The Man That Makes Millionaires: Turn $100 to $10k With This Step By Step Formula! Alex Hormozi

If you want to make more money, you might want to consider doing this. So, number one is hold that thought for just a second because the thing that comes before that is this: grow your business. Oh God, this is the entrepreneur life cycle, and there are six stages. Now, the vast majority of people get stuck on stage three, and I've made some of the biggest career mistakes at this point. You end up living the same six months for 20 straight years, suffering until you learn how to break free from it. I want to go

through the whole thing; this is going to be awesome. Alex Horos is the master of business strategy, an artist in turning companies into the millions and a leading voice in how to craft your way to success. He's an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Whether you're starting out or want to go from 1 million to 10 million, there are certain behaviors and actions that will increase the likelihood of success that we're going to go through. But here's the really hard truth that a lot of people don't like talking about: entrepreneurs must be willing to make impossible choices, have the

courage to be willing to be wrong, and feel shame by failing at things in front of people whose opinions they care about. That fear keeps people stuck in a job and a life they don't want for years, and that was my path. I had a white-collar job, a condo overlooking the city; everything was according to plan. I remember thinking that I didn't want to be alive because I was so afraid. But once you get over the fear, it unleashes this whole new realm of possibility of being able to do what you want, and that is

when you can learn the real game of entrepreneurship, such as knowing that business ideas typically come from one of three Ps, and you only need one of those three. And then there's the four Rs for customer success: how to learn new skills quickly, how to stand out in a competitive market, the winning strategy for 2025, and so much more. So where should I start? I have been forced into a bet with my team. We're about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube, which is our biggest milestone ever, thanks to all of you, and we want

to have a massive party for the people who have worked on this show for years behind the scenes. They said to me, "Steve, for every new subscriber we get in the next 30 days, can $1 be given to our celebration fund for the entire team?" And I've agreed to the bet. So, if you want to say thank you to the team behind the scenes at D of Here, all you've got to do is hit the Subscribe button. Actually, this is the first time I'm going to tell you not to subscribe because it might end up

costing me an [Applause] [Music]. Awful! Alex, if someone's just clicked on this conversation and they're considering listening for the next couple of hours based on everything that you do for the millions of entrepreneurs that follow you and read your books, can you tell me exactly why you believe they should stay and listen, and who should stay and listen? At Acquisition, we scale businesses. The content that I generate, that we put out, conversations like this, helps people who are going from zero to one—just getting off the ground—to helping people go from 1 million to 10 million,

um, to helping entrepreneurs going from 10 to 100 either get there or exit along the way. There are frameworks that cross all three of those that I consider both deep and wide, um, that help any business navigate whatever strategic decision is in front of them to get the highest potential return for their time. So, if you're listening or watching, then if one of those frameworks applies immediately to your business and allows you to pull five years forward in your career, I would say that's a pretty good return on time for the people that are at

zero. Yeah, what is it that they're typically coming to you to help them with? So, if you were one of them, what is it that they want from Alex? I think it's, um, there's what they think they want and what they actually need, um, which are two different things. So, I think what they think they want is, uh, some tactic that's going to immediately help them start a business. What they typically actually need is, um, the courage to be willing to be wrong and to be willing to feel shame by failing at things in front

of people whose opinions they care about. I think that's, like, if I rewind the clock for me, it was probably one of the hardest things that I had to get over. And so I think that's why maybe my message resonates with a lot of people: it's because it was so hard for me, um, to get over. What's interesting is, basically, anybody who's listening, the harder it is for you to break free of whatever kind of mental prison you've made for yourself, whether that's real or just in your head, the more compelling your story will be

when you break through it, um, because it will resonate with even more people. Uh, for the people that it was easy, their story doesn't have a lot—like I was immediately an entrepreneur. I wasn't like that. I had a job when I was in high school; I had a job immediately out of college. Some people were like, "I was selling lemonade out of the back of my, you know, thing when I was 13." I didn't do any of that. That, like, I School failed me. I actually was pretty good at school, uh. I didn't have any

of those issues, you know what I mean? And so I had a pretty clear career path, and so I had what many would consider a real opportunity cost. I had a white-collar job, and I had a GMAT score above Harvard's mid-score. I had a really clear path of what my life could look like in the next 20 or 30 years. It was fairly well-defined, like: I'll go to Harvard or Stanford or one of the top business schools, and then I will either go back into management consulting or I'll go into investment banking, and then eventually

end up in private equity. That would be the path, right? And then all the flowers would be set at my feet, and you know everyone would say, "We approve of you. You're an excellent person." But when I saw the people who were 20 years ahead of me, I really didn't want their life. And then it started making me look at my life, and I was like, "I don't even know if I really want my life." The big decisions that I've made in my life, unfortunately, have almost always come at the doorstep of a parent's death.

I think maybe in some ways that makes me a coward for having needed death to make decisions. Operationally realizing that has been something that has helped me move faster to make decisions that I know I need to make but don't. The first big kind of what felt like a death decision was, I was a consultant, 22 years old. I had a paid-for condo that I bought overlooking the city, and I remember thinking, "I really hope I don't wake up tomorrow." I don't mean that to be melodramatic; for a period of time, I just always hoped

every night, "I just really hope I don't wake up tomorrow. I just don't want to do this." What was difficult about that was that at that time was when my father was most proud of me because I was doing everything that was according to plan. He could talk about his son who graduated in three years from Vanderbilt, had the good job; everything was following the plan. It was upon realizing that my ultimate expression of living out his dream was me feeling like I didn't want to be alive. It took me time to get to that

point and articulate that because, obviously, you never want to admit failure, like, "I have really messed something up here." But I was living my life to win someone else's game. When I realized that, I recognized that one of our dreams had to die—either his or mine. When I understood that his dream must die in order for mine to live, that was a statement I kind of crystallized at that point in my life. I had to keep repeating that: "His dream has to die in order for mine to live." To put this in perspective of how

afraid of my father's judgment I was, I left the state and drove across the country. Halfway through, I called him to tell him that I was gone. I bring this up because I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but I'm saying that if you feel a lot of pressure, I get it. I tried to leave the job that I was at to pursue just literally anything that wasn't that. I wanted to start a business at some point. I didn't know how I was going to do it; I just knew that what I was doing was

not the path I wanted to be on, and everybody around me wanted me to be on that path. So I went to say, "Hey, I'm thinking about doing something else," and it would always be that, "Ah, you know, don’t—later, later; everything's good later." I remember when I called my dad and I told him, he said, "Understand, why don't you come home?" Well, I didn't tell him that I was gone yet. I said, "Hey, I want to go pursue this fitness thing." He said, "Cool, come over for lunch. We'll talk about it." I was like, "I'm

already gone," and then obviously his tone changed a lot. Our relationship struggled for years after that. I also bring that up because sometimes there's this illusion that you get on the Oscar stage or whatever it is, and you're like, "Hey, I just want to thank my mom, my dad, my friends for always supporting me." I can't say that, and I wish I could, and you might not be able to say that either. I also don't think that's a reason not to do it. We did struggle for years after that because I was basically living as

what was once his prodigal son, going and taking a minimum-wage job as a personal trainer at a gym, like, you know, cleaning floors and stuff to learn just to... Learn the gym business. Um, but that was ultimately like how I broke free, literally, you know, physically, uh, leaving the area and, you know, mentally. But I think that I had to accept that there was a timeline where my father would never talk to me again, and I had to be okay with that, um, to pursue what I wanted. I think that when you ask the original

question, "What are the people from 0 to 1 really looking for?" I read tons of business books at that time, but I couldn't use any of them because I was so afraid. What's crazy is that, like, I think about it now in retrospect, and it's like, it's crazy how large the perceived monsters can appear. Leila has this quote that I love, but it's, "Is a mile wide, an inch deep?" So you look at it; it looks like this ocean, and then you take the first step and you realize you don't drown because it's like, "Oh,

there's ground underneath this," right? There are other people who are more on my path, and the friends you lose, you gain new friends. Right? And so, um, that fear was the hardest decision that I've had to overcome in my entrepreneurial career. Of all the split paths in my life, that was the one that if I had many timelines or many universes that existed, that was probably the one from which I would not have parted. So, I think in like 90% of universes that Alex Roski exists, I'm just a consultant somewhere. Um, I would encourage you,

if you do feel that you're not going to die—like, you won't die, and you might just live. It's so interesting because I think everything you've said is just absolutely spot on. But you're right in the way you say that if you'd asked an audience member listening now why they haven't started yet, they would say fear. They would say, "I haven't got the X; I haven't got the Y." But actually, it is such an emotional thing, and we don't talk about that enough because uncertainty—humans seem to be allergic to uncertainty—and they'd rather the certain misery of

their current situation typically than uncertainty. And I think, um, I used what I consider a very non-palatable word, "coward," purposefully, because no one wants to say they're afraid. Because if you say you're afraid, then it means you're a coward. And I think that it only means "coward" if you allow that fear to change your behavior in an aversive way, as in not towards what you want. And so, you know, the inverse of that—many people have heard it—courage is not acting, um, without fear, but despite fear. Um, I think that, um, when you act, when you

allow fear to change your behavior the wrong way, that is when you can give yourself that title of "coward." I think that that is a title that I feared my whole life, and that label—I'm almost more afraid of that label than the label of failure. I'd rather be a failure than a coward. Is there a framework for knowing when to quit? So, I think there's the—there's like the math behind it, and the math, I think, is pretty straightforward. So, like, when do you quit your business? I like, you've saved up three to six months of

personal savings, number one. Number two is that you have started something because nowadays, in the digital age, you can begin a business on the side that can generate income, and that income, um, in the small amount of time that you're not working, uh, replaces or at least matches the existing income you have from your current job. You've been able to do that or demonstrate that income for like three to six months. If you do that, that's a very like math way of approaching it. That, also, is basically never the reason that people aren't quitting their

job. Right? Like, that's a really s—like, I have backlog. I've matched my current income with my part-time work, and if I just put my full-time work, I would probably make more. Very reasonable, but never actually the reason that people don't do it. I was thinking about the two sorts of reasons why someone might quit something or feel like they want to quit. One of them is clearly because it's hard, and that's obviously not reason enough to quit. Then there's another one, which you are speaking to there, which is it's not moving me towards a meaningful

goal, irrespective of how hard it is. Like, a marathon—you're raising money for a charity you care about. It's hard, but you don't quit. Yeah, and then there's maybe if you're running a marathon for no apparent reason, you know, there was no charity, there was no one watching, there was no, like, fitness benefit—then that's a good, I guess, moment to consider quitting. My story mimics yours in a way that I didn't realize you went through a similar thing in terms of, call it, the parent's disownment. Yeah, um, no real great option to flee to, but feeling

like the current path that would have led me to be, I don't know, a business management student was significantly worse on balance than taking the risk. But I think maybe a point of distinction is it didn't—I was so naive that it didn't feel like a risk. Yeah, so what's really interesting about that is the guarantee. And so, a lot of times, we don't look at. What I call the "don't," which is like the alternate path. If I had played out my existing path, I had a guarantee of outcome I didn't want. It was just a

delay, whereas here there's a chance that I can make it. One of the final frameworks for making the decision was guaranteed bad, chance at good. I thought, "Well, I might as well take a chance." I strongly encourage thinking about playing it out. What I mean by that is I think fear exists in the vague, not in the specific. When you say, "I'm gonna quit my job," and then, "What if this doesn't work? I'm gonna fail," there's tons of fear. But if I say, "I'm going to quit my job and then I'm going to try and

start a business. If the business doesn't work, I'll probably have a compelling story that I could tell for business school if I wanted to, to show that I had some entrepreneurial slant." In the meantime, I could use that experience, plus my job experience, to probably get another or maybe even better job, and match or supersede my existing income. The actual loss would be maybe the savings that I had saved up, but if I'm younger or I haven't made as much money as I want, then that's never been the amount of money that would be material

anyways, in the grand scheme of what I would like to make. In terms of living situation, worst case, I can go back to my parents' house with my tail between my legs, or sleep on a friend's couch because I have enough people who would be willing to put me up in a garage if I had to. So, it's like, okay, my actual worst-case scenario is just that I have a cool story and maybe some shame that is self-inflicted, because it's not like no one else cares, really—it's self-inflicted shame and maybe a detour or a different

story that I have to tell later on in my career. Not as much fear there, right? But the first one, like, "I'll fail, everyone will hate me, and I'll die," sounds like it was written by your amygdala, like the fear center. The second one was pure prefrontal cortex; it was all logic. I'm wondering, as you're going into that decision, obviously fear is going to lead it. Of course, you're going to go for option one, where you just think about the downside. Maybe there's a practice that allows you to get into your prefrontal cortex and into

logic. I think that's—I actually think you nailed it and said it way better than I did. Going from vague to specific basically disengages your amygdala because it can't reason the logic chain of causation and causality of what's going to happen next in a chain of events. When you get into the specifics, all of a sudden you’re like, "Okay, I'm not going to be homeless and then shamed and die. I might live in inferior living conditions for a short period," which, by the way, when you're later on in your life, you'll look back and think of

it as the good old days. You'll think, "I can't believe I was couch surfing; I was pursuing my dreams!" It's only in the moment that it feels bad. When you look back—like, even I find this hilarious: how long after you do something embarrassing does it become funny? For almost all of us, with enough time, the shameful experience becomes funny. If it is going to become funny eventually, it might as well become funny now. It's just about pulling the time horizon up, but all of that prefrontal cortex decision-making. So, no, but I think that's exactly it.

When I thought about this decision, I had my very emotional statement around, like, "His dream has to die for mine to live." Yes, I also considered the logic: downside risk here, I'll have a story, and I can always get my job back. Okay, and if I can't get that job back, there will be other ones that are available. Fine. And if I have a downgrading and some people think that I'm not as successful, then okay, I'll not stop, though. I think that that demystifies a lot of the fears. I think that applies not just for

entrepreneurial fears; I think it applies to any fear, like "I'm going to talk." "I can't tell this person this bad news." All right, let's play it out. I say something, and then they're going to kill me. Probably not, so what's going to happen? I'll say these words, and then they'll flip the table, they'll flick me off, they'll maybe just feel hurt, or maybe they'll cry, maybe they'll shout. Okay, okay, if they shouted at me, what do I do? You just kind of play it out, and you're like, "Okay, I think I have most of these

conditions prepared for." And then all of a sudden, you can have those things. What you also said is that in the face of guaranteed misery, any option is better. Like, it's real; you get to live once. So, why would guaranteed misery be better than any available option? It's delay discounting. That's what's crazy: delay discounting happens both ways. For 5:00 a.m. at night, and you're like, "I'm going to wake up at 5," but that's because you're delaying the pain of waking up. When it's immediate, when I have to quit the job, like I'll quit my job

tomorrow after 20 years. So it's just like we always, we, we, we delay the fact that we're going to be miserable into the present. We massively discount what a whole lifetime of misery would be. Amen. When you're thinking about what to pursue—so say you've left the job, you've quit the thing—how much of that is a decision derived from self-awareness? Because, you know, someone will look at you now and be like, "Oh no, Alex did this, so I'm going to start acquisition.com." Or they'll say, "I want to— I saw Steve Jobs did that thing with the

computers, I'm going to start Apple." Yeah, or Elon, I'm going to do the spaceships. How much do you have to know thyself to know what to pursue? Man, this is a really good question. So, there's a tweet that I love by Andrew Wilkinson: "Every entrepreneur ever: Here's the winning number for my lottery ticket." So, it's like every entrepreneur will say, "Here's the winning lottery ticket," but it's like that game already happened. That drawing already happened. Ah, okay, yeah, right? And so, you can't cash that ticket in; it's already done. People say the word "first principles."

No one really knows what it means. I mean, some people do, but I think far more people say it than know what it means. There are foundational truths of business that exist, and the conditions of the environment will change. You have to apply those truths to whatever the current condition is. That's what I try to tease out with the books and the content that I put out. At the end of the day, you have an input of time. Zooming all the way out, if the goal—assuming that your goal is to make money—okay, this is just

a purely economic business goal. You have time, which is the primary currency that you trade, and you make dollars over a period of time. I tend to reject the idea of, like, "never trade time for dollars" or anything like that because everyone trades time for dollars. It's just some of us are more efficient at it than others. But even exchanges that occur that are not denominated in time still occur over time. You have this foundational unit of time that you're going to give, and what we're seeking is the highest return on that time. Within a

business context, there are kind of three levels of things that have to occur: you have to attract attention, you have to convert attention, then you have to deliver something for that attention. In each of those things, you want as much leverage as possible, so you want as little time as possible required to get the most output. I have built acquisition.com on basically two primary theses, which are in the logo. This is a full "Crum for leverage" for people that can't see; it's like a triangle. Yeah, so it's like a triangle or the Illuminati, because that

always gets brought up, right? So we've got the full "Crum for leverage," and then inside of it, you have supply and demand. I see those as the two foundational principles of business, which is you need supply and demand to have a business and then leverage to get as much out of it as you possibly can. When you're looking at the assets that you have, assets can also be skills, resources, and what you have available to you. Now, if you have nothing, then all you have is your brain, your hands, and the time that you have

that you can put towards learning something, which is why I'm a big fan of skill acquisition as one of the primary things that you can do—educating yourself. Not formally educating, but informally or alternatively educating yourself on super tactical things. Once you get over the fear, then you start asking, "Okay, how do I let people know about my stuff, and what do I let them know?" Right? So, you have to have something to sell, which is the offer, and ideally, you want the offer to have as much leverage as possible. Like, if you sold software or

you sold media, those are things that you can cut once and sell a thousand times. If you have a conversion mechanism, it's like you can have it be automated, like a checkout page or some sort of video sales letter or something like that, where people just buy without a phone salesperson. If you add a phone salesperson, there's less leverage. Not to say this is wrong, but you want to have the highest leverage opportunity. Then from a deliverability perspective—I've kind of talked about deliverability first—but from the advertising perspective, if you reach out to people one-on-one, that's

lower leverage than being able to make one piece of content that a million people see. Over time, you go from low leverage to high leverage, where you have the same inputs, but you just get significantly more for your output. That fundamentally is like… Reasoning up from first principles, how do I get the said differently? The question someone, I think, is really asking is: How do I get the most for what I put in? You have to reason within your current context of your skills, resources, and assets in order to derive that solution for you. So,

if someone walks up to you in the street and they say, "Alex, what idea should I pursue? I've just quit my job," I would say business ideas typically come from one of three Ps. So, it comes from a pain that you're currently experiencing, a past profession—so the thing that you just quit—or a passion. It's something that you're inherently interested in that you would spend your time doing anyway, or some skill that you learned while you were in the workforce, which, by the way, is one of the most proven ways of making money because the economy

has already shown you that people are willing to exchange money for that specific job. In the world of gig economies and solopreneurs, every business can be dismantled into just jobs being done, and all of those jobs can be fractionalized. If you look at any business, you've got sales, marketing, customer success, and customer support. If you want to differentiate that, you've got product, design, and web pages. There are so many different components to a business; you just need to learn one of them and then it's like boom! You have a skill that you can trade for

money without anyone else to report to. Pain is usually, I think, sometimes one of the biggest drivers. It's like you had an eating allergy and you couldn't find pancakes that addressed your specific eating allergy. You bet there are a decent number of other people with that allergy who also like pancakes. Then, you make pancakes that are delicious and amazing, catering to people with that food allergy. All of a sudden, you have a business based on pain. Why does that matter? What leverage and advantage does it give you for the next five years? I think that

deep knowledge of the prospect is paramount or very important for creating exceptional products. You can either do that by doing a ton of research or by being the prospect. There’s a certain amount of visceral feel that you’ll know. If someone wants to make a nose product for breathing, I have tried every product since I was in fifth grade—so it's been 20-plus years, a lot of years since then—and I've tried everything. I know the pros and cons of every product that exists on the market. I can tell because I’ve done it; it's not like, "Oh, I

tried it for a day." It's like I'll try things for a month at a time. I have so much exposure to this problem that I have a lot of nuance in my opinion on what's wrong with the solutions, so I can formulate a way better hypothesis on how to fix it. That hypothesis will be, for an investor, so much more compelling because you lead with a story as opposed to logic. I met the guy who invested in Regal Cinemas, which is probably the biggest chain in the U.S. It was when there was a guy who

had just one theater, and obviously, COVID has disrupted that business, but for 20 years, they crushed it. He said it was so weird to say that cinemas were going to make a comeback because they had kind of been on a downturn at the time he was making the investment. He said the reason I decided to invest in it was that this guy knew everything about the business down to how much the cost of a kernel of popcorn was. He just knew it so well that he was like, "This guy can't fail; he just knows too

much about this business to not have it work." So, he invested and ended up making gazillions of dollars. But I think that deep understanding—and if you look at all of these passion things, you’ll have a deep understanding because you’re spending all your discretionary time pursuing this passion. The pain gives you a deep understanding of the problem and what the prospect is going through because you've experienced it probably for years. Now, the professional one I would say is a bit of a shortcut because if you're quitting the job because you don't like it and then you

say, "I'm now going to do this for myself," well, you're okay. The one proven point about that is that it is proven to work from an economic perspective; you will be able to make money doing that because you already have made money doing it. These other two are less proven but sometimes have significantly more upside. When you were talking about the breathing example with your nose, it’s funny because if you had sat down and said to me, "Steve, I've made these breathing nose strips. They are better, they're 20% more durable, they expand your nostrils by

