Brutally Honest Advice for Men To Win In Their 20s

this is brutally honest advice for men to win in their 20s I made my first million at 26 I crossed 100 million net worth at age 31 and this is my road map for things that I learned along the way I'd like to normalize a 6 day week 12h hour per day work week for men between 16 and 28 and despite all the selfworth voodoo that social media and Society will tell you you were valued based on your utility and when you're young you have none but you have a lot of energy and so trade

that energy for experience points and become useful the first rule of Entrepreneurship according to Alex is use what you've got and the reason I like that is because many people always don't start things because they don't have the capital they don't have the connections they don't have the whatever insert insecurity or projection of blame and power they want to put on but the first rule is you use what you have and so it's about resourcefulness not resources and so if you have energy you use the resource you have you use what you've got to trade

to develop experience to develop proof that you can get good at a skill and you only get good at a skill by not being good at a skill and repeating it and then failing at each time and then making incremental improvements which take many many repetitions until you actually get good and this may be a little controversial but I'm not here to be nice to you I'm trying to be kind which might mean that it hurts a little bit so let's make this practical if you have less than $100,000 in savings and you would like

to to have $100,000 or more in savings these are the things that I would recommend doing and that means that you have to check out your ego it's your ego is gone for this all right you don't care what other people think because they're not going to be there in 10 years all right because you have a whole new group of friends that are way [ __ ] better and cooler so one stop eating out discount groceries only that's if you're super poor if here's my caveat if you know how to make money you already

have a base level of skills then eating Chipotle and whatever whatever you can door Dash it in so that you can keep working the moment I realize I can make $500 every 30 minutes by selling I was like oh I'm never buying I'm never cooking food or grocery shopping ever again anything that was less than $500 an hour was was now immediately outsourced all right but this advice is for people who are super broke okay so if you don't have the skill set yet at all and you're struggling to just get things going then you

need to be completely on the defensive so that you can have enough money so that you can start taking bets cuz the only way that you're going to get ahead is that you have to make bets you got to make bets on education you got to make bets on opportunities you got to make bets on inventory you got to make make bets on software you want to start a Shopify score you want to start a school Community you want to start something it's still going to cost some money right you might have to buy a

camera you have to buy some software that helps you edit videos like there's some expenses all right and so having a big stockpile allows you to be patient the the more money you have the longer you out you can think because you don't have to worry about tomorrow you know that next month and the month after and the month after taking care of because even if you made no money you've got enough that's how you can start thinking long term people are like think think longterm think long term but like unless if you have payroll

and you've got or you've got rent or you've got you've got groceries to pay you can't think long-term because you're in survival mode and so I'm trying to get Survival to be as low as humanly possible for you so that you could get into Thrive mode but it's all relative if you make 40 Grand a month and spend 40 Grand a month you're going to be in the same survival mode but if you make 40 Grand a month and spend four you're going to have you're going to have every month you make 10 months worth

of income and so in two months you've got you've got 20 months saved up you're good and then you can get super aggressive that other 36 and start really betting to to double down all right so here's the very broke five six things that you can do to immediately spend way less one stop eating out discount groceries only two stop buying new clothes go to Goodwill only three only attend free friend events all right so think of what I just said think about all the events that friends will tell you to come to weddings Bachelor

parties uh birthdays um just nights out because it's thirsty Thursday whatever only attend free friend events and if they don't support your goals they're not your friends think about that if I said hey I've got this goal and I said hey there's this human being and he wants to get you to not have the goal would you describe them as a friend or an enemy think about it some of you some of the people in your life that you call friends are actually your enemies you just don't know it now four take the rest of

the time that you have to a apply to jobs that make more than your current job B pick up side hustle work C learn skills that you can trade for a higher hourly rate than you currently do when I say trade I mean you make more per hour than what your current current skills pay you all right and then five find the hardest worker in the room when you enter that new job or that new place and then double their level of input so if they knock on 100 Doors you knock on 200 they make

a 100 dials you make 200 dials right when I had Jacob my young neighbor I gave him this exact advice and he was expected to on his team do $100 a day he did between 300 and 400 and so guess what he got better faster and then once you follow all of those steps this is what you need to do next wait 36 months and this is what I mean by patient with your outputs impatient with your inputs and the crazy thing is that you can change your life in one decision I can get drunk

