what are the things you're doing and so we noticed that while he's while he's filming he's like yeah he's like yes this is awesome and so he said write that down and then what else do you do it's like oh I I write down questions while you're talking while I'm so he had to be able to multitask so he had to Bob his head while we're talking and write down follow-up questions for what we were saying and so then all of a sudden it became this continuous flow of Consciousness with literally constant reinforcement while we were filming visually and so then we gave that sop to the other people on the team and all of a sudden filming with them was way better and so people would be like he's just got a great Vibe it just means that we don't know how to describe all the little behaviors that that person does and and say when I start talking nod your head real right and when when there's something that you don't understand write it down and ask me because I mean somebody else doesn't understand it too and it makes for great content oh right and so we had this big list and then now we operationalized what it's like or what what you what behaviors you have to do to become somebody who's good behind the camera which means it's a skill that can be learned like Charisma like patience like confidence like whatever and so um boiling it down that way has just demystified the world for me and just made it a lot easier to navigate because I don't have to spend 90 of my time trying to figure out why I'm doing whatever I'm doing all I care about is weather I do what I need to do to get the outcome and if I do the thing and I don't get the outcome that means there's another variable that I haven't controlled I don't understand and if you know in the words of BF Skinner um if many variables are present many variables must be studied so sometimes we want to oversimplify it but like there might be 10 cues in the environment that create a banger session but if we have nine is it better than the last one that had three probably and so then we just make progress in that way okay so this is your superpower this is the thing that dude I just look at you in awe this it's really really incredible what you do and I am so grateful to live on the timeline where the internet exists and someone like you with this insane ability comes out and just creates all this content um you know I am as obsessed with learning as you are and so um yeah it's just incredible and to never stop learning is is the great gift of being a human Okay so the thing that I think that you're just unreasonably good at is taking a very complex problem that maybe I'm spending too much time in the why is this happening and you're just skipping past that and you're going okay I'm going to break it down into these do this when this happens do this when that happens to that um I'm gonna try to get to the physics of business through a weird question but keep in mind for anybody watching this that doesn't know my story I I've been in the world of Entrepreneurship for over 20 years I've had some pretty incredible success so this is uh this is a well-educated question from I've been in this for a long time so it's gonna seem like a weird angle to attack it this is for the audience more than you um hang with me because if we really can dissect this I think it will help people understand the magic thing that you do you rewrote your book completely four times something happened when you read it the first time the first time that you realize I have to start over completely yeah that thing whatever that was I promise you have the chills just thinking about it that is the thing that makes you go to business and so I need to understand what abstract use the book as an example but I want people to understand this is an abstracted version of something very important which is you were able you did a thing yeah I'm guessing you had to do the thing in order to find the part that wasn't right but you were able to then identify that part reconceptualize get more intelligent as you did it again it's what I call the physics of progress but like what your ability to learn and break into constituent Parts is is the thing certainly I want to learn from so when you re-read what you first wrote what clicked do you remember well I got feedback so I sent the first which was really the first draft I ended up sending to people was v9 um had you Rewritten it all over how many times have you read that so that was like I had gone through I mean I start back at the top I re-edit everything again start back the time without feedback correct that's the one I want to know about okay the first time you read through the book I have to reconceive of the whole approach yeah what happened in that moment uh it wasn't clear or wasn't simple enough that's that's it like and um I like to use this example because it it might make sense for a lot of the audience if I were to say edit a six assuming you know how to edit videos just for the simplicity if I said go edit this video someone might edit it and I said get you know edit this video in 30 minutes and they edit this short clip and they give it back to me and I say okay if I give you two hours what else would you do and they're like oh I might do this I might do this I might do this I'm like okay go do that and come back then come back and I'm like okay if I gave you two weeks for this 30 second clip what else would you do like I might reimagine the entire thing and actually lay it out in this way it would take way more time but like I think it would actually still be better it's like cool do that and then come back and then when there's no more loose where I'm like what else could you do to make this better at that point to me the work is done I have exhausted my level of skill and understanding like I can't make the leads book better at current now I'll bet you in a year I'll think of some things that I could have used to make it better but at present moment there's nothing that I can think that I would either cut or add in or break down or add a visual for uh or lower the reading level on uh to make sure that everyone would understand it and so whenever I have those like it's like a hangnail you know what I mean it's like this little Splinter where I'm like this could be better does it start with a feeling or with a fact um it's a good question uh I don't know I think I read something and I think that wasn't as clear as it was in my it's not as clear reading it as it is in my head so what's the discrepancy like this term is confusing or this phrase doesn't make sense or I need to break this into a paragraph or whatever it is um and honestly it's just doing that like it took me it's funny I had this this cover letter that I was going to include in every book and it was one page and I think I put uh 25 hours into the one page um and it's it's interesting because people hear that and they're like that's crazy I'm like to me 25 hours doesn't count as one unit of work yet um thinking hundreds dude you got it yeah 100 um and so I ended up actually not using the cover letter which is even more ironic um but when my team saw how many iterations went through it I was like every single person will read this part now chapter you know the last chapter in the book maybe it's 20 or maybe it's 13 or whatever it is we'll get to the last chapter but the first page every single person who reads the entire book will read that page every person who reads half the book read that page every person reads only the first chapter read that page and so it's like if anything I should put more time into that but I approached just about every page of the book that way it was just that my team was able to see it on one page publicly and so that's we we wrote my editor not Dr Kashi um wrote the book because we wanted it to be around 100 years and so that was the frame was like it has to be it has to work now and the easiest way to know if it's gonna work in 100 years is does it work 100 years ago could someone 100 years ago read this book and it still helped them advertise better because someone read this book 100 years ago and help them make an offer that more people say yes to if the answer is yes then we pass that limits test and that's actually really hard it's a very simple sentence to say very hard to do especially when you're talking about media content platforms like all of these different things um and so I think it's having an exceptionally High bar for what you what you want to do and having been rewarded in the past like if this had been my first book it wouldn't have been as good but offers was my first book and I wrote offers in one fifth at the time as it took me to write leads because you didn't hold yourself to as high of a standard because you knew what better looked like I'd never been rewarded for writing a book before and so once I was rewarded the amount of time I'm willing to put towards something to get rewarded again extends so it's like intermittent reinforcement from a Behavior Support like that's how you get addicted to the slot machine whatever it's like you reward the first time immediately the next time reward in 30 seconds the next time humans have a have a longer attribution than dogs do just for context um but you can continue to extend reinforcement until eventually you can eliminate it in the behavioral processed which is kind of cool which is very cool yeah okay I don't know what you're apologizing for okay so we're at the beginning of uh what we'll hopefully be a magically delicious breakdown of how Alex ramosi uh hermosiah's things yeah okay so what I took away from that um is that step one is going to be start with the goal so when I think about business um you need to understand what your goal is because you're and this this goes for life as well boys and girls if you do not have your North Star if you don't know what is guiding everything then you're going to be adrift and so when you think about you and okay this is definitely me putting my language on you here's how I experienced that first moment I read something and something feels off so for me it always starts with a feeling yeah but I know that feeling translates into a fact and so I'm going to try to find the fact yeah and so you were saying this isn't as clear as it could be and so now you have this North Star I'm trying to write a book that's going to be around in 100 years again I'm I'm maybe connecting dots that don't line up and so you'll correct me anywhere go wrong we've got the idea of the the guy with the one goat who's sleeping with this under his pillow which dude you cannot imagine how much a that makes me like you even more than I already did uh and B that's so important for people to have like a person that they're thinking about that will make all the fight worth it uh okay so be around in 100 years the guy with the goat needs to really understand this I read it and because I know what my goal is I have a feeling a trained feeling that something is off that's my again this is me I understand you're different um this is my feeling is my subconscious speaking to me it's already picked up on the problem I can feel it and I'm going to translate that into something what I really need people to understand is you're going to take all of Alex's advice and you're still going to fail and the reason you're going to fail