20%," it is multiples less compelling. Thank you for telling me that story you just shared about being a kid with breathing problems and trying to solve this issue for yourself. It's funny because that story you told, versus the sort of rational, logical approach or the benefits approach, is your marketing campaign for the next five years on TikTok and Instagram. It's "I had a problem, I solved it, I tried everything, and solved it for myself." There's almost nothing more compelling and believable. We see that in Dragon's Den; we'll sit there listening to these pitches all day,

then someone will come in and say, "I had ADHD, I tried energy products, they all made me crash, so I went out and solved this problem for myself." And we're on edge because we almost can't argue with it at that point, you know? So, Basic has this great framework where he talks about missionaries and mercenaries. It's kind of like you have the guy who says, "Okay, I looked at market trends, and this is a growing category. I surveyed people, and this was the result that came back. So, I believe that if we time this product

right at this point in the market, we'll achieve huge mass adoption, blah, blah, blah." It's like logging your way through. To be fair, some people do make it work. But the missionaries are the ones who end up making the most money because they do it, sure, for the money—because the business has to have some economic engine behind it—but really because they viscerally experienced this problem and don't want anyone else to deal with that issue either. If I were to tell that story, like you were saying, when I was in the eighth grade, it was the

first year that I started really noticing I couldn't breathe at night. I learned how to fall asleep with my hand on my face like this, so that my nostril would stay open, and I could fall asleep without any obstruction. If I fall asleep with my hand like this, right, like I'm on the couch, it keeps my nostril open, and I can fall asleep. It doesn't move. That's how I learned to sleep for years before I found things like simple nasal strips, but there are tons of problems with those solutions that exist right now that I

won’t get into. Maybe someday I'll make a nasal product. I mean, literally, just deliver it—if you put every product in front of me that exists right now, I can tell you what's wrong with it because I've tried literally all of them. I’m pretty obsessive, so I've tried every product; there's a missing opportunity here. I've tried the ones from Europe, not just the U.S.—I've tried every product that exists on Amazon. Every fan or follower who sends me a product from a nasal company that's new, I will try it. I still do. And there has yet to

be one that has truly solved it. I mean, in some ways, this is actually a really good meta concept here, which is that if you want to be compelling, a demonstration or a model is always more compelling than anything else. Even going through that entire narrative takes everyone else who's been listening on some journey. It's like if you want to make a compelling pitch for a business, it's like we pretty much just went through one. That's really what it comes down to. You're like, "What do I do with my business?" It's like create your narrative

of why you're even doing this. If you can explain to somebody why they should care about this problem, or more specifically, why you care about this problem, I'll tell you this: more investors will be interested. I might be like, "I don't care about kitchen utensils," but this girl certainly does, and I'm sure there are other women who do too. What everyone wants to see is obsession. Unfortunately, in some parts of the world, I know more in the UK than the US now, that kind of perspective—being all in, obsessed with stuff—has almost been chastised. But the

people who are obsessed are the ones who change the world, or at least their own world. A very close friend of mine did all the Olympic teams' nutrition and supplementation stuff for a country overseas, and he said, "You know the difference between champions and everyone else?" I was curious and asked what it was. He replied, "Everyone looks at them and says, 'What do champions have that I don't have?'" He said, "They have it backward. It's what do champions not have that I have; it's what do they lack? They lack an off button. They just don’t

stop." In dealing with the gold medals, he said, "They just never stop; they just can't stop. Everything in their life is geared towards one goal." So finding that thing is essential. Everything in their life that way, and I think that that level of obsession around everything that you touch on a daily basis is required for really getting to where you want to go. So interesting because, as we spoke there, about the reason why the story was so much more compelling, it was back to the amygdala; it was back to emotion, right? And it's funny because

we said a second ago that when someone's thinking about quitting a job, they're like "SE" in their amygdala. Humans run mostly on their amygdala. So when we think about pitching, we should really be aiming at the same part of the brain, which is what you did when you showed me that you were sleeping as a kid with your hand stretching across your face. I immediately felt sorry for you, felt sympathy, and I immediately believed that if anyone's going to solve this problem, it is this [__] guy who's been through that pain. I've had two surgeries;

both of them didn't really work. I mean, I've got the story. My girlfriend's the same—what, really? Two surgeries? But she's coming up to her third one now. We've tried all the nose drips. I saw you wearing one; I bought that one for her. Yeah, um, and so there's a lot of people watching right now, and there's something going on with these bloody [__] noses. Yeah, people shouldn't—like, yeah, we're doing something. I feel like I may have popularized some of the N stuff. Yeah, but good—making it cool. Pain, profession, passion. Yeah, ideally you have all three.

If you have all three, then you're— I mean, my God, you're set. Like, if basically pain created an obsession, and for some reason you also were doing something like that in your work, like, I feel like the likelihood that you don't succeed is almost nothing. You only need one of those three; you just pick one. Like, if you just had one pain that you wanted to overcome, or one passion that you were just inherently interested in—'cause sometimes passion has nothing to—like, you might just be really into model cars. It's okay! Well, there are a lot

of businesses that you can build around model cars. It's like you can manufacture model cars, you can have services around model cars, making them faster because some people race model cars. You can be a collector and start flipping model cars; you can just make media around how to build them and then have a media company around—like, there are so many different components of any obsession or interest that you can make. I was talking to, um, on one of the future episodes of Mosy Tank that's coming out. We have a guy who's—he loves Dungeons and Dragons,

so he's an IT guy and just loves Dungeons and Dragons. He was like, "I just want this to make enough money that I don't have to do IT anymore." But it was so pure, you know what I mean? And so I was like, "We're going to help you do this." And so we kind of walked through the business plan for it. But like, is he going to be a billionaire? No. But I also don't think that's his goal, and so I think being really clear on what you want is important. So if you're like, "I

want to be the richest person in the world," I think it's a terrible goal. But if you want that, great! Well, you have to have a multi-trillion-dollar idea because now—by the time that occurs, there are already multi-trillion-dollar companies now, so you got to be looking at like deca-trillion-dollar opportunities. And so believe it or not, basically, the bigger the goal, the narrower the scope of the path to get there. If you're like, "I want to make $10 million," like, you can literally do that in almost any business. You want to make $100 million? Probably still almost

any business; you can do it on a long enough time horizon. And you can do it at a trillion—or deca-trillion—it's going to be some sort of tech; it's probably going to have some sort of AI. And so you get—basically, the bigger the goal is, the narrower the scope of how to get there. But the vast majority of people who are like, "I want to be the richest man in the world," it's just because they don't know how to, like, really think through it and be like, "All right, well, after like a hundred, there's really nothing

you can't do except buy more big things." But, like, in terms of your actual consumption, maybe even 20 is like—you can only eat at restaurants that go so expensive, you can only stay at the best hotels, you can only drive the nicest cars. You can do that with about $25 million. What do you think the cheat code is then? So I've got my idea; what do you think the cheat code is in 2025 to win at the game of attention? Like, there's got to be some new rules here because we've got AI, we've got new

platforms, we've got new media. You know, I'm going to give you a hypothetical business idea. I'm going to be a personal trainer, okay? And I picked that because everyone can do it, and it's a saturated industry. If I'm a personal trainer in 2025, how should I be thinking about building attention? Mhmm. So I'll tell you what I wouldn't do first, which is I don't think I'd try and out-science the science people. Because, like, unless you have some PhD, there is... A PhD guy who's already jacked, who's making content, and so he's more knowledgeable and more

jacked than you, so you're not going to win there. In the game of attention, it's about trying to find what is unique, right? How do you stand out when everyone's loud? This is going to sound trite, but your fingerprint is unique, literally from a biological perspective. So is your life and your experiences. There’s real alpha—or benefit—to be had above the normal level of effort by leaning into you. What makes every person unique is what makes their content unique. So, trying to be like, "Oh, I want to make content like Alex" is probably not the best

way to do it because you're not going to beat me at being me, but you'll beat me at being you. It's basically your flavor of media. For me, my brand has elements of philosophy that are in it—do I need that? No, but that's kind of me. I obviously talk a ton about business, marketing, sales promotion, and conversion; those are all things I spend a lot of time thinking about, so a lot of my content is about that. Fitness is a component of my life, so there’s a light sprinkling of fitness in my content. Also, I

come from a background in fitness with Gym Launch and the companies that I owned before that, so that would make sense. My wife, Lea, is also sprinkled in, so those are basically the components of my life, and that’s what kind of shines through in my content. I consume a ton of comedy, so sometimes you'll see some dry humor and dark humor that shines through—that's me. You have all of those little buckets of you, and not only are those buckets unique, but also the proportions of those buckets will be different. Maybe your philosophy is way bigger,

or maybe the fitness part is way bigger, but I think what makes the truly unique personal trainer or fitness brand is leaning into people being interested in you for being you. Then, you can say, "By the way, I have fitness stuff if you want to buy it from me." The key part is that the vast majority of products and services are commoditized. You’re probably not going to be significantly better than other trainers—just being real, you probably aren't—but you will be different from them. We want to lean on that. I want to buy fitness from somebody,

so I might as well buy it from her or from him. You’re taking basically this audience that would buy from anyone, but your brand premium gets them to want to buy it from you. Think about Prime, for example, with the drink company. It’s a drink that has other products in the marketplace that satisfy the same need as Prime. But if you are agnostic to that brand and have brand affinity with that creator, then you think, "If I have two things that are basically equal and I just like this guy better, as long as the prices

are comparable, I’ll just vote with my dollars here." So, if you're a personal trainer in 2025, it's going to be, in the long term, about building the content. In the short term, it will be outreach to people you know and making a compelling offer to get people to try to work with you. This overarching point you made about being yourself—I was thinking, do you know what the thing that all of my favorite creators and the really successful creators have in common? They all have, and I use these words intentionally, the courage to be themselves. When

I was starting out as a content creator, I looked back at the things I used to post; it was like "everything happens for a reason." It was cringe, cliché fluff. It took me several years to almost relax into just realizing that the game here was to get to the point where I could be myself on the internet. Actually, that was the most high value because, as you said, it’s the unique part of me—the courage to be yourself—and it is the winning strategy for 2025. I think it's about leaning into it. The thing is that everything

in you wants to not do that. I'm not really sure why. I was having a conversation with Ila, I want to say two nights ago or three nights ago. I got a bunch of flack for some post I made, and she just looked at me and said, "Never dilute yourself." I was like, "Maybe I shouldn't talk about this stuff. Maybe I should just lean off." She was like, "Never dilute yourself! There are so many more people who need that message than people who are hating that message." She said, "If you're actually going to make a

difference in a lot of people's lives..." There's going to be an equal and opposing force of people who want to reject that, and she's like, "This just comes with the territory of how big of an impact you want to have." It was just such a great, you know, wife-talking-to-husband conversation. Um, that I guess for me, at the end of the day, I'm like, as long as she thinks I'm cool, you know, I'll keep doing it. But, um, yeah, it's just, uh, because the diluted-down version all of a sudden becomes everyone else's stuff. Well, you said

a second ago you're not sure why that is, but by very definition of it being unique, that means there is no blueprint. Yeah, there is no person that's come before you and proven that it works. So, the courage of being yourself—there's only one Steven Bartlett. So if I'm truly myself, it's never been done before. That means that the risks are unknown; the upside is also unknown. Yeah, but, again, going back to our hate of uncertainty, it makes much more sense for me to try and copy you because I can see a blueprint there than to

run the risk of being myself. And you are someone I have to say who is running the risk of being yourself, and actually, as someone who's observing you now, I know who you are, and I now know who you're not. And it's important for me, as someone that follows your work, yeah, that actually I see consistency because I've established Alex's values. Yeah, and anything that diverts from that is actually less valuable because you say it's more like everyone else and the things I've had before. But it's also—it wouldn't feel true anymore. Yeah, and, um, this

is something that even as a creator myself, I have to fall back on: my audience knows who I am now, for better or for worse. Yeah, they're not going to learn anything new. Yeah, you know what's really interesting is navigating the gray. And so there are contradictory ideals, and this is what I kind of come back to when I'm worried about these types of things, which is like you've got mercy and you've got justice. They are somehow opposed, and they are both ideals. So how can we believe in justice and also believe in mercy at

the same time? And so, I mean, there—you can have variety and consistency; there's tons of examples of this, right? Um, and so we have these diametrically opposed ideals, which means that if you ever say, "By the way, I'm a little bit more of a justice guy," like, I understand they had a hard time, but at some point, you've got to take your own personal accountability. So like, no, you're not going to get out of the speeding ticket; you're going to get—it—that's what's just. On the other hand, it's like, "Hey, single mom gets pulled over for

driving too fast. You know what? Maybe we let her off today." Both of those stories are fair, but you're going to get attacked by the other side that has an ideal that all humans try to strive for, and it will feel terrible because they are right. And so what? And so I think that like understanding that that conflict will always exist between two apparent ideals—that, and this is fun, this is foundationally what politics is, right? Is that there are two apparent ideals that I would say 99% of people would say justice is good, mercy is

good, variety is good, consistency is good, right? Respecting values is good; so is innovating and doing new things. How can we have both of these contradictory ideas at the same time and navigate that without conflict? You can't, because how much becomes the question. And so I think that your thumbprint as a creator is that when someone presents a scenario and says, "Does Alex choose mercy or justice in the scenario?" that your audience says, "Gets it." Right? And so I think about branding in general as basically a mosaic that you get to create. And so, like,

each piece of content is a little tile that has a single color on it, and if you just see one piece of short content of Steven Bartlett, you don't really have an idea who Steven Bartlett is. But if you see a thousand of them, all of a sudden you zoom out, and you get to see the whole picture. And I think that the colors that are in those mosaics and the proportion of how many yellows, how many reds, how many greens, and where they are is what ultimately creates the brand. And so, um, because people

want to try and turn this into, "Okay, so I make one post about family, I make one post about finances, I make one post about whatever," right? It's like, I don't think that's how it works. I think you just be you, and then those proportions will naturally shake out. And also, over time, you will change, and so it also makes sense that your brand will change. And was I had to reconcile, which like, I don't know if I agree with some of the things that I said years ago. The thing is, in the digital world,

like my first podcast was July of 2017. Wow! Episode 8 is called "Stop Branding." I have changed my views on branding, to be clear. Yeah, but that first podcast is 90 days from when I lost everything, MH. And so the entire, the entire, like, journey, if you want to call that from zero to billion... is actually documented 90 days from zero. It's all there, and so you can see how my, my, my views on business have changed and like what I was thinking about at every kind of portion of my life. And so I had

to just be okay with the idea that I will change my mind because I will get new information. Because let's take the alternative stance: if I get new information, do I just keep parroting what I did before? This is also an issue with politics, right? It's that, like, he's flippy floppy. It's like, so they're not allowed to learn? Yeah, you've been in politics; like, you haven't learned anything? Like, no stances change? Like, I feel like we should be able to do that. Obviously, brands don't work that way, so it has to be gradual over time,

which I think if you were always you at all times, it will be gradual over time. Yeah, I don't know. I think a lot of the time we end up over-focusing on unreasonable people, which is a war we can never win anyway. Because you say that to me, I think so. I think it was like I had this, uh, this guy therapist on my podcast, who I then spoke to after the podcast, and he basically broke it down to me. He was like, there's 20% of people that just absolutely love everything you will ever do;

like, you could say anything you change, they're [ __ ] they're just super fans. There's 60% of people that are really reasonable; they don't speak, yeah, they just watch. They're like reasonable, and there's 20% of people, no matter what the [ __ ] you do, they're going to be [ __ ]. He is like, don't spend your life focusing on the 20%. The quiet majority, the 60%, they don't tweet, they don't, they just chill. And then the 20%, you know, they're your evangelists. But you know, I find myself falling into the trap of the… So

what's interesting about the 20% is that, like, I was thinking about this today. So no matter who you are, you're going to be disliked, period, because no one's liked by everyone. So we just have, like, let's… if we can accept that as a premise, right? No one's going to be liked by everyone. You might as well be disliked for being you than being somebody else. Amen. At the most basic level, being disliked is a fixed cost. And I think, to take the opposite perspective, I think it is far better to be disliked for being who

you are than loved for someone you're not. Yeah. And one of the great entrepreneurs I interviewed on the podcast said to me, when it comes to marketing and branding and this sort of attention conversation we're having, she said to me that in order to reach your 80%, you have to piss off your 20%, or at least be willing to piss off your 20%. It was Jane Wurang, who’s the founder of Demica, a global beauty brand with, I think, hundreds of thousands of people. And she sat and said, to get to your 80%, you have to

be willing to piss off—no, actually [ __ ], she said to get to your 20%, you have to be willing to piss off the 80%. And from a branding perspective, it makes so much sense, because when you stand for something clearly, which you do, you inadvertently stand against. You have to. If you draw a line, there's a side on either side, and you have to say, like, I'm on this side. Did you see that Nike ad? Dude, I was just going to say that! I was just going to say that! Yeah, the Willem Dafoe ad?

