If you only have an extra $1000 this year, spend it on THIS!

the first rule of Entrepreneurship is you use what you have every self-made billionaire and millionaire was in the exact same position as you because they were self-made which means that you have the same exact ingredients they had which is nothing but also nothing to lose and that's the piece that I think anyone who starts out misses if you lose it all you're still at zero you have unlimited shots on goal it's like life gives you a lottery ticket and you're like what if I lose it's like well the lottery ticket's free and you can keep

cashing it in until you win Alex has been absolutely taking the Internet by storm from opening gyms to launching software startups Alex knows how to make any business worth a million dollars Alex rosi welcome back to the show skills are the ultimate hedge against inflation they're the Hedge against currency changes people like what's going to happen to the dollar doctors are going to get paid in seashells or Bitcoin or US Dollars it doesn't matter if you have value to exchange the world will exchange for it if someone only has a few th000 a year extra

to spend on something what's more important for them to invest it in the stock market or real state or to invest in themselves you know where I go with this one my friend welcome back to another special episode on the school of greatness my name is Lewis how and we have the inspiring brutally honest Alex Heros who is back and he is going to break down why most entrepreneurs fail to scale and also he's going to reveal three critical mindset changes that transformed his business and money approach to creating exponential growth so if you're looking

to grow your business or your money knowhow and you want to accelerate and scale either one of those this is for you make sure to like this video below please subscribe to us here on YouTube so we can continue to notify you with these incredible episodes and guests and leave a comment below on your biggest takeaway I want to see your comments Below on what you're learning during this episode because there are so many things that I was taking notes on I could not stop and I can't wait for you to dive into this also

share this with one friend that you want to see become financially free in 2025 and Beyond just share the link below with one friend or over on social media and if you're looking to really transform your Financial Freedom this year and Beyond make sure to pre-order a copy of my new book it's called make money easy create Financial Freedom and live a richer life a lot of things we talk about in this episode we dive deeper in this book as well on how you can unlock Financial Freedom in your life and make money easy the

link will be in the description right here on YouTube and without further Ado let's dive into this episode with Alex Hermos welcome back everyone to the school of greatness very excited about our guest my man Alex Heros is in the house good to see you brother I am honored to be here very excited one of the things that you just talked about before we got started was the biggest mindset shift that you've made this year that has helped you unlock more money and financial abundance yeah what is that big mindset shift that's helped you go

from where you were couple of years ago when you launched sold your company I think around the 40ish million Mark to now over 100 million in ebaa what has been that mindset shift for you so there have been I would say two really key ones um and a third kind of bonus so the the first big one was my understanding of focus has changed and so if we were to Define Focus as the quality and quantity of things that we say no to right cu the most the most focused person would do nothing but one

thing and so everything that's not that thing would make you less focused so if that's the definition of what focuses but i' I thought about it like it's almost like wine where like as it ages there's more nuance and there's more depth of the flavor and I feel like as my entrepreneurial Journey has has like progressed um my understanding of what Focus means has changed because it's actually like Focus from the top it's literally from the top all the way down meaning the company needs to focus on one thing not five and if we have

five objectives for the year it's because we me personally I haven't done my job because one of those things is the most important and if I can't tell my team this is the most important then how am I going to expect them to make that judgment without the context that I have and so it's like being willing to make the heart call and I think a lot of people are afraid of making it and The more I've doubled down on saying if I have to choose one thing you think differently so like for example if

I said you know Lewis what what one thing if you could only have one thing happen in 12 months what what would reality need to look like in 12 months for you to hit your goal like what one thing if if that only thing happened the rest of your goals would either be accomplished or become irrelevant as a consequence which is the more common one and so thinking about that like this was four years ago the big thing that I had was like I if I just built a big business brand then I don't need

to be the best picker of of of Investments I don't need to be the best negotiator I because I'll have more proprietary deal for so people want to they'll just want to come invest with me or have me invest in them and I'll be able to pick the best company because I'll get more at bats than anyone and I don't need to be a pro negotiator because people want to do a deal rather than just like auctioning off between me and 10 other parties and so it's like if I can just what's that one thing

for this year and I think we're kind of strategy comes into things is by forcing that focus and saying no to the other things you get really really selective and that's at the top level so what's the what's the main focus for you then um for this next year yes what was it this year and what will it be for the next year so this year was actually developing like a farm system um for the portfolio so flow Yeah Yeah so basically what we figured out was we looked at our number one so we looked

at our whole portfolio and right before we were talking about this I was saying how we had kind of pruned things and so I'm a big believer in deleting as much as possible because you only have fixed bandwidth and if strategy is uh limited resources against unlimited opportunities and so your prioritization of that limited amount of stuff against the things you can do like that is strategy yes and so so we had you know we had 24 portfolio companies and so I trim that to 10 um within the last 12 months on top of that

I did no New Deal does that mean you sold your Equity stake in those yeah you just got them out I got yeah I I basically uh got rid of them at a loss or whatever you want to call it but the thing is is that the portfolio as a whole still outperformed the previous year by focusing on the stallions um and so in on top of that over the last year we only did one deal which before that we had done 12 deals the year before and so did you need to do those 12

deals first though to see where you were think so yeah I think so I had you can't just do one deal a year to start out you need to have some loses I think that's a great point because it's very much like okay uh I if I want to be rich I should just fly private planes it's like that it doesn't work if I want to you know be tall I should play basketball it's it's like people conflate what you're doing now versus what it took to get there and so those are kind of two

separate things um but but back to the focus piece um if strategy is prioritization of the resources then having focus is part of strategy and then all the way down because I've just hopped I recently hopped in into the media side of the business um back into operating which I haven't done in years and it's been really fun for me because I just have such a I have a better skill set now than I did 5 years ago which was really the last time I really operated stuff and just ruthlessly focusing the team on what

one thing if we did in media would change everything and so uh to the question that you had this whole year has been dedicated to the farm system which was like when we looked at the portfolio we saw that a number one number two and number four highest performing portfolio company were companies that we had met prior to doing deals and so we' worked with them for a little bit just like me helping them out hopping on phone calls meeting in person whatever and I was like O Okay that there's something interesting there how can

I recreate that process on purpose rather than by accident so only one company once you started the farm company made it to the top four after you started doing this right so number one number two and number four those happened by accident just from me yeah me doing normal deals you know meeting people whatever but now I was like okay how do I create that and so that's why we started running these little workshops at our headquarters so there's I mean it's just what we can fit in our office so it's not huge um but

we invite entrepreneurs out and that way we can we can meet them my team meets them we say hey this is what I would do like a lot of them aren't necessarily portfolio re ready but if we've helped somebody go from call it 5 million to 20 million a year then when they want to get a growth partner they want to exit our hope is that they call us first so it's like an incubator weekend not a fulltime incubator exactly CU I don't have the resources to do that and I don't want to take my

eye off the ball but it felt like so that was basically this year that was the big thing that we did this year how many of those workshops did you do um I want to say we probably done like 14 okay this year so probably a little bit more than like basically oneish a month sure sure and it's like you know if we're busy then it pushes out and we can do to hey we're kind of free let's do two as well um yeah so that's that's that's um that was the big thing and then

Focus all the way down um because it's just been more and more ruthless in terms of being able to say no like I talk to I talk to somebody on my team and I say your job if you just did this one thing it would make your job the most valuable version of your job and then they say something to the degree of like well I have all this other stuff and i' like cool don't do it and they just look at me I'm like yeah don't do it I'm the boss here I'm the one

who pays you it's fine if you just do this and so the thing the feedback I'm getting back is like dude it's so much easier if I just have to do this one thing I can totally crush this and so everybody needs focus and I I see the job of the boss at every level entrepreneur or division head or you know Department leader manager whatever as constantly assessing the things that are on the people who you who reports use plate it's like what do they have in front of them and how can I how can

I prune that tree how can I strip things away from them so that they can put all their resources into one thing and to me like acquisition. comom like our little logo here is two main the two main forces of business as I as I understand them you've got supply and demand mhm and the reason that it's a full Crum is for leverage and so Leverage is getting more for what you put in and so the people who move fastest in life don't do more than other people they get more for each R and so