is because you're not yet good at the thing that you're good at which is um finding the fact and saying oh this is the very thing that's broken now as you have said so I'll just Channel you for a second you're gonna suck at this for a while but don't worry just keep doing it and you will get better at identifying the fact okay given how much you're nodding gonna assume so far I'm on the right track here so how do you yeah exactly right uh how do you identify that fact so what is is it just repetition you've just done it a thousand times so you can either have uh basically it's got contingency-based reinforcement which is the environment corrects you right you put the thing on the market no one buys it no one watches it whatever it is right um the other is that you get feedback from somebody who has more knowledge than you and so you can either have a person give you direct feedback on you know listens to your sales call and says hey you know try this next time um and ideally that's where the feedback loop is like if if I have a one-on-one with somebody and I give them that feedback a week later it's much more powerful to be there an hour after the call like the moment the Call's over and even more powerful if you're sitting there with them and you can be like and then you get the feedback loops way faster because they'll remember it because they'll be in the moment of trying to learn like so if we're trying to teach sales and I'm gonna I'm gonna come back but if we're trying to tcls because we've got three brick and mortar chains in our portfolio um teaching Frontline sales like very transactional like front desk walks in go here whatever if you train them off-site which is what most companies do then they will remember it better off site than on-site so you want to train them in the environment that they have to do the behavior because they'll have environmental cues while they're learning just like if you if you study for a test if you can study in the actual chair that you're going to take the test in you'll remember more of your answers what oh for sure what yeah if you ever have you ever been on the phone and like had some conversation and then you walked the same path a week later yeah and then as you see a tree you're like oh yeah I was thinking about because it's because you learn and you have geography that's interesting actually now that you say that it makes a lot of sense I wonder if it's different for guys I don't want to derail it yeah okay guys have spatial memory yeah uh interesting all right step one we'll start with the goal we went through that identify the fact yeah okay how do we get that contingency versus uh versus individual so either either your environment uh gives you that feedback because it didn't work or somebody who knows more and has done it before multiple times can recognize the pattern for you so when you uh say like find the fact I would have just the only thing I would have maybe tweaked on the earlier uh preface was uh the feeling is because of powder recognition I know this isn't right because it hasn't been right it looks like something that has been right again in the past and we always have something called successive approximation so like success of successive approximation right like uh girl's name Tiffany are crazy right and I mean uh also crazy but looks different but I'm like wait a second I know Tiffany's you're all crazy right like so you have a successful product like you learn it's a silly example but um that is like that's how we can generalize learning and um the bigger the the more depth you have in terms of the principles around any skill the more you can generalize learnings from one thing to another okay that makes a lot of sense pattern recognition huge uh getting people to help you short circuit that huge okay so um getting into the reinforcement yeah what I want to understand is um how uh I'm gonna ask it and then we'll see if I think I know the answer but um the real thing you're trying to figure out when you're doing the testing is what would need to change in order for this to work yeah um the reason I say it like that is because the language I would have naturally used is why didn't this work yeah but you don't care about why you just want to know what would I have to change in order to get this to work how do you we'd use experts if they're available sure uh but if we're just testing let's say we have to Brute Force this how do you go through that you uh I've heard you say the number of tests that I thought were going to crush and they just absolutely tank so you you thought you had it and all you get is an answer says no yeah so all you have is no yeah how do you turn that no into a new action item yeah so um I think it's breaking down didn't work from binary to a Continuum so it's not it didn't work it's it didn't work well enough and so that's a huge one when it comes to like running ads making cold call whatever it is to get customers whatever you want to do it's not yes or no it's how well right and that just says it's an easier frame and so then you have to go at least from my perspective you break it down to First principles of okay what has to happen for someone to buy it's like well so that's just a whole lump of psychology right there behaviors they have to see it they don't see it or hear it they will not buy it because they won't know you exist okay that so and that luckily like within the marketing world because that's what the book is about is measurable like did the impression get displayed did the email get delivered that is you can see that on any any platform the next one is like did they engage with it so that's a behavior they engaged which would be they opened the email or they open the email and click the link inside of my email they click the ad to then get to you know the landing page whatever it is so they engaged to a degree um the next you know the next thing is that they're going to like in order for me to contact them in the future then I need to have some way to contact them so they have to give that to me um if I don't already have like an outbound thing you'd already have their contact information you want to reply if you're running an ad then they need to give you the account information so that you can reach out to them um but it's really breaking down forget what they think forget what they feel like I I wholeheartedly reject the like there are seven stages of awareness it's like how the do you know like well they have to have a desire and then it's like how many people have bought things without desire tons all we know is that when they see this thing they take their wallet out and they purchase period right and the same thing with like a sales script like I truly believe that if you knew every single variable that it took for somebody to buy you get 100 of people to buy now the problem is that we don't have every variable every time for every person and so we do the best approximation we can to hit as many of those piano keys to get them to purchase right and so that is how I that's how I approach all of them whether it's you know what do I figure out what to sell which is the offers book uh who do I sell it to which is the leads book um and then you know future books will answer One Singular question and the leads book was fundamental like and the reason it's called leads instead of advertising is because I test advertising versus leads and leads beat advertising even though the book is fundamentally about advertising into Divine advertising it's the process of making known and so did I make it known great I advertised like she advertised that she was with that guy all last night you're like oh she let it be known right she made people aware and so there's only four ways you can do that right you can do one-on-one you can do one to many like I can tell you one-on-one in an environment where no one else can see me or I can put it on a bulletin board worked a thousand years ago works today uh and then I can do that in public or I can do that in private so you've got sorry I just repeat the same uh you can do that to people who know you and people who don't know you so you've got one to one to people who know you which is warm reach outs you've got one to one to people who don't know you which is called reach outs you've got uh one to many to people who know you which is making content to your audience and then you've got one one to many to people who don't know you which is paid ads you rent other people's audiences and you display your thing you let them know about your stuff and so break it down that way like there's no other way that someone will buy unless they find out about you period fight me know what like no one can fight that and that's basically what the process of writing these books comes down to is I want to make a series of statements that are that are Beyond reproach so that no one can argue with them like you you cannot get someone to buy unless they have given you a way to contact them so like you walk down that that logic tree and then you figure out which of these didn't happen so I ran an ad and I didn't make money well there's like a hundred things that have to happen between then between them seeing it and them giving you money so we just look at and we start at the front because if you don't get to the third step there's no point in trying to fix the third step because you haven't gotten people to even click and so the first thing you know we'll talk about is like how do we create a hook how do we create a headline that people that will capture someone's attention that's it and then from there it's like if you master that part or get good enough at that part then you move to the second part and I this has worked very well for me because then it demystifies the concept of success and I stopped judging myself as being a good or bad it's just like How likely is the thing that I did here get them to move to the next step okay How likely is it if I share this thing they get to move to the next step and you just keep going until eventually you're like oh wait I made money and then you have all the the pieces together and then you do as many times you can all right just gonna I actually first let me address something so uh to say things that are Beyond reproach that's what you said I want to make sure that I'm saying things that are Beyond reproach uh to me it's like another way of saying it's Gotta all be first principles 100 cool makes sense so you're trying to boil things down to this is true does not matter what people say think believe ah it just is true okay that I think is critically important for anybody that wants to scale a business um you believe that we live in a deterministic universe okay I actually don't even know what that means okay so cause and effect pure and simple billiard balls bouncing around a table that behaviors are the the cause of a behavior is knowable uh uh I wouldn't I'll say there is a cause of the behavior I don't know if we can know it necessarily we can try and control as many of the environmental factors but I don't know if we can say this is why well I'm trying to avoid this okay yeah yeah and get to uh if if the cause and effect God is that a pure why okay for for Alex I'm going to disagree with you violently based on your own principles cool uh that none of what you do would work