Yeah, like, what's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine? Yeah. Just like, it was actually the first time that I'd seen something from Nike in a long time that I was like, this is what built this brand. And I think they had lost their way for a while, uh, with like the wokeism and all that stuff. And I think it's like Nike means victory, which means people have to lose. Yeah, and they were willing to say that for the first time ever, right? I posted it on my LinkedIn, and it was 50/50. Yeah, I'd

say it was actually more like 80% of people were either neutral or pissed off, and 20% of people were like, that is me. I am a Nike person. And for me, when I saw that, I thought, I want to buy some Nike shorts! Yeah, it was, I mean, it was the first time I actually felt like I had positive brand affinity towards the brand in a long time. How important in this game of building and starting is people? Oh, very! A hiring question. I'll tell you why I asked this question: because when I look at

my portfolio, early-stage first founders never seem to understand the importance of hiring in people. Yeah. And I bang my head against the wall trying to convince them that actually, the game they're playing is in the company group of people. Yeah, so I would... I'll start with one thing and then I'll answer the question. So I was talking to, um, a mentor of mine, and he said when I was in my 20s, it was all about the destination. He said when I got to my 30s, I realized it was all about the journey. He said when

I was in my 40s, I realized it was about the company. And I was like, I can't wait till you're in your 50s! The next one, right? But... I thought that was such a great, like, such a profound shift in terms of how he thought about his business success because he was like, "I don't need to be, you know, a decabillionaire. I'm cool where I'm at, and now I just want to do it with people that I like." So, to the question about people overall, I believe that the potential of an organization is directly correlated

with the aggregate intellectual horsepower of everyone contained within it. If you are the smartest person in the business and you can do everyone's job better than everyone in your company, then it means that the limit of the business is purely based on one person's horsepower and one person's life experiences, and that will be the cap. Basically, it doesn't matter how smart you are; you can't live a hundred lifetimes. Sure, some people can learn quickly—there are some who can learn faster than others—but you're not going to be able to live a thousand lifetimes. As a business

grows, more expertise is required, and I think the easiest litmus test for this is if you look at the richest people in the world, almost none of them own 100% of their businesses. Number one, most of them don't even own 50%. Most of them have small percentages; Jensen Wong is at 4% for NVIDIA, Bezos is at 7% or 9% for Amazon, and I think Elon is at 20% for Tesla—like small percentages. It’s because it takes a lot of horsepower to take a chariot to the moon, right? So, basically, as you put in more intellectual horsepower,

the potential peak of the business goes so much higher, so much faster. Keith Rabois, from the original PayPal Mafia, has a really good analogy for this. He talks about it in terms of barrels and ammunition. He says that as soon as you get some product-market fit, the business starts to grow, and you say, "Okay, we need to start shipping things faster." This works the same with a services business, a physical products business, or a software business; the concept is the same. What happens is you then hire a lot of people, and you assume that your

throughput is going to increase proportionally. If we have 10 people and hire 50, we should 5x our output. Then you quickly realize that that is not the case. There are people who are rate limiters for an organization, and those are the barrels. Think about, like, a Civil War barrel, you know, an old cannon, and you've got these cannonballs next to it. He said most people are ammunition, so you bring in more ammunition, but you're still going to be limited by the one barrel capacity of how many shots can get taken by that barrel. You need

to find more barrels. You have to go from one barrel to two barrels, two barrels to three barrels, and that becomes an increase in capacity or throughput for the organization. There are very few of those. There's an organizational law, but the square root of the number of people in a company generates 50% of the work. So, if you have 100 people in an organization, 10 people are responsible for 50% of the value created. Right? Anyone who's been in such a situation would say, "Preach!" The thing is, I think the real game of entrepreneurship is that

your standards rise over time. It's unfortunate because we hear things that other entrepreneurs tell us: "It's all about the people, stupid!" Then you're like, "Sure, but look at mine," and it’s like, "No, you’re not hearing it." I think Williamson talks about how there are some lessons that, for some reason, we have to learn for ourselves. I still believe that we can operationalize this at a lower level so that we don't have to learn it for ourselves, but I'm convinced I haven't figured it out yet. Every entrepreneur can resonate with this: every business that I’ve started,

I’ve reached the success of the business prior way faster. I kind of liken it to a video game, where it's like you beat level one, and then you get to level two. You spend months trying to beat this boss, and when you finally figure out how to beat the boss, you think, "Great!" Then you spend another three months beating Boss 3. If you start the game over with a new character, it's like you zoom through levels one, two, and three, and then you get to level four, and you're like, "Shoot! Now I’ve got to spend

time." It’s like virgin land—like, I don't know how to beat this yet. I think that happens for archetype finding, for skill and talent within an organization. Say that again: if you have functions across an organization, there are people who are going to drive results within that function. The first time you hire a salesperson, for example, you don't know what you're looking for, so you just hire a person who claims they can sell. Maybe they can, maybe they can't. You try to train them; maybe that works, maybe it doesn’t. Then, finally, you cycle through three salespeople,

and finally, you find a killer. At that point, you have this recognition: you're like... Okay, that's what I'm looking for. And then, all of a sudden, you try to approximate that person or that archetype as much as you can. So when you start your second company, you're like, "Oh, I can quickly staff up sales because I know what I'm looking for." But then you're like, "Shoot, I've never really nailed a sales manager yet." And so then you cycle through; you start whacking away at the boss, and then you have to end up firing the boss

at that level because you're like, "Oh God, this didn't work." Then, six months are gone because you had to find them, recruit them, hire them, train them, and then find out they sucked, and then start over again. Maybe it takes 18 months to really find the right sales manager, and then you're like, "Okay, I know what that looks like, but I still don't have a director of marketing. What does that look like?" It's basically developing this pattern recognition across all functions of the business so that you know what exceptional looks like. Over time, what happens

is, as a business grows, your ability to attract talent increases, and then your standards also grow. You find out that there's even more nuance to this: there's a director of sales at a $1 to $10 million level, which is a different-looking person from the $10 to $100 million level, and it continues to go all the way up. It's basically building this repertoire of identifying patterns. If you talk to, I would say, more experienced entrepreneurs now, they don't talk about building businesses; it's like assembling them. You just assemble the pieces, and you just know that this

is how it's all going to flow together. That fundamentally is basically what I try to decode within the content that I have. It's like, "Here's a pattern for how you recognize this; here's a pattern for how you recognize this," so that you can just move faster through the levels to get to where you want to go. To loop back to the original question, which is how important people are in an organization: people are the organization. If you ever want to build enterprise value, it's about building the collective consciousness of the organization, the skills, and how

they collaborate together towards a specific outcome. Knowing how to staff that up is the job. I think the reason why first-time founders feel like they have to learn this lesson themselves is because everything you've just said is an unknown unknown; they don't even know that they don't know it. So they stumble; they hire the sales guy because they were their friend from high school, and then they go through the pain. I say this because I'm so unbelievably passionate about it. I went through the same BS. I hired my friend who worked at Prada to be

an account manager. I hired a guy I met at a rap battle to be my marketing director—who was literally playing video games for a living at 30 years old. I went through this whole thing, and then, maybe three or four years into my first business, I accidentally hired someone great—through no intention of my own. I accidentally saw the net impact they had, and I thought, "Oh my God." Over the coming years, I learned that the fundamental game here is, as you said, assembling the best group of people. If I'm a first-time founder, how can I

put a system in place to make sure that even though I don't know what a good salesperson looks like and even though I don't know what an exceptional person looks like, I still attract them to my company? The simplest way of attracting somebody to your business when you don't know how to do the job or know who to look for is, unfortunately, to do the job yourself. Once you can break down the job, we follow 3Ds: document, demonstrate, duplicate. That's how we train anybody. First, you have to document everything that you do to successfully perform

the job, and that becomes step by step into a checklist. Then, you demonstrate, so you go through this checklist in front of the person you're trying to bring on. Then they duplicate; they do the checklist in front of you. What's interesting about that three-step process is that you'll often find when you try to demonstrate following the checklist, you don't follow your checklist. Then you have to adjust the checklist until you actually follow it. When you can consistently follow that checklist and get the output, then you can have them do that checklist. I think this is

why bootstrap founders, oftentimes, will find they tend to know more about more things because they had to learn them in order to teach them. Now, what's really interesting about what you said regarding accidentally finding that star three or four years in is that I think that happens to almost everyone—well, hopefully to the people who end up making it. It happens to almost everyone. Because then you realize, "Oh my God, if I had four of these people, we could change the world!" The other epiphany or revelation I had was that stars hire stars. I think of

her name's Casey Leison; of the 10 people she then hired, nine of them became the best people in my company. And also, I'm not going to say his name, but someone else in my business, a C... Player: Yeah, of the 10 people he hired, yeah, he and everyone he hired was F. So, one of the—it's so— as you go up in the organization with hires, the risk and reward goes up. And so, that's something that a lot of people don't like talking about, but I will, which is if you hire somebody and let's say that

they're not a cultural fit, maybe they have the skills, or they are a cultural fit and they don't have the skill fit and they're a leader, what you find often—and it sucks—is that everyone—it's almost like a tree that has an entirely rotten branch. It's like you end up having to scoop out three-fourths of what was underneath because you realize that they were ineffective or they just were against the actual mission of the business. And it's harrowing and it's horrible, but I try to give this analogy to my team because we've had to do it in

every business we like; it happens. It's just part of business. If somebody goes to the bar and you're at the club and somebody racks up, you know, just ordering shots for everybody—shots, shot, shot, shot, shot, shots—and then that guy dips, that guy leaves, we all have to pay the bill. In the moment when we pay the bill, when we scoop out the deadwood, when we scoop out the rot from the organization, it feels horrible. But that pain isn't because the scooping out the rot is bad; it's because we planted it on bad ground or because

that guy ordered all these shots but couldn't afford it. And I have a different analogy because I really want to drive this home because I think it's important. In the relationship world, if one spouse tells the other spouse, "Hey, I cheated on you; I had an affair," that moment is incredibly painful for both parties. And so, what it makes you think is, "Oh, this was wrong to tell the truth." But it's not wrong to tell the truth; what's wrong was cheating. When you tell the truth, that's when you make it right. And so, the pain

that you often have to encounter in the organization feels wrong but is right because you're writing a wrong. And that's where the pain occurs. And that's why so many businesses stay stuck: because they have this affair; they have this person, and they're unwilling to have that hard conversation—or multiple conversations—in order to make it right, and they stay stuck for years. This is another quality of really successful founders that I've noticed, which is what you just said: the ability to have the hard conversation sooner. In my first, um, in my Folia, where there's first-time founders, they're

coming to me in our monthly meeting saying, "God, there's this guy who's running the e-com division and he's so bad, and I'm having to do the job for him. What do I do about it, Steve? What do you think?" But then they come back to me two weeks later and they're like, "He's still there!" Right? A year later and you're like, "It's still John!" You know, you're like, "What are we talking about here?" I remember asking them at such a meeting, "Does John know that you're unhappy with him?" "Oh, yeah, no." So, there's this quiet

dissatisfaction, which I think is a virus, right? And what no one wants to discuss is the fact that everyone else knows John sucks. Amen. And that becomes the minimum standard for what is acceptable for excellence in the organization. And so, I think, like, if brand is what your reputation is externally, I think culture is kind of what reputation is internally. And so, I define culture operationally because I think culture is a very fluffy word. What does that mean? Right? It's the rules that govern reinforcement within an organization. What do we reward? What do we punish?

And so, the thing is that realistically, there's—like, people have values because they're bundled terms that lead up to many behaviors. If I said Rolls-Royce, they probably would have some value that's quality over speed, probably, right? And so they would have that, but somebody would have to say, like, "What does that mean?" Right? Well, we hope that we use this as a decision-making filter for how it affects behaviors in every situation so that when you're in the question of, "Should I go fast, or should I make it right?" you make it right. And there are other

organizations, kind of like the speed—justice and mercy, speed and quality; both of them are important, and sometimes they sit diametrically opposed. So it's like we have to say, "Where do we sit in the gray so that we can duplicate decision-making across the organization so that we can maintain the culture?" And so, culture—this is a lot, but culture, I think—this is actually a quote. "Culture trumps strategy" like twice a week and every day on Sunday. If you have a mediocre strategy but an unbelievable culture, you will crush somebody who has a great strategy and a terrible

culture because culture leads up to performance and execution. And almost every business is limited by execution, not strategy. Most business strategies aren't that complicated: like, "Let's do a really good job so good that people tell their friends about us," and as long as we have enough gross margin, we'll make money. It's not that hard, right? It's just that the doing it is the hard part. And so, when we have these—they are the spoken and unspoken roles, mostly unspoken. If someone shows up three minutes late to a meeting and... There's 10 people in the meeting, and

it's supposed to be a marketing meeting. I'm there; if I don't say anything, I have now said we have an unspoken rule that if someone shows up three minutes late to a meeting, it's okay. I've reinforced that rule. Now, if I've reinforced it by not punishing the behavior or, at least, calling it out, um, on the flip side, if someone comes in and I berate them, that's also a way of changing behavior—maybe not the right way to do it. Um, but I could then—like, what do you do in that situation? Someone shows up three minutes

late. First off, you would probably sideline with that person and be like, “Hey, I don't know if you realized that you were three minutes late. What happened?” And they're like, “I was on a client call. It went late. I'm really sorry,” or “I was on a sales call.” For me, in my organization, clients and sales take priority. So if you have a meeting and you're on a sale and you're about to close it, close the sale, right? But if you were just doing nothing and we have this meeting, then this is the priority. So, the

next time we hop on, I'll be like, “Hey, guys, I just want to address something. John was late; he was late because of a sales call.” Or, when I DM him right as he got on late, I would say, “Hey, make sure you say that and be like, ‘Hey, guys, sorry I was late. I was on a sales call.’” And then I would say, “That's fine; you're good to go. Always go make money.” Yeah, and then I'm reinforcing the right thing, yeah. Right? And so I think we're very big on rapid feedback, um, in the

moment because that's how you train behavior. So, if you look at, if—so there's tons of studies on this, but basically, if you want to train a dog, right? Um, and you want it to sit, if you have it sit and then immediately give a biscuit, it learns really quickly. If you have it sit and then wait 10 seconds before you give a biscuit, it takes like three times as many repetitions for it to learn that the sitting gets the biscuit. If you wait more than a minute, it never learns, really. You can see the learning

curve; the amount of repetitions just skyrockets until eventually there is no amount. But here's where it gets crazy: that biscuit is still reinforcing something—just not sitting. It's reinforcing the thing that just came before it. So, if we want people to do something, we have to change in the moment. And so when we train—and I think that we're a training organization; we're very good at training whatever skills—is engineering ways to give many feedback loops in a short period of time around, uh, specific skills. So, I use sales because it's one that everyone understands. If you're training

a script with someone, if you let someone read through a script and then at the end you say, “Hey, you know, here are the things you could have done better. Blah.” This is how 95% of people train. It also doesn't work. Mhm. We set the premise with, “You're going to read through the script and in the first 30 minutes we might get through a third of it. I'm going to probably stop you like 30 times, and if that happens, it means we're doing it right.” So we set the premise that I'm going to interrupt you

a bunch of times, and as soon as you say the first line, I'm going to be like, “Stop. Say it again. Say it like this. Go again.” And then they're like, “Okay,” and they say it, and I'm like, “Awesome job! Do it again. Awesome job! Do it again.” So I reinforce it as many times as I can. Okay, go to the second sentence right now. Do first and second. Right? Do second and third, right? And you keep working your way through until eventually, they just say it like a whistle; they can sing it because they've

also had so many repetitions and so many feedback loops that they're like, “This is what it sounds like when it's right.” And I think that the vast, vast majority of organizations have no idea how to train, and their entire training, their way of getting talent is just, “Uh, let's hire 10 and we'll just see who works out,” rather than being able to take someone and level them up. And I think that the ability to train is one of the largest alphas that exist in organizations because if you can buy talent at a B skill and

get them to A+, then you net the delta and profit between what you had to attract and pay the person to come and what they perform at. If you have to use a picking strategy, then you have to pay for the current market rate of the skill, and so you actually eat into margin because you don't know how to train. There are advantages to speed, and sometimes it still makes sense to bring in the talent because maybe the training requires so much time that it's not worth it. And so, from a hiring perspective—because we were

just talking, this is the theme—we always want to hire for the smallest skilled deficiency. And so, in low-skilled labor, for example, if we have a cupcake bakery and I need somebody to work the counter, that is pretty low-skilled labor. And so, if there are a number of skills that are required, being able to be on time, smile, and be nice—those things… Are bundled terms that have many skills underneath them, right? Whereas teaching someone how to use the register might take like 30 minutes, so it makes sense to hire for attitude and then train aptitude when

you have low-skilled labor. When you have really high-skilled labor, I can't teach someone 10 years of being a CFO for M&A—just an extreme example, right? In that instance, we still hire for the smallest skilled deficiency, but I can probably teach someone to be nice under these circumstances faster than I can teach them to be a CFO if they have everything that I want here. Obviously, you would want both, but the world is imperfect, and so we just try to hire for the smallest skill gap. Attitude is a series of skills, so instead of thinking of

things as attitude and aptitude, just think of everything as skills, and then we hire always for the smallest deficiency—the thing that's easiest to train up. Yeah, okay. One of the things that's so central to that is we were saying about giving people feedback, and I wrote down that most companies, and most entrepreneurs and founders, are scared to give petty feedback. Oh, because if I notice you're making a slight error, it feels petty to point that out; it feels like I'm some kind of rude dictator. Yeah, why is that so important, and how do you create

an environment? I'm totally good with that. Yeah, a lot of people aren't. I have lots of managers on my teams, and they don't want to offend people. Their central focus is too much on being nice, and it's “dude kind,” not nice. It's one of our cultural values—you know, I wouldn't say it's not the one on the site, but it's something that is repeated internally all the time. "Not nice" is one of the big ones, which is that you're actually being unkind to someone by not maximizing the likelihood that they succeed in their role. People don't

usually lose jobs because of one thing; it's typically a hundred small things. If we can immediately fix those hundred small things, most people want to do a good job, and most people want to succeed, and most people want to move up. We can maximize the likelihood that those things occur if we help them. This is where the culture is there. If on that first day, like I said, we say we're going to work through the script, and we're only going to get through a third of it, I'm going to stop you 30 times to correct

you, we've already set the expectations of how things go here: we will fix things, and we will fix them fast. It's understanding the difference, and we teach our teams this. What is the difference between an insult and criticism? So, criticism is a discrepancy between actual and desired. You were supposed to be on time, and this week you were late twice, so that is a discrepancy. "You're lazy" is the insult. The judgment that's associated with the discrepancy is insulting. Pointing out the discrepancy is purely criticism, and that's objective. If you want to improve the team, remove

insults, focus on criticism, and tell them what to do instead. The easiest way to think through this, I think, is "stop, start, keep." So, I'll tell you a real story. We had a director-level, so a relatively high person in the organization, who was having behavior issues. Said differently, everyone thinks you're a dick. He ended up making his rounds of the executive team and having a sit-down with all of them because he was really proficient at his skill—he's a high performer, good at what he does; just no one liked him. So, he talks to four different

executives, and the behavior didn't change. He finally came to my office and was a little bit worried. He was like, "Am I going to get fired?" I was like, "No, HR will fire you. If you're going to get fired, you're not going to meet with me. What are we talking about?" When we sat down, I said, "Okay, I want to be clear: I want to decrease the likelihood that people call you a dick in the future." I said, "Does that sound like an agreeable goal?" He said, "Yeah, I want that." I was like, "Okay, good.