I think about that within across all the organizations that we have like we spent a full day with our largest portfolio company and I'm sure we'll transition off of like hardcore business but this is what's top of mind for me uh we spent a full day with all the executives from our large portfolio company um which this year probably close out at 110 million that's software business um and We Grew From 2 million so we've been very integrally involved in the in in the growth of the company and at the the what they came in

with the day was five objectives and each objective had five subtasks so it's 25 things that we had to do for quote this year and I like you know I was just kind of like sitting a little bit more quietly throughout the day like H just taking it in like something felt wrong 25 things yeah Bas a lot of task a lot of stuff and so at the very end of the day I ended up going to the the Whiteboard that was on the side of the wall and I wrote one two three and I

wrote the three things that I thought we needed to do and I said and we don't do number two until number one is done and it was this really clarifying moment because I was like if we don't do this one Nothing Else Matters and if we do this one then this one will be worth more and so the it's like this will multiply the second thing and I think there's this big fallacy of concurrent tasks like a lot of people it's been super well studied that you know if you switch between tasks you're way less

effective you're like 75% less effective effective when you switch between two things let alone like five and your phone and your kids and your whatever right and so I think there's this big fallacy that i' I've changed in terms of how I operate which is that we actually do things in sequence we do things in an order meaning although you might have five people on your team we need to deploy all resources towards solving this one problem and then once that problem is solved what happens is the fact that the other four fires exist because

let's be real there's always going to be problems but the fact that the other four fires exist gives you urgency to solving the first one M and so you actually get five things done faster when you do them in order than trying to do all five at once and yet for some reason we don't we don't regularly remind ourselves of that and so this has been like I'd say like that has been the the single largest shift in my entrepreneurial like career and the reason that like at gym launch which was the company that I

sold for those you listening um the biggest mistake I made in that business was that when it was crushing I then started another basically another company rather than doubling down and basically the year that I started the second company Revenue didn't go down but my growth rate went down a lot so we you know we added maybe like 30% in Revenue when we probably could have doubled um because I put all my attention to this other thing and so um things are going really well at acquisition. comom and I had this inkling to do the

same thing just repeat the same mistake and um I was like I cannot learn this again it'll be more painful so much more painful the stakes are higher and so so so Focus has been the biggest thing so far number one the second one has been my understanding of talent has has also kind of developed like a fine wine in terms of like how there's so much leverage with good talent so for example Steve Jobs gives this great great analogy he says you know in uh in New York there's a ton of taxi drivers and

the worst Taxi Driver if you had to get get you across town uh would maybe C you know take you uh twice as long as the best taxi driver maybe maybe he'd take you one you know he take you a third of the time of the bad guy right but that's the difference between the absolute best and the absolute worst but in like a knowledge-based business like mine like yours um the absolute best could get a hundred times more return than somebody who's even even just good and compared to bad obviously I mean they basically

wouldn't it wouldn't even ever happen they couldn't even succeed right and so in thinking about that I still I I have doubled down on the Arbitrage of intelligent hardworking people which is like it's worth paying someone millions of dollars a year if they can make you tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year and I think that it's one of the great opportunities that will always exist because there will always be cheap entrepreneurs and who will not recognize the outsize value of talent and I think that as I've as the longer I've

been in the game to be fair the more the more exposed to higher level Talent I've become and the more I know what's out there and one of my one of my great mentors he told me uh the best talent is always in the future and so whatever your standards are he's like you always have to keep pushing that standard because as things grow too some people grow out of their you know their sphere of Competency they're not as good at this level as they were before there's nothing wrong with them or with you it's

just Seasons um and so my understanding of that has shifted in terms of my role as well like I see myself as lead recruiter for the top people because the absolute best people only want to talk to the Seas because you're not giving them an opportunity to have a career they already have a career they're giving you basically everything they know to help grow your vision and so it's a lot more of you selling them than it is them selling you they already have a track Rec they already they're making money they have offer they

have Head Hunters that call them every day that's you're not giving them anything that they don't already have and so it's really con it's like Cheryl Sandberg with um Zuckerberg he met with her her for dinner like once a week for a year before they uh before she transitioned and took over Facebook and so it's it's a much longer recording process and and all the people that you know that I'm looking at like they're all killers and so rather than thinking like man we really need someone to fill this role it's like I need JN

to fill this role and JN doesn't currently work for me it works for somebody else it might months exactly and I have to figure out a way to get John to leave what he's doing and come work with me yeah um and so that has probably been those have been the two biggest those have been the two biggest changes or shifts um that I think have propelled uh acquisition. comom um to just last few years have just continued to get better and better is focus on the one thing that matters most and be disciplined enough

to say yes we aren't going to do these things and yes they are problems and we will get to it as soon as we finish this one thing that matters most and then in order to execute on that you need the absolute best and brightest because the Arbitrage on if somebody if that imagine the difference if we had this as Engineers right this T this Taxi Driver thing if if a good engineer costs 250,000 a year and an amazing engineer costs a million dollar a year but you get a 100x return on that guy it's

still a better deal even though it costs more and I think that's where people get mixed up is that it costs more but it's a better deal and so Talent is a better deal this is the fear for most people is okay what if I make that $200,000 investment in the person half a million dollars and it doesn't work out yeah and they they're lazy they're entitled they're this they're that and I just invested six months of my life recruiting all this money all these and they're not delivering what I either expected or they would

I think you'll love this so this is so what what we outline is the job of the entrepreneur risk the reason that we are we are outside our compensation is outsized to our effort is because we're willing to take on risk how people aren't and that doesn't always work out of course and that's but the thing is is like if you think about like that let's say there's let's say there's a casino right and you have a game where you've got a one in five shot at 100x payout well you should play that game every

time knowing you're going to lose four out of five times because it's worth it for 100x payout but you lose more times than you win and that's the that's the the difficulty from the human brain perspective is that we see two three losses in a row and we're like oh this doesn't work or I'm a failure or whatever but it just may be intrinsic to how the game works and so most volatility comes from lack of volume and that that's all the way down so like I you know I'm me trying to get my first

my my side business going on Etsy or whatever like you know I'm trying to get my my little accounting or bookkeeping business started they're like you know clients are kind of sporadic you know I'm getting you know one every every other week or so but if I took the whole year of the amount of promotional effort you did and then I crunched it into a week then you'd actually be able to have predictive metrics that make sense it's just that you're having a 100 conversations over six months and those 100 conversations create three Deals and

so it's like okay what what appears sporadic or what appears volatile is actually a function of low volume you're just not doing enough or not on a on a fast enough time Horizon and so um I think about this a lot whenever there's inconsistency I said do we just need to do a lot more so it becomes consistent we have the illusion of inconsistency but we just need to increase n by 100 fold and then all of a sudden it feels very consistent at 3% of conversations turn into customers and then all of a sudden

now we have a business yeah exactly what would be the third thing then um is it third and then a bonus or is this no the yeah the Bon the bonus uh the bonus one is uh is basically my understanding of branding has I feel like also developed so these aren't all three of these things are not new Concepts I feel like my understanding of them has has deepened and I and I look forward to deepening my understanding of them even more in the future but so I had a wonderful conversation with Ben Francis who's

uh who's a CEO yeah um for those you don't know he's like 32 they do a gazillion dollars a year they're like CR number two biggest apparel brand in the UK um yeah really impressive awesome guy and we were talking about basically the the ratio of branding versus asks direct response that is the right for a business now everybody who's listening to this is like I don't even know what he's talking about but I'll tell you a story that I'll make that he told me and it just it changed my perspective it was probably the

the most influential conversation I had of the year so the CMO of New Balance got fired because they had 15 years of decline so the new guy came in and he went to the CEO and said hey can I just swing with the venes here can I really can I take a big bet and the guy said sure go for it and so what he did was they had uh 70% of their advertising budget going towards just you know discounts and deals and getting people to directly buy shoes and then 30% was going towards like

influencers sponsorships endorsements more top of funnel awareness like you know cool factor and so what he did was he flipped it and he made it 70% influencers and sponsorships and cool Factor branding exactly positive associations for their ideal audience and then 30% was you know hey come buy the shoes and so over the next 18 months they just kept losing more money and then on month 19 it just went Boop it started going up and then it just shot up like a gun and it's kind of changing the perceived value within the oh 100% And

they're having a complete rebirth right now they're crushing crushing yeah you see it's like it used to be datu and gen C girls who have like white socks pulled up going to the gym and New Balances I'm like what is happening but but that that there's a number of smaller lessons that I took from that the first one is that branding happens at a delay it's like he changed the behavior and it took 18 months in a big company that spends a lot of money yeah and so when I think about that for myself it's

like I'm living today based on work I did two years ago and so you want to dig the well before your and so if I'm thinking to myself like what do I want two years I it's like I have to start digging for that water today I need to plant that tree now and so that was that was number one is just the delay between how long basically when you need to start changing your behavior and when you when you see the result of that behavior the second thing is um founder-led companies tend to do

significantly more investment in brand versus the corporate suit owned guys because they are measured by quarters and so that's why they tend to um destroy companies over the long because the day that you go shift from branding to 70% uh you know direct hey buy the shoes for a period you do better you're pulling forward Revenue that that that that's maturing kind of like a fruit on a tree it's like you're you're plucking some fruit a little bit early but you know there you end up filling the basket faster but then there's no more fruit

to pick because you haven't been planting your trees right and so um interesting and so that that has that dramatically shifted and it also had a quantifiable metric to it which is and and what's interesting about the 7030 is that it's super well studied because so TV Facebook if you look at the ratio of posts to ads on your newsfeed you listen look at the ratio of minutes on a show compared to ads um they've already studied this they know how to maximize okay how do we how do we put as many ads as possible