if it couldn't be known what you needed to do to elicit a given response otherwise everything would be entirely random and so what I think you know and what makes you so good at overcoming sales objections is that you know if I can get them oh God I don't know how you would explain it the difference between knowing why and knowing that so this is cool I just care about that and so this conversation I know that if I say these 12 questions when this person walks in the door the likelihood that they will buy is 38 percent do I know why they buy no I know that if I do these things this will happen perfect deterministic okay so that that helps me to understand how you go about doing this so it seems to me what you are doing is you were trying to map behavioral cause and effect which is why at the beginning of the episode you even said like I'm really into behavioral a personal Obsession of mine because I also believe that we live in a deterministic universe which calls into question free will we're going to set that aside for now yeah uh and so it totally does do you think that Free Will exists less and less by the day yeah I I think eventually we all get to the point where it's like it can't yeah then you get into very interesting questions about morality yes right which we won't get into correct at least not now maybe at the at the end but it's okay if you kill somebody if it's temporary insanity but if it was premeditated it's bad but to what so where do we draw the line of okay that means that there was environmental conditions that made this person act in this way that they wouldn't otherwise do but it's like were there not environmental conditions that created the person that that train these behaviors that then created the murder yeah correct I'll just but now as as marketers if if we can understand right right if we can understand what triggers behaviors now now the you can truly predict and execute because ultimately that's what this game is and the feedback loop that I think people either know about you or Intuit about you is that you're really good at this process I did a thing it did not yield the results that I wanted and I was very shrewd about the next thing that I tried and getting people shrewd about because there's going to be 10 is really ten thousand there's going to be a lot of things you could do when the first thing comes back and you only got 38 of what you were looking for and you want to get as close to 100 as you can so being able to do the next most logical thing logic as defined as I have a goal and this is the thing most likely to get me closest to it the ability to do that rapidly I will I don't know if you'll agree with this but I'll add bolt-on to your definition of intelligence okay that if your um you said the rate at which you change your behavior is is the definition of intelligence I will say the the rate at which you can identify the the most meaningful next step or the most likely to be successful next step is also uh intelligence not that that really matters but this is the game people are playing and this chunks up what does that mean so uh the re so learning is defined by similar condition new Behavior right and so if I have a fast rate of learning means that I have a new behavior that I do in that condition the only way I can have that new behaviors have some sort of knowledge so I think it chunks up to the same got it got it got it okay I see what you're saying um right so if these two are the same idea of manifesting in slightly different ways as you come back down that I think is what people are learning from you and why you're so effective um so the the question becomes do you have a methodology for identifying the next most useful test to run or is it true this is all just going to come back to the same answer experts and repetition it is and then I did try to create an operationalized version of that from a funnel perspective because I realize that some people don't have the money or whatever to test more times they need to you know succeed faster and so I operate off the theory of constraints meaning that every system is constrained in some way and then if you simply identify what the constraint is and deconstrain it it will grow until it's next natural constraint can you give me a concrete example um let's say you uh you've got a a Shopify store that sells uh coffee mugs uh and you spend a thousand dollars a month and you make three thousand dollars back uh on on the mugs so the constraint of the system at some point will either be I run out of mugs that could be the constraint uh it could be that I just need to spend more money because that might be the constraint today and then I spend enough that I run out of mugs or I spend enough that my cost per impression exceeds my profit because I go to colder and colder audiences so then the constraint there might be like I need to build a brand or I need to get trusted sources to increase the likelihood that increase the awareness let more people know about my stuff so that when they do see my ad they're more likely to make the purchase and so it's really being able to accurately identify what the constraint is and so for me uh when I walk this through the book I said usually uh the constraint that I will focus on in a funnel uh is usually the one that has the largest incremental has the largest throughput difference with the smallest incremental change and so it's like if I have uh you know 50 of people who are scheduling uh 30 of people who are show or let's say 25 people are showing and then you know 30 of people are closing it's like okay if I'm looking at these things which one am I going to attack well I'll probably attack the 25 show rate because if I get a 10 or 25 increase just for Math's sake uh I would double the throughput if I increase my schedule rate from 50 to 75 which is a 25 increase from an absolute perspective um I would only have a relative difference of 50 so I would make I would get more bang for my buck by focusing on the constraint which is the one that the smallest incremental Improvement increases the throughput the most and that you can use math to find out yeah this is um this is business for people listening so my obsession is helping people understand how to solve novel problems not problems you've never heard of before problems no one has ever heard of before and this is where you have to get down to First principles thinking anything that can be turned into math should be uh something that we talk a lot about here oh cool yeah so uh because then you're pulling it out of the realm of emotions I know I've been talking a lot about emotions but um I'm only trying to identify that as a as a predictive mechanism for the next thing which may be just where you and I um don't see the world the same so for me to understand what the next smartest thing is you think you think uh behavioral Behavior what's the behavior I need to do that may be more useful and I will really be thinking about this after this discussion the way that I've always thought about it is if I can understand the psychology in that moment I'll be able to predict the behavior right um so maybe wasted time or maybe necessarily Maybe you intuitive I don't know uh time will tell them that but um it's it's very very interesting okay so people are um they need a rubric by which they figure out what the next thing that they need to test is you've just offered one which is to understand the limiting factor when you understand the limiting factor then you're able to think mathematically and remove said limiting factor or at least know where to approach that problem I think that's incredibly helpful um as so when you're explaining all this I your business model at acquisition.com is a pure understanding of even though you're able to even though you're willing to give all of your secrets away there's still going to be a gap in execution sure why why are you better at this than most people um I've done it more times that's it yeah really believe that yeah I've done it a lot of times um I think that's a big part of it and then I think that there are elements that we have that are kind of competitive modes which we purposefully um set up like we are building this brand so that we can attract the best talent so like if you have let's say a chain of nail salons right which is a company I'm looking at investing in right now so if you're listening to this you're great love your company um and and so you have a chain of nail salons and you will probably struggle to get a plus talent to go to that I will not struggle to get a plus talent to place for you because they will want to work in an acquisition.com company because they know there's a huge backing behind it they know that we're going to be shooting big we're going to try and do big stuff and they might think the founder might be a first-time founder of getting to business of that size but we are not and so they have a higher likelihood they have a higher confidence that we will help the business grow to a much higher degree meaning that their career can grow they have more opportunities it'll build their resume all that kind of stuff and so from a competitive mode perspective we're able to get better people and if we get better people we build better companies and then that becomes a flywheel because the more companies we take on the more we grow the more success stories we have the more Talent wants to come and it just it just continues to feed itself and that's something that continues to compound in time and that's purposely built as a long-term competitive advantage okay talk to me about leverage I think that's an important part of this puzzle so there's a couple moments in your story around leverage um one is is the guy that told you hey you shouldn't be in the gym business you should be teaching people how to do this and then the other moment at least for me on the outside um was when you realized I'm not going to help these guys launch their businesses so I'm gonna sell them the course that I put together um what's the what is leverage why does it matter and how do people get some okay so first off just for the just for the audience um it was much closer to a franchise than a course uh so it was it was a licensing model so we had it was more it was closer to licensing plus Services than it was of course just because it would just do it we don't even sell courses so like I think that that's because there's a lot of people in that space that follow my stuff and so they make that assumption um which is fine and I only set the record straight for for clarities um beyond that um leverage as we Define it is the difference between what you put in and what you get out and so if I uh and it's volume times leverage equals output so it's how many times you do something times how much you get for each time you do it equals output so if I do a hundred sales calls and I have no skill then I will get fewer scale fewer sales than somebody who does the same 100 sales calls and has much higher skill so skills create leverage you get more for what you put in at a simple at a at a basic level but it works with anything so if you're trying to invest it's like if I can invest a smaller amount of money and get a bigger return then I have more leverage right the reason debt is considered Leverage is because you can put 20 of the