I also don't care if you are a dick; I just care that everyone else thinks you are. I just want to minimize the likelihood that I get drawn into this ever again." So, the reasons that they are calling you a dick, we need to dive into that. Every other conversation you'd had with some of the leaders was just like, "Hey man, stop being a dick." The thing is, what do you do with that? Nothing. You just get insulted, and then you have nothing to do. Instead, it’s like, "Okay, when you cut people off when they

talk—stop. Start: keep doing this instead—shut up." So, when someone else is talking, wait until they finish; if you're not sure, ask if they're done. It's like, "Okay, when you give unsolicited advice on how they should run their department—don't. Or ask if they want it. If they say no, don't say anything." So, we identified three or four behaviors that he was doing. And I said, "Just do this instead." Literally, the next week, people were like, "What happened to him? He's like a new man." The thing is, he wasn't a dick; he just didn't know how to

behave. If you want to teach, teaching has to come from conditions and behavior. If you're trying to get someone to be different, you have to give them the conditions under which they need to change. So when someone says, "If this occurs, then this is what you need to do," the vast majority of training that exists does none of that. It's just people shouting at each other, insulting them, and saying, "Hey, you need to level up! You need to get, you know, you need to increase your performance." What does that mean? I think one of the

easiest ways to identify the actual behavior—because that's actually the tough part—is like, why do I think he's a dick? Why do I think she's lazy? Because I want to insult them. But that's not the case. So how do I help her? It's like, "Okay, why am I describing her this way?" When I slack, she tends to be slow in her responses. Sometimes it takes an hour; sometimes three hours. I'm like, "Okay, so I'm going to gather that data." The next thing is, when I get stuff, you know, projects from her, they are incomplete. I feel

like they're not all the way fleshed out. I'm like, "Okay, that's a second bucket." The next one is that when she shows up on Zoom, she looks disheveled. I'm like, "Okay, so now when I talk to Sandy, I'm not going to say, 'Hey Sandy, you look lazy; I need you to level up a little bit here. Otherwise, we're going to have issues and have to put you on a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan).'” Instead of saying that, just put her on the Performance Improvement Plan without saying it's a Performance Improvement Plan and just say, "When you

show up on calls, change your background to the standard company setting so we don’t see your bedroom." Also, "Make sure that from the waist up, you look professional." What do I mean by "look professional"? Have a collared shirt and put your hair back. Now, some people might ask, "How does that work with woke politics?" I have no idea; deal with it in your country. But you should have a culture where you can say stuff like that. The second thing is that right now, I need you to turn on Slack notifications, and I need you to

respond within ten minutes during work hours. After work hours? Fine. But you know, from 9 to 5, you have to respond within ten minutes. Do you think you can do that? Yes. The end goal here is to get everyone to stop calling you lazy, and this is how we do it. It's interesting because it goes back to something you were saying earlier about specifics versus vague—like the prefrontal cortex versus the amygdala. An insult is amygdala-based; you totally can't do anything with that. But if you make it specific, then action is more likely to occur, and

useful action is more likely to occur. Now, on this point of a person who's listening right now, who's an entrepreneur and thinking about making those first hires, I want to throw a proposition at you to see what you think of this. One of the things that I think can help you not mess up in the hiring process, especially early on, is to live with the permanent assumption that you are bad at hiring. I live with the permanent assumption that I'm bad at hiring because I have biases—there are things I don't know about certain areas, etc.

And when you start with that assumption, that you are really bad at hiring, you try to decentralize the decision-making. One thing I say a lot to startup founders is, if you're hiring a salesperson, create an interview process where there are five people, and one of them might be you, while the other four are the best salespeople you've ever encountered in your life—like who sold you your house. Ask them to be part of the interview process. How does that sit with you? I think it sits great, and I believe that the amount of references you go

for is proportional to the importance of the role. Okay, so say I'm the co-founder of a school. When he was a non-technical founder, he knew that to build an exceptional software product, you need world-class talent. So he interviewed 600 developers to find Daniel, who has become the CTO of school. He asked everybody to know who the best coders were, and then he talked to all those people and asked them who the best coder they knew was, and he followed up with those. People, and then he asked them who they thought the best coder they knew

was. Eventually, Daniel's name came up as "god tier." He's like, "If you can ever get this guy, he'd be amazing." So, he ended up finding a way to find Daniel, and then he ended up becoming a co-founder of the school as well. What's interesting about that process is that it actually leads into rapid learning. When I was a consultant, I was 22 years old, and I would have to give presentations to four-star generals about weapon systems that I knew nothing about because I was, you know, chugging beers like 12 months earlier. So, how do you

sound intelligent in front of somebody who has 30 years more experience than you do? The consulting process for rapid learning begins with finding five experts. You ask one person, "Hey, tell me the five people you know who are the best at this thing." Then you ask them, "Who are the five people you know who also know a ton about this thing?" For each of the interviews, you take down all of their information—like, "What do you think about this? What do you think about that?"—and what happens is you start mapping the information ecosystem. The reason you

talk to experts first is that there's no lack of information; you can Google whatever you want. The problem is there's too much information, so the filter becomes where the highest point of leverage is. Experts have spent years filtering out what's important. Then, you basically rapidly consume the most filtered information and reorganize it. This is what a typical analyst will do as a consultant. For the space and cyber project I worked on, we had 600 pages of notes from all the interviews we conducted. The first step is to recategorize all the notes by category, so it

goes from raw notes to categorized notes. From there, you distill and consolidate the notes into what the truths or the most distilled beliefs are about these particular weapon systems, but it could be about whatever topic. From there, you're able to generate your inferences regarding what it looks like when it's right, what the problems are, and what potential solutions might be. That's how you say, "This is what we need to do next." That's if you're trying to learn something, but in talking to all those people, it actually works the same way. Because of the interview process,

the higher up the talent is, the more I would encourage entrepreneurs to use it as a learning process. As a consultant, I present candidates who want to come in for a role with the actual problems of the business for which they would have control and ask, "How would you solve these?" They tell me all the things they would be considering, and then I'll ask the next candidate what he thinks, and what she thinks, and all of a sudden, I get free consulting, which is amazing. Secondly, I can tell by the quality and quantity of metrics

that someone tracks how good they are at a particular scale. This is fundamentally what separates beginners from experts. Beginners typically have binary thinking in terms of outcomes: either it worked or it didn't work. An expert, for example, for a marketing campaign isn't going to say, "Oh, marketing doesn't work" or "ads don't work." They're going to say, "This particular campaign didn't work because our click-through rate was too low," or "because it was sending unqualified traffic and we weren't converting enough on the page," or "we didn't have enough people taking the second step in our four steps."

They can break down any part of that continuum. If I'm interviewing a salesperson and I ask, "How are you going to affect these metrics? What behaviors are you going to implement?" the same degree of specificity applies. If they give me vague responses, I'll dial in and say, "No, what specifically are you going to do that's going to change that?" By the way, this is a wonderful way to teach in the organization how what they do makes the business money. For example, if you have a customer support rep, and you say, "Hey, how do you make

our company money?" if they can't explain it to you, they probably aren't doing it. It sounds as simple as it is, but if someone says, "Well, you know, I answer customers' questions," you can ask, "How does that make us money?" If they're able to say, "When I answer customers' questions, I increase the likelihood that they refer other customers, and I increase the likelihood that they stay and continue to pay for us. So, I help us get new customers by delivering an amazing experience, and I get the customers that we have to continue to pay us.

If it makes sense, I recommend other products and services we have, and I can introduce them to sales folks who can explain that, so we generate even more revenue from them," then I'd be impressed. If you can articulate that, you're probably not just a front-line employee; you're probably a... Director, right? And so that level of nuance, the specificity, is what shows expertise. When I look for and I'm interviewing candidates, I first want to gather as much information as I can; I want to drain as much knowledge as possible. But I'm also really looking for the

quality and quantity of metrics they track and the behaviors they employ to influence those metrics. So, in the hypothetical problem where let's say we're trying to solve that we have low click-through rates, I'd be like, "Okay, this is the problem we have. How would you approach changing it?" Right? And then that actually gets me to understand what they would do in the organization because it's very easy to say, "You know, I'm going to come in, and let's say as a sales director, I'm going to improve the sales team." I'm like, "Okay, cool. What are you

going to do?" You know? "I'm going to coach the guys up." I'm like, "Okay, what does that mean?" And so, just continuing to ask, "What does that mean? How do you do that?" until they're like, "Okay, well, I'm going to meet with the guys every single morning, and we're going to do role play." "All right. How do you role play?" "Well, we're going to start with the script." The more detailed they get, the more I believe they can do it because they've actually explained what actions they will take. If someone can't dial into actions, then

it's very unlikely that they're going to take them. What I just outlined is basically three core things. So, one is the quality and quantity of metrics that they track; the second is the behaviors that they're going to perform to influence those metrics; and then, leading up to the third, how do those metrics and these behaviors influence the revenue in the business? If they can explain that clearly, you have a winner. All of that requires them to know whether the person's not bullshitting and also to know what metrics matter. Right? Because someone could sit in an

interview—if I'm a first-time founder—say a bunch of big, complicated words that sound good, I hire them, and that's really what I'm trying to mitigate here: How do I not let a [ __ ] pass me? I think having them explain it as though you were a fifth grader is key. So, I always make the same joke because, you know, you do this enough times, you make the same joke. It's like, "Hey, I need you to explain this to me like I'm a golden retriever," which is a breed of dog that has Down syndrome. All right?

So, and I always get a laugh, and I'm like, "So, assume I know nothing; let's start there. What do you think customer service means?" If someone really has expertise—so Richard Feynman was famous for this; the physicist said, "If you can't explain it to a child, then you don't understand it well enough." So, if they do confuse you, then it means that they don't understand it, or they're doing it purposefully, neither of which are good scenarios. You said something during that explanation; you mentioned your founding partner at school, and you said that he was pursuing a

CTO, and he remarked, "If we can get this guy, he'd be amazing." So many entrepreneurs that are starting in business have that thought. Sometimes they think, "If I could just get that guy from that amazing company to come join us in our garage, where we're building this new startup, it would change our fortunes." But how do I get a truly exceptional person who is being paid tons of money, who has a comfortable job, who has security, to come join me in my bedroom? I think there's the soft and the hard side, right? So, the hard

side is compensation. Maybe you don't have as much cash, so what you have are a few levers at your disposal. You have what do you pay them in cash; what's their upside if there's equity or shares that you're going to give them? This is obviously if it's a software business. It's probably worth segmenting this. If you're not in a software company, which is probably the vast majority of people listening to this, there are four elements within equity that exist: You have control—who gets to call the shots; you have risk—what happens if everything goes wrong; who's

liable; you have profits—who gets distributions from the cash flow of the business; and then, basically, you have sale or enterprise value—when we sell or if we sell, who gets to participate in that upside? Those are kind of the four elements of equity. Now, the thing is that you can obviously grant shares, or you can give stock in a company—that's one way of doing it—but you can also basically negotiate around any of these things. Now, most of the time, they don't want the risk and they probably won't get control if it's your company, so you really

just have profit and you have upside in terms of a sale. You can negotiate these things; there are lots of structuring options. I’m not going to get into legal around this, but asking somebody, "What do you want?" sometimes is just a very powerful way of beginning this. My favorite question for these types of scenarios is asking, "What would it take?" So, when you have this guy who says, "Man, it would be amazing," like… How do I sell this guy? I just ask him, "What would sell you?" So say, "What would it take?" 'Cause I don't

know; he'll tell me, and I love that frame because it assumes yes. It assumes you're going to come. So, what would it take? So many of the books that you write and so much of the content you make centers on this idea of sales. Yeah, and it is a sale, isn't it? Totally. And I always think about the Steve Jobs quote where he met with, was it John Sculley, who was working at Pepsi? He said, "Do you want to consider continuing selling sugar water for the rest of your life, or would you want to come

change the world?" How does that sort of emotional, psychological element of this factor into persuading someone exceptional to come and join your mission? I think it's the amygdala story that we started with— with the nasal strip thing, which now has actually reared its nose multiple times, poked its nose in a few times here. But I think that pitch that you're giving to a potential co-founder or potential early hire who's going to be a leader is the same, more or less, that you'd give to an investor. It's almost the same pitch, except instead of investing capital,

they're investing time, they're investing their life, they're investing their expertise. But fundamentally, you're asking for investment. I'm just asking you—there's also this weird question which I've actually never asked anybody—oh, but founders often struggle with: Do I hire naivety, because that's going to probably create new solutions to old problems, like the young, scrappy kid that gets TikTok, or do I hire experience, which is going to be more expensive, more conventional, and safe? I see some companies lean too far either way. Yeah, I have actually fairly strong opinions on this. Oh great! So, I actually think it's

a barbell strategy where you have people on either end and very little in the middle. Interesting! So I love lots of young, hungry people who are here for growth and want to learn, who are ready to work long hours and just go all in, and the people at the back half of their career that are here—they’ve made enough money; they know they can get a job wherever. You're not doing them a favor by giving them a job, and they're not what I—a term I hate—which is "careerists." They're not obsessed with their title; they're not obsessed

with their career path, what their promotion plan is going to be. They basically have a litmus test, which is like, "I have to make about this to come in and do this with you." But they actually just really love the work. So these people are learning—so the young people are learning and overcompensating with tons of hours and reps, and these people are bringing their experience to the game and creating significantly more leverage with strategy. The people in the middle are the ones that tend to be the pain in the ass for everybody, and I don’t

think—and be clear here—I don’t think this is an age thing; I think it’s a perspective thing. It's just: are you here for growth or are you here to share what you know? I think that it's the people in the middle that are like, "Well, I’m bringing something but I need some," it's like this kind of tit-for-tat relationship that I would say the vast majority of people that don't work out are in that bucket. What role does naivety play in innovation here? Because the kids that don’t know the rules are more likely to stumble across nuances,

right? I think yes, you can fundamentally disrupt any industry if you don’t know how it’s supposed to go. And so, but that’s—I think that really speaks to something we said at the very beginning, which is starting from first principles: What are the few things I know to be true? And then basically forgetting everything else. When you build from those assumptions up, you end up building lots of different paths up the mountain that may or may not have been trod before. I think one of the most corroborating things that can happen sometimes is that, like, you

re-derive a solution that already works, and you’re like, "Okay, well, now I know why this works." And I think that actually gives you more confidence in the path, and you’re like, "Okay, that’s fine, but now I know why we’re doing this—not just because other people did it, but because I understand why it works." And so, I think it just comes down to: What are the few truths that I know to be true? And going all in on those things—like I know that if customers love my product, they are more likely to tell other people about

it than if they hate it. That, I feel very confident. So then we say, "Okay, what are the things that must occur in order to get someone to, quote, love my product?" AKA increase the likelihood that they tell their friends about it or post about us. And so now there’s—and you can break this—and again, this is where quality and quantity of metrics matter. So it's like, how much more nuance can I break and break this up into small pieces? So it's like, okay, at what... "Time do we deliver these messages, or around what experiences that

have a high likelihood of them posting can we decrease the friction around, uh, them sending friends? How can we make it both easy, and how can we incentivize it? And so, all of these components, whether it's a service business, a physical products business, or a software business, still work the same way. For each customer, for example, as we're taking someone through this, I have four milestones that I look for, which are the four R's. So, how do I get them to review my product? How do I retain them? Immediately, how do I get them to

review my product? How do I get them to refer somebody? And then how do I resell them? Basically, those four R's are what I try and take every customer through. It's a very simple framework. When you think, 'Oh man, customer success, what does it mean?' it's just like, 'Well, these are the four things that I want to occur.' So, all I'm trying to do is reverse engineer what activities increase the likelihood that each of these four R's happen. This year, 55% of businesses globally are utilizing AI in some form. It's become so integrated across every

point of my businesses that it's hard to remember a time when my team and I weren't using it. Adobe Express, who sponsored this podcast, is a prime example of a tool our team uses day in and day out. Its generate image tool only needs a few words describing what you want, and using AI, it returns many images for you to choose from. If you're watching, see how quick and easy it is, and you can try it yourself for free. The customizable templates mean you or anyone in your team can create something that stands out without

starting entirely from scratch or being a design expert. It's the type of technology that differentiates Adobe Express from being just another design tool and makes it the quick and easy create anything app. Search Adobe Express or download it for free in the app store right now. Well, I want to go through the four R's, but I also think that what comes before the four R's is knowing how to get customers in the first place, which is a tricky one. Actually, maybe even the thing that comes before that is being psychologically prepared for the toll and

the roller coaster that business is. I found this, um, found this graph of yours. Oh, God, yeah. I think for any founder starting a business, it's important for them to understand this cycle. I think you call it the crash burn cycle or something, because if you're not aware of this cycle, when you hit certain parts of it, you're probably going to think that there's something wrong with you. But there’s a certain inevitability to this crash cycle. I'll put it on the screen for anyone to see. Yeah, this is the entrepreneur life cycle until you learn

how to break free from it. There are six stages. You have stage one, which is uninformed optimism. This is where you see your friend or you see something online and it looks like they're making money, or it looks like there's some opportunity, and you think, 'Oh my God, that sounds amazing!' You have optimism because it looks great, but it's uninformed because you have no idea what it entails. So then you dive in and you say, 'Okay, I'm going to pursue this thing,' whatever it is—baking cupcakes, lawnmowing, or crypto trading. The second step is you get

into it, and you're like, 'Oh my God, I don't know! There are so many things involved in this, and this is significantly more complicated than I expected!' So then you become an informed pessimist. You now know that it's hard, or significantly harder than you expected. The third stage is you have your crisis of meaning, or the valley of despair. You're continuing to do this stuff; it's continuing to not work, and you keep working, and it keeps not working. This is the step, and this is the point of truth—the cycle where the paths of the entrepreneur

split. The vast majority of people take this next step, which is to say, 'You know what? There's that thing over there that my other friend’s doing; maybe I should do that instead.' So then they hop back to uninformed optimism, and then they go boom to informed pessimism, and they just go around and around and around, living the same six months for 20 straight years. Now, the other path from the valley of despair is sticking with it. You become an informed optimist because now you understand all the bad stuff, but you also understand the good stuff,

how to avoid the bad, and maximize the good. Once you're there, you stick on that path long enough, and you end up achieving what you originally thought was really easy and fast. This cycle is more or less the Alex Rosi life story, which is why I can so intimately describe the steps. I call that loop and that the person on the other side, the woman in the red dress, is probably my favorite part of the Matrix movie, where Neo, who's the main character, is in a..." Program to teach him one thing, and so he's walking,

uh, through the crowded streets of what looks like New York City, with Morpheus leading him, and, uh, he's droning on about something that he's supposed to learn. He says, “Neo, were you listening to me, or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?” And Neo was looking at the woman in the red dress as Morpheus was talking. Then he says, “Look again.” Neo looks back at the woman in the red dress, and it's Agent Smith with a gun pointed at his head. In that moment, he's like, “Freeze.” He explains that you're either one

of us or one of them, and they are the people who are Sentinels sent to destroy us. So, what appeared to be the woman in the red dress is actually an agent from the system meant to destroy the opportunity that you're in right now. I love the woman in the red dress so much because it’s so real. You’re in this thing, you’re in this relationship with your business, and you’re like, “You know, this girl seems great.” Then you get to know her and find out she snores when she sleeps, and all of a sudden it's

like, you know, you see the sweatpants and no makeup in the morning and realize that sometimes she’s moody or whatever. But you start to get to know her, and you're like, “I don’t know if we’re going to get married; this is kind of where we’re at.” Then you see a woman in the red dress, and you’re like, “You know what? I think that’s the girl.” So, you quit this relationship with your business and get into that relationship. But then you realize that that girl has baggage; she has a crazy ex-boyfriend, and you’re like, “Oh my

