How to get what you want...

the hardest respect to earn is one's own over the years my wife and i created acquisition.com which portfolio of companies does about 85 million a year i get questions all the time in terms of like how do you create these businesses how do you sell stuff how do you live your life all of those kinds of things and i was talking to a good friend who'd come back into my life briefly we actually started at the same time together there was a there was a period of time that he did significantly better than me just

from a financial perspective and then i ended up passing him and we met back up a few years later and he was a little bit down and the conversation that we had was really enlightening for me and the conversations we've had since and so i wanted to share that with you the main purpose for this video as i'm getting to it is to underline how do you actually do the stuff that creates the wealth the empire the status all that stuff and i think that this is where people get really tripped up the reason i

say that is there's kind of three elements to the the goal right so you have the external result that you're looking for which might be make more money get a six pack whatever you've got the processes behaviors activity that result in that goal right being achieved which would be like doing the work the third aspect is being the type of person who does those things so basically identifying with those types of behaviors or being the type of person who does those types of activities which then creates the reward right i think james clear talks about

this in his book atomic habits but there's a lot of behavioral psychologists who've touched on this point and you probably have heard be do have at some point in your personal development journey and if you haven't welcome to the game and so one of the things and this is what i wanted to give to you in this in this video is a keystone habit that has served me very well and it's only been in retrospect explaining it to someone else that i kind of had more clarity on it which is why i'm sharing it with

you when i have something that i want that i do not have so i have a desire which means i've made a contract with myself to be unhappy until i get what i want right and so i have this thing that i want externally and i think i've had enough experience with this to know that simply writing down the goal means nothing and so i think this is contrary to common belief or practice which is like people write down their goals are more likely to succeed sure i mean having a direction is more likely to

achieve than than not having a direction so i'm not going to disagree with that but here's an interesting statement that may hit you which is that winners and losers have the same goals right everybody olympics has the same goal everybody who's in business has the same goal right they want to increase how much money they're making you sell more products get more customers etc so the goals are actually not that unique and so the fact that we're writing them down sure it's a first step because we have to have a direction in terms of what

are we trying to accomplish sure but i think that what you'll see that is different because if you look at two people with the same goals and one person achieves them the other person hasn't then it can't be having the goal that is the main driver of success right right and so then you get you know you dive a step underneath that and you look at what are the behaviors that created that goal and now we get much closer to the things that are actually driving the progress what gets more interesting at least to me

is if we know the activities that are going to generate the result we want so maybe it's we want to get more customers which means we need to advertise more and i use advertised by the definition of what the word actually means which is to make known and so if we do activities that make our products and services known like doing more private communications which would be one-on-one reach outs one-on-one cold calls 101 dms one-on-one emails etc prospecting or one-to-many so public communication which should be uh you know broadcasting across different platforms for media right

so you have radio you could have an email list you could have um actually that would be an example of a high version of scale of the original so i apologize there but like making posts on social media things that are public forum where people can find out about it right if you do more of those things more people find out and that would be the activity that's associated with getting more customers right but the thing is is that people will know what that activity is right they will know that inherently they should be doing

more of it and yet they don't and so that is kind of the purpose that i wanted to drill down in this short video today is why not and what is the way that we can try and correct that or fix that i wanted to give you the simplest single hack that i have used inadvertently and seen a tremendous amount of success that is asking myself the question what would a person who does this type of thing do in this instance the one that i'll tell you that i've repeated a lot to myself over the

years probably over the last five or ten years has been the repeated chorus of what would a wise man do i think it's because i did not consider myself to be very wise and i acted many ways that were unwise earlier on in my life and i still continue to do so uh but i try to do less of it right and i think that and i'll borrow this again from james clear's book your identity is much more of a weighing system actually this is not from this book but like it's much more of a

voting system where you you cast votes in either direction based on your activities of what type of person you want to become and i think the simplest distillation of that concept is simply asking the question what would this type of person do if you can use that as the refrain that you come back to over and over again the chorus of your day that gets repeated over and over again i think it's much easier than trying to remember the 50-point checklist of all the activities that you need to do to achieve the goal and the

the friend that came back in my life um where we were having this conversation i just distilled it down to like what would a billionaire do and so when we're confronted with these crossroads right you wake up in the morning and you're like i don't know what i should start it's like what would a billionaire do and so basically what you can do is have a certain refrain or chorus that you ask yourself what would this type of person do and that type of person when you ask that question is who you will eventually become

