You're Not Behind: My System for Outlearning Everyone

I've spent over $500,000 on my own business education and in every single course Mastermind coaching program Workshop I've become the number one student they had and then eventually surpass the person who taught it if you're in the game of Entrepreneurship the game of business you have to grow in order to get better and in order to grow you need to learn and if you're going to learn you might as well do it the right way and win I had someone say this um recently to me they're like you know how do you know what programs

to buy how do you know what workshops to go to how do you know what courses to listen to or what channels to watch in order to learn right and they're like how do you know that it's going to work and I think that's the question that always gets asked is like how do you know it's going to work and I think that fundamentally asking that question shows that it won't work because it is never going to be the thing that works you are going to be the thing that makes it work and so when

I look back at my history as a student of and continue to be a student but student of the game of business the I have yet to have a negative Roi on any purchase that I've made whether it's tutoring courses workshops and to be fair I've bought from from from bad people I've brought from some scumbags I've bought from Bad Teachers but I have absolutely awide every single purchase that I've made and so whenever I hear someone say like I bought something in it and it didn't work um it kind of grinds my gears and

I think I've had it and heard it enough times in the last month or so that I wanted to make this podcast about it and so this is this is what I want to kind of zoom out on is that I want to give you a top- down approach in terms of levels of competence and then a bottom up approach from a skills perspective and I think if you combine both of these things together you will make a lot more money and you will be more successful at the things that you try to learn and

so if you're like trying to learn how to make Tik Tok ads to start a second you know acquisition channel for your business then this would apply to you if you're if you're a customer of an agency then this will apply to you if you're trying to be a student and just get in the game then this will apply you and so the first thing is understanding the levels of competence and so at the top the best and the highest level of competence is something that I will call positive active all right so you've got

you've got the inclination and you've got active or passive and so there's five levels all right so the top is and and and the characteristics of somebody who has this belief set is that no one has proven that it cannot be done and they ask other people to prove to them why they can't do it and they think I will be the best student that this person has ever had no matter what no matter how incompetent of a teacher they are I will make it happen I will win because that's who I am not who

they are basically the idea that we make our success dependent on the quality of the teacher puts the power in their hands rather than ours and so on the flip side of this the reason that basically any single program in the world will still be able to get positive reviews of some sort is that no matter what some percentage of real winners will always go into everything you just look at the public school system like more or less a dog [ __ ] system but there are still winners that come out of it and it's

not because the quality of the teachers it's because of the mindset of winners because winners will win and so the highest level of this this example of like Elon where he's like breaking down to physics he's like if you can't show me that it's physically impossible based on the laws of physics that we know that it is possible I'm going to go do it it's the same concept as R Roger banister running the first 4minute mile like no no one had done it before and he's like well physically it's not impossible it's not breaking the

laws of physics for me to run a 4-minute mile and so that is positive active now underneath of that you've got the second class of competence which I would consider positive passive this is all the people who ran the 4-minute mile after Roger banister they're the people who say okay he did it so I can do it and to be clear this is still good there's still winners absolutely that can do that and when I look at the people that I've worked with customers employees anything I can identify and these are honestly these are your

these are your a minus players like they're like okay he did it I can do it and honestly that's a great perspective like it's not impossible I just need to do the same stuff they did and that's awesome that's the that's the replicate before you iterate they're like I'm going to just do what they did and get what they got and that's an awesome perspective now there's three more levels to this and as we go down some of you will start nodding your heads as either like you are this person or you know someone who's

this person the third level of competence here is what I'll call neutral passive and so this is somebody who just says well it's worked for other people let's see if it works for me so it no longer goes from I will like prove to me why I can't make it work level one level two okay someone has made it work therefore I can make it work two let's see if it works you're passively accepting whatever happenings and you're just open now this is where the majority of people are this is where most people just sit