God, I didn’t want to deal with any of this stuff.” Right? So, my CFO was one of the first people that was like, “Oh my God, I hired that person!” It changed everything. My CFO at Gym Launch had taken four companies from zero to one hundred million. She had done over 40 M&A transactions; her largest one was five billion. Super experienced, she was at the very end of her career and said, “I’ll take you guys. I’ll take this one last ride with you.” Now, mind you, Leila and I—I'm 26 or 27 at the time, and

Leila's 23 or 24—and we're sitting across the table from a very experienced business person, being like, “Please help us.” One of the things she taught me that I'll never forget is, “The grass is always greener on the other side; you just don’t know that it’s fertilized with [ __ ].” She’s Southern, so she had this deep Southern accent: “There’s always [ __ ] [ __ ] everywhere.” She said, “I’ve been in enough businesses to know that all businesses have [ __ ], so you just have the [ __ ] you don’t know about and the

[ __ ] you do know about, and you’re in this business, and so this is the [ __ ].” That has been so profoundly impactful in my life because it was so hard for me to break the cycle—really hard for me. I mean, I gave you my life story of the many businesses I’ve been involved in—entrepreneurial ADD has been so real for me. I’ve made some of the biggest career mistakes by just pursuing and splitting my attention between multiple endeavors. I can say truthfully that this year, 2024, was the first year—this is now 2025—where I

haven't experienced FOMO, so fear of missing out. It was one of those things that I always had. I would see somebody doing really well, like, “Oh man, I should be getting into that,” like, “I shouldn’t be doing this; I should be doing that.” It was one of those things kind of like being happy where you don’t realize you’re happy; you just look back and think, “You know what? That was a really good year.” You kind of see it in retrospect. What I realized was that now, when I hear someone say, “Oh my God, I crushed

it with this thing,” I think, “That’s amazing for them. I’m sure there are tons of problems that I don’t know about, and that’s amazing, but I'm going to keep doing this thing because this is the only thing I know how to do pretty well, and I’m just going to keep compounding my information advantage against everybody else who thinks this is easy and wants to get into it.” I think that any massive company that you know of has existed for multiple decades, and in order for something to exist for multiple decades, the founder has to stay

focused on that thing for the whole time. I measure focus by the quantity and quality of things that you say no to, and I define commitment as the elimination of alternatives. If you think of marriage as the ultimate commitment, then it is indeed the ultimate commitment because you've eliminated literally every alternative besides this person. I think that many business problems and many entrepreneurs would 5x or 10x their businesses if they simply gave themselves no way out—this is what I’m doing. I mean, the term, you know, burning... The boats, but I'm eliminating all alternatives and structuring

my life such that I make it very difficult to pursue the alternatives. I think by doing that, you can actually conquer this cycle and make it past the split where you go, uh, crash and burn, and then restart the doom loop, or make it to informed optimism and then eventually to the achievement that you want. There's so much there; there's so much there, but it's such an important point. Um, so where shall I start? So at that moment, here, this crisis of meaning moment, what I see so much of is entrepreneurs not necessarily quitting the

old thing but just taking on something else. I get entrepreneurs will come up to me in the gym, and they'll say, "Hey, Steve, um, just want to let you know what I do and see if you can offer me any advice." Then they'll list three things: they'll say, "I'm starting this crypto thing with my friend Dave; I've got this hair business where we're selling on e-commerce; and I've got this other thing." They almost assume that the more things they're doing, the higher the probability that they'll be successful in something. My mom was that—my mom has

started 30 businesses, and I watched for my whole childhood how she would start a hairdressing salon, and then the person down the street running an estate agent would come in and say, "We're making loads of money as estate agents." She'd start that; that business would suck; she'd hit this moment of crisis of meaning, then start a furniture business, and she—so she jumped between 20 to 30 businesses. It’s kind of still happening now, where they last six months; they eventually go bust. She sort of like, you know, like the monkeys that swing to the next branch,

swings to the next thing, and there's never been the escape velocity that comes from this informed optimism part. So yeah, this—it really rang true for me in every sense of the word. This idea of focus going against all of your instincts and your emotions, but being pivotal to achievement. I think entrepreneurship is far more a war of the heart than it is a war of the mind. Like, we can understand what we should do; we just don't do it. I think that's why, um, we are so much better at giving advice than we are at

following it. Most people, if they just followed their own advice, they'd be successful, right? And so, um, with this kind of valley of despair—I call it, um, niche slapping. It's like, "Don't make me niche slap you!" which is like when you have three things going on. It's like, "Let me, like, slap you into just picking one." Because the thing is that any of them can work, but none of them will work unless you pick only one. Because it's actually, in my opinion, an exercise in arrogance to assume that you doing three things is somehow going

to beat somebody who's doing one. I can promise you the competitor who is going to beat you is only doing that one thing. And you think a third of your time is going to beat theirs? No, it's not going to. I think it's arrogant, and so there's actually like an underpinning of ego underneath of this. And I say this to somebody who did this. So like when I had the launch business, I also had my six gyms; I also had a chiropractor agency, and I also had a dental agency. And so I would introduce myself

like, "Oh, I own lots of companies." But I think one of the biggest misconceptions when you're an entrepreneur is not understanding the difference between being an owner and being the CEO. And so they might hear that you have a portfolio; they might hear that I have a portfolio and be like, "Okay, well, they have a portfolio, so I must model that." That guy's tall; I should play basketball. It doesn't work that way, right? I should be—if I want to be rich, I should fly private. It doesn't work that way, right? Um, it's conflating order, and

so we must do these things in order to get the outcome. We have to concentrate on only one thing in order to get the outsize return. And that spreading of attention, especially when you're newer in the entrepreneurial career, it's like you already don't know so many things. How do you now want to have three sets of knowns that you want to try and conquer at the same time? The fallacy in thinking is that I'm going to try all of them and see which one works. But none of them will work because you're waiting to see

which one will work because you can force, in my opinion, you can force one thing to work. Provided, like, I'm going to assume basics, like you're selling—you're not selling $5 bills for $4. Like, you know the normal economics of a business. Like if a real estate business exists, there are other people making money. There are hair businesses where people are making money. There are lawn mowing businesses where people are making money. You can make money in all of them; you just can't make money in all of them at the same time. And when you walked

in today and you sat down on the chair, I said, “What's going on with you professionally?” I remember what you said. You said, “More of the same and better,” which clearly comes from your wisdom, my infinite wisdom, right? Well, it's just from suffering. This, like, the biggest entrepreneurial mistakes I've made in my career, have all come from splitting my attention. Every one of them—like, every single one of them. Like I talked about how I had the e-commerce business that I bolted onto my licensing company. I should not have done that. As soon as I did

that, my revenue started slowing down in its growth. Why did it? Because I was ADD. Like I just—I was like, "Oh my, I don't want to leave money on the table," and I want to be so vigilant about this. You are always going to leave money on the table. That is the result of focus. But you're leaving a small amount of money on the table to pursue the much larger money that's on another table, just sticking with the thing that you're on right now because of compounding. If I were to show a chart here, it's

like if you're at year three of your thing and you want to think about moving to year zero of a new thing, you have to compare. Maybe year zero of a new thing grows faster, but it has to grow faster than year three to four of the thing that you're on right now. And I think people will compare year zero to year zero, but not year four to year zero. And the thing is, we actually have a linear life, and so that is an unfair but true comparison of the opportunity cost. Every exceptionally successful entrepreneur

that I know has just stuck with one thing for such an inordinate amount of time. I think there's a quote by, um, I want to say Shane Parrish, but he said, “Success is doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without believing that you're smarter than you are.” Yeah, and it's just like, we know what we need to do. And comp—so we don't need to make our lives more complex. Complexity will come with scale, I promise. And so just simply trying to do more of what you're already doing well is already hard enough.

Don't add anything else. And so, like, if you need to write some sort of commitment of, "I'm just going to stick with this," then do that. But what happens is—we were talking about the level earlier, about like beating the bosses. So what happens is, you know how to beat boss one through three of the game and so then you just say, “Okay, well, I'm just going to start the game over and beat boss one; I mean, this time it's going to be different.” But then you just get to level three again and then you're stuck

again. And so people just keep getting up to level three in new endeavors over and over again because they never learned how to get past that boss. And so you just have to confront the uncertainty of knowing that you don't know how to do it, but that you will figure it out if you keep doing enough repetitions. And that's where you talk to as many people as you can, you see what they say, you consolidate it all, you say, “I think this is the highest likely path.” It might not work, but I do believe fundamentally

that if we cut people's hair well and we do it for a long period of time, we will have a thriving business. And if we have a really good model from that thing, we might be able to open up another location. And if we keep our costs down, we might be able to have an actual model that we could either invest our own capital in or bring somebody else in to take it—like, all of these. Like, I have yet to find a business that can't get to $100 million a year that has a permutation of

it that exists. You're a dry cleaner? Fine! Well, cool, we'll build the model, and either we can license the model, we can franchise the model out, we can get outside investors, we can scale it nationally. We can do it! But the crazy goals are only crazy because people have crazy timelines. They're actually very sane goals if you extend the timeline out. If you have a true 10-year goal or a true 20-year goal, almost anything's accomplishable. I mean, almost every multibillion-dollar company is about—you know, they get—it's usually between like years six and ten when companies get

to kind of like those big numbers. And most people who are listening to this are five years into entrepreneurship. But you're six months into the thing that you've been working on right now, and you keep restarting the clock for getting to year ten every time you start over. And I think that's the part that it took me a very long time to figure out. And I think it takes a lot of entrepreneurs. Like, everyone messes around with a lot of stuff in the beginning because you just don't know what you're doing. And so in my

experience, it takes about five years for most entrepreneurs that I know to just, like, find something that works. It takes about five years to figure out which way is north. Yeah, right? Yeah. And then it takes like another five years, and a lot of people, that's it. Like, they restart; they go off, crash and burn. Um, and it takes another five years to build something that can create generational wealth. So it's about a ten-year slog. And here's the really hard truth about it: if you have a job right now, for almost all of that five

years, you quit your job because— You don't want to work as hard as you are, and you want to make more money. As soon as you quit, you will realize that you are now going to work way harder than you were, and you're going to make less money for an extended period of time. The one benefit is that you get to claim all responsibility for how little you make and how much you work because you're like, "My boss is an idiot," and it's me. But it's the truth. I think that, in some ways, having that,

um, optimistic ignorance is actually one of the really redeeming traits of entrepreneurs. One of the really hard parts is that the biggest jump you have to make gets so immediately reinforced by the freedom you have from being able to, you know, chart your own path. But that big success of quitting one thing and starting another? You need to immediately forget. I think that, fundamentally, that is why so many entrepreneurs keep doing it. It's because the first time you do it, it's the biggest rush ever. You quit your job, you do the business, and you get

some first traction. That first dollar that you make with the new business is like the best dollar ever, right? But it's such a strong reinforcer that what does it reinforce? It reinforces stopping what you're doing and starting something else. So, I think one of the fundamental errors of entrepreneurship is that sometimes the jumping ship to start this thing is the lesson that you need to immediately unlearn. Because after that, you have to just stick with it for a very long period of time. There's also something in that: entrepreneurs don't go into starting a company with

the belief that their hypothesis is wrong. So, in year one, or seven months in when they realize that their initial hypothesis was wrong, they think that means abandon [ __ ] because my hypothesis was wrong. Whereas successful entrepreneurs that I've met, especially second-time founders, realize that their hypothesis is almost certainly wrong from the jump. The process of starting is to correct and to find a new hypothesis. I think about Mark Zuckerberg in his room with face swap or whatever, rating people's attractiveness, and now Meta is there like a virtual reality AI company. Understanding that your

hypothesis is wrong from the jump and that, you know, this is a process of finding a new hypothesis, I think would give you a little bit more patience as well through these cycles of crisis of meaning and so on. So, two things. One is, I had this tweet that went super viral. It was like: first-time founder, "Hey, I need you to sign an NDA before I tell you my business idea." I know you've gotten... I know, I know. Third-time founder: "Here's everything I have. Here's all the documents. Here's all the projections. It's probably all wrong,

and this probably won't work, but I have a couple smart people, and I think we'll be able to figure it out. It'll probably cost more and take longer than we think, but we think it's worth a shot." And that thing went viral because everyone who's been on both sides of that understands: the entrepreneurs got it because they're like, "Oh my God, I was that guy." And all the investors get it because they're like, "Oh my God, I deal with this guy all the time." But actually, what you just said about the many iterations from your

original idea until what actually happens is, yet again, one of those demonstrations of the difference between a beginner and an expert. A beginner has binary thinking; they think this worked or it didn't work. If it didn't work, then I need a new idea. Rather than having the nuanced thinking of a master or an expert or advanced person who says, "What about this? If I click into it, I break it into its component parts: what about this didn't work?" Okay, it's not that meta ads don't work or advertising doesn't work; it's that we didn't nail the

hook in our ad or that we didn't make our offer clear enough on the landing page or it was not congruent with the advertisement. Or, you know, the offer itself wasn't very compelling or didn't have... it just wasn't this. Everyone's coming in and saying, "Yeah, yeah, I kind of want that, but this is actually my issue." We're not solving the core problem. So, it's always in the details. It's always in the sifting through the many small things that you find the kernel that ends up fixing the business. I mean, I know that Facebook was trying

to fix their virality issue, and they were locked in a room for days trying to figure out how they could get more users to retain on the platform, right? People would sign up, but then they wouldn't do anything, and then they'd drop out. Finally, Zuck just said, "Okay, we have some belief that if people have more friends, then they will engage." And so they didn't. And here's the thing: with the uncertainty, they couldn't prove it. He just said, "I feel like that's better than them not having friends." So, he said, "All right, the new goal

is 10 friends in 14 days." That's the goal. So, we have to create the experience so that we can get it to introduce them to 10 people or connect them with 10 people they already know on the platform within 14 days. And as soon as that happened, then... Obviously, Facebook took off or continued to grow, and so he wasn't like, "Oh, Facebook doesn't work anymore," or "Social networks aren't going to be a thing." It's usually way smaller, and the adjustment you need to make is much more nuanced than what you originally expect. If the foundational

principle is like cutting hair or mowing lawns, whatever it is—this problem exists, and I can charge a certain amount and make a profit on it—then there's nothing wrong with the business. It's just about determining what the constraint is that's holding us back. Usually, by zooming into the constraint and realizing that there are 20 things contributing to the outcome, not just one, that's where expertise comes in. You develop that expertise by trying and failing. Yeah, and that’s just the name of the game. So I think you have to have an incredibly high tolerance for failure without

internalizing it and feeling like you yourself are a failure as a result of failure. Well, this is it. When I started my first business at 18 years old, called Wallpark Social Network or whatever, I thought the game was to be right. I came to learn from businesses that came after that, actually, the game of entrepreneurship is to be successful, and they're two very different things. To win, because when you want to be right, you not only want to be CEO, but you also want your hypothesis that you put in that first pitch deck to come

true. Even when customers are telling you that you were wrong, you try to force the issue. But when your game is to be successful, there are a couple of really interesting things that I observe happen. One of them is that I watch founders say, "Actually, maybe I'm not the best person to be CEO." Even though I founded this thing, maybe I should be chief brand officer. When I think about some of the top companies in the UK, represented just valued at 100 million—Gymshark, Ben's business valued at 1.5 billion, Julian's business probably valued at a billion.

I'm involved in some of these businesses in different ways, but the thing they all have in common is, at some early point, the founder put their ego secondary to the success of the business. They said, "Actually, I'm not the best CEO; I should be head of brand or marketing or product, or whatever it is." That mindset shift—from needing to be right and at the helm of being right, versus this thing needing to be successful—goes back to the "who," which is that at some point, if you want to have a really ridiculously successful company, it will

require more lifetimes of expertise than you can live. Then it becomes a recruiting game. Very quickly, almost all business becomes recruiting—how do I... I mean, if you listen to Zuck talk about it, if you listen to Elon talk about it, if you listen to Steve Jobs talk about it. Steve would talk about how the best players he had in the company, he would set aside like a year to 18 months to bring them in. Amen. He said every time he knew who he wanted, and then he would take some calls with other people, and he'd

just be like, "But they're not John. They're not John." He would just keep working on them and working on them and working on them, and eventually they’d be like, “You know what, fine,” and give up. They'd think, "If this guy's this persistent, he probably will be successful; he will take us there." I think that people are the highest leverage thing that you can bring into the company, outside of, you know, crazy technology. One of my favorite videos of all time is where Steve Jobs, whom you just mentioned, talks about hiring truly exceptional people. He says

words to the effect—I’ll play it on screen—he says, “People think the success of Apple was a consequence of me and my talent and my skills, but what I've actually done is I've built my career, quote, on hiring truly exceptional people, doing the extremely hard work of finding them and hiring them.” This crazy thing happens when you do that: it propagates. I.E., A-players then want to work with A-players; they also hire A-players, and it spreads. I think it was this video where he said, “I've built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people

and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A-players.” I found something: I found that when you get enough A-players together—when you go through the incredible work to find, you know, five of these A-players—they really like working with each other, because they've never had a chance to do that before, and they don't want to work with B and C players. It becomes self-policing, and they only want to hire more A-players, so you build up these pockets of A-players, and it propagates. The thing is that it's just like money won't make you

happy; it's one of those things that every founder has to figure out for themselves. But the thing is—and I've obviously had a bunch of conversations around this—but like, what you think is an A-player today is not what you will think an A-player is in five years. So I think one of the hardest mental hacks... Around this is trying to project yourself into the future, into the size business that you want to have, and say, "Who would be an A player at that size and scale?" Then, coming back to the present and saying, "How do I

get them to work for me today?" Amen. It's really, and so as a mental process for anybody who does have a business right now and has some employees—if you like everybody right now, you probably have some version of your A player, because every business has at least one, hopefully, right? Besides you, imagine your business had five of those people. Picture in your head you've got that one person; now you have five of them. How much more would you make? Would you double? Would you fivefold? Would you 10x? Would you 50x? Sometimes you realize, you're like,