as you continue to cast votes that reinforce the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and those are the things that create long-lasting deep change and what's more about this is that these changes when they become internal when they become ingrained in our behavior they become effortless but it takes time and so i think that the mental cue that i have given myself inadvertently over the years i don't have a lot of choruses that i refrain to or that i come back to over and over again and so i tweeted about one and

it got shared a zillion times but is what would someone 10 times smarter than me do in this situation right and a different way of saying that is what would a billionaire do and and word in whatever way that resonates with you but i think rather than having that big checklist you can put just a little post-it on your computer or wherever you work that's a reminder to yourself that this is the type of person i want to become and in order to become this type of person i need to do these things because those

actions will reinforce the thoughts that i say about myself because the whole concept behind affirmations that i do not like right which is i am a you know i'm a lion i'm a tiger i'm a whatever right just saying them doesn't make them true unless you're a crazy person and most of us are not crazy i think right there's plenty of crazy if you don't get me wrong but if you're probably watching this channel you're probably at least semi-same right if we have you know this degree of sanity that's on our side then what we

have to do is create something else which is evidence we have to give ourselves evidence that we are this type of person in order to become that but how do you have evidence that you are going to be this person when you have none well it starts with activity it starts with doing the stuff and as an added correlator depending on the goal that you have it might be what would a person with a six pack do what would a pro champion bodybuilder do what would an amazing husband do or what would the best husband

in the world do and so you can use this framework of asking the question of what your ideal self would do in any given circumstance to apply to a vast number of scenarios so rather than trying to fix for the habit fixed for the being and then the habits will take care of themselves in accordance with the type of person that you have stated you wish to become and so then the goals we have become becoming the person we want to be once we know who we want to become then that can direct the types

of activities that will be in accordance with that and the reason i like this better too is that if we're trying to reinforce an identity or an identity trait about ourselves this is a really good habit i think that i've picked up over the years but breaking down the etymology of words is really really cool and i think really teaches us a lot about the words we say and words matter a lot because they are the things that encapsulate thoughts a classic one which is like i didn't really like the word philosopher because i thought

it sounded really fluffy when i found out the etymology behind the word which is filet which is to love or to like and then sophos which is knowledge or wisdom it's lover of wisdom and i was like well shoot i am a lover of wisdom and so now i actually have a very positive association with the word and to the same degree identity um comes from like uh i don't remember the actual latin word but entity is being right like just beingness and it's in and of itself and identical which is repeated so repeated beingness

is what your identity is so your actions what you do literally becomes who you are which means that we can actively change who we are by changing what we do but it is a reinforcing secular path of like i am this type of person and therefore i do these things and because they do these types of things i am this type of person right and so it's the chicken or the egg but at some point we need to take action in order to do that and so i think the simple and easiest cue that we

can use to change who we are to change character traits that we find undesirable is to simply ask ourselves when we're confronted with the decision what would this type of person do and then act in accordance to that and i find it much simpler than having the lists and having the the daily routines and the things like that because if you are this type of person you will do the types of things that that type of person would do and that also comes down to the many decisions we haven't accounted for yet you're going to

be confronted with situations that you have not predicted in fact the vast majority of us don't predict things well in general it's because there's far more variables than we can possibly comprehend i think it's much more useful for us to think about ourselves in terms of if i were to encompass all of the things that i would like to be right and that's why i think the the what would jesus do was such a powerful statement in the christian community overall and candidly people outside of the christian community could use that same exact thing which

would jesus do in this instance and probably get the right activity and become more like jesus right which is the entire goal of the christian faith and if it makes it easier for you to think in a more tangible sense when you're asking yourself the question i think the reason the jesus thing was so powerful is that it's there's a very real identity that they're associating this decision with um the ones that i asked are what would king solomon do um which he was considered you know one of the richest and wisest men which is

why it's someone that i i revert back to and the other person that i asked myself was what would they do in this situation is warren buffett and charlie munger when i ask myself that question and it depends on the scenario which person i'm going to draw on to answer the question depending on what suits best you know what best suits the objective etc um but i think if you can if you can if you don't know someone that you can make it the value or the version of yourself with that value or you can