without getting people to stop watching right and so the ratio is about three and a half of what like basically good experiences to ads that has to occur and so when you think 7030 it's it's it's a little bit they're a little bit on the on the lower side but so for me I take it as like I it'll probably be closer to 2575 but I'm also I'm assuming that they're rounding and there's you know numbers change but the fact that it was in parallel with the same ratio that consistently delivers value and allows you

to monetize it was it was it corroborated different evidence that I had on different platforms so what are the three biggest moves you'll make this year to invest in branding that won't get you the return you want now but will bring a astronomical results later my book that's I literally I I I this like this quarter after looking at everything I was like because obviously I'm in the business space and so it's not like I can uh you know sign cama up like Jim shark can and just get all the athletes and have them promote

my thing like I can't get Elon Musk to promote me right as much as that Elon if you feel like it let me I doubt it and I and I say that with the most respect um and so I was like within the cont to business there's really only two things that I can do one is go do big aspirational things which is what we're doing with our actual portfolio companies and the other is help other people do those aspirational things which I can do most effectively with leading with the books leading with value and

so I'm pushing more into content I'm pushing more into the books the books are free um unless you want a physical copy obviously you can buy them but like um those are big Gibbs and so I'm like how do I put and I'm looking at how much I'm spending on team and what the team is creating relative to what uh the give versus ask ratio is and so I'm going to I'm going to be putting really heavy I'm going to be doing more than 75% I'm going to be putting like 95% towards it because I'm

always I'm always happy to push more you know plant more trees for the future um so is it more content or is it more promoting a book it's both yeah basically the the call to actions all likely shift towards will be the book and from a Content perspective I um I I'm using the same same concept of of the talent piece which is if I had the absolute best people in the world who could help me with the content that I have we could get 10 or 100x Improvement in what we do and so I

am going to be paying even more and I gave my whole team just massive raises and I also eliminated the people that I thought weren't up to that standard or just didn't weren't as invested don't like business things like that right just good good objective editors things like that that didn't mesh with where we're trying to go um so you had a like a lot of people too yeah yeah yeah I see that as as as being kind not nice as long term you want I want somebody to have the opportunity to be at a

company where they have a very long-term trajectory they're aligned with the mission and if someone isn't I think the day that you realize they're not you owe it to them it's kind like be relationship if you don't think you're going to marry somebody I think the day you realize it you should let you should you should release them to free agency cuz somebody else will and they are the right person there's a company out there that they're they're best for um and even though those those ations can be trying in the short term I've I've

seen it work out so many times that I have limited emotional affect When approaching them because I'm like I know this is going to be better for you yes I know this sucks right now but you will not go homeless and you will not die right right you'll figure it out you'll figure it out you'll be okay yes and so and we obviously you know we we we do our best to try and make recommendations andu sure sure sure yeah so the three big mindset shifts for you this year have been focus more on the

main thing not everything yeah uh find intelligent hard working people and really invest in that talent and be willing to risk losing or not working out also and the third thing is branding I'm betting big on brand really betting big more content higher quality content books things like that and all three of those things are aligned yeah what's the one big thing if I can continue to 10x the brand that's the focus what do I need for that I need the absolute best people and then how do I back that up with dollars and cents

in time the only resources I have and so I'm putting all my resources into doubling down on that's cool man um if you could go back to yourself before you started making money yeah what would be the mindset shift that you would have needed to have to go from more lack or scarcity into abundance only think about the actions and not about anything else what were you thinking about um I mean honest a lot of it was what other people would say it's so weird because it's so foreign to me at this point but I

remember that the most terrifying thing that I ever did was K my job it was the most terrifying thing was the hardest thing I've ever done for sure barnone not even closeth the hardest thing I ever did was quit my job I belabored the decision for six months I called every friend I had I wasn't sure I would I remember just pacing in my in my tiny little condo back and forth Just on these endless phone calls where I just Loop in circles talk it' be like I don't know but I I mean but I

really want to but I could fail but what if I fa you know like there's all this all this nonsense right and so the thing that ultimately allowed me to get over the hump was actually playing out the worst case scenario in Exquisite detail like most of the reason that we're afraid to fail is because we're afraid of dying in an abstract reality we think oh we catastrophize okay I'll lose my job and then no one will like me and then I won't be able to get a job again and then I'll be homeless and

then I'll die like just right like that's that's how we go right um but but when I when I thought through I was like what would actually happen so if I went there and I failed what would I do I was like well I'd apply to business school and I'd have this cool story and they like entrepreneur or people who tried to do things so this would actually this would be fine this would be okay and I have plenty of friends who would let me sleep on the couch if I had to I could go

back to Mom and Dad's house with my tail between my legs which I felt it was was that was honestly the most horrifying thing that I could imagine going back home as a failure yes um but the idea the one that that got me out of it was I can always get the job back mhm so like this is actually a significantly lower risk move than I'm perceiving it to be I can just get I can get the job back or get another job that's comparable I have the experience and me doing all this stuff

only makes me more valuable cuz I'll have a cooler story than somebody who just did four years of this job rather than two and then did you know two years of things on the road and so that was actually that was the one argument the secondary argument was for me I was young at the time I was like this is extremely hard to do if you say because I used to always tell people like yeah I'd like to own my own business someday like it's almost like you like tag it on to like what's your

you know what do you do now and I'd like to and so I I thought to myself if it's this hard now when I have no kids I have no wife I have no Stakes it's going to be nearly impossible for me to do later and so I was like I have to do it now and so I'm actually a very risk averse person despite the fact that I am a quote entrepreneur now um I guess not quotes I guess I am an entrepreneur I think it's just because the influencer world so like everybody's like

everybody's an entrepreneur but um but that those are the two strongest arguments that got me to take the plunge and make the B what would you say then for those that don't have money right now is the frequency or the energy that money is attracted to I don't know what that means what would you think if money was trying to go somewhere money is out there it's it's in the middle of the table sure sure what is money attracted to what type of a person is money attracted to I don't oh so I I Define

everything by actions because it's the only thing that's observable so a person who takes action yeah I mean at the most basic level yes and then you know one level above that i' would be like money is exchanged for goods and services and parties when they make exchange both parties are better off the person who sells the goods and services believes they'll be better off if they had the money and the person who buys the goods and services feels like they'd be better off if they buy the goods and services and so it's a mutual

exchange both people say thank you which is why capitalism is wonderful um but the point is that you have to look at and I I like people starting out with service based businesses because when you ask the question does somebody need to have money no you have time if you don't have you use the number the first rule of Entrepreneurship is you use what you have first rule if you don't have money yeah use your time yeah and so that's because everyone focuses on resources rather than resourcefulness and so every self-made billionaire and millionaire was

in the exact same position as you because they were self-made which means that you have the same exact ingredients they had which is nothing but also nothing to lose and that's what makes you the most dangerous player on the board and that's the piece that I think anyone who starts out misses you're the one if you lose it all you're still at zero you have unlimited shots on goal it's like life gives you a lottery ticket and you're like well what if I lose it's like well the lottery ticket's free and you can keep cashing

it in until you win and so you might start a a a card detailing business or you might start a lawn care business and the thing is is that everyone has this fallacy that the first thing they pick is going to be the last thing they pick they think that's going to be their business forever but I've had a lot of businesses over my career and you learn it each time like every business I've had I've I learned lessons from the ones before that before I moved on and it took me it took me nine

businesses before I actually had my like first real successful one uh with Jim L yeah you were saying before we got started that your thoughts on manifestation yeah what what are your thoughts on manifestation um I I shy away from things that I can't Define um and so I I function 100% in the observable reality and when someone says I have manifested this I would say if you have a set of beliefs that you repeated it on a regular basis that then changed your behavior the behavior is what created this outcome not what you repeat

to yourself and so as long as whatever you do translates into changing what you do in reality then then great whatever whatever it takes for you to do there but I just focus ruthlessly on that because how do you how do you know someone's like he's really motivated you can't see if someone's motivated until after they've taken action which means do I need to be motivated at all I just need to do something right and that makes for me this has made business teaching people training learning so much easier because what happens is if someone's

good at something a lot of times getting good at something and then teaching someone else to do that thing are two very different skills and so people who don't know how to teach train then add a lot of energy and and mindset and all this stuff but it's like dude just do this just do this and so what happens is we have these terms so people like man I want to be more charismatic for example right well if I looked at someone and said be charismatic what do you do yeah you can't do anything with

that and so what happens is we have these I call them bundled terms and so it's these words that actually have a a laundry list of behavior underneath of them so be charismatic really might mean when you walk into a room stand up straight when you talk talk louder uh when you shake someone's hand like grip them firmly look in the eye try and say their name as many times as possible when someone's talking you're doing it right now nod your head it shows that you're listening and over time if you do this laundry list