they just live their life passively letting things quote happen to them and they're sometimes mediocre customers for for for an agency or a vendor they're mediocre customers for you this is the person who goes into the gym and is like we'll see if your program works for me like I'm you know we'll see if it works now underneath of that you've got level four all right this now we're going down this is it might work for other people but it probably won't work for me this is negative passive so they're still in the passive seat

but they're negatively inclined this is the person who half asses and I'll give you a story about this that happened recently so we had a business owner came out I was a salon owner okay so a salon hair salon owner and the guy said hey I used your gift card campaign and it didn't work and I was like all right bro like so I just went through it I was like did you get a referral from all the people did you write the name down of he's like well uh I didn't do I mean I

asked them and I told them that they had to use the card on other people but they came back in trying to use the card for themselves I was like well that's not the play he's like well I told them that and I was like well obviously you didn't tell them well enough because that's not the play so and the thing is I just let's just stop I was like do you want me to take accountability for the fact that the gift card players worked for so many businesses and just not yours I was like

do you want me to just say it's my fault I was like would that make you feel better and he was like well no I was like that's what you coming for you want me to say that it's my fault I was like you didn't do it you didn't do it right so you just did something else and yeah that something else didn't work because that's not what the program is that's not how the gift card play works if you don't know what I'm talking about it's on my YouTube video it's a whole play and

So eventually it got up to be like okay I just didn't do it I was like cool guess what now you can do it again and you can do it right because you know what you messed up you had to let them know it's for somebody else and you had to get the referral and you had to get the three-way introduction otherwise they're going to trying and use it on themselves not bringing people in and you're just giving away services for a discount that sucks don't want to do that he's like okay fine and so

we had a little moment and he got over it okay but that's negative passive that's like it might work but it probably won't work for me hey and by the theme if you want to be the best student ever out of all of mosy nation I have two books uh they actually audio books that are for free that I have here uh on this podcast starting at 579 it's my $100 million offers and $100 million leads they have sold over a million copies 26,000 F store views on Amazon if you like hard copies but if

you actually follow the steps I've got courses on the site that are also free acquisition. comom trining if you just follow the steps prove why it will work for you and it will now here's the fifth level this is the bottom of the barrel all right this is the this is your one-star customers this is uh this is this is the customer you sign on who just genuinely sucks at everything and they take an active role all right so this is negative active I can prove that this will work for everyone but me I have

bad luck nothing works out for me in the end I am the special snowflake that nothing works for my my body is different calories don't affect me I could starve to death and I am immune to death because I could not eat for years and my body would still hold on to Fat because I am special and so what's interesting about this is some of you guys may be laughing about this right now but some of you are this person but you just might not be this person in business you might be this person with

your weight but you're not this way in business you might be this way in your marriage but you're not that way in business or you are that way in business and you're not in your marriage you're like oh but you know what oh this this way of communicating it's not going to work for us not in our relationship but I'll prove it I'll I'll go to your [ __ ] sessions I'll follow your little framework for communicating with my wife or my husband and I'll prove to you that it won't work because we're so special

that nothing works for us you want to prove it and what's interesting about this is that because underpins a whole set of beliefs behind this that your identity is attached to so it's so much harder to say listen I've been fat my whole life and and and it's my fault it's so much easier to just not have it be that way it's so much easier to be like you know I've always struggled with with women our our you know our marriage has kind of been on the Rock but that's kind of how it's always been

that way right and so we it's so much more difficult to accept that all of that pain and suffering that you've been through is 100% your fault and so instead it's easier to just try and actively prove that it won't work now there's some good there's some interesting stuff about number five so I actually find number five people very very interesting because they in my opinion have the highest potential to jump from five all the way to one and I've had so many experiences in my life this is the one star becomes the five star

this is the the person that all of a sudden like something switches and the thing is they go from negative active they have the active they're trying to prove it but they're proving the wrong thing they're trying prove it wrong but all of a sudden sometimes if you can get it to swap they just try to prove it right and then they become absolute [ __ ] animals and so I'll tell you a story so there was a gym owner uh at gym launch and he was he was definitely one of these number fives right