"No, I think I would actually 10x." And so, if that were the case, one: Not only would you 10x the company; number two: the value of the company would more than 10x because it would no longer be significantly reliant on you, and it would be more reliant on the team that you've built. Number three: it would happen faster because you would have more barrels that were firing concurrently, moving things forward. When those pieces are put together, you have to then ask yourself, from an opportunity cost perspective, "What other activity could I be doing that would

have the possibility of 10x-ing my company, doing it faster, and increasing the enterprise value multiple?" If you can't find one, then it means you're working on the wrong stuff, and I think that is one of those great litmus tests. If I can find something—and I’ll give you a really simple one that’s not human-based; here’s something as simple as calling your leads. There’s tons of research that suggests that you can 4-5x your conversion of leads by calling them within 60 seconds of them opting in for any product you have. If you have all of these priorities

across the company, do any of them have the high likelihood of 4 or 5x-ing your business immediately with a very low cost of doing so, less so than just calling the leads within 60 seconds? If the answer is no, then by God, why are you not calling all your leads within 60 seconds? The follow-up question would be like, "Well, I don’t have enough people to call our leads within 60 seconds." So then we'd say, "Okay, what is 4x the revenue of your company worth? What does it cost to hire one person whose only job is

to just call the leads?" Now, I recently talked to a restoration company that did water damage for homes when they got hit by storms. He told me he was converting 55% of his leads—not calls, leads—and I was like, "How on earth are you doing this?" I asked, "How many leads a day do you get?" He said, "Two or three." I was like, "Okay, so what’s the process?" He said, "Oh, it’s really simple. My aunt—I pay her $60,000 a year—has only one job. She has no responsibility in the company besides the moment a lead comes in:

you stop having sex with your husband, you stop cooking, you stop loving your child, and you immediately call the lead. That’s her only responsibility. She just has to make three calls a day the moment the lead comes in." He pays her $60,000, and that brings in millions of dollars of revenue. So you’re not going to pay for it out of the dollars you have now; you’re going to pay for it out of the dollars that you’re going to make but aren’t making yet because you haven’t done it. Now, pinning that back to the people, I

think the hardest time—we call this the swamp at acquisition.com—but it’s usually between like $1 million and $3 million. There’s a number of reasons for why it’s such a painful period for entrepreneurs. Let’s say $1 million for simple math. If you have a million-dollar business with 20% margins, that means you’re making $200,000 a year in profit. For you to get an A player, it’s probably going to cost you 100% of your profit to get that A player, and so you’ll have what appears to be an impossible choice: do I sacrifice basically 100% of my profit to

bring this person in, or do I work another six hours a day to do the job that this person is doing? Both paths work; both are painful and risky. Because the overworking yourself thing, you can get yourself through that hump, and now you’re at maybe $3 million or $4 million. That 20% is $800,000; you can spend $200,000, you still have cash flow, you can still live. The downside for picking the person path is that what if you pick wrong? And this, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, is why entrepreneurs get outside returns: it’s because we

take on outside risk. This is the reality of entrepreneurship—we have to be willing to make impossible choices, and the vast majority of choices for entrepreneurs in business are impossible choices between two relatively bad scenarios. The rest of the choices don’t even feel like choices because they’re obvious. Of course, we should follow leads faster; of course, we should follow up more; of course, we should… Try and onboard faster, okay? All these things are the obvious ones, but when you have... and I'm trying to think of the ones I... I'm not almost all the decisions that you

get stuck with. Elon says this beautifully: he says, "Running a business is like staring out to the abyss and chewing glass." The staring out to the abyss component is just the fact that this may never work, and you're almost facing existential risk at all times to the business. The eating glass component is that, by nature of your role, you will get funneled the worst problems in the business, and the problems that no one else can solve. So, it's one: problems that people can't solve. Two: the worst ones, or that they don't want to solve, and

they suck. Yeah. You basically become a filter for the worst things, and that's why it feels like a fire every single day in the business. Because you're the only one who can make the tough call—no one else wants to choose between these two impossible choices. And you're like, "Why is it so hard?" The thing is, it literally never stops being hard; it's that the currency you pay for in the hardness changes. You know, a lot of people have this envisionment of, like, the Rocky cut scene of "It must be hard for business," but I don't

think that's where the hardship comes. I think the hardship is that at every level of business, there are new sacrifices that you didn't know you were going to have to make. Because if it was just, "Oh, I have to work long hours," there are tons of people who work long hours in their business and don't grow. It's usually because they're unwilling to have a hard conversation; it's a different currency. Right? They have to take on risk; it's a different currency. They have to make some sort of bet that they otherwise wouldn't have had to make.

They have some sort of legal issue that they encounter; they have an employee who tries to sue them for some sort of mal... whatever, right? All of a sudden, you're like, "Wait, all of these things are happening," and they happen on a regular basis. At each level, you unlock new levels of glass that you get to chew through. This is why, in my opinion, most entrepreneurs don't actually quit; they fizzle. It's a big bang usually; they just stop seeking. Either they get content at the level they’re at and they just don't strive for more; sometimes

they say it just wasn't worth the trade, and I respect that. If you're like, "You know what? I'm at a million dollars a year, and I don't want anymore," fine! You won! Congratulations; you wanted life. But most of the time, they don't really quit; they just stop trying. Then they just either coast or it just fizzles into nothingness. That's just my experience of having... and I'm sure you've seen this having gone through cycles of entrepreneurship. It's like seasons. It's like, "Oh yeah, I came in..." Even in the media and influencer space, whatever, there are a

bunch of guys that, ten years ago, it's a different landscape now than it was ten years ago. Some people adapted; some of them were like, "I don't like this." They just weren't willing to chew the new glass, which is: "How do I learn TikTok? How do I learn... but man, blogs were so good!" It's like, "Yeah, and they're not anymore." I talked to an entrepreneur, a really massive CEO, many hundreds of millions a year in sales, and he was like, "Dude, we were killing it on infomercials, TV," and he's like, "We just really have to

crack YouTube." I'm thinking to myself, "Dude, it's 2024! What? You needed to crack YouTube ten years ago!" He had the resources to do it, but it was just a different kind of hard. So, most of the hard is one: a level of uncertainty that goes into it, and almost certain immediate failure. Because the first thing you're going to do will probably not work. Again, it's the iterations of when you get into the new domain: you have to transfer your generalized knowledge, which is that as an entrepreneur, I will know that this doesn't work probably because

I only know four things about it, and I need to know like four hundred. So, I will get my first shot, and I need to get directionally correct and then just keep doing more of that. I gave the consulting way of learning—kind of like a new space. But if you want to learn a new skill, the fastest way that I do it, that's outside of courses or anything, is a tremendous volume of activity. So, whether that's: "I want to take a lot of sales calls. I want to do a lot of outreach. I want to

make a lot of content. I want to do a lot of customer success calls." Whatever it is, you do a hundred of those, and then you say, "What are the top 10% of these?" Okay, what did these top 10% have different than the other 90? Then I say, "Okay, well, these ones had these three things that were different. Let's try and do those three things on the next hundred." Because of the variety of life, there's going to be some new variables that... Exist that you look at the top 10% of the next 100, and you're

like, "Okay, we did those three." But there's also two more things that happened in this 10 versus the other 90. Now, let's do all five of those things. Over time, this is how you develop a checklist for making banger content and banger videos. I'm sure, like, there's this clip where David Perell talks about Chris Rock's creative process, and he says, "How is it that you see Chris Rock at Madison Square Garden, and it's just like 60 minutes of just fire? You're like, how is this guy so funny?" It's because what you don't see is the

many small clubs and the first club that he goes to, where he does a whole hour-long set and has, like, three moments that people laugh a lot about. He's got, like, five minutes that are good, and the other 55 minutes basically suck. So the next time he goes to a club, he takes those five minutes, puts them at the front, and then he tries all new material for the next 55 minutes. He gets another five minutes, and he continues to repeat this process and put the new stuff at the front until eventually, it's 60 minutes

of uninterrupted laughing. Then people are like, "Oh my God, he's so talented! I can't believe that he can just stand up there, talk into a microphone, and make everyone laugh across age boundaries, cross cultural boundaries, um, cross, you know, all of the boundaries that you might imagine. How can he be so funny to everyone?" That's how. How can that guy be so good at writing? Well, he looked at the stuff that he wrote, found the best stuff, made it into the few things that he always does, and then kept writing. And that, fundamentally, is the

process of learning anything. It's usually not one thing; it's many small things that, when added together in aggregate, create the outsize returns. Sorry, that was a little poppet there. I just get passionate about skill acquisition. Like, that's what makes it so interesting. But it's so interesting to see your journey through that and how you ended up at skill acquisition because, as you went through, there were three things that I was thinking about, and I managed to write them down. The first, at the top of it, was you detailed three reasons why hiring the exceptional person,

when you're faced with that paradox of "What do I do with my profits?" makes so much sense. One of the big things I hear from founders that they don't appreciate is that to go for a long period of time, you have to have some kind of emotional regulation. And as you were talking about the different levels of business, and every level you have more problems, what I often see is that a young founder hasn't hired those levels in between to deal with all those different types of problems, and they are like burning out and thinking

of quitting. I had someone in my office last week, and she's on track to build about a $50 million business this year. The first question I asked her was, "What's your executive team?" She just rolled her eyes and said, "I don't have an executive team." She'd done a post on social media basically in tears, saying that she was going to quit. She's got a 30 to 50 million business; it's growing like wildfire, but she's about to almost quit it because she's dealing with every single problem. Often founders say to me they think because they're experiencing

so much hardship in that one to three million phase that forever, it's going to be just huge pain. I talk to them about this thing I call The Promised Land. I love this because in the first two to three years of my business, I thought that forever, I'm going to have to deal with every problem. Jenny in the office is pissed off at Dave, and on Saturday night when they were drunk, they did something which they shouldn't have. I realized the problem was I hadn't solved for hiring these levels, so everything was coming to me,

and the emotional toll on my nervous system of dealing with every problem was not sustainable. Then, I accidentally hired someone good, who I mentioned, and she dealt with all the issues, and then I could think again as a founder. I want to just give a moment to that and your thoughts on that. I want to do my best shot at operationalizing what you just said for somebody who's listening. When we encounter this issue, we have a specific process that we go through. So we tell the founder, "I want you to make a Google Sheet, really

simple, and I want you to have the time slots from 5:00 a.m. to, you know, midnight—however long you work—in 15-minute increments. I want you to set a timer; an easy timer, a kitchen timer like for cooking—for every 15 minutes. And every 15 minutes, when it dings, I want you to write down what you did—one or two words. It doesn't take a lot." Now, as soon as I say that, people are like, "Oh my God, I don't have time for this!" I will promise you it will be the most productive week of your life because you

will be aware of how you're spending your time. Every time I do this, I immediately think I should do this all the time, and I don't. So just do it. Just do it for the one week, okay? And so what happens is you'll do it for a whole week, and then what the second step of this is: you'll look at that and you'll say, “Okay, wow, I didn't know that 40% of my time is dealing with this thing, and I can hire a role to handle 40% of my time for this amount of money. If

I had 40% of my time back, I could double this business, and that would be worth significantly more than what I'd pay this person.” Then you look at the next 13, you know, 15% of your time, and you're like, “Okay, is this something that I can give to somebody else? Like, can I push this down? Can I create some process around this that can correct it, or do I need to keep eating it for a little bit until it's enough that it's a full-time role?” So fundamentally, I see the entrepreneur as the many-hated fractional that

you continue to pull things under your plate until you have enough that you can ship it out to somebody else full-time. And being aware of, again, the one resource we have—which is time—how we're allocating it so we get the highest return. If you look at the stack of time as an entrepreneur, we are always getting paid for our time. Kind of the premise of the whole talk here is that we trade our time for dollars. The whole process of entrepreneurship is continuing to trade up what you're trading your time for. And that's it; at the

most foundational level, that is all we're doing. So to take this as a hypothetical: your business doesn't need you right now. You spend whatever hours you do working, and you do these things. Imagine a world where you could hire somebody who could spend the same amount of time doing all that stuff. Now you own the business, and whatever you have to pay them you take out of the profit; everything else is now distributions that you own as an owner. That's it. Now, the entrepreneur who's mission-driven then stacks their plate with even more things that they

need to do, and then just continues that process over and over again. Now this is the part where the pushback comes, which is, "No one can do what I can do." And I want to say, "You're right!" And if I wanted to, let’s say, you a unicorn—so we can imagine this mythical unicorn: it's got this white horse, it's got the horn, the tail, everything, and the little pixie flies for the magic that's around it, okay? You probably won't find a unicorn, but you can find a white horse, and you can find a rhinoceros to get

the horn, and you can find some fireflies to give you the twinkles. So you may not hire one person who has all of these things, but you can hire three, and then those three together can potentially do everything that you're doing better because it's all they're doing with all of their time. Breaking it up into basically understanding that you're not going to find that unicorn, but you just break it into pieces, and then you can partition it out to people who can just do those parts makes it a lot more manageable from an emotional level

to think like, “I’m never going to find this.” Of course, you're not, and that's okay because we can solve for parts of our calendar. Fundamentally, when you buy back the time, you can then do what you're like—basically take the next step in the business. The other really interesting thing is you were talking about your friend who was doing blow and missed YouTube: the idea that our success traps us—it's the old Innovator's Dilemma that success traps us in the past. Your friend probably missed YouTube because he didn't want to reallocate headcount to something that was working

and paying the bills. This, I guess, ties into your point about failure being so unbelievably important because what me and you both do right now is going to get old. Yeah, like, I mean, we probably both watched the people that came before us fade into irrelevance. Look at these dinosaurs, right? And we're part of some kind of new school of content creation, but we're going to become part of the old school if we don't adapt. I think that it’s a point. So, you know, Google has their—you know, I think Sergey solved this mathematically, but they

called it 70/20/10. So 70% of resources get allocated to the core business—do more of what we're currently doing. 20% goes to adjacent businesses—so things that have a high likelihood of success that are one step removed from the existing core business—and then 10% goes to moonshots; totally like off the path: let's just see, maybe we’ll get a 100x return. We probably will lose on most of these, but he proved it with math; he's smarter than I am. But fundamentally, that is the concept of more, better, new. And so that's one of the chapters in the lead's

book, which is “Okay, now that you have the core four, right? These are the four things that you can do: you can post content, you can run ads, you can do outreach to strangers, you can do outreach to people you know.” Those are the four things any person can do to advertise. The first thing you do is you do more. For most small businesses, they're doing so little and think they're doing... So much, and it's a huge gap in understanding. So I'll tell this story; it's probably the easiest way to explain it. When I had

my first gym, I called up a mentor. He had 20 locations. I said, "How do you advertise?" He said, "I use flyers." I said, "Okay," so I put 300 flyers out. It didn't work. I called him back and I said, "WTF?" He said, "Slow down. What was your test size?" I said, "What do you mean?" He replied, "Well, your test size. So, I mean, the 300 wasn't the only amount that you put out." I was like, "Well, yeah." He said, "Well, our test size is 5,000 flyers. Once we have a winner, then we do 5,000

every day in terms of flyers that they put on cars to get people in. So, over a 30-day period, he would be putting out 150,000 flyers, and over a 30-day period, I put out 300." He was, in a very real way, doing whatever the math is there—like 300 times whatever, I don't know—a lot more, 500 times the flyers that I was. Of course, he was getting a better result. One of the fundamental misconceptions of small businesses is that they mistake low volume for volatility. Meaning, if you're not sure where your sales come from and you

get one sale here and then, you know, two weeks later, you get another sale, and it feels sporadic, it feels volatile. Well, there is a certain amount of advertising activity that is occurring over that period of time. We know that a month passes, and you get one to two sales. The companies that are in your space that are doing one to two sales a day take what you're doing in a month and they do that every day. I know that you can get this, and I want to put this in context here. I hear, "I

would like to build a personal brand," and I say, "Cool." Then I ask, "How much content are you putting out?" They say, "You know, I put out one or two pieces a week." I'm like, "That's amazing." For context, for anyone who's listening to this, we put out 450 pieces a week. The brand that we have is way larger because we do so much more than you do, and people can't fathom the idea that someone works two times, five times, ten times, or a thousand times more output than they are doing. But it is usually the

reality of why they are getting a thousand times more than you're getting. Fundamentally, this is the concept of leverage, which is that you get more for what you put in. In the beginning, you're the one doing the flyers, then you get leverage because you make enough from those flyers that you can look at your time study and be like, "Okay, I can pay two guys to do these flyers and I can get eight hours back." That would be amazing. But now you've got two guys doing flyers, which is still double of what you were doing.

Now you have double the revenue that's coming in. You're like, "Okay, should I hire more guys? That's more," or "Should I do something better? Should I change my flyer? Should I change the offer on the flyer? That would be better." Or "Should I start Facebook ads?" Well, the new thing, which would be Facebook ads, is the 10%. Now, when you're looking at the allocation of resources, let's say we're now—I'm fast-forwarding a little bit—into a company that has profit that they can do stuff with. Part of the reinvestment is insurance for the future. Every business has

three strategic buckets that it has to allocate its resources into. Number one is: "How do we get more customers?" If we get more customers, the company grows, period. Number two: "How do we increase lifetime gross profit per customer?" So, if we got the same amount of customers but we made all the customers worth more, we would also grow. Bucket three is: "How do we decrease risk?" AKA, "How do we increase the likelihood that the first two things don't stop happening?" So those are the three buckets. When you look at that 70-20-10, the 70 for the

most part is usually going to be directed towards getting more customers and making them worth more. The better that also leads up to that, the risk factor is usually going to be the new thing that you're going to do to ensure your future is going to be there by the time you get there. If we notice, for example, that like YouTube becomes like legacy television and viewership starts dropping and it becomes this new VR whatever, at some point, we're going to have to look and be like, "We need to take 10% or 20% of our

profit every year and start building out this new team." We're going to continue to do what we're currently doing, and here's the mistake that you need to avoid: Don't take the stars that are making the one thing work and then push them on the other thing. You have to find the people who can build this; otherwise, you're going to sacrifice the core. Because all of a sudden, it's like, "Oh God, well now we're totally screwed because now we're not getting customers from our existing thing, and we haven't figured out the new thing." Yet right, and

so this is fundamentally where I see the CEO role: it's like you want to eventually become the flex player, which is that you can parachute into a specific division or department that's solving a complex issue. Then, you have the benefit that you have as a CEO or founder: you have decision-making power, and you have the ability to allocate resources and immediately say yes to things. And that's why, to be fair, it's unfair to your team to say, "Why can't they do things as fast as me?" Well, because you can write the checks, and because you

can say yes—you don't need to check with the committee, you don't need to run it up the flagpole; it's just you saying, "Do this, do that, don't worry about that. I'm telling you you can stay late for this meeting; this is more important." Strategy is just a fancy word that people say when they mean prioritization; that's all it means. We have unlimited opportunities that we can allocate things towards, but we have limited resources. So, how do we prioritize those unlimited opportunities against those limited resources? That is fundamentally what strategy is. And that's another way of

just saying we prioritize your gut. My gut is the home of our digestion, and it's also a gateway to better health, but it can be hard to know what's going on in there. Zoe, who sponsors this podcast, has one of the largest microbiome databases on the planet and one of the world's most advanced at-home gut health tests. Their blood sugar sensor, which I have in this box in front of me, goes on your arm so you can see how different foods impact your blood sugar. Then there's the at-home blood sample, which is really easy and

analyzes your body's blood fat. And, of course, the famous blue Zoe cookie, which tests your metabolism. Oh, and I can't forget, there's also a poo sample, which is a critical step in understanding the health of your microbiome. You post it all to Zoe, and you get your results back, which will help you understand your body's response to different foods. Using your results, Zoe will also create a personalized nutrition plan for you, and this is exactly why I invested in the business. So my question to you is: how healthy is your gut? Head to zoe.com to

audio kit and find out. And because you're one of our listeners, use code STEVEN10 for 10% off your membership. Head to zoe.com now. At my company, Flight Studio, which is part of my bigger company, Flight Group, we're constantly looking for ways to build deeper connections with our audiences—whether that's a new show, a product, or a project. It's why I launched the conversation cards. I've relied on Shopify before, who's a sponsor of today's podcast, and I'll be using them again for the next big launch, which we'll hear about soon. I use them because of how easy

it is to set up an online store that reaches all of you, no matter where you are in the world. With Shopify, the usual pain points of launching products online disappear completely. No matter the size of your business, Shopify has everything you need to make your business go to the next level and better connect with your customers all over the world. To say thank you to all of you for listening to my show, we're giving you a trial which is just $1 a month. You can sign up by going to shopify.com/Bartlet, that's shopify.com/Bartlet, or find

the link in the description below. On the car example you're talking about with the Flyers, what I was thinking is: so many businesses try and win on the game of creativity. They’ll create something more creative and appealing as an advert. I see this in my portfolio because they'll send me something and they'll go, "Steve, one particular business I'm thinking about, a major national supermarket, has given us a display slot in 400 supermarkets; which display should we use?" and they'll say to me, "This one or this one." I remember replying to them and saying, "I don't

know, and you don't know. But here's a system to find out. We're going to create 100 displays, and we're going to run them as ads on Facebook, or we're going to create some kind of environment where we're not going to try and win on being the best creative guessers; we're going to win on our rate of experimentation. Yeah, we're going to conduct more experiments." I think this is a real shift in so many regards because especially if we've gone through university and we've been trained as a copywriter, we have the old problem of wanting to

be right, not successful. Being able to, as a creative, even as a podcast, say, "I don't know what the right answer is, but I'm going to create a system where our rate of experimentation is going to be so much higher than our competitors that we're going to stumble across the right answer more than they do," is a shift in thinking. So there are two types of questions that you shouldn't ask: questions that can be solved with a spreadsheet and questions that can be solved with testing. Fundamentally, the outside advice that you get on something that

can be solved with math—just solve it with math. I would say like 30% of the questions that I get are like, "Should I sell this one or this one?" and I’m like, "Okay, well, what's the lifetime value of this product and what's the lifetime value of that product?" What's the cost to acquire for this customer? What's the cost to acquire for that customer? Okay, this is a math problem. You have a way higher LTV to C ratio here. Allocate resources here, but that's a math problem; anyone can just do that math. For the testing one,