and there's more yeah people will begin to describe you as charismatic but if I said be charismatic it's useless but if I said do all of these things then all of a sudden people would then say Charisma has occurred and so in training people to do things in the companies that we have and also in trying to train myself to do stuff because I try and learn all the time I see I see the purpose of life as as learning is changing my behavior um how can if someone has a skill that I want I

just instead of looking at and I don't even listen to what they say because a lot of times they don't know why they're that way either I just try to look at what did they do that was different than what I'm doing and try and compare their reality versus mine and say oh I need to I need to do this ah now it works and all of a sudden people describe me in that way and so trying to operational as many words as possible that are amorphous is how I've made sense of reality MH how

is your relationship with money changed then over the last few years since selling a company to then growing your companies do you have a different relationship with it honestly not really um I I like to always know what I make per minute uh because that so I'll say I'll rewind the clock in terms of the things that I have now I think are a result of behaviors that I did in the past that I have haven't changed and it's just I have more time under my belt and so I think one of the big uh

misconceptions of people who are starting out is that the amount of results you get in the beginning for correct behaviors are not indicative of how of how correct the behavior is and so the first week you go to the gym you're not really going to see anything it doesn't mean they going to the gym is wrong it just means that your your results are going to come out of delay and so for me it's like I checked my bank account every single day for years um until I had more money that didn't make sense anymore

because the volatility of the things I was invested in made it irrelevant um but I I had I having a pulse on the money you need to know where it's going and where it's coming from and when you have that pulse all of a sudden you're like I know what an expense that costs $500 means to my bank account and I know what a $1,000 check means to my bank account and all of a sudden I started seeing my expenses as bundled time so I remember the first time I had this realization I used to

work in a minimum wage job uh at a a Smoothie King I was a blender ton so I made 675 an hour and uh and when peanut butter mood right go and so what I remember I remember my co-workers it was like three or four people to a shift they would go get lunch at Coy which was next door like s shop and and I I went with them one day and you know I bought a normal meal and I think it was you know 12 bucks something like that you're like dang that's two hours

exactly and I was like wait I'm only working at you know a 5 hour shift and I'm using post tax dollars and this is two and I was like if I do this every time I'm here I only get get credit for three of the hours that I'm working and so immediately I was like wait I'm going to cut my work efficiency in half every time I I I go to eat lunch out while I'm here and so I was like oh I have to change that but then as soon as I realized that you

know when I go to the the the mall on the weekend because that's what you do when you're you know 15 or whatever um I would look at you know a new shirt from the gap which was cool back then and I would look at it and it was like $30 and I was like man if someone if my boss came to me at the beginning of the shift and said hey work a whole shift and I'll give this t-shirt I'd be like nah I don't want to do that and so in thinking about how

much time it took me to pay for things all of a sudden a lot of stuff wasn't worth it and so it shifted so from a my relationship with money is more like what what did it change about how I spent and bought sorry how I spent and and how I acted to make more and so I um I've always been a saver in terms of I always live below my means um I don't if like the first rule of money is spend less than you make first rule of money like you don't need to

listen to anything else you don't need to do any investing you don't nothing else the first rule of money is spend less than you make the second rule of money is take what's left over and invest it in making more money and I think the big piece especially people were starting out Miss out is that they expect that they're going to get rich as rich people get richer and it's a different strategy when you need to when you're starting out you have to think about how you're going to make money while you're awake not while

you're asleep the only reason that people who are really rich think about how to make money while they're asleep is because they've already maxed out their waking hours and they can't put more time into Investments and so they have to by consequence pick passive things to make money but they already maxed out their active currently you haven't maxed out your active and the Returns on active are significantly higher and lower risk than passive income opportunities so for example if I were in a you know it's about to be winter time in most the US uh

if there's snow in the area that you're at you could probably buy a you know a push snow blower for a couple you know I don't I don't know what the rate of snow blowers called 1,000 bucks right and you could use a shovel in the beginning and you might be able to do two maybe three you know big driveways in a day okay if you have a snowblower you might be able to do 20 and if you have that then you just 7x your earning capacity and so it's a small like what thousand stock

is going to 7x your pay nothing right and so I I think people wildly wildly undervalue the active Investments where you put a little bit of capital and a lot of time and how much that Capital multiplies what you make with your time and so that's obviously in the physical labor where you have a machine that helps you out but even on a on a on on knowledge based work the the one of the highest leverage things I did is I paid a guy who knew how to run Facebook ads I didn't know how to

run them I had a gym I knew okay because I like looked online and stuff but I need I was like I need to get better at this and so I went to I went to three different agency owners and they all pitched me their services and I said honestly I couldn't afford them and so I said what what would it take for you this is the question what would it take for you to teach me how to run ads and I was like I'll pay you every hour he's like I don't sell my time

and I was like it's America everybody sell yeah how much yeah exactly what would it take and he said $750 an hour which to me was unbelievable amount of money at the time and so I said okay deal and I said but the the the the terms are I have to have my hands on the computer not and you need to tell me what to do and then I have to do it and then if you change something I need to understand the decision Mak behind it did exactly and so it took me eight sessions

with this guy eight 1 hour sessions was cheaper than hiring him for two months totally oh he was he asked for 5,000 a month and I was like oh my God I can't afford that but from and every time I I would do it and then I'd record it and then I'd rewatch it a couple times I would take notes and then when the next one I was like the best student ever right but by the by the sixth time I got it and by the eighth time I was like I don't need this guy

anymore I get it and so that $6,000 investment made me millions of dollars in my life because I knew how to advertise and I didn't know how to advertise before I could get leads I could you know and I could I could call them and close them bring them to my gyms and then eventually I showed other gyms how to do the same thing that I did and so this is the like Leverage right how do you get more what you put in yes and the the biggest and best investment that you can make is

in your own skill set because skills are the ultimate hedge against inflation they're the Hedge against currency changes people like what's going to happen to the dollar doctors are going to get paid in seashells or Bitcoin or US Dollars it doesn't matter if you have value to exchange the world will exchange for it yes and so that's that's the the big thing that I think people who are who are starting out Miss what's the number one skill that people should be investing in to earn more promotion you need to learn advertise so if you think

about it in sequence right if you start a business uh what are the what are the what are the what are the contingencies if no one knows you exist no one can buy your stuff and so you have to first let people know you exist so it begins with advertising now advertising doesn't mean you have to run paid ads I say advertising I Define that is letting people know about your stuff and so you can let people know oneon-one via Outreach you can DM you can email you can phone call any you can knock on

doors all that's one-on-one you can uh you can make content you can post on public platforms uh you can stand on the sidewalk and Shout it's one to many right uh the and then the third the third third way you can do is you can run out the fourth and kind of like secret or more advanced ways that you can use those to then go get somebody who already has that audience that you want so get an affiliate to then prefer you business and that's amazing strategy but you in order to get in touch with

those you reach out one-on-one you make content or you run ads so those are going to be the core things that you're going to be able to do and so in the beginning you have to do that to get the first interest now I think where people make mistake is they then double down on that at that stage oh this worked I should do more which is a logical thing to think but long term the product is going to be the thing that's going to allow you to scale really really big now don't get me

wrong you can make a few million dollars a year $10 million a year being a really good marketer being a really good promoter you get Limited at a certain point because Pro like you you you burn through a Marketplace because people understand the concept of Word of Mouth they're like yeah you want to have Word of Mouth but what they fail to realize is that negative word of mouth is significantly stronger and more viral and so all of a sudden when they their advertising stops working or their their cost to a car customers d and

triples but the cost on the platform hasn't doubled or tripled it means that you have an invisible hand that's suppressing your results which is that somebody who would have bought heard that you're not good or that you're even mediocre and just decides not to and we do this all the time like you're like I was thinking about checking out that restaurant it's like I went it was and that's it it's done just like that and you would have gone if that person hadn't said anything I was going to go to that movie how was it