cash in and get eighty percent of the loan you buy a building five times bigger than you normally could so you get more for what you put in um and so there are degrees of Leverage and this is wholeheartedly taken from Naval and I'll probably have to think more about it because I haven't written the book on Leverage yet so I'm borrowing um but I I remembered as the four C's he has different words for it but you've got collaboration Capital code and content those are the four C's of Leverage um like we make this video right now we make this podcast and we put x amount of effort in but we get unlimited upside on it many millions of people can see it or one person can see it but we get more for what we put in the better and better we get at this uh code you can write you can write an app one time and then unlimited amount of people can use the code or use the app uh collaboration is I say okay I will now teach 20 guys to sell and I will get 10 times the output that I had if I were selling and so I might not take any sales calls but make more sales than anybody else does because I have more leverage and so a big you know through line of the leads book is there's the core four which is the first four things that I expect to do one-on-one one-to-many uh trainers and friends or people know you people who don't and then the other four to the four lead Getters people who let other people know on your behalf which by their very nature have more leverage because you don't have to do it so if you can get your customers to tell other customers about your stuff using the core4 because they also have to use that like a customer can only tell a customer by telling somebody throughout warm Outreach posting content about it writing an ad unlikely and doing cold Outreach also unlikely but they could do one of those four things and that's complete that completes the advertising cycle so you do something to get a lead getter who then does the core 4 and around and around you go so I could also make ads to get affiliates who then run ads to get customers for me but if I uh go and let's say I spend all my time and I get 10 sales a month of customers right and let's say each customer is worth a thousand dollars to me great I'm in a cap at ten thousand dollars a month if I use the same effort of marketing and sales and I sell 10 Affiliates so still still same number of conversations same number of humans but I sell 10 Affiliates per month and then those Affiliates each month after that get me one customer each well then the first month I'll get ten thousand dollars because each one of those guys got me a customer but then I'm still going to work and get another 10 Affiliates next month so then next month I'm going to have last month 10 plus this month's 10 so now I'll have 20 new customers and I do it again I have 30 new customers and so I'm using the same amount of work to get more customers than I divide I directly went through it and so that is that is a basic example of how leverage Works uh within the context of advertising to get customers in a business so what is the what is the way that you think about constructing a a business or the way that you're going to structure something so when I first asked that question about leverage you you said something really interesting which was hey I just want to point out to everybody that that was a licensing model yeah it meant something to you to make a distinction there which I have a feeling there's there's a little bit of hormuzy sauce in there that we would all benefit from understanding what what drove that decision why does that matter to you you mean saying that structuring the business to be so um this is exactly what went through my head when you said that was oh like he actually had a more keen moment of understanding than has come across at least I mean I've heard you tell that story multiple times um and I've heard you say oh it was a licensing thing but it never I don't know it never landed for me but this time I realized it really meant something to you so there was a keen insight there what what was the Keen Insight why why do it as a licensed model instead of just saying oh this is of course go use it if we added assistance and services where we would maybe run the ads for them and we would train their sales teams which we do and we would give them the ads to run for their local area and we would help them build the landing pages to attract customers and we would give them the white label you know meal plans grocery list for food preparation you know instructions for their clients if we do all of those things then we would increase the likelihood that they would succeed and make more money and I can charge based on the a fraction of the value that I can produce for the majority of my customers and so if the average so right now gym launch until a company still continues to grow the average gym Lord which is what we call the community Jim Lord Lord yeah lording um the average gym Lord uh adds two hundred thousand dollars shoot I have to know the metric a lot yeah ads this is it there we go uh adds two hundred thousand dollars a year um to their business and a hundred thousand that's profit there there that's what the math is so the average gym Lord adds a hundred thousand dollars in your profit I think a little bit was like 118 whatever and we can charge a percentage of the increased net profit that we are help we were able to help them generate on average and now we have to usually charge a significant uh discount on that because half the people are going to be below the average so for the people who are for for half them it's an even crazier deal you know they they pay for the licensed model they don't have to spend money to test ads we would say we already spent 50 Grand in 20 markets these are the winning ads this month and they could just run them through the system and then just collect the money on the other side and so they get the speed and they don't have to have they don't have to taste the test you know the the failed ad test because we would incur that cost but we were able to distribute that cost at scale so no individual gym owner could spend fifty thousand dollars to test ads in all these different markets we could and then give it to a thousand gyms and so and again from a media perspective uh leverage we could do that one time and a thousand gyms can do it at no incremental cost to us and so it is a very profitable business it still is a very profitable business all right when you had that moment and I'm sure people know this part of your story you had the moment where you're desperate you've lost everything twice you're scrambling to make money and you tell the guy I'm just going to give him a number that's high so that he doesn't bother me with it uh six grand he's like yes had you already thought of it as a license model or you do those first like whatever 150 Grand that you made uh with the seven people or something I forget the exact details of the story it was like seven people that you'd promise to do their gym and instead you sell them this model yeah had you already thought of it in that moment as a licensed play I had um I just I think honestly a lot of a lot of the the words around like what we did came from outside sources because people saw how quickly we grew and we were in a world that was direct response marketing and so many people in that world sell courses so they use the words that they know how to describe something um but it was much closer and arguably like significantly more support than what a franchise does for a franchisee and that's how we structured I wanted to be I want to deprive more service make them more money for a lower fee than a franchise would and potentially this is smarter and um I'm really my goal in this part of the interview is to help people map the models that you have running in your head that allow you to do the things that you do um because even from my perspective it's very unique it's very rare you just have a real ability to break things down to what I'll call the essence of the thing the anybody listening I will tell you right now the biggest mistake you're gonna make is what I'll call a category error people fail to understand what the true essence of the thing is which I am as guilty of as anybody so I don't put myself outside of this but have spent a lot of time trying to understand my own failings and shortcomings so as I'm hearing you tell the story I'm thinking okay one to identify the license thing is very shrewd and so trying to map how you conceptualize a thing feels tied to me to the the same idea of understanding that an individual gym cannot afford to do the market testing thing that you can afford to do and therefore if you do it you now have a moat you have leverage you have a service that you can sell that is understanding the true nature of the Beast yeah do you ever stop and model the the nature of this thing is and then you break into constituent Parts yeah what does that process look like and is it Universal or is it nail salon nature of uh gym nature of yeah um I I boil it down to something probably hilariously simple which is number of potential units sold times gross profit but that that's and then and then the you know the tertiary piece is what up front or Capital Investments required to be that would enable that right like if I had if I had to go buy a machine that could manufacture widgets that have you know phenomenal margins because the value that people get from it is you know ten dollars and I can make them for 10 cents then that's a you know great business but if I can only sell it to you know one town in Alaska because it's a really unique fishing tool that only works in their environment uh there's elements of that that would make it an attractive business but there's almost that won't so it's like it'd probably be a very small very profitable business that could not scale um nothing wrong with that there's definitely huge place in the economy for things like that but when I'm looking at opportunities that's what I would that is the simplest way of looking at it for me is number of potential units sold uh gross profit per unit and then what I'll call competitive Dynamics as the as the third part which is like if you look at you know cell phones it's like what does it cost them to add another cell phone to this massive Network probably not a lot is it really sticky yes do people stay and pay for a long time yes okay so there's probably a lot of gross profit to be made there and how many people need you know cell phone service a lot right it's like okay so that might be really attractive but the competitive Dynamics is that I would have to have I don't know a billion dollars or I'd have to partner with somebody that would allowed me to White Label so this is when you get into the competitive dynamics of like okay well is there is there value in creating a brand and wrapping on top of an existing solution and say hey I might be better at marketing a sales than you and you already have the infrastructure to deliver cell phone services to people Nationwide or maybe just in this region um and I will do what I'm good at and you deliver on the back end we structure some sort of deal where you know the more volume I get the more of the economics I get to you know participate in so those are kind of