Drive in a car and change my life forever right I can happen like that but it can happen just like that the other way it's just that the outcome's delayed that's the only difference you can change your life today In This Moment by making these decisions and the and your Life Path will have veered you will have changed Direction your tree of of life will move it's just that it takes time for that new direction to bear fruit whereas you can poison the fruit in a second you can kill a tree real fast you just

can't grow one real fast but it doesn't mean that if a seed's planted and you're watering it it's not growing it just takes a second to get above the surface I think you can solve a lot of male Problems by getting in shape and making money you'll still have problems they'll just be smaller and you'll have more resources to handle them so let's talk about the making money part first fundamentally in order to make money you have to provide value to some someone either an employer or customers but either way you have utility which you

exchange for money and so by making that a goal then it means that you're going to increase your own usefulness and so somebody who is more useful all of a sudden develops other ancillary skills around that utility that they can use in other parts of their lives if you're good at sales guess what you can do when you're talking to girls you can use the same conversational skill set if you're trying to negotiate uh a purchase for a car or a house or whatever like those skills generalize they transfer across domains and so a lot

of people think it's like well when would I ever be a salesperson or when would I ever be outbound what like it doesn't matter it's not about that thing the thing is it's like real life skills actually do generalize like this isn't elementary school or or middle school when you're learning calculus or algebra or whatever and thinking like what am I going to use this in real life one it is real life right now two these skills do get used across domains of all of my friends who are s Millionaires and billionaires to a person

they started in what I would consider a high volume sales environment so that's either door knocking cold calling or some sort of in-person business where they had many many many conversations with strangers on a daily basis and I think there's and I'm talking not like a a month or six months I'm talking like three five years where no one knew their name they were just some faceless representative that stood there at the door saw people sold memberships sold Insurance sold solar sold whatever and the thing is is like skill development happens through volume and feedback

loop so it's the number of repetitions you have times the amount of improvement between repetitions brute forcing the amount of volume definitely will help if you can give yourself feedback I've seen people say hey I've actually made a 100 pieces of content now this is like 1% of people because most people do nothing but of the 1% of people who say okay I post it every day for a year the thing is is they didn't do the most important part which is you don't just like make a video and post it and just every day

like hey make a video post it make a video post it you have to look at what you did and what you could do better fundamentally that is the the Cornerstone of feedback and so you look at the top 10 videos you made over the last month and you say okay how do I do more of that and how do I do less of the bottom 10% and you just pick one thing that you did well there and you try and do it in every video going forward and that develops a checklist of things to

do so that you develop a skill and So speaking from my own experience the first sales conversation I ever had first off I had zero sales training no one was like hey this is the script this is how you go over they're like hey here's a new lady go sign her up and so I was like okay and I didn't even know this was a sale I didn't know the I didn't know the term sales I just he said go sign her up and I said okay and so I walked over and and she was

like Hey you know I want to know more about the gym and I said well do you want to know and she was like well I mean like how much is it and I was like oh it's uh whatever 150 bucks a month and she was like okay and I was like you want to sign up and she said I left my credit card at home and I was like okay and she was like I'll be back with the credit card and I was like cool and so I walked out and uh it was like

2 minutes right and I walked out and the owner Sam was there with a few of other other gym owners he had brought a few gym owners in so it was like three or four gym owners there and uh he was like damn he was like that was fast and I was like yeah he's like you closed her and I was like yeah and and he was like with a credit card and I was like oh no she's she's going to go get it and she'll be back and they just looked at each other and

then looked back at me and then just started laughing at me uncontrollably like couldn't breathe at how dumb what I had just said was and the thing is is I had no experience and I and I tell that story because so many people assume that like I walked out of the womb closing deals you know what I mean like hey nurse what are you doing later you know I mean like but it wasn't like that right like I didn't know I I didn't I even know the term and so you know over time I just

started developing like okay well what do you do and I watched other people say I was like okay they start with asking them why someone's there ask them about their goals ask them things that they've done in the past that didn't work I like okay that that that seems to work okay and then when they asked them to buy then if they don't want to say yes they ask them more questions rather than just saying okay so I started to develop at least an understanding of the framework of how sales occurred but I still wasn't

good right and so then I went through like that Rocky cut scene period where this is where I'm very grateful for this is that uh Facebook ads is when I started running them in 2013 where super cheap and so it actually gave me so many repetitions because not only was I taking 15 to 20 consults a day in person I was also working leads and so I'm talking to strangers over the phone to set the appointments and so all I got was just names on a list and I would call them set the appointment like

who's this again you know all of that um and then and by the way if you are local um you just say the name pause with a question mark at the beginning you're like John and then they'll be like yeah you're like this is Alex I'd pause and they'd be like they're like who the [ __ ] is Alex I'd be like from Facebook you signed up for our blah blah blah blah blah our thing yeah I'm just calling to make sure that uh you're not a crazy person from the internet and neither am I