I mean it was okay done you're not going yeah that's it and so people over like it's so hard to get positive word of mouth and it's so easy to get negative word of mouth and that's what suppresses you long term so in the beginning you advertise then you maintain that level of advertising to continue to iterate the product because you need to get the people in and this is the unfortunate part but you bring people in knowing your product's not that good and you just do the best you can and you keep making it

better and better and better until you get people to stick or keep or get people to come back and so if you have a if you have a membership business it's obvious you want people to not cancel if you have a a consumable business like if you if you sell coffee you sell Coca-Cola whatever it is it's it's how reoccurring is the revenue How likely does that person who buys your coffee come back again to buy coffee whether it's a shop or it's a product doesn't matter and so once you know that people are coming

back it means you fix the product sufficiently that now you go back to the advertising and then you you double down you go crazy on it if someone only has a few thousand doll a year extra to spend on something what's more important for them to invest it in the stock market or real estate or to invest in themselves you know where I'm going with this one um so my favorite ISM that I that I like is don't invest in the S&P 500 it's invest in the s me 500 because you will get so much

more on active income by investing the small amount you have into increasing your earning capacity than you ever like just think about the dollars here so let's say that you had $1,000 all right saved up if you if you invest in Apple whatever or you've like you you'll have a 20% gain this year a 30% gain this year okay great so now you have $1,300 but $11,000 can teach you a new lesson or a new that can take your earning capacity because if you only have ,000 saved up you either make very little money or

you don't you're not following the first rule which is you got to spend way less than you make right and so if you're if you're on the I don't make a lot of money's part by the way you can still definitely save more but if you're on the I don't make a lot of money part then doubling your earning capacity would by the end of the year you might have $30,000 saved up rather than one or300 in the alternative scenario it's not even close it's an order of magnitude if it's not even close but everyone

everyone everyone's afraid to work and everyone wants to get rich quick which is why lotteries continue to make money and so if you can just get out of that basic that basic fallacy that you're somehow going to get lucky I would rather get rich for sure and be willing to like that's for me like success insurance is extending the time Horizon and being willing to learn skills along the way that's success Insurance cuz here play out the other scenario if you actually do hit the lottery you also lose it because you don't have the skills

to keep it it's true so the other path is pure fallacious thinking it's false it's a false dream you it's never going to result in wealth if you get rich quick you get you get poor even faster we've SE say that say that again if you get rich quick you get poor even faster why because you don't it's so my favorite Magic card hold on I'm going to bring it back my favorite Magic card was this card called burning wish in Magic the Gathering and the sub the the flavor text on the card said she

wished for a weapon but not the skill to wield it and I always loved that text because I thought about that as as business as money it's like we wish for money but not the skill to wield it because money is just a potential for exchange and so if you don't know how to make it then everything you have is just enough that's going to go down because you also don't know how to multiply it if you got lucky because anybody who wants to get rich quick only is relying on luck you're relying on chance

you're gambling you're not investing and so if you want to play the game and the thing and unfortunately the the the the tweets the the Instagram post or whatever when you see someone screenshot when they get go from $10,000 to 1.5 million you just don't see the other hundred people or a thousand people put 10,000 went to a dollar and so the idea is I want to get rich for sure and the Surefire way to get rich and the reason all these billionaires get up there and they say hey uh just invest in skills and

was like sure it's because that's the only thing that protects you and I come from a country or my father comes from a country rather um where my family everything we had was taken from us by the government and so it's very real that you may have to start over halfway through your life at zero and if you do lose it all the only thing you have is what you with your brains and your hands and so my grandfather who I was very very close with used to always say you have two hands in one

brain use them and my father came here with $1,000 and he buil the life that he has now he's a doctor um but that that was only possible because he had skills and even though everything was taken land houses everything was taken you can't take no divorce no tax no government can confiscate who you are and what you can do mhm and I see that is is the ultimate freedom and Independence of excellence and representation of Excellence if someone has skills but they have a bad relationship with money or they have money wounds or they

have money beliefs that they live in fear around whenever they receive money mhm are they able to earn and make a lot with those money wounds yeah yeah and so I will I will first off I don't know what money wounds are but I will if I can Define it the way I would Define what you're saying yes is so it's like bad money beliefs money wounds money trauma bad money energy all of that I'd bucket into bad behaviors under specific conditions which is that you don't know how to behave with money that's all it

is how do people learn how to behave with money well the F you just follow very simple rules the first rule is that you spend less than you make period no questions asked that's it you what if money what if people have never had money and then all a sudden oh I got $1,000 and they get excited or they get scared or they get worried how do you manage the energy that money brings to you so I think it's thinking in ratios so it's like I will save this percent I will spend this percent this

percent goes to my house or you know my my lodging this goes to food and you just have to stick with it now I think that that that process is good to go through but I agree that when you don't make a lot of money what feels like a lot of sacrifice results in very low payoff and that's why I'm bullish on put as much as you can in increasing your earning capacity skills yeah and the thing is is you you don't have to you don't have to buy so you really only have to have

one skill and then you can get everyone every other skill you need in your life and so when I when I got into the business game the only real skill I developed quickly was sales and I didn't even have that skill but I I had to for the gym so I learned how to sell I got pretty good at it and so I do I would go to these networking things I would meet other business owners and I I felt like I was a collector of of of fine skills I would find people and i'

be like hey how do you get customers and some people be like Oh I'm really good at Google PPC and i' like o I don't know how to do that that sounds interesting and so what I would do is I'd go and say hey what's your sales process look like and they'd be like oh you know it's it's it's okay I'd be like hey do you mind if I just like I'm pretty good at it and I can I can walk you through what we do uh some might help you out and so then this

is the key part if they said yes which plenty of people take free work I would then I would then treat it as though they had paid me for like a 10 ,000 like Consulting gig I would do tons of research I would talk to their team I would rescript what they had and then I would train their team on I tell them how to manage it and and this is when you know you did it right I would present it to them as though I was like making a presentation and they'd be like dude

this is too much man like whoa and then the magic thing comes out they say what can I do for you and I'd be like it's funny to ask can you show me your PPC stuff and the thing is is that they would give me less than I gave them but it was more than I had and so it was a net positive game and so you only need to develop one skill and then you can barter for everything else yes so like in the networking groups that I joined I got voted the the best

you know the member of the year in the first year they ever had it when I was in my fraternity back in the day I became voted president like I always TR like when I was in high school I was uh editor and chief of the of the literary magazine and vice editor of the newspaper like I always tried to like what can I how can I trade what I know how can I just keep trading up and that's fundamentally what I've I've done my whole life is just just trade up and and and the

risk here is that let's say you do all this work and the guy says thanks and then just gets off the call well there's two there's two possible SC scenarios one is you're not as good as you think you are or they don't function with reciprocity yes and that's okay because again volatility only appears volatile with low volume yeah you got to do it a lot of times if you do it 100 people you'll get what you want and if there's three guys who know PPC you give to all three and maybe one of them

helps you out absolutely but you're still better off than you were before and so this is the part like this is this was how I this is how I leap frogged in my earning capacity really oh 100% And then for the people I couldn't I would do a favor and asked to pay them you know like I would do whatever I could and I I would encourage people to I spend so much money for one one time and I also think there's something very powerful about being in person and um not Zoom yeah I think

there's something I think that you can observe far more behaviors in person there's so many things that are lost on Zoom uh what's the most you spent on one ofone time I spent $350,000 for an hour an hour yeah with who guy who's worth of s billion what what was the biggest lesson he taught you in that one hour he said protect your reputation with your life did you need to spend 350 grand for that I think that there's something powerful about knowing that someone who is much further ahead says it to you mhm and

it's not that that advice is something you haven't heard before but it's the advice that you needed to hear right now and that was what I needed to hear right wow protect your reputation with your life what does that look like and how does one do that when anyone can speak about them negatively online and say what they want and make stuff up or you can only control what you do and so the Stoke approach to this is that you know the truth and uh you know there's the whole like you know bad bad news

you know lies get out of get around the world before you know the truth gets out of bed but I see lies a lot like so Warren Buffett says this about the stock market he says in the short term it's a it's a uh it's a popularity contest in the long term it's a it's a weighing system and I see reputation the same way which is in the short term somebody could make some viral thing about you or they make they make some piece of conent some hit piece whatever it is but if you do

right by the values that you have on a long enough time in you touch enough people the surface area of your reputation compounds because it's not just that you do business with one person but as soon as because if you do grow in your reputation then more people will ask about you to the people who have met you and then they will give you they will give their opinion just kind of like the movie before or the or the the yeah exactly and so if every person who has done business with you is like he's

tough with fa or like he's very ethical or like you know what I would I would trust him with money you know what I mean if if if you have that that core set of beliefs and you behave consistent with that those bundled terms I want people to think these things about me what are the behaviors I have to do in order to get them to think that I'll give you a story about this so when I was in college I had a bad reputation with women uh in my freshman year I went from high

school where it was small you know small pond and I kind of ruined my reputation there and so I went to like a new area where like no one knew me and I was like oh this is like it's like virgin land right um not with the pun intended uh but I went to college and I very quickly got the same reputation in weeks yeah oh wow and so I went home depressed and I went to my dad and I was like man I was like how do I get all these people to stop saying

that I'm you know a man or whatever and like that I'm just like this guy who just goes around and sleeps with girls uh because it's preventing me from sleeping with um and he said and I had all these ideas of like maybe I maybe I could do this or I could like I had all these like strategies and he said have you considered not acting like a right not sleeping with women yeah and uh and I was like no no it can't be that and so but it's like as a kid like you you

know for the parents they are listening right I I dismissed it immediately but you know on the on the flight back and in thinking when I'm you know sitting there alone in my dorm I was like maybe I do need to just stop acting this way and so what ended up happening is I I decided I was like I'm I'm I'm going to be some someone that I want to be proud of I want I want to be proud to associate me with me because I want a different caliber of girl and that caliber of

girl is not going to go for this you know this guy who's always chatting up like I want a good quality girl um not just hot but good character right and it took basically two full semesters of me acting like a priest basically um and just like doing well in school studying hard just you know being a contributing member of society that all of a sudden like more like the the reputation started to change but like the New Balance reputation it took time it did and so it's like there's this period of time that you

have to go through and be willing because right now you are living through consequences of actions you took last year five years ago and so you have to be able to split it without getting the reward for it and that's the hard part and that's the part that no one's willing to go through and the longer people know you for one set of characteristics the longer it's going to take for them to unlearn that this is a really good point so the reason I think it's so hard for people back home right So for anybody

who's ever left home and you go back and people treat you a certain way they knew you for 20 years exactly and what's interesting is Imagine over imagine you went to high school with somebody and in middle school all right so it's like they had eight years with you and they had every single day they had hours and hours of exposure you go back and they have two days a year during the holidays well it's like okay well two days out of 10,000 were this way yeah yeah it's it's almost never going to outweigh it