the the big three variables that I look at if I'm just trying to analyze a business uh in terms of opportunity and uh and the big piece that I think a lot of folks will miss out on is when I say uh gross profit um I'm talking lifetime gross profit and so that's where like I have less care about recurring versus not recurring um you know if from uh and this gets into the push and pull of selling a business or not selling a business but you know if uh if a company has something that's super recurring let's say it's a service like accounting or bookkeeping let's say there's really high you know gross profits on that because we've automated a ton and we've got some offshore workers doing you know the remainder of it we have really amazing margins and it's really sticky um that could be a super high gross profit business but at the same time if you're Elon Musk and you sell everyone a Tesla and even if everyone buys one Tesla that might be still more gross profit than you know the bookkeeping services just as a completely contrasting example and so I just look at what is the lifetime gross profit and some of that might be better structured for recurring and some of it might be better structured for a one-time transaction and then I know I'm going into like stuff that will probably bore the audience but if you're looking at the business as a product then it then it also becomes you have two customers you have the customer that you're selling a product to and then you have the customer that you're going to sell a company to and most customers who are investors who are buying companies feel better buying something that is recurring in nature uh because then they feel that the likelihood that it will continue to make money in the future is higher even if the Tam's huge all that stuff they still feel they sleep better on it until you get a premium for the company and so that's that's kind of big picture how we think through what companies we want to invest in uh or at least the opportunities that we could look at and then from a personal investing perspective is how much value can we add to that specifically like I probably wouldn't take on a wireless cell phone company likely but if there's a you know a brick and mortar chain of services that's like Med spas or beauty or you know health and fitness like that's my wheelhouse like we know how to crush those and so it decreases my risk because I know that even From value-ad perspective if I can 5x the company because I know how to how to build those marketing and sales processes at scale at the unit level then the likelihood that I don't get a tremendous return is really low okay there's two things um there one sorry that's soliloquist no no this is this is amazing and I hope people are taking this as it's intended so in fact let me uh let me give people a frame of reference this is the way that you should be thinking about what we're talking about right now which is all of these things abstract so that you can think through novel problems so big data sets with a few filters so you can make quick decisions on massive amounts of data what do you mean by that in terms of what we're talking about right now so if I if I so if I so I get every day on my phone I'll have a list of all the companies that have applied at acquisition.com and they'll be ranked in terms of like this one looks among most interesting these ones are less interesting and here's why we didn't think they were interesting for my team and so I will basically go pass pass pass pass second call and ask these things and then they'll go and do that for me to be able to quickly make the decision because otherwise I would I would be inundated with the amount of data that I have to take in I have to have filters that are faster just LTV to CAC ratio like I feel like you can boil down most businesses to what does it cost you to get a customer what do you make from that customer over the lifetime period that's it now Tam is you know how many of those customers can you sell short but like if I just had if I could only look at one metric in a business that's what I would look at okay so mostly entrepreneurs that are listening to this or people that want to be an entrepreneur no I think they'll get that but they're that's not where they're going to be at in their Journey that's certainly a more advanced thing so the part that I want to bring you back to is they're gonna they're they're gonna be thinking through how do I start a business sure what business do I start how do I identify the opportunity and so there's a couple things that you were just going through that I think are really relevant one of them is how you identify the business model so um looking at a total addressable Market uh lifetime value of the customer versus what it costs you to get them all 100 they will have to figure that out or they're gonna end up doing something dumb chasing a small opportunity whatever um but the all of those metrics will change based on the decision that they make around what business model to pursue so just by way of what a business model is uh selling courses that's one business model licensing a business is another business model so people you're saying even when they try to retell your story they are confusing the two so uh but very different when it comes to execution there's no recurring yes so um how do you process through if if you were starting so not as when you're looking to acquire how do you process through what is the right business model to pursue so this is pulled from my 100 million dollar offers book which goes the point of that book was to answer the question what do I sell and I think that a lot of people especially when you're starting out you're like I need a business plan I need a I don't think any business I've had is had a business plan as an aside um it's just what are we going to sell and how we're gonna get customers and then from there we build everything around it and so um isn't that a business plan I have two things on my plan I mean I've seen like 16 page business plans right like okay all these numbers are made up it doesn't matter like do you know how to get customers um and so picking the Avatar which is the customer that you want to go after and then picking the problem that you want to solve for them and probably you want to solve is I feel like kind of a trite term in the in an entrepreneur space um but you usually want to make their lives easier in some way uh it's usually going to track down a status or it's going to track down a time right like those are those are two huge buckets that that can that cover a lot of stuff and you know different people say there's health wealth and and relationships there's you know there's a million bigger buckets that you can try and chunk this stuff into but if you are starting out so let me just get you really tactical so we were just really clouds for a second let me just get you Tactical number one you can go and set up all of your autos of incorporation your LLC and all that stuff online with a few clicks of a button under 30 minutes so you do that at step one step two you take those papers to a bank and you get a bank account step three you hook up a payment processor to that bank account which is again a series of clicks that nowadays are almost automated once you have those three things you get a stranger to give you money in exchange for doing something for them and so I would categorize businesses as I see them usually as you either sell products you sell services so physical products something like a mug right you sell Services you do something that they would otherwise have to do for them you write software that does something that a human would do for them but because you have an auto you have automation with code uh you can get them to do it or you create things that entertain people that they want to have access to and so those basically function into media again you've got people products uh code and and uh and and content so it actually breaks out to those four types of businesses and I think that most people if you have no like let's say you aren't a software developer right and you want to start a business uh the easiest once you start are either the easiest one to start is a service business because it only requires your time and you to learn a skill that other people can also learn but some people just might not want to do it and that is all you need to solve and I remember like when I was in college and I spoke at some universities for uh for entrepreneurship and everyone there is always like here's my business idea right and it's always like weird Gidget widgets and gizmos and like these these never before seen businesses and most of those will fail whereas like if you want to make your first business and the big fallacy is that the first is going to be the forever business which it won't most entrepreneurs have many businesses over their career and each business you learn elements that help you build a bigger and better business the next time and so you start with something that people already buy so it's like you can look what do people already buy they already buy lawn care services they could mow their lawn they just choose not to they could optimize their website for SEO they just choose not to they could run their own ads they just choose not to they could edit their own videos they just choose not to you could set up email you know autoresponders for people but they choose not to you could set up voicemails for businesses and and transcribe it and send it to them because for those people it saves them time and so you can pick any problem you want that someone already does or already purchases look at the solutions and you can literally just do it the same way and have a way to get customers that's it like that's that's it you just reach out to people that you know one-on-one you reach out to strangers one-on-one you make content about the problem and you run ads there's only four things that you can do to let other people know about your stuff so once you decide what you have to sell you then use the core four one of them pick and then you let people know about it until eventually someone says yeah I'd be interested in you solving that problem for me and that's how you make your first off all right Focus becomes a problem people end up getting really scattered they want to try a bunch of different things and see what sticks um how how do you make Focus work for you and not against you I feel like Focus can only work for you um the nightmare scenario most people spend their time in yeah I think it's um so I love showing this visual uh and maybe we can grab it at post for this but if you imagine a curve right where you go uh you start here a little bit above the line at uninformed optimism is that you see your buddies doing Drop Shipping and he's making money and so you're like wow this must be amazing I will do that too so then you leave your current opportunity to do or maybe you start you start doing that then you move to stage two so you go over the hump of excitement and then you go to informed pessimism now you're below the line then you're like wow okay you have there's a lot of other stuff it's really competitive I don't have a brand it's hard to differentiate you know the cost of goods is actually continue to rise and so our ad costs and