I was like we're actually on the corner of X and Y I was like right next to the 7-Eleven they're like yeah I'm like okay cool well I just wanted to see what time you want to come come by I was like we have the sweetest facility in the world not really but it's uh at least pretty decent for this area but we have five out of five coolness and they would just laugh they be like I can make it at six and I'm like six works I was like do you want a picture of

me or just of the address and they're like just the address I'm like all right sounds good I'll text it to you and I'll see you later today right so that kind like notice the like half Giggles between each word like it's it's showing that you're positive tone person high energy and someone's like man this guy seems cool or this gal seems cool right and so they're more likely to show up they're more likely now if I maintain that tone if they give me an objection I can pivot really easily if I'm like neutral or

like hi I saw that you signed up on the internet for our thing uh would you like to come in they're like uh well tell me more about it like well it's just you have no you have no room for messing up and so I always tried to have more Rapport and bring a lot of energy and the thing is is like if you've seen any of my content I'm not naturally like a high energy person um I will continue to work which is different than being like up here and so I developed a lot

of things to try and keep myself energized and so I had a small trampoline that I would bounce on uh before and between every sales appointment it sounds ridiculous but if you I'm telling it's it's like a hundred bucks if you buy one of those little trampolines and you bounce either between sales calls or between people like I'd have people coming in as I was still bouncing and I'd be like I know this is ridiculous I was like but try and be in a bad mood on a trampoline you can't do it you can't do

it you can't do it and I challenge you too you could be in a bad mood if you try jumping around like you feel like such a child it's ridiculous but what would happen is like I would really I would would also get a little bit exercise my blood would keep moving but it's also just like mentally um literally bouncing gave me a lot of energy for these appointments and so I say this because I developed all of these things over time and so if you're starting out you're not going to be good that's why

you're new you have no experience but there's a difference between there's a story that um shoot I can't remember where it is but there was a foreign kid who had never seen a banana before and so the adult gave the kid a banana and so the banana so the kid took the banana and then bit right into it with the skin and everything and another child was like you're such an idiot and then the adult yelled at that child and said no he just doesn't know any better and there's a very big difference between being

dumb and being inexperienced right now you just don't have reps and so you're going to make a lot of mistakes like biting into the banana like at for just walking letting someone walk away assuming it's a Clos when they say that they're just gonna come back and call you with their credit card right by the way that never happens um very rarely but instead uh you want to just peel that banana you want to bite into the banana bite into the orange all of those mistakes as quickly as possible and not judge yourself for making

the mistake and see the mistake as part of the process of being like that didn't work that didn't work and if I develop enough of these doesn't works then you just kind of walk the the mindfield and you get to where you're trying to go and people are like wow you're so good at this and you're like oh no no I actually just know all the things not to say in a sale and then they end up buying I just avoid all that and then they buy and to be clear I think I have a

similar piece of advice but for very different reasons of telling young men in general or men to work harder and it's not because I think it's some sort of you know beating your chest I'm an alpha whatever thing it's just that for me the point of my life is to become the best version of me and in order to do that I need to learn because there's huge subcrib between where I am and where I want to go and the discrepancy is going to get filled with skills which means that I need to do repetitions

to acquire failures that I can learn from to get better from and if I can do more of that in a shorter period of time I will learn more skills and by definition I will shrink the distance between myself and my ideal self and so that is pretty much the only thought process I have around this and I also believe that you need to be patient with outputs and impatient with inputs so let me unpack that patience in general is figuring out what to do in the meantime so when someone says Hey be patient what

they just mean is figure out something else to do in the meantime and so if I'm telling you to be patient with outputs it means that you basically just have to figure out something else to do in the meantime while you wait for outputs to occur because you can't output you can't money doesn't appear you have to do something and then money happens right but the doing something part is the thing that you can control the money happening is the part that you don't control that comes afterwards it's an outcome right and so when I

say patient with outputs that's the first part the second part is impatient with inputs and so if being patient is figuring out what to do in the meantime impatience is doing the thing in the meantime right and so it's the opposite of that it's the thing you do in the meantime and so if you want to be impatient with the input the input is the thing that's the action you do and so so by delineating that if you hear yourself thinking man why hasn't this happened yet you're talking about outputs and that means great if

I think that thought I need to do more of this input right and so use your input your action your doing this the thing you use your hands for as your coping mechanism for your impatience without outputs I want to say that one more time whenever you have that feeling that things should be happening faster use action as your coping mechanism I used to write this down a lot uh and say it which was action alleviates anxiety and so when I would have this anxiety about the future of like why haven't I made it yet

why are these other people doing better than me like is is this not going to work what if I'm on the wrong path action alleviates anxiety the only thing I can control with that I was is that I would work is that I would get better and the key point there was that it wasn't just working for work's sake it was working with the intention to improve and so you want to do repetitions because by doing things more times you get better at them typically just by accident but if you were deliberate about the point

of doing this when I started working at a gym going from a white collar job it wasn't because I wanted to become a trainer for the rest of my life it was because I wanted to learn the skills and then I knew that once I learned those skills if I owned a gym then I would know how to do the training part as well and that would be good for me and so then when I was a gym owner and when I started and started working at a gym I wanted to own a big chain

of gyms that was my that was my whole goal to start with I wasn't getting into this for one like I never had the goal of only owning just one gym and so even when I started that gym the whole point and I worked all the time because I thought of all the things that I didn't know how to do yet and so it wasn't about great I've made it I own a gym it was like I'm so deprived of where I want to be I have I have to fill this Gap as fast as