just use an external person that embodies a lot of the character traits that you hope to have and that can be equally as effective so it just depends on who you are but i think any of those are good strategies that you can employ to maximally use this kind of tactic for self-improvement and self-change what we repeatedly choose to ask ourselves which creates our identity which then creates the tasks that we do in the activities we spend our time on reinforces the story that we tell ourselves about who we are right or what type of

person we are what i shared with this individual i said you know what do you want to become and if it's like a billionaire it's like cool then what would a billionaire do and always asking ourselves that question and the reason that this was important when i was talking to this individual i'll read you the text that i had that i had said to him because they got shared all over instagram when i when i tweeted them or whatever is that after you left i said here's a thought for you so i was just like

thinking about the conversation we had and he had felt kind of shitty and what's interesting about this is like as you level up in your life and this is just an observation that i've had is that like you will simply change who you compare yourself to and i think jordan peterson talks about this in some talk he had but i find it very true which is you just change who you compare yourself to and so you always find a way to make yourself feel terrible and even if you're the best in the world and stuff

you'll just look at people who are better at other things than you and compare yourself to them to make yourself feel bad this is what i said to him and i'll share it with you i said every winner and every loser have the same goals what separates them are the activities they commit to committing to the activities that is the goal so commit to the activities that is the goal when you make a lot of money one month you've achieved nothing because the goal is the activities and then later i said do me a favor

instead of writing down your goals just write down what would a billionaire who lost it all do or what would a billionaire do to keep it simple or whatever version of yourself you want to be the doing and the outcomes will happen as a result of the main internal identity shift which you can reinforce many times a day by asking yourself that question at each crossroad and so i i think that was uh relatively you know i i think it's a good point to end off on which is the only tactical ask that i have

for you is to simply write down what type of person do i wish to become and then make that the chorus that you recite to yourself when you're at your your crossroads when you're at your decision points that are going to create who you are on a repeated basis every single day and i think going back to that refrain will be all-encompassing in terms of what would jesus do applies to a zillion scenarios but everyone at least in the christian faith and i use it because it's a very simple catch-all would want to become more

christ-like right and so whatever the christ version is for you we can steal from that concept and continually reinforce it by asking ourselves those questions and if you ask yourself the next joshua question which is well alex i don't know what a billionaire would do or i don't know what an ifbb pro champ would do or i don't know what a okay well there's two ways you can see this number one is that most people know what they need to do to lose weight but they don't actually do it so i think that i could

push back on the vast majority of people and say no you probably do know that and i like this saying a lot which is we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught most people know they should be doing more than they're currently doing in order to achieve their goals and i think an example of that is if you're if your family were kidnapped you would probably act differently right when you were trying to save them because you would take significantly more massive action in order to do so right you would take

huge action in order to accomplish the goals which also means that you're the type of person who wants to save their family which is actually kind of a total side note here right but um in in doing that you already knew what to do all along you just weren't taking the action now that's if that's the vast majority of situations is covered with that example but if you're in the minority of situations right which is like well i don't know how to become a billionaire right well what are the things that would lead you towards

that right which might be like maybe you need to lower it a little bit which is what would a millionaire do and if it's not that then what would somebody who's trying to become a millionaire do and they would probably talk to millionaires or whatever or talk to people like the thing is is if you really want to go bad enough you can ask the question in such a way that you would be able to answer it and make progress right and then the nature of the question itself can develop over time as you discover

what you believe you need to do and i really will say this again the vast majority of us know what we need to do we're just simply not doing it and i think attacking why we're not doing it is a much more fruitful conversation than trying to discover the the secrets of the universe because the people who achieve the really extraordinary things do the uncommonly obvious thing for an inordinate period of time and that is what separates them is that they are doing it because it is who they are rather than something to achieve an

outcome that is fine and external that they don't have control over because if you are doing it for who you are you will continue to play the game indefinitely which will give you the outsize returns versus the person who is doing it to make money which means that when they do make money one month they pull back on the gas because they accomplish their objective of doing the external thing rather than being who they are or more of who they want to be and so if you're new to the channel by the way welcome my

name's alex like i said earlier my wife and i own acquisition.com it's a company that buys minority interests in uh service based info coaching uh digital products type businesses and then helps them scale to like 30 50 million and beyond and that's what we do full time but i do this stuff uh just because i struggled a lot on the way up and i don't want other people to struggle and i don't want my pain to be in vain and so that is why i make these videos so um welcome to mozzie nation lots of

love and i'll see you guys in the next video bye