well you start realizing the other things that you didn't know before so you have a slightly more realistic view of the opportunity then you go to stage three which is the value of Despair where you're like nothing's working I don't know what I'm doing and this point is where everyone then jumps to uninformed optimism and the next opportunity and they replete repeat one two three one two three one two three until they're eventually able to learn that they just need to stomach because every single business has and when the grass is green on the other side it's because there's lots of manure there right same as yours and then you go up to informed optimism and then you hit achievement and so those are the five stages that I see most entrepreneurs going through and they continue to cycle the first three over and over again until they learn the lesson so this is a skill focus is a skill I can train someone to do it if you're in the same environment and you're at this point where you're not sure what to do but other people have succeeded at this thing and then you think something else is easier that you find out about that is a stimulus that we can then say here's the red flash card are you going to duck are you going to get slapped and realistically most people just need to keep getting slapped until eventually they realize that nothing is going to be easy and they have to go through the period of not knowing what they're doing because that's like that in essence is what entrepreneurship feels like his uncertainty of whether or not all of the time that you've put in is actually going to work out and you have to get really comfortable with that is that you won't know because if you were to be guaranteed the outcome that you're going to get what you want you wouldn't want to do it to begin with because everyone would already be doing it because it's already guaranteed which means the opportunity is gone so the opportunity is in the uncertainty and so as long as you can Embrace that which is why you have to have some tolerance for risk as an entrepreneur because you have to pay down your tax of ignorance which we all have to pay down every single day for not knowing the things we should know um and the only way you do you pay down that tax is that you test and you iterate and so you just want to get as many no's out of the way as many failures out of the way because you're not actually failing you made progress it wasn't yes or no did it work or not it's how well did it work and I think if you can make even that frame shift you're like okay well I'm reaching out to people they're responding but I'm not getting them on the phone okay well then you have a scripting issue okay then you get them on the phone okay well they're not buying okay well then it might be a offer issue it still might be a sales issue depends on why they're not buying if they're saying you know it's price it's like you might be mispriced but you also might just be really terrible at explaining the value and so you just continue to work your way down until eventually someone's like yeah that sounds good and they read you their credit card over the phone and you're like holy this is actually happening and you make your first dollar and I promise you have to make your first dollar the second one comes a hundred times faster than the first one did if there are many variables present many variables must be tested yes we studied yeah that is certainly uh marketing summed up yeah they're no doubt that people are going to have a hard time figuring that out um I want to better understand you just did a book launch for your most recent book and it I mean you set records it was Unreal I mean really like blew people's minds set a standard in in the world of online marketing um what was it about that that or what did you demonstrate in the way that you did that that other people don't understand so with each book I wanted to demonstrate the concept of the book with the book itself and so offers when I released it was uh 1.99 I've now since made it free um but it was 1.99 on Kindle it had a course that went with it that many people charge five thousand or ten thousand dollars for um and it was the sub headline of the book and offer so good people feel stupid saying no and so I actually launched that book with a single post on I had 10 000 followers on Instagram that's it and every month after the first month it continued to sell more and more copies into the state continues to sell more copies every month and that is based on the offer being exceptional and people sharing it because they got tremendous value relative to what they paid that was the that is the entire concept of the book The Core framework of that book is is called the the value equation um which I'll get into but that is basically people say the word value but how do you operationalize value right and so that book is about operationalizing value making the thing that you currently sell more valuable in the perception of the customer so they're willing to trade more of their money for it the Leeds book had an entirely different core concept which was the core 4 and the four lead Getters and that is the advertising cycle and so it's how do you let other people know about your stuff and so the sub headline of that book was how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff not to be fair it's not it's not how to get strangers to buy your stuff because that's sales but how to get them to want to buy your stuff is advertising and so this book sits literally just between they don't know who you are and they show interest and that's where the book ends you get lots of leads saying I'm interested I'd like to find out more about your stuff and that's all I could fit in one book to make it actually effective and operational for most people and so since the concept of the book was to advertise and to get lots of leads then I thought it would be appropriate to advertise and get lots of leads and I used every method in the book all eight for the book launch even though I could just have made a post on my you know across all my social medias and probably sold plenty of books just doing that but I wanted to show that this stuff works today and it will work in 100 years and it worked 100 years ago and so I went through I had some people that I reached out to one-on-one purposely just to check the box I reached out to some cool people so I could do podcasts I ran ads for it even though I didn't need to run ads we still got 137 000 people from ads uh we had Affiliates we had 104 000 people there from Affiliates uh we had 27 000 Affiliates promote the book um we had customer referrals people sent their friends there so I had an incentive that if you just get 10 people to come you'll get two bonus chapters that aren't released with the book uh Affiliates uh which is the the another lead getter right I mentioned it earlier but uh Affiliates uh we got them uh to to promote the book we got agencies who actually were the ones who ran the ads for us because we don't run ads at hold code because we don't transact um and then employees which is the fourth type of lead getter which is they do the core four on your behalf for you so we had Mosey media which is our internal content team made all the content and the ads for that matter uh for the event and the book itself and so I actually only did uh 17 long uh 17 short form pieces of content and six long four pieces of content and then that got cut into uh 143 posts that we did over six weeks on top of the 2200 posts that we were making anyways uh over that same period of time and so I used all the methods in the book to demonstrate to give proof that the book works and so you know the next book I'll try and continue that meta theme of I have Concepts in this book and I will show you that they work because I will use them to Market and promote the book the thing that I really want to make sure that people understand and if you think I'm crazy definitely let me know but I doubt you will um the reason that all of that worked so well isn't what you did at the time it's what you did for the years leading up to that moment building brand uh building awareness generating massive amounts of Goodwill um is that like what amount of magnification did the whatever four-ish years leading up to the launch of that book play in the the launches success it was everything I mean it was everything now that being said you could still absolutely use it like you can still use warm Outreach you can see this cold Outreach you can still like and one of the concepts in the book is making content and I talk about how I structure content how we pick topics how we pick headlines how we format it how we do all those things so that people can use that and make content for themselves um but usually the longer you can wait um before making any asking to be fair that I gave the book for free and if if you wanted to buy a physical copy you could that was the whole that was let me let myself spoil the surprise of the launch was that I gave everything away for free and said if they want to buy physical copy you could um I'm I can't wait to write the book on brand because I have a lot of thoughts on it and I can't wait to have really clearly crystallized like UNR you know beyond reproach ideas about brand um but I'll give you a working teaser for for how it works but brand is basically teaching it's associating something people know with something they don't know and we associate these things enough that eventually I can remove this and then you'll associate water with my hand and so if I do that enough times and I have you know water and you know coffee and whatever then you might generalize and say the hand is a beverage thing right and I like thinking about it that way because what do I want people to associate me with I want people to associate me with tremendous value on people that associate me with long-term Goodwill I want them to associate me with money right so every book's 100 million dollars something offers 100 leads um and so I want them to associate with investing which is what a lot of the stories that I talk about are companies that we've invested in that we owned and scaled or exited and so I we do those things so that when you have a brand a brand is put on something to direct someone's behavior is a physical sign so if you look at the you know original the origins of the word brand it was a brand you put it on a cow right and so if you have a cow that doesn't have a brand and a cow that does have a brand you will behave differently with a cow that has a brand on it you're not going to go capture it you're not going to go kill it you might return it to its name its neighbor or whatever like the brand changes your behavior and so brands have at least as far as I'm concerned like these you know I haven't written the book yet but um have kind of two two continuums you have the strength of the brand and then you have the positive or negative uh inclination towards it so away or towards so like Nazis for example have a very strong brand away for most people now to be fair there's also a subset of people who are strong super strong towards there's a subset of people kind of way right it changes their behavior yes it does and then and the inclination says towards your way to some degree um you know Donald Trump