I possibly can and so that's why I spent so much time on this and got feedback from as many human beings as I possibly could who were ahead of me so I want to say this clearly once I start up my gym one I paid for a mastermind for gym owners before owning a gym and I did that because I figured well why would I start a gym until I learn all the stuff that you guys did wrong I was like I'll just learn from all y'all's mistakes it sounds like a great deal for me

it almost felt unfair I was like yeah okay he said don't start at one of those locations he said have good storefront he said make sure that you have you know good parking I was oo these are all good you know good things she like don't go too big I was like okay that's good and they're like make sure your rent's under this per foot I was like all right make sure I got that right and so I took all these notes in that I would have just Mis made huge mistakes on the on the

upfront now once I did start my gym what a lot of people don't know is that every weekend I would either be on phone calls or I'd be driving out to other gym owners and I would and thankfully because I was so young when I started my business they were just like they felt bad for me and so they would just sit there and I'd be like hey why do you do that hey why do you do that hey why do you do that and it was like you know they'd be like God you're such

a pain in the ass but I just wanted to learn right but I was always like willing to help them with anything they had you know what I mean I was like let me show you the stuff that's working well for me and I would always just share it um and the thing is is I would go there and they would say they did something and I'd be like huh that's weird that's different than the other guy and I I like that way better it didn't mean I had to take everything as as fact but

I got a lot of ideas from that and then I would use them and if they didn't work I would just toss them out and if they did I kept it and that's how I quickly iterated the gym model to become much better than a lot of people's models despite me being younger because I was able to leverage everyone else's experience as fast as I could and jam it into my own and so I think like the people who move faster than life learn faster and the only way you learn is by changing your behavior

with the same conditions which means that if a person walks in I say this is my six-point script a person who's identical walks in right afterwards if I've learned something that script changes means same condition new behavior and so if you keep doing the exact same thing every single day then you may not be learning and it's a key point it's good to work hard but it's good to work hard and smart which means that the work you do gets better because you tweak things and so if you're not documenting the process that you have

and I'm not saying you making content about it but literally looking back at game footage looking at the calls you did looking at the content you did I do this today people ask me like what are the masterminds you're into what are the courses you learn from I have now broken apart the learning process that I have that works best for me because I see the biggest gains in Improvement haven't come from advice for me for the most part they came from looking at data which was let me look at the last 2,000 ads I

made let me look at the top 50 let me look at what these ones have in common let me look at what they don't look like compared to the bottom 50 okay these ones have these characteristics these don't I'll do more of this and less of that and then I do another 100 ads and I look at the top 10 again I say what do these ones have that these ones don't and I do that for sales calls I do that for Content I do that for meetings I do that for for businesses in general

when you start zooming out and so that process of do a lot of volume then look at the outcomes that were good look at the activities that led to those outcomes that are positive do more of those activities look at the bottom percentages look at the things that led to not having that happen and do less of those and if you're younger and this is specific for everyone who's listening to this video if you're probably sub30 sub 28 maybe right if you're in your 20s or less you can probably get away with this which is

that people ahead of you are more willing believe it or not to feel like they have status so you can give them status by saying be a mentor and the thing is a lot of young guys have a lot of ego right because you're trying to prove yourself trying to be a man whatever the thing is is that if you humble yourself it's not like there's some [ __ ] massive scoreboard where it's like who humbled themselves to whom across the whole us it doesn't it's not not exists it's just just within one Dynamic right

and so if you go and say hey I don't know anything I'm happy to learn if you do that then a lot of people are like oh well he humbled himself well yeah I'm happy to teach you and the thing is they'll give you advice that's worth thousands of dollars years of your life for free if you just say you're better than I am at this but the thing is is that the end of the day none of it matters but scoreboard would be the thing that matters in business right and so the only thing

that precedes the scoreboard is your learning I've spent ego points I've spent dollars I've spent time I've spent Social Capital I spent every resource that I had to get more learning faster because fundamentally the only thing and I think this is probably one of the biggest gifts my father gave me is believing that I am the asset I am investing in and the cool thing is is that you are the permanent hold right you can't sell you like you're you until you die and so this is the one asset you've got because you compound skills

compound when you get really good at sales and really good at Finance guess what you can raise a billion dollars because you know how the finance World works and you know how the sales World works right if you know how to if you know how to code and market then guess what you can build software and sell it to gazillions of people because you have the product and the AC acquisition like skills stack disproportionately if you only know one you might not be able to make a tenth as much as if you know two now

obviously those are big bucketed terms that have many many many skills underneath of them but fundamentally when you think about it that way you become a weapon so let's tackle the second part I said you you can solve a lot of male Problems by getting in shape and making money and so let's talk about the getting in shape side so you can avoid tons of problems in life by doing one thing going to bed on time and so instead of setting alarms to wake up set alarms to go to sleep on time it's hard to

wake up late when you go to bed at 9: right and so the thing is is that that one simple Behavior actually can eliminate a lot of the things that derail men especially young men and so Charlie Monger talks about a lot which is like all I'd want to do is find out where I'm going to die and never go there the whole point is he thought so much more about avoiding stupidity than trying to be intelligent it's kind of like the stupidities are very easy to identify the intelligence is hard but if you avoid