I'm given a lot of thought to this because I was like like why can't why can't I change everyone's mind cuz like I have changed so much but the reality was that the exposure required to change their perception of me was greater than the time that I was willing to dedicate to it you need to spend two three years with them now yeah to show up as you are not two days exactly and then the trade-off is is it worth it no it's not which I don't have many childhood friends anymore of course and then

and so and I also I'll make this point to anybody who's in that situation where you're like man I don't want to be like these people I don't want to be like my friends that I have right now is that you have to be willing to accept that you may lose those friends or you probably will lose those friends but you will gain many more with the caliber of person that you want to become and you get caliber of friends that match it but there is a transition period will you'll have neither it's tough man

for about a decade I felt like I didn't have many friends I felt like all my childhood High School College friends they didn't want to hang out or when we hung out they didn't really understand me and they were kind of judging me and it felt like why are they always talking weird about me behind my back why am I not invited more to stuff all these it's kind of hurtful right totally um but at the same time those I guess childhood friends that I maybe do have or I talked to once in a blue

moon they've chosen to accept the person I've become and and appreciate who I still am not expect me to be who they once knew and I can respect them for that and not judge them on their journey and just accept them for being a friend yeah and I think um well two parts one is the people who hate it or the people who don't accept the new version of you you they downplay your success for being willing to take a risk that they were unwilling to take mhm because it like your success makes them feel

bad whether they whether they say it or not it does because humans are comparative creatures we look at one another that's I mean we learn through modeling we see what someone else does and if they did something that we aren't willing to do and they have something that we don't have we start not liking them because what does that mean about me and so the what does that mean about me it's much easier to say he's changed and he sucks now uh rather than saying I didn't and I suck so hard because the people who

don't know how to say you've grown say you've changed and they say it like it's a bad thing and I think the E the the the simple response to that is and you have it and I think it's it's being willing to sit in that and be like I'm okay with this and I have lost almost every friend or rather I could say I have actively cut off every friend that I've had you know from the beginning I have one friend that I still have um from middle school one friend um but basically no one

else and that one friend is because he is a is a champion like he's a cheerleader he has a different life but he's just like dude go he's not criticizing you he's not judging you he's like you're amazing and you keep him in his life your life and he's also not a he not a money guy he's an FBI agent and so he's exceptional at what he does it's just not money related so we have this perfect thing where neither of us we have no competitive overlap so I'm like how many how many drug rings

did you bust this month oh dude let me tell you these syrians I was I was take this whole gang I took down you know like and so I get to hear this whole thing he's like what deals have you done and because he you know we could kind of live vicariously but that's cool those relationships are rare and if you find somebody who who speaks well of you behind your back and talk to you to your face those are the friends that are worth keeping amen and if you can find somebody who can do

all both of those without flipping every conversation and making it about themselves I think you have somebody who's worth keeping mhm but most people don't even meet one of those criteria let all three yeah speaking of young men and ourselves when we were younger yeah what would you say are three brutal truths that young men need to hear in order to become more successful in life you have to be willing to trade the things you love right now for the things you want and you may not like the price of what you want but you

can't change the price and so there's all this graveling that goes back and forth for younger men of like basically wishing it didn't cost this much time or cost this much failure or cost this much risk in order to get to where they want to go and so they basically stomp their heels and then you know Retreat inwards into their basement and video games and whatever else rather than confronting their own inadequacy because the first thing you have to do is say it's my fault everything that I have in my life is my fault but

if it's your fault it's also under your control to change because you cannot not change what you do not control and so to me it's taking full accountability so that's number one um the the second thing is if you want to change your behavior change your conditions and so one of the most powerful things that you can do is change who you surround yourself with and where you live and so if you have an environment of people around you who speak ill of you or like basically reinforce the wrong traits or the wrong actions there's

a reason I left Baltimore and there's a reason you left the right yeah is I went to where I thought I was like I want to get into fitness and so I was between Miami and Southern California those are I was like those are kind of the fitness capitals I'm going to go to one of those places because I want to do Fitness and I want to be around the best and so Baltimore is not the capital of f is and so me changing my environment allowed me basically slate to to start behaving the way

that I wanted without interference because a lot of people have interference in their surroundings and so I think it's a lot of times you have to well I think this leads to the third thing so you change your environment that's number two the third is delete everything that is not getting you closer to your goals and so I have used that this razor has not changed in my life which is my probably the two most often asked questions that I have that I like mentally think I probably think 10 times 20 times a day is

number one does this action this person this decision increase or decrease the likelihood that I achieve my goals yes or no that yeah does it increase or decre does this friend who who always wants to go out does you you playing fantasy football increase or decrease your likely that you he your goals and that is just it's black and white it's pretty like you know it's pretty like you know which what what now you can pick the like but shouldn't I have a I'm talking about winning if you want to talk about if you want

to talk about you know fulfillment and and and and and all the joy and all that stuff like I'm not the guy for that yeah yeah but because fulfillment is winning for you for me that's your hobby your hobby is winning where some people have hobbies for joy and fulfillment you have hobbies which are to win I like looking back and enjoy cuz memories pay dividends in the future and so suffering lasts only for a month but the memory of the achievement lasts forever and for me I love like looking back on what I've done

only in so far as it excites me about what's to come and so um the so delete everything using that question and the second question which is my Pro it might be my favorite question in it might be my favorite question in general which is what would it take and the reason I love that question is because it assumes success so if you go up to some girl who's way out of your league and you're like what would it take it assumes that she's going to go out with you or she's going to say you

need to be you need to make this much you need to do this you need this she's going to give you the answers right and then do you want to pay that price exactly either you don't like the shoes or you don't like the price you got to pay it if you want it and and so what would it take and it's like hey if we have a deal that we're working on like what would it take now you can make the decision whether the price Tag's worth it but at least you learn the price

and what I have found in my life is that when I when I try to answer those questions like what would it take for me to be number one in this field what would it take for us to to to lead this Market what would it take for me to be the best salesman in this company the answers are not as crazy as you'd think and so a lot of people spend most of their time answering questions not worth answering it's playing games that aren't worth playing it's like if you play stupid stupid games you

win stupid prizes and so no one asked the question before they play the game is this game worth it and so when you ask the question of like what what is the big goal and what would it take then you just get to solve for it and to me it's just great if if I know what it is then either I have those resources or I have to use my resourcefulness to get them yes but it's under my control and these are how the big leaps in my life have occurred when I when I wanted

to get in the gym business I was like okay what would make it the highest likelihood that I hit my goals so what I did was I join I said I'd say $50,000 23 years old I lived on nothing um I said $50,000 and I traveled to California cuz I was like all the best fitness people are here then I joined a gym Mastermind of all gym owners I didn't own a gym I joined a gym Mastermind without owning a gym and he was like you sure and I was like yeah he's like why I

was like well I fig I'll learn from everyone else's mistakes before I start smart right so the first thing I said I was like where do you guys open one go oh I have a terrible location I wouldn't have done this another gu like oh I my and then the guys who had the best location it's like what was what was it okay well how how many square feet should I have should I organize the gym what equipment oh should I buy or lease ex I thought I was going to they're like oh don't buy

those they're really expensive I thought I was going to use them no one uses them oh yeah girls trip on those don't don't use that and so I was like uhhuh uh-huh I was just taking all these notes and so then I was like okay if I'm around the best gym owners and I'm learning from them then I can be at year 10 in my career on my first year because if I do what the best people did I will get with the best people got and so I've always just focused on what did they

do forget the forget the energy forget the manifestation and forget the you know the vibrations and the frequency like what did they do I will do that and not only will I do that I'll do way more of it because I don't want to just Pace them I want to beat them yes and so like Kobe it's like if he's if he's working out if if the best guys are working out twice a day he's like well I got to work out three times a day because they're already ahead of me so if I'm working

out twice a day and they're working out twice a day then we're going to advance at the same Pace but I got to work out three times a day if this guy's doing $100 a day ad spend I got to spend $500 a day if this guy's doing you know one piece of content I got to make 10 because he's better at it than I am so I have to make 10 just to make up for my skill deficiency and so again this volatility is is is a consequence of volume is that you're typically just