has a strong brand right for many people for a percentage of the population it's it's uh negative and for percentage of population it's positive right and so when we think about brands that way it's been helpful for me because you really answer the question who and what do I want to associate myself with and then by doing that eventually your logo and your identity will then have a set of things that people associate with which then will change their behavior which is why I think brands are the most valuable things that you can build because it really becomes a way to influence the behavior of the masses at scale and so if every single person recognizes the Nike Swoosh and I can take a water bottle and then put a Nike Swoosh on it and triple how much I can charge for it and still get more people to buy it then you can measure the strength of the brand by the difference in price between the commoditized version of it and the Branded version of it and that translates into tremendous profits from a from a capitalistic perspective and so if you're trying to build something really valuable then you make many associations that are positive for specific audience because uh I think Black Rifle coffee right they're kind of like politically charged-ish right so Black Rifle coffee is going to be really positive for people who are probably right leaning uh in terms of their associations with that brand it'll probably be kind of negative for the people who are more last learning and that's okay because they're like we can sell to half the population whatever and so I'm kind of agnostic to the direction of it and obviously Nazi's negative on that but like for for most of these things I'm just looking at what is what is the percentage likelihood that people will adhere or comply with the requests that the brand makes of them buy my thing go to this thing whatever and so that is the that's why you can have somebody who has a huge brand in terms of uh the amount of people who are aware of it but have very low ability to direct or change Behavior and so you probably I'm sure you know this better than anyone with Quest you guys were one of the first ones getting into the influencer space like way back way back when the term influencer was a new term um and you probably saw some people with million person accounts and they couldn't drive any sales and then you saw somebody with 15 000 and crushed it because they had a stronger brand for a narrower audience even if it was just like a girl cop who has an audience of all girl cops they might have lots of positive associations with that person and then be more likely to you know comply with whatever request they have and so I know this is a branding discussion um but the reason that I think many people wanted to come to the event is because they were awarded in the past for consuming content for reading my last book and so they felt like the likelihood that I was going to reward them again at this event would be high and I try to like I'll tell you a secret I try to make many promises and keep all of them and the more times you can make promises and keep promises the higher the likelihood people will ascribe to you for being somebody who is predictable in a good way if he said this will happen this is what's going to happen if he said it's going to be worth it it's going to be worth it and so that was woven in for the 24 months from the time I released offers to the time we did leads was trying to actively build up the Goodwill so that we could set records and do something really cool and demonstrate the concepts in the book in the real world so that people could know that it would work for them too I mean it's incredible it's breathtaking um what you guys were able to do what was a record that you broke so the Guinness Book of World Records for a business virtual conference live was 21 000. for a business conference so you absolutely demolished yeah that which is really cool that's awesome I will say this as an aside uh I think the the the the Fanfare about the launch will decrease soonish and I think that the actual contents of the book is going to be the thing that that can that people that is that machine will start spitting because inside of the book referrals is always the one that I always try and drive the most in any business I have because it's the lowest cost to a car customers not that it's a customer acquisition thing for me but um or sorry not a money-making thing for me books are not the best way to make money just throw that out there um but it can create a viral effect so that you can get more customers every month without paying a cost to acquire and so the mission of acquisition.com is to make real business education accessible for everyone and so in order to do that I can't do it alone and so that is why I have to have other people help me yeah uh you're only going to scale as much as you can get high quality people to help you that's for sure there was something fascinating that happened during your launch um which I would love to hear from a guy who did not in the beginning consider himself a salesperson somebody that has gotten very good at sales and as I was saying in our first interview which the funny thing is I ended up taking you on a side tangent before you answered it but I said the world does not think you're creepy why aren't you creepy when it comes to sales but there there was a a moment which you did on purpose but I want to know what you're going to say it doesn't matter it's all about Behavior but I want to understand what you think about this so you intentionally took people on an emotional rollercoaster ride where you start I'm going to give you this for free and I'm gonna give you this but if I ask you or sorry I'm gonna give you this uh it normally goes for this much and this normally goes for this much but you're Crossing it out classic thing where you then ask for money now you could see the comments coming through at the time and people turned on you totally and I'm assuming they were saying something akin to I knew it this guy just after money whatever um if there's nothing wrong with sales why did they turn on you uh actually so I don't know why they turned on me I can make a guess but at the end of the day like I'm never gonna know what the main reason you knew they were going to you I did that on purpose I don't know why I knew that so when people see this thing um there is an aversive reaction to it in a certain percentage of the population that being said I got a zillion messages people would be like dude I was ready to give you my credit card at 5K and so sure like we could have taken 50 million dollars at the event um but what I wanted was you know 500 million dollars of value to many people that later will come through companies that get started and scaled using the stuff and then they want to partner with us um but the reason that I did it was or at least this was my hope for doing it was that I wanted people to remember it and so memory is driven by emotion um and so I uh I took this roller coaster approach uh because I also wanted to subvert the audience if I just said hey it's all free it's all amazing here it is I don't think nearly as many people would have talked about uh the thing I also don't think they would have perceived the value as high so I wanted to sell them on the value of this thing and then give it to them rather than just saying if I got on and said hey guys uh there's a free course with eight different things in there that are you know I spent a lot of time on go enjoy them I mean it would have been fine people would be like you're amazing uh but doing it this way it becomes uh like I think a lot about this it's like what is that person going to tell the next person like what words are they going to say they're probably going to be like dude he did this like fake pitch and he like and he like everybody was going left and then all of a sudden he made it all free was Unreal like like the place went nuts like that they will remember and um that was what I was going for I figured there was a higher likelihood that they would remember it if I did it that way yeah I think you are very correct about that um talk to me more about your mission um so um and I I would I like to put this big disclaimer out up front I'm a ruthless capitalist I am absolutely here to make money I am not a saint I have no like many nice things were said about me after the event and I also remember that the same people also threw stones at me 30 seconds earlier so like that doesn't sway me a ton but I'm letting everybody know I'm here to make money I'm just measuring how I make my money over a longer time Rising that's all it is and so I could have taking 50 million dollars you know from from the event I think that's a really realistic number um but if I do one deal from somebody of the now probably million something people who have just even just seen the event recording or where they're live um I will probably make more than 50 million dollars and also get a brand that continues to compound at a faster rate and so to be clear I don't think there's anything wrong with monetizing an audience I don't think there's anything wrong um it really comes down to keeping promises so like for example like I I will probably be launching some product at some point uh in the in the future um whatever could that be yeah and um I don't think that I will have any negative response to it and so it really just comes down to like what have you promised or what expectations have you set and then are you meeting those expectations and so I think my my view on this has shifted a little bit over time is I used to think like you have to exceed expectations but now I think that it's really just like can you perfectly meet the expectations the person has now somebody might have really high expectations um but you try and set them and meet them and you do that cycle as many times you can so that their predictive measure of trust with you if you want to operationalize that um is that you are trustworthy because you keep your promises and so I think that's a lot where uh like the only the other reason is that within the unfortunately within the the course creation world this is one man's two cents all right now I want to be really clear about this because people get their pennies in a bunch you can choose to feed your family whatever way you need to I have zero judgment on it what I do acknowledge is that people make associations and so I could find the most ethical porn business in the entire world as soon as I stand on stage and talk about our porn company I will forever be associated with porn is there anything wrong with that yes or no I don't know for me I think that there is uh there are other businesses that I would like to do that I would like to do a deal with that might view that negatively and so it might prevent me from doing a much bigger deal in the future by having that and so I won't do it not out of principle but out of pure dollars and cents materialism if you want to call it that and so um the course world to that point has a lot of charlatans and a lot of people who make promises and break promises and a lot of people who set bad expectations or unrealistic expectations and then people get really frustrated and upset over what they get and so for me even if I had the best