all stupidity you just become intelligent by default and so if you define intelligence the way I do which is rate of learning so how quickly you pick things up that is intelligence if you can avoid all of these things that make you look like an idiot right then you become more intelligent and so let's let's talk about this from the from the the getting in shape perspective show me a situation where you have two groups of men one group of men that is really out of shape and fat and another group of men that's really

in shape that are going to outperform one another and this is generalized you have to take random sampling of the population bunch of in shaped guys a bunch of overweight guys who's going to do better at any task over and over again if we pick 10 tasks that are completely different the in shaped guys are going to do better than the out of shape guys period they're going to have more energy they're going to be more focused if it's anything inter related like inter relations based like those guys are going to close higher percentages if

you're better looking you will close more if you're better looking you get paid more if you're better looking you get more promoted if you're better looking you do better in content period fight me and so the thing is is like if you have this one thing that affects every way that people see you and the only thing you have to do is control what you put into your mouth then don't you think it's worth developing that most basic skill of discipline at this point in your life because the thing is is that you want to

get in shape young because if you're not in shape guess whose fault that is so get in shape now thing is is it costs time not money and right now you've got time and not money and time only becomes more expensive as you age so buy it now while time cost you the least and you have have the fewest responsibilities it'll help you no matter what life path you choose the thing that no one recognizes is that drinking cost you two days the day you drink and the day you recover and sometimes the weeks afterwards

for the stupid thing you did while you were drunk that everyone else saw it reminds me of this quote from Muhammad Ali and I asked my team to pull it up because I think it's so good also because he was the greatest of all time and just a cool dude what's the the central part of your training is it running is it sparring or central part is dodging the nightclubs and the parties and the girls you want the truth and being in the bed by yourself 9:00 at night and if you can get by that

you'll make it that's the truth now I tell you the truth you talk all that running and hitting the bags and jogging and vitamin you want dodging ladies is the main thing especially when you're pretty like me and I'll speak to myself personally when I had my intense periods of work I would take off for a long long time so the longest thing I took off was two years while I was scaling gym launch from you know the 20 months we went from zero to 4 and a half million a month 4.4 to be technical

I didn't drink that whole period And once things settled out I was like all right I'm willing to drink again and right now acquisition. comom is scaling like crazy and so Lea and I both said let's just stop drinking for the foreseeable and same thing now so that was when I was in my 20s this is now when I'm in my 30s and I'll probably continue this until I feel like I'm at a place where things feel chill again and then like maybe I'll I'll partake again but the thing is is like if you're hungry

argue me the opposite which is me drinking more will make it more likely for me to hit my goals I think you'd have a tough time making that argument and so right now everything's compounding is Amplified right the stuff you do now amplifies throughout your career and your life and so I would want to Stack as many advantages as I can to my favorite which is like I'm going to go to sleep on time I'm going to not drink right I'm going to get in shape right I'm going to do as many repetitions as I

can I'm going to humble myself with people who are more experienced than I am even if I think I'm smarter than them they still know more and there's a big difference and this is what I think is really tough for younger guys is that your brain at 25 to you know like 25ish 25 to 30 is like Peak processing power but I'm way [ __ ] smarter now than I was then because I've still learned more and that's the thing is is that you may be smarter than someone in sheer processing power but they still

might know more than you and so you can't live their life and especially if somebody is further ahead then they it still means that they have knowledge that you don't and so listen and humbling yourself to somebody even if you think you are smarter will teach you more because again argue the opposite I will learn nothing from no one how does that help you it helps you your ego feel good but at some point your ego is going to have to rectify its Good Feeling with reality which is that you're broke as [ __ ]

and no one cares and so I would rather humble myself rather than have the world humble me this is a Bible quote that I just really like a lot it's Matthew 23:12 he said those who are humble will be exalted and whoever exalts himself will be humbled I actually told that to one of our our team the other day because I felt like his ego was getting a little bit bigger than it probably should have been and I said listen man I was like if you want to get humbled keep doing what you're doing I

was like but if you want people to talk you up I was like humble yourself let your work work for you and then everyone else will exalt you and so I think most men want to be respected they don't have respect and so they compensate by exalting themselves because it makes them feel better in the short term but you look like an idiot in the long term and think about it like this like for some reason I don't know why we're wired this way but we say nice things about ourselves and we feel good but

everyone else feels bad right if everyone else says nice things about you it doesn't make them feel bad to say it but it makes you feel good think about those people in your life who always like talk themselves up it's like what do you see you're like this guy's so insecure it's obvious and you look that way you don't feel that way but you look that way and some of the things that you develop as you get older is the separation between how I look and how I feel which is like oh even though this

feels good I look dumb doing this your feelings can lie to you in terms of how well this behavior is serving you with your goals in the long term and while we're talking about your friends exalting you and your friends saying you're cool how much do their opinions of you really matter because now this is going to take a completely different direction than you expected which is you being humble is a description that other people would give to you but it relies on you caring a lot of what they think which is a double-edged SW