I love this, like the leads book. I didn't know what to name it, so it's about advertising. I ran story tests for like a week or two, just saying, "Uh, $100 million promotions," "$100 million advertising," and then "advertising one." It's like "$100 million advertising, $100 million marketing." Okay, and then advertising wins. I'm like, "Okay, $100 million advertising, $100 million leads." Leads wins—$100 million leads versus two other things. Leads keeps winning. Okay, that's the title. Then I did the same thing for the cover, and I did the same thing for the subheadline. I tested every component

of it to get the thing that people seem to want, which is like the book is advertising, but ironically, people want leads. So it's kind of like, "Do I want to have a book on drills, or do I want to have a book on holes?" Right? People want the hole in the wall, not the drill. That's just the vehicle, and so the book is just the vehicle to getting leads. Amen. But as a quick hack for anybody who has a brick-and-mortar business, this is just a quick hack for anybody. If you're like, "What market should

I expand into?" Here are five markets we're looking at: take $1,000, run your best promotion that you won in your current market in all five of those markets, and see what your lead cost is in all five markets. The one that has the lowest lead cost, then open in that market. Don't spend $250,000, you know, doing all these studies and then building out this location, only to find out that the lead cost in that area sucks. Just test it first. It's the best $5,000 or $10,000 that you're ever going to spend to just ensure this

is a risk bucket. Ensure that when you're there, it's going to work. I mean, amen. It's our whole philosophy. So it's so wonderful to hear that, and I didn't realize that you had done that with the book. Oh yeah, I have it in the chapter where I'm like, "You have to wrap everything," and I show all the tests that I ran too, and like you can see all the percentages of people saying, "This is the—that's the book title." When people look at you, Alex, you're a guy that knows a lot about a lot, and one

of the questions that I often get as well is, "I need a mentor." Kids will come up to you and say—I'm sure they say it to you all the time—"Will you be my mentor?" Yeah, do mentors matter? So to explain what I'm thinking through: to answer that question, I think it asks, "What is required to win?" Is a mentor required? No, but there are certain behaviors and actions that will increase the likelihood of success. If you can do those actions faster, then you will have a higher likelihood of winning and a higher likelihood of winning

faster. All of humanity has been built on us standing on our forefather's shoulders and taking what they learned. We don't have to figure out how light bulbs work. I have no idea how the internet works, but I know that it works, and there's somebody who can figure it out. So we just start where they kind of lay off the baton, and then we pick it up from there, and we run the next leg, and then we die and hand it to the next guy. I think you don't need mentors, but you need to learn from

people ahead of you, and so I think in models, not mentors. What can I model about their behavior so that it can change my behavior to increase the likelihood that I win faster? Everything that I do—and I feel like this is a pretty strong statement—everything that I do ladders up or down to behavior. You probably notice it when I talk about training and employees, when I talk about advertising. I just want to increase the likelihood that a stranger takes a desired action; that's all I'm trying to do. And when we get into behavior change, it

removes a lot of the surface-level fluff that I think confuses the vast majority of people. I'm always afraid to go on podcasts where somebody is really heavy in manifestation and energy and frequencies and whatever the hell, and they'll say things like, "I manifested this meeting," and I'll be like, "You didn't. You have content that did well because you produce content on a regular basis, and then your EA reached out to my EA." That reach out is what initiated this, not whatever vibes you were setting out into the universe. Now, some people might say, "Yeah, it

was also the vibes," but I would bet that if they made the content and did the reach-out, I would still do it, which means that those are the core things. Because if we removed those—if we just did the manifestation and didn't make the content or do the reach-out—I would not be here. One of these works; one of these doesn’t. And so that is what has allowed me to try and extract the essence from the mentors or heroes ahead of me. I consume a tremendous amount of Elon. Zuck, anything that I can find—uh—that they’re out or

that they’re interviewed on, I try and consume it, and the whole goal is I want to think about their decision-making process as it relates to what they did and try and apply that to my context, um, in terms of behavior. And so that has been just like the big, the big, big, big zoom out. Do I need a mentor? No, but you need to learn stuff, and so whatever way is the fastest way for you to learn things, do that. And so I'll tell this story because I think it’s—it's like, do you need one? No,

no one needs one. You could literally just do all of these things through trial and error on your own and you will figure it out. Time is obviously the one thing that is the big question mark, and I think part of it is a question of how valuable is your time to you—not in a micro example but could I—or would I—pay in time or money to move forward five years and not make five years of mistakes? So when I started my first gym, I didn’t actually start the gym because I quit my job and I

drove across the country. I showed up at a guy's house that I Googled on the internet who said he was good at running gyms. His name was Seven Figure Sam, all right? And so he was a gym guru, and so I showed up at his actual gym unannounced, and I was like, "Hey, I'm here to be mentored and learn," and he was like, "Uh, I'm working. I really don't know who you are, and maybe we'll talk tomorrow or something." And I was like, "Okay." And he's like, "Where are you staying?" And I said, "I don't

know; haven't decided yet." He's like, "What do you mean?" I was like, "That's my car; I just drove here and all my stuff's in there." He's like, "You have nowhere to—?" I was like, "Figured it out." Just figured it out when I got here. And so he offered me to stay at his house that night, which was unbelievably generous, and maybe my salesmanship got him, you know, who knows? But within a few weeks, he had a meetup of all the gyms that were kind of like following his little system for how he ran his personal

training studio and boot camp. I got to go as a 22-year-old, and I paid to have access to this community of gym owners. They were all going around talking about what was going good and what was going wrong in the business. And when it got to me, I was like, "Well, okay, so I want to open a location, and this is kind of what I was thinking about my model, and this is what I was thinking about price points." They were like, "Wrong, wrong. Here's why that's not going to work. Here's how that's not going

to work." And I was like, "Oh." Uh, okay, well, this is where I was going to buy equipment—they're like, "Don’t buy there! That’s retail; you can get it secondhand over here, and it’s literally a tenth of the price." And I was like, "Oh, that’s awesome! Okay, great." I was like, "Well, I was thinking about getting this type of thing." They're like, "No, girls will eat [__] on that, and they'll fall. I've had two girls do it. Don't worry about it; like you’re not going to use it, but you can get sandbags; you can use them

all the time, and they’re super cheap, and if you have to replace them, you can, but you can use them for like hundreds of exercises." And I was like, "Great! I'll do that." And then I was like, "Okay, so I was thinking about this kind of square footage for my facility." They're like, "Dude, you don't need all that; you can cut that in half." And I was like, "Okay, well, cut that in half." And I was like, "I’m willing to pay two bucks a foot," and they were like, "No, never go over $1.50." And I

was like, "Okay, never go wrong." And so, like, in a matter of a day, I got to take like all of the knowledge of all of these guys, of the mistakes that they had all made with their gyms, and I started my first gym just on their backs. So how much was that worth to me, years? And so for me, I have always been willing to pay in whatever currency was required to get knowledge that I don’t know. Can you get that now for free? Yes. It didn’t exist then. YouTube wasn’t even a thing; Instagram

had just come out. Like, for context for everybody who’s listening to this, um, I think about this equation a lot, and I actually had some video of somebody [__] on me for this, but I’m gonna say it anyway because there’s the 20% that are gonna say it that I’m not gonna dilute myself. So I saw a salesman say this at a conference, and he wrote a million dollars on a whiteboard. He called up a lady in the audience and he said, "How much do you make?" And she said, "$50,000 a year," and so he wrote

$50,000 underneath of the million, and he subtracted it, and it said $950,000. He said, "It costs you $950,000 every single year you don’t know how to make a million dollars a year." And so the question is, what is the value of that skill? And the answer is the difference. The troll who responded to this originally was like, "Well, you can keep going. What about $100 million a year or a billion dollars a year?" I was like, "Yes, yes! If you had the skill of making a billion dollars a year, then the difference between $50,000 and

a billion is the delta of the value of that skill." And it's really not one skill; it's many skills that ladder up to, when combined together, create that kind of value. I remember that being seared into my memory, which is like, whatever I want to have—the delta between where I'm at and where that thing is—is basically what I'm willing to sacrifice in order to learn what I need to learn to get there. I think that if people appraised that delta not by the money in their wallet or the time that they currently have, but by

how much they would be making or how much time they would have and how much that's worth to them, then I think far more people would be willing to invest in their education. It's such a taboo word because people hate the word "education." It's like, "Ah, it's like work!" But like, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you’ve got to learn. You just have to; there’s so much stuff to learn. Pirates versus practitioners—this is an idea that I've thought about a lot over the years because I look at someone like you, and I can tell

based on everything you say today that you are a practitioner. In this analogy, what I call a parrot is someone who hears what Alex said and then starts saying it. But your lessons and wisdom have come from going through that [ ] and being able to distill the essence like Richard Feynman and then show. There is a group of people that just spend their whole life reading books; they never take the leap. Pirates versus practitioners is the best way to learn. Being a practitioner is widely known in the education space, but not as much in

the content world. There are two types of education: procedural and declarative. Declarative knowledge is knowing about something; procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something. A simple example would be, "Okay, I understand how private equity works." You could talk about it; you can explain how, "Okay, they take some debt, and then they have this arbitrage, and they get this enterprise value multiple," whatever. But you've never done a deal, and until you've done a deal, you will not have procedural knowledge of knowing how to actually do a deal. You can read a hundred books on sales,

but you will learn more about actually selling from your first hundred sales calls, and business is the same. Yes, and so the idea, in my opinion, for most people is that if you want to rapidly learn, you want to rapidly do those hundred repetitions as fast as you can so that you can suck a hundred times in a row and find the ten that sucked the least, and then say, "How do I suck least on the next hundred?" You keep doing that so many times until eventually, you suck so little that you're actually good. Hard

work, yes. I think, you know, this is actually really interesting because it ladders up to... there are two types of creators. You've got entertainers, and then you have educators—at least that's how I separate it. The point of entertainment is to maintain the attention of the audience; that is it. The point of an entertainer is to literally just keep people watching. The point of an educator is to change someone's behavior. So, if you want content to do well in either of these buckets—fundamentally, at least in the education space—you’re selling time. Education is "I spent all this

time doing this thing to learn these four things that I can give to you so that you don't have to spend this time learning it." And so education is actually, if said differently, what you do is you buy time. When you buy education, it's the only way to actually buy time today. If you want to basically time warp into your future, you have to buy education so that you can buy all of the life experiences from all these people and then not pay for it in your life. You pay for it with less time, by

consuming what they have, or some money, or some combination of those things. Fundamentally, we usually pay with the currency that we value least. Interestingly, a rich person values their time more than their money, and so they’re willing to pay with money to get time back. A poor person will also pay for their time and drive around to ten different gas stations to find the one thing that’s ten cents cheaper or drive to ten different grocery stores to use whatever coupons—they're valuing their time over their money in that instance. And so, back to the educator. If

you want to be certain or have confidence in any endeavor, you have to do so much volume of activity that it would be unreasonable that you would suck. If you were to write out the equation of like, "Okay, how many public speeches would I need to give for it to be unreasonable that I would suck?" Is it 10? Is it 100? Is it 1,000? Write the number that you're like, "There’s no way that I would suck after this many," and then... All of your effort gets really narrowed: commitment, elimination of alternatives, focus, turning down quality

and quantity of other things to just doing that. And then—and the key part of this—is not just to do the thousand, but after every ten or every twenty, looking at the top ten or twenty percent and saying, "What did I do well there?" Because you have to have the feedback loop; otherwise, it’s not just doing 100 reach-outs. You have to do 100 reach-outs and then look at what worked, and then do more of what worked. So, for the parent versus the practitioner component of this—even if you're starting out—you can have confidence in what you're doing

because you derived the solution and you can actually answer why you do something. If you cannot explain why you believe what you believe, it's not your belief; it's someone else's. Most people, I would say, parrot—the vast majority of the things that they say—because—and to be fair—that's how humans learn. You're five years old, you say, "What's that?" They say, "Bull," and you say, "Bull." You parrot it back, and there we go, right? But when it comes to skills, you can describe what other people have said before, but if something goes wrong or, "What about this condition?"

you won't know what to do. But if you derived it from the ground up—there's a great portion of this in the Y Combinator community that you've probably heard about, maybe like three or four months ago. It was like "Founder Mode." Did that get to the UK? Okay, yeah, it was from Brian Chesky. I actually messaged him about it afterward. Oh yeah, it was awesome, right? So basically, the tenet is that the founder always has special powers in the company because they know what built it. At its core, that’s the difference between the practitioner and the

parrot. The people who came later are parroting why you do what you do, but you know what conditions you were in when you made this rule, and you also know how to break and when to bend those rules. If you build something, when you built it from those repetitions to suss out the few truths that exist, you’ll know why those are the truths. I’ll give you a really simple example: we’ve tried to learn YouTube and we’ve gotten better over time. In the beginning, I did this massive review and I figured out that the videos we

had that had three things at the beginning—proof, promise, and plan—were the videos that did the best. So then all of a sudden we said, "Okay, all videos have to have proof, promise, and plan right at the beginning, the first 30 seconds." Great! So we started doing that for a while, and then we looked at the outliers among those, and we were like, "Oh, well, we also found that some of the ones that did really well also had some sort of visual picture of this plan." Alright, so it became proof, promise, plan, picture. Then we kept

looking and we found out, over more repetitions, that if we also included some sort of pain or problem that’s being solved, that also helps. So proof, promise, plan, picture, pain. And you’re like, "Wait, if you keep adding to this thing, it’s going to get really long." No, sometimes you can check multiple boxes with one thing, and this becomes the elegance of creation: how can I check off three of these boxes with one sentence, right? And so that is—by the way, if you’re like thinking about this—you’re like, "Do they really think about this when they're making

videos?" Yes! That is the difference between a 10,000-view video and a million-view video. It’s understanding that level of nuance across the entire thing that creates expertise. Also, when you’re like, "Oh, this video flopped," when you’re a beginner, you’re like, "These videos in general don’t work" or "Content doesn’t work," rather than saying, "This video didn’t work, and here’s why, because we did three of the five." So it’s just like, all of the— I mean, the devil is in the details, and you only meet the devil himself by doing the unreasonable amount of work. It then becomes—it

goes from uninformed lack of knowledge to informed optimism. Because first, you’re like, "I can make videos and get rich." Then you realize that it’s really hard to make videos that people watch. Finally, you start developing a framework of "This is how I make videos that people watch," and when they don’t watch, it’s because I didn’t follow it. It’s so timely, because it weaves into something you said earlier. My girlfriend came to the recording yesterday, and as I went into the green room and I sat down, she went, "Babe, look, I found this new app!" I

said, "What is it?" She goes, "It’s an app that summarizes books!" Yeah, and she—it's called something like Head Something—and she showed me it, and I go, "Look at my book!" Because I know the laws, I know the chapters, I know all of the principles that lead up to the point. So show me my book, and law two of my book's called "33 Laws." These 33 laws, I got it, yeah? And law two was about the Richard Feynman technique you talked about. I explain why that process of learning something—simplifying it to its essence—for a 10-year-old, teaching.