he was like it's not like my Gym's in a different Market the people the people here are different my weight loss leads are different than everyone else's weight loss leads my Market's different my zip code's different the corner that my gym is on is different but all of a sudden he'd been on enough calls and I probably ranted at him or something on on some on some live call and um he was like you basically just called me a [ __ ] and I was like yeah probably one one way or another and so he

said I just decided what if what if it did work and what if I took the same energy that I'm that I'm doing to try and prove myself right and try and prove this system works and what if I just did everything as though I as though it was going to work and I assumed it was going to work and so he did that and he ended up becoming one of the top facilities out of the thousands that we had and then we ended up hiring him because he completely outsourced his gym made it profitable

made it make more money using the setup that we had and the interesting part here and this is what's crazy same system same gift card play Same advertising same gym model different approach different level of competence showed up and executed an entirely different way I'll give you a different example I had a lady this was one of my first probably 50 customers at my gym her name was Autumn so autumn came in and she had the nothing works for me I have a special thyroid you know whatever uh you know if calories I could starve

myself forever and I'd still live I defy the laws of physics and and uh after like two three four weeks all the people that she' started with started losing weight and of course now normally in that level five she'd be like well that's of course of course that's what way cuz I'm different than them I'm special I get my identity from being special and I just was like listen I was like do you want to be right and fat or do you want to or do you want to do you want to get skinny I

was like which one matters more to you being right or being thin I was like I just had I had had a sit on with her and I was like just be real with me if being right is more important to you I was like then then you can be right I was like but which one's more important to you being right being thin and she was like I want to be thin and I was like then [ __ ] do this and so she did and of course she lost a bunch of weight and

then she became one of my top clients and then she started referring everyone and the thing is is that when you see a level five turn into a level one you're like oh my God and the thing is they become absolute ambassadors brand champions for you because you help them get over that and so I say this from a business owner perspective because don't lose hope on those people sometimes you just have to say do you want to be right or do you want this outcome I'm cool either way but you're the one who has

to live with it and so she decided that she wanted to be thin which is awesome and so it's kind of one of those it's kind of like uh it's interesting that in like NE so Matrix and Star Wars probably two of my favorite um kind of universes of of of movies um but like Morpheus and Yoda sit in very similar positions in terms of the guide for the for the main character and so there's a there's a point in the dojo where Morpheus looks at Neo and he says stop trying to hit me and

hit me and so the the point there is that when you it's basically the difference between going through the motions acting as if versus actually trying to to succeed there's trying to do the things that looks like success versus actually trying to win so replace stop trying to hit me and hit me with stop trying to win and win stop trying to make ads work and make ads work stop trying to hire the sales guy and hire the sales guy right and so it's the idea that like a no fail situation where there there's absolutely

somebody this is like the the founder says no one can sell like I can sell yeah no [ __ ] there's people who sell way better than you right you just haven't found them yet okay that means that it's possible so what are you complaining about you just need to go do more stop trying to make your marketing work and make your marketing work stop trying to prove yourself right that you're special and win it's the same reason that Yoda says there is no try there's only fail or do and not do and so it's

the same concept because the reason that try is such an Insidious concept is because it allows the possibility of failure it basically says that there is a way that this won't work but if you fundamentally believe that if like even at level two if someone else can do it so can I then there is zero possibility of failure because if they can do it I will do it and obviously the level above that is even though no one has done it it is not impossible and therefore I will and so that's the that's the top

top down approach that I would approach I said there's two levels of this in terms of of thinking through becoming the best student is that where are you on that on that pyramid are you level one are you level two level three level four and are you in different places in different domains are you some way in your Fitness life or some way in your marriage or spouse life or some way in your in your business life and notice how you approach it differently and then look at the one that you're most successful CU you're