and the younger you are actually at all points it hurts you it's kind of like the stock market one person two person one day or two days in the stock market it's just about sentiment but how big the stock goes over a decade is about how good the intrinsic stock is and so if a few people say you're an [ __ ] no big deal if everyone says you're an [ __ ] probably a problem right and so it's understanding the Nuance between that but your friend group has a disproportionate sway over your behavior and

so your reference group is one of the number one correlations with how big your life gets or rather the goals you achieve now they've done the studies in terms of Finance because it's easy to quantify but your reference you're have the five people you compare yourself to not necessarily spend the most time with but compare yourself to are the ones that determine your future and so sometimes you have to like your goals more than you like your friends and every person who wants to do something in their life or has done something with their lives

is going through the exact same chapter that you're going through right now and it's the lonely chapter it's the chapter where you don't fit in with your old friends but you don't have the achievements yet to fit in with a new group of friends and you're doing all the stuff right the fruit tutorials you're watching these videos and you're reading everything you can get your hands on and you're trying to set up whatever your podcast is or your content thing right and you're going through it and you're thinking to yourself like is this even worth

it because you're not seeing any signs of success but the sign of success is the hate that you get along the way it is the leading indicator and what you can't do is bend the knee to their hate and try and fit back in and conform because it's comfortable and it's warm it's like the scene in The Matrix when Trinity opens the door the very beginning in the first Matrix when Neo is about to take the red pill and he wants to get out of the car and Trinity says you've been down that road Neo

you know that road and you know exactly where it ends and I know that's not where you want to be and then he closes the door and he gets back in and he goes they they go to go take the red pill so right now this moment that you're going through is Trinity opening the door and saying you could go back you could go party you could go to the nightclubs you could say that this was just a hobby you could downplay what you're doing like I'm just trying out oh yeah I'm not I'm not

really that into it it's just like just some thing I found right but then as you're saying you feel like a fake cuz you're lying to yourself you're lying to them about what you re what your real intentions are and in that moment when you're trying to think about having that conversation you remember exactly why you left why it is that road and you know exactly where it ends and that's not where you want to be and the thing is is that your goals will stick with you longer than these relationships your goals will serve

you more than these relationships and this is what this is the stuff that no one will tell you I can tell you personally I don't talk to I talk to one friend that I have from middle school and high school all right I talk to one person two people from college and it's not like we talk all the time I talk to him every six months or so and so I say this because although these relationships feel like they're incredibly important in your life right now they will disappear the majority of these of these friendships

are based on convenience you're only friends with them because they lived in your dorm they lived in your neighborhood they went in to English class with you but as soon as your conditions change you change where you're at all many of them will fade away because you'll develop new skills you'll develop new context you'll meet new people who are upskilled from that and then you'll compare them to compare to these people and you'll be like man these are better friends these are people who are more aligned with my goals they're trying to grow when I

want to work all day Saturday they're like cool I'll work with you rather than being like dude we're going on a pontoon boat where you going to be and you have to accept that as the price and the thing is it's like it's only if you want that like if you if you want to live a life that is the same as everyone else's then you can do what everyone else does the only issue is when you want to do what everyone else does but get what none of them have if you want to be

exceptional by definition you will be the exception you will not be normal you will be unlike the others and so it makes sense that you would be in the outgroup and it hurts as a human being because you want to be in the ingroup it's part of our DNA shame is a real thing and we don't want to feel that because in in the real in the in the N natural world if you're outside of the group you have a much lower likelihood of living and procreating so it's strong in our DNA to be in

group but the thing is is that you're actually not in group or out of group you're transitioning you're between groups and so in that lonely chapter that's where you can do a disproportionate amount of work because you have no distractions so you listen to the podcast you read the tweets you watch the videos you consume the content because you know deep down I can do more than this and you begin to see the person that you could be and realize how far you need to go to get there but despite how far away it seems

your goals the best version of you you look back down the Dead End Road and you know that's not where you want to be and so you keep going and realize that there's no turning back once you see the Promised Land once you see what you could become you can't go back and if you're not sure who your real friends are one ask is it more likely or less likely that I hit my goals with this person in my life just think about it like if this person is in my life is it more likely

my goals then remove them because it's better to have friends who force you to grow than ones who accept you as you are because the biggest risk to your future isn't your future competition or your Rivals it's the distraction that you insist on keeping in your life rather than doing the things you know you should be doing but aren't think about it like this imagine a competitor that you'd never want to go against focused persistent always learning always improving Relentless says no to everything but that which makes them stronger you know what he looks like

you know how he acts you know who he Associates with great that's future you now become him you have to kill your current self for your new self to have room to grow and so it's this constant appraisal of your skills and activities and saying which of these makes me stronger which of these makes it more likely for me to hit my goal and I just want to give you that frame because that like that single frame of is this person being in my life make it more likely or less likely that I hit my