It to someone else. If they understand it, move on. If they don't, go back to the top and learn again. It had summarized two of my books: um, like writing is the best way to learn. Yeah, and I said, "Babe, if you just read that summary at the top of the pyramid and you don't have the story and all these agreeable foundations," which I then explained to her, "would you be able to then translate that and truly understand the nature of the problem so that you could apply it to lots of different settings?" And then

I told her what that second law in my book actually meant, and she deleted the app. Yeah, because there's no point in knowing the conclusion, the aphorism. Yeah, like the punchline when you don't know the story. Um, and without the story, you can't, I guess, get to the first principles of the thing. So this is really interesting because, um, with that fan example, it proves that the distillation of knowledge is not bidirectional. So you, Richard Feynman, can break it down to a child, but a child cannot then re-derive what Feynman has done. Interesting, yeah. And

so it's convenient for the transmission of communication and for teaching someone who's, let's say, coming new to an organization. Here's the, here are the things, and these give you the decision-making frameworks around which, and it can give you directional guidance. But that is the whole founder mode; that is basically a different way of getting to the founder mode idea that person derived this thing. Yeah, and so when a problem arises, we can re-derive the next solution rather than trying to apply the aphorism to a new setting. Another point for founders who are getting their work

copied, because this—everything you've just said actually should give a founder who's having their work copied, their t-shirt designs, their content copied, a huge amount of peace. Because if I need to know steps one, two, three, four, five up the staircase to success to be able to predict step six, yeah, then if someone's just copying your step five, you should be at total peace because they don't know, yeah, the foundations that would lead to the next step. And that's what we see with podcasts; podcast is copying you. They'll copy your thumbnail, your title, whatever. Dude, I

mean, I'm sure you see it everywhere, but the peace that I have is honestly, I say to the team all the time, if that's the thing that makes us special, we're [__] anyway. Yeah, like if it's the thumbnail or this or how you do this, if it's the trailer that made us special, we're [__] anyway, yeah. But also, there's a set of principles we call it the iceberg. The 99% of what we do, you can't see. It's the culture, as you said; it's like, uh, so I have so much on this. So, um, one is

right when I sat down, you were telling me about the episode that we ran that was like akin to a Shark Tank, but the new version that we had on our channel. And as you saw me, like, kind of like grow and be like, it was 56 minutes on video, but it was so much work to produce that one thing. But no one sees all the work behind it; that's the 99%. So that's thing one. The next thing is, think about the—if you're a founder who's plagued with competition and being upset about it. I was

one too, and I want to tell you how I got over it. So number one is think about the alternative, which is that no one copies you because no one cares about what you're doing. Well, then, it would be a requisite for success that people will copy you. So as long as you are successful, this is just a part of business. The second piece is, by definition, if someone copies you, they are second, period. And so if you want to lead, you can't look at anyone else. You have to consistently be deriving the next step,

the step six that's unseen from your first five steps to innovate rather than just parrot the next thing. And as soon as you find yourself copying, you have admitted defeat. You've admitted that you are no longer the leader and that you are just following in someone else's footsteps, and you're giving them the baton and saying, "You be the champion; I'm happy with second, third, fifth place." And in a winner-takes-all world, like attention is all the fruits go to first place. Anyway, amen. Amen, I have nothing more to add; that's perfect. The last thing I want

to talk to you about is really like a three-part thing: it's hard work, love, and happiness. Okay? And I put them together intentionally. Um, one could say work-life balance, yeah, love, happiness. I think these things are kind of fundamentally intertwined. But how do you think about it? You're someone that's known as being very obsessive, um, very into your work, to say the least. Um, you have a wonderful partner who seems to be aligned. I know—oh, super! Okay, good. She's hardcore. So let's go through it: work-life balance, hard work, love, and happiness. Okay? If we start

with work-life balance, it was that [__] question beliefs on it. Yeah, so I will answer with how I derived my kind of life thesis, which was after we had taken about $40 million in distributions from Gym Launch, um, personally. Throughout the, you know, years that we ran the company, and then in the year of the sale, um, for those of you who have never sold a company before, you typically don't want to change a lot of things; you kind of want the company to just be stable, keep working, everything's fine. It's one of the most

harrowing experiences to go through because you can't really change anything, and if you're the founder, you're always trying to innovate. So you can't do what you're normally doing, um, and you also can't start the next thing. You can't change the current situation, and you can't start new projects because if the deal doesn't go through, then you don't want to start two businesses. Remember, because we, you know, cardinal rule number one: we're not chasing one in the red dress. So you basically have to sit idly by and just let things operate, and during that year, it

was one of the most miserable years of my life because I basically had nothing to do. Um, when I looked back on my life—this sounds like, you know, I looked back on my life as though it’s been so long—I looked at the days that I enjoyed the most, and on those days, I had worked out, and I had produced something, and I had done both of those with people I liked. Almost all of those days, I had worked many, many hours. When I realized that the idea of working hard—I can insert blank—the “so that” actually

makes it still destination-driven. So that was when I derived what I called "hard work is the goal." It’s just to work hard; that is my goal, and then die, mhm, on things worth doing. Those are the days that I love, and I get a tremendous amount of pushback for saying this, and it bothers a lot of people, and to them, I say, live your life whatever way you want. This is, again, my life; it is not a sermon; it's a documentary. This is just how I do it; you can do whatever you want. For the

people who are dissatisfied, try it, and if not, no worries. Um, I really enjoy working; like, the best days are when I write those books. It's the happiest I am, and it’s not happy in the moment because it's really hard. But the amount of challenge is about proportional to my level of skill, and every book I think is better than the last. The third book that's coming out is going to be [ __ ] awesome; I'm very excited about it. But there's nothing that I enjoy more. In the moment, I'm like, how do I break

this down? I'm just rubbing my forehead, and then I create two or three different frameworks. I'm like, nope, that doesn’t work here, and that doesn’t work here, which means some kid in Afghanistan is going to get stuck on this step because it doesn’t work. I have to figure out how to get it so that it works everywhere, and I keep driving. But the moment it clicks, I'm like, that’s it! Fight me; like, that’s the framework. That is what I strive for. For me, the love, the happiness, and the work have all, because of the nature

of my life, been one. Now, some people have lived their lives where their love life, their happiness, and their work are all separate. Um, for me, it has just been life, and I like it that way. For the people who are upset by that, I'm not upset about how you live your life. Um, I just choose to live it this way, and if in the future I change my mind, I’ll change my life. If I get to a point where I'm like, this is no longer a priority for me, and something else is, then I

will. But when I look at the centenarians and I look at the people who, like, I look at Warren Buffett as somebody, and Charlie Munger as two of my heroes, Charlie worked until the day he died. To be clear, I don't work on a set day calendar. Um, I don’t work a certain number of hours; I work as much as I can until I feel like my rate of output drops precipitously because of fatigue. Then I sleep, and if I feel like, on a longer time horizon—of like I’ve worked nine days, I’ve worked 20 days,

I’ve worked 30 days in a row—and I’m like, all right, I feel like I don’t have any gas today, then I’ll take the whole day off. Whether that’s a Tuesday, Sunday, or Saturday, I take the day off, and that just is what it is. I have learned to work that way, and I'm okay with it. The goal, clearly for you then, is the hard work itself—it's not a certain place you're trying to get to necessarily because that always moves. Yeah, and so, um, Jesse Itzler has this, and maybe someday I'll be able to steal it

from him. Um, but he told, I saw him show a picture of his kid finishing a race and putting a zero up. What that signified was nothing left in the tank—that he’d spent everything he had on the field. And I would—it's like I have this visual of the 300 movie where the queen says to the king as he goes off to battle: she says, “Come back with your shield or on it.” I kind of see my work that way; like, I can't imagine a... Better way to go out than doing the thing I love—and it

bothers a lot of people that I love something different than they love. It's like, it really, it really bothers me that it bothers them, to be honest, because I make no projections. Do whatever you want! I feel like, if I ever had one thing that people took from me, it was like absolute freedom. Because of that absolute freedom, we are 100% responsible for our own lives. Where we place the finger of blame is also where power flows. If you blame your parents for your life, your parents have power over your life. If you blame your

boss for your bad life, your boss has power over your life. If you blame yourself for your bad life, at least you can change yourself and do something about it. I think absolute responsibility has been my core tenet. If you have a life where you're like, "I don't want to care about work that much; I just want to spend all my time with my family," I'm like, "Congratulations, you won! That's amazing." Just don't assume that everyone is you, and that winning for me is the same as winning for you. I know that my message won't

resonate with everyone, and that's okay. It's for the few people who were like me and felt like everyone told them there was something wrong with them. I still get people telling me there's something wrong with me, and if "wrong" means "not normal," then yeah, you bet. But it's more so that you are different, and that's okay. If you're okay with that, then it unleashes this whole new realm of possibility for being able to do what you want. I had the idea, you know: you do 100 of these, and you look at the top 10%. That

was my way of trying to operationalize happiness because it was this ephemeral thing that, when I was 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, I struggled a ton with. I was very depressed; I looked at religion, I looked at a lot of different things. This is common for people at that age. I came up with a mantra for myself at that time which was, “Happiness.” Now, people hear this, and I'm sure it will get taken out of context, but that was basically a release moment for me. By continually chasing happiness, it always existed outside of me—it was

always this carrot in front of me that I could never really get to. By saying, “Happiness,” I was like, it's unattainable. I'm just going to work and do the stuff I want to do. When I started doing the stuff that I wanted to do, I looked up years later and was like, "I actually kind of like my life." I was like, "Is this what happiness is?" And I thought, "I don't know, but I think one of the major plights of humanity, myself included, is the expectation that life should be different than it is." We create

this idea that whatever we have right now is not what it should be. I think "should" is the root of all pain—the things we think should happen but aren't, basically measuring our pain. I've tried to eradicate “should” from my life—should for other people, "She should do this," "They should do that." I just lean into “is.” It just is this way I work, period. Not, "I should work more," "I should work less," "I should work differently," "I should see my mom," or "I should call my dad more." I do this, and if something changes, I will

change. Now, if there is a condition—like, if you want to make more money, then there's a higher likelihood you might want to consider doing this—those are things that I don't consider in that category. But just the generalized “shoulds”: "He shouldn't do that," "He should build a family," "He should have kids," "He should have gotten married earlier," "He should have married someone different," "He shouldn't have the life that he has," "He shouldn't work this way." According to what? For me, that is my theory on life—on happiness, work, and love, has been very unified. I love my

work so much that I got out of a relationship, and when I started dating Lea, I said I am not willing to change this. You have to be willing to deal with me working this way, or this won't work, because my relationship with my work is the most satisfying relationship I have. Now, people will hear that and be like, "Well, that’s because he's never experienced true love," or whatever narrative they'll say. But it's like, you haven't lived my life, and I haven't lived yours. I don't project anything onto you. I like what I do, and

I love what I do. I get attacked for liking what I do so much, and I like working a lot. It's because they have negative associations with the word, and that's their issue. Own history of their experience with the word, but I see my goals and my relationship with my goals as one of the most sacred things that I have because I see them as a relationship with myself. And so those proxy, when someone comes in and says, "Hey, you know, sweetie, you've been working too much," according to what? Why should I stop right now?

Let's do this other thing, and people will probably see this as a... they'll put whatever labels they want on it. But like I just said, this is what I would like to do with my life, and if you can incorporate yourself into that, that would be amazing. And so my second date with Ila, after we talked about business for four hours on our first date, was I said, "I'm going to be working all day. It'd be cool if you worked with me." And she just worked next to me; she had her own thing, but she

just worked beside me, and I was like, "This is nice." Over time, eventually, I was like, "Hey, maybe you want to work on my thing with me?" and she was like, "Yeah, that sounds good." It was a little bit more than that, but fundamentally, I got her to switch to working on it with me. At that point, what we got to talk about was what we were creating together, and to me, that's been the journey of my life, and it's been amazing. And I'm not saying it works for everyone; I'm saying it probably doesn't work

for most people, but it has worked really well for me. It would make sense for me that my path would be different than most people's because I don't behave like most people, and so I would have to have a different formula for how I derive, you know, meaning or joy from my own life. Since I don't believe in inherent meaning — just the meaning that we choose to ascribe to things — then it's up to me to create that meaning within the work that I do. And so the reason acquisition.com was all based on... it

was during that year where I just basically had nothing to do, where I was like, "What do I want to do with my life?" because I don't need to work anymore. That was, you know, we took out 40 before the sale, and then we obviously got the sale, so I don't need to work. I like to work, and I try to spend... I look at, you know, I had this boss that told me this, and was one of the catalysts for looking at life this way. She said, "I had just had like a good weekend

or something, and I came in chipper." She said, "Well, you must have had a good weekend," and I was like, "Yeah, it was good." She said, "I'm pretty sure the key to happiness is living as many days in a row like that as you can," and it was actually like really operational. I was like, "I can use this! What are the good days? How do I live as many of those days in a row as I can?" And so I've, you know, I've been attacked for saying that I don't really enjoy going on vacation very

much, and it's because I just want to get back to doing the thing that I really enjoy doing. I remember Leela and I went to Mexico this year for a week, and it's always during the week of Christmas because no one works, and it drives me nuts. I've just given up trying to get, you know, to work because even if my team will work — because my team will, because they're crazy too — other teams won't, and vendors won't. It's a pain. Anyways, while we were there, all I came out with was, "This is for

other people; people are not me, Karma, and that's okay." Earlier on, when we were talking about... Sorry, that the long run... no, it's beautiful because... a couple of takeaways from it. But earlier on, we were talking about being a great content creator as a byproduct of having the courage to be yourself. And from that, what everything you just said so... yeah, I also gleaned something similar, which is being happy, requires the same thing — which is the courage to be yourself. And both in the previous analogy you said: everybody is unique, and that is their

value as it relates to showing up in marketing or with whatever product they have. But also when I think about Alex's story, your story, and all you went through with your father and the early experiences in that consultancy firm, the gym, the fur place you worked — logically, from first principles, the thing that's going to make you happy, because you are completely unique, is going to be completely different from everybody else, right? Like to varying degrees, depending on how sort of defining your early experiences are. But I actually think we talked about the courage of

being yourself — there's also the courage of being happy. And with the courage of being happy, you have to withstand public pressure, the "shoulds" you said from your parents, whatever, from social media, especially as you become a bigger creator, to actually just listen to how you feel every day. Can I throw something out that I think might... like, so this blew my mind. I was in around that same period of time because I talked to everybody I could to try and get context on this. I called a friend of mine—um, or not a friend, I

would say an acquaintance that I got connected with—who sold his company for hundreds of millions of dollars. He’s a really bright guy. One of the questions I asked him was, “So how do you drive meaning from your life?” He gave an answer that really shook me—um, which doesn't happen that much given my worldview. He said, “Why do you think that life needs to be meaningful?” It was just this really interesting question, which is basically that I had an unspoken demand of the universe: life should be meaningful; I should be happy. It’s the “shoulds” that we

don't even know we think and say that are the ones that change the most—like hardcore. My favorite quote of all time, which is probably at the front of a few of the books that I have and will probably be the one that’ll be on my tombstone, is a permutation of an Orson Scott Card quote: “We question all of our beliefs except for those that we truly believe, and those we never think to question.” Mhmm. I would say that a lot of my entrepreneurial career, even just my human journey, has been about what are the beliefs

that I so inherently believe that I don't even see them? I don't even think about the “should.” So when he said that to me, I was like, “Whoa, I have had this inherent demand of the universe that my life be meaningful.” Now, people would hear this and be like, “They have their shoulds,” and they’re going to say, “Well, it should be meaningful.” I’m like, “Why? According to what?” If we look at history, history pretty much sweeps everyone under the bed within a hundred years, and within a thousand years, basically everyone—but the people that we remember,

we remember some of their works. If we go a hundred thousand years in the future or ten thousand years in the future, it's probably unlikely that we will be remembered in general. Solving for the idea that we need to be remembered again raises the question of “Why?” My solving has been for degrees of freedom and responsibility. So what are the things that bring me back in control? I will do the very best of my ability to try and do the things within my control to ideally make other people's lives better and my own in the

process. Now, that is a choice rather than a demand I make of the universe. This gets really abstract and heady really fast, and so I will try and bring us back down to Earth. By demanding that life be meaningful and that I be happy, when I understood that I was demanding these things and pursuing them, it was clear that they were outside of me. By saying, “I need to do this,” I created an inherent space that I could never gap or close. Trying to forget or eliminate that demand was the first time that I experienced

those things, and so I try to keep them out of my head to the greatest degree possible so that I can be inside of them—that sounds weird—rather than in pursuit. The times where I derive the most joy from my life—if I’m optimizing for that, which I wouldn’t necessarily say that I am—are because I think Williamson was like, “You definitely optimize for purpose or meaning or something like that,” and I kind of reject a lot of it. Mostly because I do what I have been rewarded for doing in the past. So, because I have a behaviorist

view of the world, which is that everything boils down to behaviors—why do I do these things? I do these things because when I have done them in the past, I have enjoyed the result. Therefore, I continue to do things that I’ve enjoyed the result of. If other people have done things that they enjoy the results of, then I encourage them to keep doing those things. I also encourage you to not project that other people need to do those things and that they will experience the same results as you, because they might not. Alex, thank you!

Oh, that was such a beautiful way to end. It’s so interesting because if people attack you for that, I just wanted to give my own perspective: when I hear you say these things about not enjoying holidays and the things about your relationship with Laya, how that happens for me, I feel: even if I don't agree with you 100%, I probably get to 95%—to be honest with you, the fact that you’re telling me that you're different makes my difference, whatever it might be, feel acceptable. Do you know what I'm saying? I 100% know what you're saying

because when I heard you say these things, I thought, “Oh my God, Alex feels like he’s different from the norm.” Me and Alex aren’t the same, but we both feel inherently like we're not playing by the rules and, therefore, in some way, getting life wrong based on this public narrative of the way we should live our lives. I thought, “Amazing.” I remember watching the... Here's the text you provided with correct punctuation: "Video where you talked about not liking going on holidays and being like, absolutely obsessed, and me thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm so glad he

said that,' because deep in my heart somewhere, I felt a guilt. Yeah, oh, I, you know, a guilt, and I'm like, where did the guilt come from? I'm doing something that I love every single day, but I feel guilty. Well, I feel guilty because of other people's shit, right? So, please, Alex, despite the, um, despite any critics that might be out there, please continue to have the courage to be yourself. Because you have no idea how it's making a group of weirdos that feel like they don't fit in feel heard and understood for their variance.

Well, that is my, yeah, I mean, I make it for them. We have a closing tradition on this podcast, as you know, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. Oh God, I'm laughing 'cause it's so ironic. Okay, great, what is the meaning of life? Well, the short answer is obviously 42. But, I actually do think it's learning. Because if we think about what learning is, it's that you're exposed to new conditions that, over time, change your behavior. And so, you are different now than you

were 10 years ago because you've learned more things. And so, if we think about the meaning of life as what is the output of life, so I actually do really like this. So, people talk, I can relate this to business, of course. I can relate, what's the meaning of life to business? But what is the meaning of a business? The purpose of the business is whatever the output of that business is – that's the meaning. It's what the output of that business is. And so, if the mission, like with Elon, is to get to Mars,

then the output of the mission is that people get to Mars, and so that's the meaning of that business. And so, the meaning of life in general for me, I think, for all humans, is that the output of experience is learning. And so, we will learn regardless of whether we want to or not. We learn. Learning happens whether you want it or not; you will learn. And I think that that's where I would just leave it. And the question is, are you learning the things that you want? Amen. I highly recommend people go and check

out the new format you launched on your YouTube channel. It's titled "Building a $1 Million Business for a Stranger in 56 Minutes." It's kind of like a new take on Shark Tank, but it's more actionable, more practical; it's what you referenced earlier. And I know it took you many, many, many, many hours to perfect it, but it's a really interesting format that I think YouTube is seeking because it's so actionable and practical. I highly recommend; I'll link that below. But I would also highly recommend people go and check out these books. I mean, to say

they've been smash hits is a massive understatement. Thank you, Mill. I mean, I just see it everywhere. I feel like it's a prerequisite of any entrepreneur's toolkit when they're starting and they're trying to figure out frameworks for scaling a business, making sales, generating leads. And I know there's another one on the way, which you won't tell me about, but I know it's coming this year, which is volume three of this format, and I'm exceptionally excited to see it. And for any entrepreneurs out there that are looking to get into business with you, I highly recommend

they go check out acquisition.com because there's so much there, regardless of where you are in the cycle, whether you're starting out, whether you're scaling up, whether you're looking for advice. Acquisition.com is the place to be. Thank you, Alex, for your generosity; I appreciate it. And thank you for all that you do. Thank you for being weird and different because, like, that's again, that's the value. That's all the value in the world. We don't need more of the same; we need people that have the courage to be themselves and the courage to be happy, and that's

exactly who you are, and I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much! Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So, you've got every guest we've ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code,

you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered those questions. The brand new version 2 updated conversation cards are out right now at theonconversationcards.com. They've sold out twice instantaneously, so if you are interested in getting some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want

to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this..." Show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much! [Music]