not doing enough and the people who outwork you they out output you and I'll give you a really simple example that will demonstrate this that it's very real so in a company so I just took over operating uh one of the divisions um on the media side and the first you know day I came in I was like okay so you know what are we going to do and so they're like this I was like okay what are we going to get done by and they were like you know next meeting which is like the

next Monday is a weekly meeting and I was like okay how many hours does that take and they were like I don't know probably like 4 hours to do this thing can we do it today exactly and then I was like okay well it's you know noon let's meet at 4: I'll give you an extra hour and show me what we did and then we met four hours later it was done and I was like okay well what can you do tonight so that we can do tomorrow morning and he said this thing so we

just moved the buck along and in 3 days we did 3 months of work because if you think there was 12 actions that had happened and you had a one we k in a very real way we move forward at 20 times the pace and so a lot of people think that like it's not speed of activity it's elimination of waste there's all these other things that people are distracting distracting themselves with and so if you were if you were that young man it's you have to recognize the trade-offs that you have to be willing

to make you have to change your environment so you can change your behavior and you have to delete everything that's not the thing that you want most and if you can't decide what you want most then that's what you need to do first but once you know what you want then go get it yeah then what do you think are the most toxic traits that young men have today that are holding them back H so if we Define traits as bundled terms right which means that there's just series of behaviors that bundle into one word

um convenient for communication hard for training uh is that you know what there it's there's actually just a hundred small skills that you need and I think in think I think demystifying this makes it easier so it's like I want to be confident well confident is an is an approximation of how statistically likely something is to occur so if in statistic you have a confidence metric How likely is this thing to occur and so if you want to be more confident it means you need to do enough repetitions that you can make a statistical prediction

that it's likely if I go up on stage a 100 times in a row I do the same presentation and I get up there like how are you so confident I'm like because I've done this a 100 times and I know how this is going to go because I've done it before and so people want the confidence before the Reps but especially in confidence the proof comes before the pudding you have to you have to do the Reps before people are like wow cuz you can't fake I mean you can you can fake confidence but

not to yourself to your you'll know and as far as I'm concerned in life I'm the only one I'm trying to impress and so if I know I'm fake I'm the one who in the middle of the night is looking up being like I can't believe I'm so full I would hate that it's an empty life it's also living for other people and so if the toxic trait is people wanting the outcome without the repetition right without the price that's I say that's number one um the the let me see what the I'm trying to

think of like a really specific thing well the second one is um has everything to do it's offshoot but is entitlement right is is is fundamentally believing you deserve things and that that the world must accommodate you why do so many people have that belief um I think parenting in the school system has made it so that like you can have a safe room and you can you can have a cry corner and hey if you if you think that 1 plus 1 is 5 like that's that's this is emotionally safe for you I don't

want you to feel it's like but you're going to the thing is is you can't change reality right and so you can believe whatever you want but if you're actions aren't aligned with how the world Works you're not going to get what you want and you're going to be very upset for a long time until you figure out that the universe doesn't Bend to your will like does it Bend to your will though no but if you do a set of actions it's starts to bend I play Within I play Within I play Within the

realm of reality but it bends to your will once you do the actions that it it wants you to create for you to get the results you want I think that the Universe isn't I don't anthropomorphize it so I don't humanize it and saying it wants anything right right um but because of the actions you took over the last 20 years yes you were able to create extraordinary results yes based on reality and if I had done if I had said I want to become the best business guy and then sung songs every day that's

not going to be I can manifest All I Want but that's not going to be the thing that makes me the best businessman and so I don't get to set those rules but I can play by them and I think a lot of people a lot of men specifically waste a tremendous amount of time stomping their feet demanding that the world be different than it is and so to me that's a losers mentality and they then spend more time defending their excuses than defending their Ambitions and so if you if you put all of the

effort into how do I how do I make this thing into reality rather than how do I excuse my behavior up to this point like winners winners think about what they can make happen and losers think about what happened to them and it's one flip of a switch which is I will judge myself on what I do and what I make happen not what occurred MH and I think that divorcing those things is is like and this is a freeing thought for me it's a little bit heady so maybe maybe you're you're a like it

I'm in the past doesn't exist except for in your mind it's l like it's gone it's gone we only have this moment and then this will be gone right and it's only exists in our memory and so I have this this mental idea where what if I woke up one day I got hit with a shovel and I all these things I forgot about them what does it change and so a lot of people are like I need to process my trauma I'm going to get into this because I think it's I think there's there's

somebody who's listening to this that this will this could change their life I Define trauma as a permanent change in behavior from an aversive experience from a bad thing that happened now does that mean that trauma is inherently good or bad to me the answer is no if I'm a child and I touch a stove and it burns me that's traumatic if I never touch a hot stove again it permanently changed my behavior from a negative experience is me touching not touching hot stoves a bad thing no it's just a manner of learning and so

if you have PTSD you had a traumatic experience you had which is fundamentally rapid learning it's what trauma is you learn you have an accelerated rate of learning bombs go off loud noises your friend dies in front of you and then a car honks really loud and you're in basically you take the same condition and then you repeat the same behavior because you learned it which might be duck down or whatever it is right and so the this idea that people espouse that trauma is is stored in our body it's in our it's in our

banks it's in our DNA now I'm like where where is this where is this compartment in our physical biology no you learned it different way to behave under circumstances and so we just need to behave differently I had a young guy who got on my who was on my uh uh uh team in one of a one of the portfolio companies that I wanted to interview because he was sales manager and he said you know I have um I have some demons that I need to like you know slay and I was like what does

that even mean he's like you know I just I tend to I tend to like self-sabotage sometimes and I just said you don't know how to behave period in certain conditions you don't know how to act great so we'll expose you to those conditions and then we'll teach you how to act the right way that's it that's all it is that's it exposure therapy yes and that's how you change Behavior same condition new Behavior that's learning and so I I I bring this up because I think so many people are chained by the idea of

trauma rather than thinking okay this thing occurred I learned a behavior that is that is aversive to my goals makes it less likely I achieve my goals so and here's the key point this is the thing that you ask yourself what can I do instead and so for example if you give feedback to someone the reason no one can or very few people are good at giving feedback is that often times they insult rather than criticize so if you say you suck at that or you a dick right that's insulting but it doesn't tell someone

what to do instead yes and so criticism is the difference between desired and actual now that can be very a uh non-emotional you can say hey you said you were going to show up every day and you've been late great okay so desired actual am I saying now if I said and because of that you're lazy that's an insult mhm me saying this is reality is just looking at what we can observe and the reason I come back to this over and over again is like what can I observe is because these are the only

things that affect the world is what you do and so in trying to quote conquer trauma like I I could say like I can create a narrative around whatever so it's like if you were to say hey Alex what do you think happened in your childhood that that made you you know driven or whatever right I could make up something but no one knows I can't run a split test on my life I know that I I do these things and I've been rewarded in the past for doing so I repeat them that's about the

only thing I could probably say okay but if I said I I treated women that way because I had a a broken relationship with my mother okay and all change the it doesn't right it's like so it's all all we all it is is it acts as a defense for maintaining behavior that we know doesn't help us hit our goals and so every ounce of effort that goes in defending trauma or a a negative a negative behavior from a negative experience is waste M and so using that hit head in the shovel like got hit

you have amnesia you don't remember that that thing happened great but you can do that today yeah and you can just say Okay under the next time this happens when my husband comes home drunk again what can I change about my behavior now it might be leave it might be telling him hey don't do this or I'll leave that's a consequence not a threat it's a consequence and so this this has massively simplified my life and I have this belief that billionaires see the world more clearly than everyone else why because they've been able to

predict what's going to happen better and so my only goal is to be able to see more clearly how reality works and I my my iait or my hypothesis is that the more clearly I understand how things work the better I will be able to execute within that realm and predict what's going to happen you make better decisions yeah that's it and you get the results you want more likely get those results you want and that's what I would Define as good decision making a high likelihood of getting the thing that you want speaking about

good decision- making you've talked about this a lot the Solomon par Paradox where you have conversation with your 85y old self um here's a question for you we're getting close to the end here how often do you have this conversation with your 85-year-old self whenever I have a big decision okay and so it's not how many times in the last year what you say five yeah that's actually about it probably about five that's probably what I say um let's say you're the next time you talk to your 85y old self you ask him hey I

want to make this decision and he gives you the advice that you need to hear subjectively outside of yourself and saying I just do this this this and boom it's done when you become 85 yeah and you win at everything everything that you do and you touch you win at you you know you accomplish way more than you fail all these things happen what do you think will be the biggest price you pay that you look back on and say I wish I would have told you to do something else we won a ton we

wanted everything everything we wanted we won yeah but there was a price we paid somewhere that maybe at 85 yeah I wish you would have taken a different choice and and not looked at winning but looked at doing something differently is there anything that your 85-year-old self would tell you what that could be I think about this a lot and I think that most people have deathbed regrets because it's easy to make them on your deathbed yeah and so basically we wish we could have lived six lives and so the the concept of regret basically

is like I wish I could have had it's I wish I could have had my cake and eaten eaten it too right I wish I could have lived the life as a musician and as the perfect husband and as the best businessman and as a professional Health whatever and I think it um skews the idea of trade-offs which is what life is more realistically about which is that you make trades give the information you had and for me to wish for a different outcome would mean that I would wish for a different decision-making algorithm which

would then massively change my life in general because saying oh I wish I had spent more time with my you know wife or whatever if that meant it would have people say I wish I would have done this but they don't accept the cost of that would you actually because the thing is is that if you play all that all the way to the other side they might say I wish I would have done this so I see this as fundamentally we want to have everything and we can't and for me and that's okay what's

the biggest um regret that most billionaires have that you've talked to um I don't talk about to them about regrets I talk about I talk about business with that to be like really real like like the real answer is if I have an hour with a billionaire I'm talking about money stuff sure um that's that's that's about it I mean when if I think about my younger self right um I'll play this out for you so let's say today I'm not 85 but I'm in a very different time in my life than I was when