goal is this activity or this behavior that I do make it more or less likely I hit my goal and I consistantly just ask that question over and over and over again and that is because for me I do love my goals more than I love my friend because my goals will be with me long after they are and so if you think about your relationship with your goals and you put it on the same pedestal or higher than your relationship with your friends you're going to lose one of the relationships and the question is

which one is the one that's going to serve you more in the long term that's a decision for you but for me I can tell you personally achieving my goals has served me more than any one person has and because achieving your goals is a generalized thing it can open all doors to new relationships and so you do have to burn sometimes what you have in order to have what you want if you want to impress poor people out spend them if you want to impress rich people outwork them and I can tell you this

being in the position that I'm at because I have tons of young men who work for me and I mean they hear all the content that I make and they know that and so if you lease a Ferrari for $5,000 a month or whatever I know you're not rich and every rich person isn't impressed by that because we know what it costs you only impress poor people and if you do it really early in your career every rich person's like man you should be reinvesting that to get way F bigger now if you're like in

a ficado and you want to have lots of cars and that's like again that's different it depends on the reason you're doing it it's like you shouldn't be cooking your own food unless you love cooking but if you don't love cooking then you should Outsource that [ __ ] as fast as possible so that you can get your time back it's understanding the context of this which of course this will be taken out of context but hopefully you watching or listening to this can at least get it Lea and I both collectively started buying nicer

things so living in nicer places having nicer cars I bought my home which was a nice house in Austin I think it cost me 1.7 million I bought it in cash and I bought it off one month paycheck and so I want to put that in context to like was it a ball in house totally it was sick I was super happy to be there but where I lived before that cost me 1,200 bucks a month and so you're like wait one point set right we spend money but by percentage the amount of money we

spend is inconsequential if you want to buy the toys and you want to buy that stuff I'd say sure understand one whatever you spend you're taking away from the future now there is always a point you have to balance between consumption and investment if you never spend anything you live you live your entire life and you end up with a big pile of money and you didn't enjoy any moment of that I don't think that's the way to do it but I do think there's a ratio there and I think that ratio depends on you

as an individual I tend to always over index on investment because I just I want to become a really like great version of me and I think that's going to cost money and it's going to cost time and I like to be ready for those opportunities because the opportunities get bigger and have more zeros next to them and there's no masterminds you get to at a certain level you just do a deal with someone and for me to Pony up for the deal might be like hey you got to write a check for 10 million

I'm like all right I got to have that ready for just like on the sidelines waiting for opportunities right and so the idea is being on the defensive so that you can be on the offensive it's living far below your lifestyle so that you can more heavily invest in the growth of the business and so your lifestyle is your competitor's opportunity there's you and other version of you there's Bizarro you right and Bizarro you wants to live this great lifestyle and has the Ferrari and the nicer place and whatever but when an opportunity comes along

Bizarro doesn't have any savings because he's trying to to show face right but the thing is is that every's trying to show face for hates him anyways because it looks like he's bragging but also they know how much he makes relatively and they're like God he's got to be spending his whole check paycheck he looks irresponsible there's zero advantage to being accurately judged if you are strong you want to appear weak you want to have more money than people expect you to have and so for me when we did buy the Bentley which I bought

because I got I'll be honest I got pressured into it they're like dude come on you make all this money like buy something nice for yourself and I was like I guess people buy nice cars so I bought a car I bought a Bentley and um I returned it six months later uh and I lost 20 grand on it and I was like this was just a complete waste of everything like I just don't care at all about this because you only need three things to win you can write this down the balls to start

the brains to learn and the heart to never quit and the good news is you already have all three you're just not using them because fundamentally if you found somebody and they started and they contined to get better and they never stopped they would win just think about it from fundamental Basics like if I said okay think of a person who only did one thing and all they dedicated their entire life to is doing that one thing and getting better and better at that thing and they did it for 50 years do you think that

person would not be incredibly successful of course they would be then why aren't you doing it the problem is it's never been easier to start a business it's also never been easier to do nothing at all and this is what I mean by your distractions are the things that are getting in your way preventing you from doing the things you already know you should be doing but aren't right now if I were to say hey go get in shape what do you need to do what you want to say is I'm going to go do

some research to find the best program and to find the best diet but if I just said no no no you can't look make a guess what would you say probably like well I need probably like go to the gym probably do some weights probably do some cardio move a little bit or to say do you want to stay at the same weight do you want to stay at the same cardio Pace or do you want to move those up over time you probably say I want to move those up over time like okay and

then foodwise like do you want to probably eat more protein and El [ __ ] probably like yeah like well why don't we just start there most of the things you need to do you already know what to do and you delay doing them by under the guise of having a better plan but the reality is that your plan is always going to change as soon as you get new information and so the point is to start period and learn and it's giving yourself permission to have the humility to start a role that you know