course in the world I wouldn't want to sell the information because it would associate me with that group and so I've taken a lot of time to disassociate myself with that category um and it was because I mean I was a brick and mortar owner but like I learned a lot of direct response Marketing in that world so I made a lot of friends in that world who then made commentary and then put me on stages and so I had a really strong associations early on with that Community again nothing wrong with that Community I'm saying but the associations that I would prefer to have with my brand are the ones that I said earlier which might seem in direct conflict with that which is like long-term oriented Enterprise Value being patient giving first like these are all things that many people in that Community not all but many people and in that instance especially with branding in my opinion the good apples do get thrown out with the bad so I do absolutely think that there are amazing education businesses that exist absolutely like Bar None period end of statement there are just so many that aren't that it's very difficult to make the association and so that's why I think that if I had let's say a no strip that I was going to come out with or I had a dessert company that I was going to come out with I don't think anyone would have any issue supporting that or me saying like hey I want to I want to build this with you guys but this in public I think these are all things that people would be totally fine with but why it's because of the expectations that I said at the beginning and so acting in accordance with that over a long period of time and to one sub note on that is that I do believe that Brands can change over time and so the concept we're talking earlier with like successive approximation we're like if you are one shade to the right one shade to the right one shade to the right you can slowly move a brand now whenever you make that move you will lose some people who liked the thing that you had before and you will gain some people that like the new thing and the idea of repositioning or you know directing a brand is making sure that that trade-off is positive it's like uh it's like the local band that you know has that local you know Vibe whatever and then they they go a little bit more mainstream and then all their early fans are like they sold out but what they really did was they trade a small group of people for a much larger group of people and more people like this brand than the old brand because if they like the old brand they would have already been big and so it's really just a calculated trade on what you're willing to associate with that more people will have a positive strong association with to make it increasingly likely that they will do what you would like them to do that helps you with your long-term goal so zooming in on your the mission of your company which is to make entrepreneurship accessible or business success accessible to everyone yeah um you have a quote which I think is really really interesting businesses solve problems businesses make the world better there are too many problems for any one person to solve I want to help create as many businesses as possible so we can solve as many problems as we can what are some of the problems that you think business can solve I mean I would probably have a shorter list of problems that businesses can't solve interesting yeah in a world where entrepreneurship is not always celebrated and capitalism is often vilified um is that just a contrarian stance or do you think that people are a little crazy to not see the value of business so if we're to zoom all the way out and just think about the economy as a whole is allocation of resources just time energy money Etc capitalism in and of itself is the is a is a system about efficiently allocating Capital now there are trade-offs with that because if you have a pure capitalistic Society then there are a lot of other things that we say are important to us like we believe people should have health care we believe people should have a place to live We believe people should have education and you know services for their kids when they're younger whatever it is right um we have these beliefs and so we make trades based on that pure idea of capitalism because capitalism can absolutely be pure but most actually I don't know of an economy right now that's a true pure capitalist because most humans say that that market is too ruthless and so we're willing to make some trades and that's where legislation where we actually artificially move the incentives of the market to incentivize certain behaviors the problem with governments as an allocation vehicle for capital is that they are one-tenth as efficient as private because it's not their money and they never earned it and so you get really good at capitalism by allocating resources well and getting a return on your resources you don't get you it's very hard to get fired in the government and you manage billions and billions of dollars and the requirements to get in are not as high as they are to spend even a modicum of that kind of money in the private sector and so you just have to be more efficient with what you have because you have to survive every day rather than having a guaranteed stipend from the whole country that gets taken off the top before everyone sees their paycheck and so um if Government can solve it private sector can solve it better faster cheaper the only real issues come into how much regulation do we put on top to prevent Bad actors or one I mean that's the whole concept around I mean you know this I'm just saying for the audience uh around like why we try and break up monopolies which now we've just given up on because they're bigger than governments uh but we we do that because we want to protect you know we want the capital Society competition in general is good for society tough for the competitors but if you have 10 dry cleaning stores the best dry cleaning store win and then everyone gets better dry cleaning so it's good for society it's bad for the nine guys who fail and so um I do think that entrepreneurship is the way that we solve problems and I think that there's usually an Innovative way to solve any problem if we have enough knowledge uh to do so I mean in elon's proving that with kind of first principles approach to like can I rock can I launch rockets that attempt the price well where do we get our metal from right like what is required for a rocket right so we have to get this from here to here let's build from there right rather than like well we have to go for this guy who's our contractor for space navigation well why can't we make space navigation well you know like and then again though and then the prices expand and so that is my tldr is that I can't learn everything everyone has a unique life they are uniquely uh positioned to tackle opportunities that I only have one lifetime to live and I might be able to solve two or three big problems in my lifetime Maybe but if everybody has these skills then I think when I die I will be proud of the meta contribution even if I don't capture all of the economics because I'm going to then die and then someone else will have it and it doesn't even matter anyways and so I I there's an element of that that just makes me feel good about it that drives me forward like the 17 year old who's going to sleep with the book under his pillow to serve you know provide for his family with the one goat they have um I think that if I can equip that guy that he can do whatever like he can solve problems that I never could and so I don't think it's my life purpose to build the next rocket or cure cancer I just don't think that's in my skill set it's also not in my interests but I think I can help equip the entrepreneurs who will I love that man I hope more people hear that message about business I think that to your point about serving people in a more efficient way in a way that they prefer is so powerful and to watch it slowly get villainized as I've gotten older has really been sad and I think will lead us down a super dark path tell me for those that are just listening and aren't watching across the bridge of your nose on a nose strip it says the one of zero yeah B one of zero excuse me uh what does that mean so one of our kind of big themes in our content creation at Mosey media is one of one content or it was one of one content meaning I don't want to do a breakdown of Coca-Cola's business model because literally anyone could do that that's a book report a college could do that anybody could do that and so I only want to make content that I can make and so one of my big rules of advertising is show it only you can show and say what only you can say and so if you're the the only triple black belt something in your local area then say that and then also show what you can do that other people can't do and if you don't have that reality you either need to Niche down and make it a much a narrow thing that only you can do or you get better and can beat more people and you expand it but that's fundamentally anyone can become a category of one if you go narrow enough and then you just continue to expand over time so the one-of-one content was the concept that we've adhered to now as the team started to see what was going to happen for the event and how much we were putting into it and all the free stuff we're gonna give away um and how much money we were choosing actively to not make they were like dude no one would do this they're like this is even one of one they're like this is one of zero and it was like that's it for 18 months I've been looking for like uh a saying or an ism that was short and could encapsulate many of the values skills that can be learned uh that I believe are important and that one of zero concept which I love because also from a math perspective one of zero you know one divided by zero is undefined and so it's really about being Beyond definition writing your own path you know keeping promises in a world that breaks them delaying expectations giving first and giving over and over again until they ask or even if they never ask and trying to live your life in a way that you earn your own approval by the end of it and I think that's what one of zero is all about and so for me one of zero and that's a that is a brand that I I really want to stand behind because that's what I believe I love it where can people follow you you're listening to this on audio both my books are free on my podcast the leads book and the offers audiobook are on my podcast you can just listen to them you don't have to you don't have to opt in it's just right there you can you can listen to them I love that all right everybody speaking of things that you will love if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace check out this interview with my friend Peter diamandis about Ai and the future of Business and Technology you said that the next billion dollar company will be founded by three people how is that possible first of all just say that we're living in a different day and age the ability to start companies

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 848,480

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech

Id: Tigt75AcLLA

Length: 175min 40sec (10540 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2023