probably going to be better hopefully better at one of those domains than the other and think about the thought process you have when you approach it and use try and think about using that set of beliefs and systems on the one that you fail at the most and that has been helpful for me now the question that I always like to ask because obviously been I've been in the education world and I like education a lot is why why do we have unequal outcomes why is it that you've got a 100 people who start and

you've got one guy who murders it one guy who tanks and then you've got all these people in between and so the this is the bottom-up approach in terms of thinking about this is the number of skills someone has going into an education process program whatever predicts their success so let me explain so if you and this this happens all the time this is the I went through three different things and then I did this thing and then it finally worked but what you didn't know is that you were building this bridge towards an outcome

and the first thing you did gave you the first five bricks and the second thing you did give you the second five bricks and the third thing you'd give the next five bricks and then the last thing you did just gave you the one last brick you needed to finish the bridge across from where you are to wherever you wanted to go but the thing is is that we attribute all of the success to the last brick just because it was the most recent not because it was the most important it's the same thing as

like it's kind of weird in the world of like education and business education it's like oh man I I you know I used to think this guy was good now I now I learn from this guy but it's like saying yeah my kindergarten teacher taught me uh simple Edition and then my algebra teacher wow he really taught me that guy who taught me you know simple Edition is an idiot it's like no he taught you what you needed to get to where you're at now because skills and education build on themselves and so you were

able to be successful with the algebra teacher because you had the simple arithmetic teacher beforehand and so we have this weird thing where you get to an advanced level and you think that the person who taught you the basics was somehow wrong they were just at a different part in your process in the stage and building the bridge and so the reason that that that some people are successful and you are the last brick if you're a business owner for that particular business is that they were able to assemble all those skills at a time

now the more skills someone comes in with and also the more meta skills that someone comes in with the more likely they are to be successful and the reason for that is the vager the instructions can be and so for example someone can come to me and say hey Alex can you build a nose strip company for me and I would say sure because I have that skill set to build I have all of them right like I know how to Market I know how to sell I know how to get product I know how

to do Logistics all that stuff they can just say that vague of instructions and I can go do it because I have that skill right now that stack of skills rather The Meta skills you have allow you to bridge the gap where things are vague and the vast majority of Education basically has to meet people at some level because if you truly start at zero then it has to be like here's how a computer works here is how a phone works here is how you use the internet right and of course most things that you

do in education aren't at that level they're higher up than that but the thing is is that you might be a level four of Education here but a level one at one of the steps and then all of a sudden it quote doesn't work for you but it's because you actually are have a remedial level of education on that step and that's where having the meta met meta skill of like I mean as simple as this is like shoot 30% of people can't read good like they're just they're not even they're not even literate and

so so of course it's going to they're going to have a harder time trying to learn anything because they can't even have the ability to learn right and so I think about this and so if something has fed for you in the past rather than blaming the thing blaming the fact that you did not have sufficient skills to make it work and even in the most counter example where something's Absol like just absolute dog [ __ ] because it does happen right I think you can still learn what not to do some of us had

phenomenal examples of what not to do in a marriage from our parents some of us had exceptional examples of how not to parent from our parents we've had exceptional examples of how not to boss from our bosses we've had exceptional examples of how not to deliver a product from a business and so sometimes it's using inversion thinking of like okay what are all the things that made this horrible and then do the exact opposite of that and I think that that's why you can always Roi every single experience you have because there you can always

either benefit from it or benefit from the inverse of it and I think both like if you have if you have such a terrible experience as you're like new and innovative ways to ruin my experience wow I didn't even know this existed well if I can do the inverse of that then that still will give me the benefit of of learning from this experience I still as much as they wanted to make me fail I still got better like I still will win and so I'll I'll I'll I'll wrap this with with a scene that