I was 23 when I started 22 when I started my first gym um I know what that young man was going through and I know how hard he worked and how hard he wanted it and if I were to look back at that young man and tell him what to do differently if I were to go back I would look at him and I would smile and I would say nothing why because I love the life I have and I wouldn't want to change anything right now you do yeah you''ll be like whatever you're doing

whatever you're going to do do it I wouldn't want to mess with that exactly so like I've already played if a time machine ever exist and an old version of me comes back and he says nothing and smiles I'd be like all right all right I'll keep going right exactly and so I think the regrets only happen if you if you don't if you dislike the present like that is where regret comes from there's some part of the present that you in this moment yeah right but I spend all of my time doing the thing

that I enjoy most and I have to to the to the the criticism of the vast majority of people in my life past present and probably future like we were talking at the very beginning like I worked the first 100 days of this year I didn't take a day off and I've probably taken 11 days off since you know since the halfway point or whatever of the the year and I went on a vacation that was a two-day vacation and I left one day in I got to this beautiful Resort very expensive you know crazy

you know 22 Villas that's all it is super highend whatever there's there's a like a 3 to1 person who works there to you ratio like it's crazy and I remember we had this beautiful view of this mountain great you know and I and I there's this lawn chair I'm sitting on you know fancy lawn chair but I'm sitting there and I look out and I say to myself this is beautiful and I don't give a I don't care it's and the thing is is that there's this expectation of myself that I should care like I

should take a vacation but I think about like how how recent is the 5-day work week it's a it's a 50 6year old concept it's not something that happened for hundreds of years for thousands of years for humans this is a new thing people used to work every day yeah it's just life that's what they call it you had to get up and work on the farm and take care of everything and your name was literally what you did Carpenter but Taylor like all of these were names because what he like oh John the Taylor

John the butler John like and then eventually they just became names that we have now the Smith like it's the same thing and so I I spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to remove every sh from my life why should I go on vacation why should I go home for the holidays why should I call my mom once a week right now if some people may disagree with me and that's fine live your life differently that's okay like do your thing I guess if you're unhealthy or you're exhausted you're drained you'll take the time

to sleep and recover yeah you're not going to burn yourself out every day no and so I think about output in terms of net output over a long period of time so if I said okay you have to work as hard as you can for 24 hours then of course you take every stim in the world you don't sleep because you only have 24 hours but if I said do the most work you can in a month then it doesn't really make sense to do that right because you really just want to maximize your effective

time and so that also means that you're going to have periods of rest and maybe it isn't working you know 18 hours every day maybe you're good on 14 hours a day or maybe you're good on 12 that's going to be dependent on you but I also think that your ability to work itself improves and so like in the fitness world there's something called work capacity which is basically your ability to recover but I think there's work capacity in work as well like my ability to do work so like I have uh like you know

if you if you speak on stage right and you do these pres you know this so people if if I were to say hey I'm going to go do a hundred of these in a quarter people might be like that's insane you did 100 speaking events right but if I were to say I'm a university professor and I do eight of those a day because I have lecture Halls that I give presentation to why is this different M it's the only differ people say it is that it should be different I you should be tired

you shouldn't travel that much you should feel exhausted whatever and I'm like why and is there another alternative reality that I can ask like the thousand years ago or the teacher that would make the current struggle that I have just par for course and if I can do that then why don't I do it now yeah and so if if my priorities change I'll change my behavior if in if tomorrow I wake up and I say you know what I have enough money and my achievement goals no longer matter to me then fine but I

believe that we're a Whisper In The Wind anyways and so I think we just I think life is hard then you die yeah and it's just what what type of hard you want this has already been you know talked to tears but like in the business context like growth is stressful stagnation is stressful deine is stressful so disease is stressful yeah life is stressful and so to where that life weren't stressful is to live is to wish to not be alive like stress is just an indication that you are alive yes that you exist congratulations

so that would actually be a positive thing again all of these are just shoulds that people tell us and so I just I really push back on that a lot and try and keep my space and say like I'm going to do the things that I think increase the likelihood that I get what I going to have and if someone has a problem with that then they can they can they cannot be in my life and that's okay because there's 8 billion other people and I'm sure there's one that's fine with it I'm glad you're

in my life I appreciate you you've got a you've got a you've got two best-selling books that have sold over a million copies each 100 million offers 100 million leads we'll link those both up you've got another book that you have coming out here in the future we'll we'll we'll announce that when you're allowed to announce it you've got a a free $100 million scaling course which I think is pretty cool where can people go to get that just acquisition. comom trining okay um we just released it I spent go so I probably spent I

spent so many hours on this thing um I vetted it with three uh other billionaires and I walked through each of the stages and they were like dude I can't like this is so accurate wow and so basically break down every stage of business across all functions going from zero to 100 million plus so what does sales look like what does marketing look like what does uh customer service look like what does product look like what does it look like what does HR look like what does uh recruiting look like what does Finance look like

across uh zero which would be you you don't even have a business yet next stage is you have you graduate by making your first dollar next stage you get your first employee and then you basically scale all the way up from there and so I got all the way to 500 employees uh which for most businesses will be over 100 million a year uh I scaled it by headcount because headcount is more similar in terms of structure of business rather than Revenue like a software company can have you know 20 guys and do 100 million

a year and then you know restaurant has 20 and has does right and so but the structure of the organization is more similar by head count and so basically walk through each of these as functions that's cool what must occur to move to the next level and so uh basically you can take the road map uh assessment it'll tell you where to go it's all free um and it'll give you a personalized uh like plan of like this is what you need to do your sales at this point there what you do to advertising this

point and then there's videos that go with it if you're more of a video learner wow so that's acquisition. comom for that yeah yeah just training um I think Road it's forward slash uh you back slash whatever the slash is uh road map one word um I'm pretty sure that's what the the URL is worst case if you're go.com you'll find it you'll be up there somewhere yeah you'll find it or I will have failed as an Advertiser if you get to the Fig it out how much how many pieces of content are you putting

out a day on all social media now um 65 so if you want 65 pieces of content a day go follow you Alex Hermos on YouTube Instagram her MOSI Facebook Twitter all the all the places um this has been powerful man I'm grateful for you for always sharing your heart I'm glad to see that like every year since two and a half years ago there's been this you know new insights that pop up for you as you keep expanding and growing and learning and failing and winning mostly uh you continue to learn more and share

more here so we appreciate you here we're grateful for you we acknowledge you for uh constantly evolving you know it's like the last time I saw you you were 50 pounds heavier of just mass now you're leaning because you're focused on longevity which I think is really cool um but either way man we're grateful for you here we appreciate you and we're excited to see what's next is there any final thing you want to share before we wrap up yeah never give up my man appreciate you appreciate you thanks for having me man it's great

brother thank you so much for being here I hope you got some value from this episode as much as I did if you did please do me a favor and click the like button right now if you like this it's going to help share it out into the YouTube world even more for us please click that like button and leave a comment below on your biggest takeaway or if you have any questions that you want me to follow up with also subscribe to our Channel because when you do you help us book even bigger guests

and I want you to have the best information out there in the world because that's what the school of greatness is all about so make sure to subscribe right now like this video share a comment below on your biggest takeaway and also I've got some big news a new book if you're looking to create Financial Freedom in your life and you want more abundance and you want a richer life then make sure to check out my new book make money easy I think you're going to love this and it's all about creating Financial Freedom the

link is below in the description or you can go to makemoney easyb book.com and check it out I know who I am I'm an incredibly patient operator and I build slow and quietly Vayner media Vayner X has 2,000 employees that's incredible man I thought it was only a th000 it's 2,000 employees you were there I was there when you had four correct I remember there