I like a lot from Invictus which is a movie from 2006 it's Morgan Freeman and and Matt Damon and uh Morgan Freeman's Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon's like the head of the rugby team and it's right during the apartheid when it's the whole racism is that it's you know Max or whatever and um and he says I'll I'll read you the quote he says how's your ankle is it healed it's one of the first questions he asked he's like I heard that your your ankle you know was hurt um you know is it healed he

asked that the head guy and he said the truth is Sir this is Matt Damon responding he said the truth is Sir you never played 100% and Mandela responds as in sports as in life and I like that a lot I remember hearing it being like whoa that like for whatever reason it just hit me when when when I heard that because we have so many times where we blame the conditions for the lack of success but the reality is that the Champions create success regardless of the conditions and so they don't look at the

education system they don't look at the thing that the teacher gave they don't look at what the vendor provided and think well I'm going to prove that they were bad so that I can be right they just win no matter what and so I think it's like kind of like Tom Brady of like okay well he can go to a different team and still go to the championship still change the conditions because he forces the winning to occur and that's why like that is the like that is the quintessential thing that like if you look

at your team if you're a business own you're like who on my team is a level one who's a level two who's a level three who's a level four who's a level five who wants to just like prove that my thing's not going to work who's just like we'll see if it works who's like I think this can work other people have done it we can do it too and who's like we will be the first to do it because there's no reason we can't and I think it's a great way to to measure and

assess your team I think it's a great way for you to measure and assess yourself and apply it between different domains and so I think if as I think about these things for my for myself um I think the the biggest thing that I've been fortunate with um is I I I hate the idea of someone making me worse and I hate the idea of quote not getting better from something I invest time and money into and so I've always had the desire to be the number one person in anything that I ever try and

learn and so it's like even if this guy's mediocre I'm going to be the best student he's ever had no matter what which has come to bite me in the ass because every single person I've ever bought something from has claimed that they're the reason for my success but the thing is is that all I'm just going to get real nasty with you I've been more successful than every one of their customers and them so like [ __ ] you um and so I've always taken it from the approach of replicate before you iterate so

I don't try and get fancy so this is I'm shifting gear set out because I just got a little little passionate about this but like I I will do everything they said to the tea to replicate what they've done so if I want to learn something from them they have been able to do it and I will do exactly what they did and then I can get the same result and then once I've replicated it then I'm like all right here's seven ways I can do this better than them and then I will iterate but

I think one of the other issues that happens is people try to iterate before they replicate and the thing is is unless you unless you've learned to replicate you don't know why it worked to begin with and so you have to retrace the steps you have to pick up the breadcrumbs and be like okay that's we did this because there's that hole there okay we did this because there's that problem there okay got it got now I have a good lay of the land now with the other skills that I have that the person who

taught me doesn't have I will make this better and that's how I think you can stair step your way learn from as many people as you can and when you learn by your from your third teacher you can pull from your first and second teacher to try and make what you learn from the third teacher better but the thing is is that in any of these paths you just have to start learning and be willing to know that no matter what happens as long as you execute you will learn either what to do or what

not to do but you learn either way and I think that gives you a no fail situation as a student because it means you become an inevitability like I will win whether it's with you the next guy the guy after that I will win I will figure this out because there's no way that this is impossible there's no reason that Facebook ads can work for other people's businesses not mine there's no reason that doing a direct mail campaign if I can get it into the right business owner's hands that I cannot find a way to

monetize that there's no way that somebody else can be have a have a billion dollar roofing company and I have a roofing company that's only do a million dollars a year I need to change Industries if they can do it I can do it there's a way and I just don't know how yet but that's a me problem not a universe problem and the thing that everyone keeps messing up about this is that they're trying to think that like they're proving the system right or they're proving their teacher right or proving the guru right but

you're not doing any of that you're proving to yourself yet again that you can win no matter what and I think that's the big difference because some people like don't want to win because they want to prove that the teacher's bad it's like that's that's like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies it's one of the dumbest things I can possibly imagine like you want to sacrifice your outcome your success because you want to show that someone else is bad like the best way to show that someone else is bad is to beat them

and then just keep winning and move on with your life and get them to shrink into irrelevance as you grow into your potential