is not going to be your endgame because you just see it as one tile on the painting that's going to become the version of you that you want it's like I got to start at this corner I'm going to paint this corner up because I know that this Cornerstone of experience in door Todo or cold calling or media buying whatever is going to be something that I can build my whole career off of there are maybe trillions of dollars but at least hundreds of billions of dollars that are being made and dedicated every day to

getting you to do nothing it's not a fair fight I want to be clear it's not a fair fight and they're winning and so I love this from from Andy forel he said personal Excellence is the ultimate rebellion and so I think like you want to be a [ __ ] Rebel be excellent and do it for you like you want to stick it to the man now just be great fundamentally the point of entertainment is to get someone to pay attention to it that's all entertainment does is pay attention to me right and so

that means that you're not paying attention to the thing that matters more to you in the long term and so every dollar every minute of attention you pay to entertainment whether that's porn alcohol going out the clubs uh all of social media in general motivation porn if you will all of that is you not doing what you need to do to get to where you want to go you just have to be able to do things without seeing an immediate reward like if there's one meta skill that that overshadows all of this it's your ability

to delay gratification is to delay a moment of reward that's it like that's all you have to do and in the beginning you just have to be able to do it long enough that you get one reward and that reward is typically outsized in its strength and then that will reinforce you sticking with it because the people who do work really really hard it's not like they're made of different Flesh and Blood than you it just means that they had a short period at some point where they said I'm going to shut everything else off

and I'm going to go all in on this and then when they do get that first feedback loop like holy [ __ ] I made my first sale holy [ __ ] I I got my first lead from from ads holy [ __ ] I got my first you know 100 followers whatever it doesn't matter like you have some feedback loop for whatever it is that you're trying to go after that then encourages you to do more and you're like oh this could work and then as soon as that turns on you can get obsessed

with it if I had to sign a contract right now to be that you guaranteed that you'd be a millionaire in 10 years but you couldn't make any real money between now and then would you sign it every person I've asked says yes and so maybe if you are listening to this and you're not your head like okay I'm 30 I'm a millionaire yeah that sounds like a great deal by the way that's like 0. whatever 1% like no one is but if that's you a lot of stuff takes much longer and the problem is

that when you're 20 you've only been an adult for like 3 seconds and so the thing is that 3 seconds feels a very long time but I have this belief that older people are more patient not because they're actually more patient it's just because your perception of time speeds up I can be more patient than a 5-year-old because for me one year is not 20% of my life so my perception of time shrinks I might have the same patience as a 5-year-old it's just that more time passes and so if you are younger then you

have to just understand that your perception of time will speed up and so you will be able to exhibit patience you'll keep being able to do something in the meantime because the meantime will pass faster and so you have to over index on it when you're starting I mean I've got guys on my team who are like hey what's my next career move and they're like 30 days into their job and I'm like give it a second like you still suck like you went from suck to proficient like you're not great yet calm down the

real world's very different from school which you've already if you're watching my stuff you already kind of have an idea about that but I want to give you the more the behavioral definition around it is that with school you have very clear directions and a clear outcome with a clear timeline and you get a grade immediately so that's kind of like the roar or feedback loop right and sometimes it's Pop Quiz same day next day you get the the feedback loop or even you get you finish the quiz you go outside and you're like hey

would you answer for six you're like a [ __ ] I got it wrong or whatever right but the thing is that the world is completely opposite of that and so the re the thing is is that beginners are paralyzed to make a decision because they assume the real world works like school and only has one right answer but reality is is that there are many right answers with only one wrong answer which is doing nothing and that's the answer that most people pick so I was talking to Neil Patel who's a friend of mine

and he just made this uh this big tweet about this but he and I had a conversation about it earlier he has two friends one who's a public uh CEO found a company took it public he's got another friend who found a company took a public took it back private and then now only does Private deals the guy who does public and made all his money public is like you got to go public and the other guy who took his company public and it was a big mess and then took your private again is actually

richer than the guy who made his company public both those guys are billionaires and both gave advice and they had differ advice and so I don't see it as one is right or wrong it's that there are many right paths but only one thing will prevent you from achieving all of it which is the only thing I'm trying to comper in this video is getting you to not do the one wrong path which is fear fear of not making it work fear of of other people's disapproval who don't matter anyways that you aren't cool anymore

or because you don't show up to social events or because you don't blow money on stuff that doesn't matter anymore or you're not wearing the brands that they think are cool is all of that worth you for the rest of your life having the crushing feeling of mediocrity knowing you could do more and I say I can describe this because I've lived it it's why I say it I'm not saying that that stuff's not going to happen it absolutely will happen it might even be worse than you imagine but you will not die and if

you use the frame does me losing all of these relationships and having more time increase the likelihood that I get to my goal or decrease the likelihood they get to my goal all of a sudden when you use the goal frame of the best version of you all of a sudden it starts to it starts to make things a lot clearer it's like no me going to this bachelor art party does not increase the likelihood that to hit my goals and I'm not saying that you have to to make that sacrifice every time but the

thing is is you're making a sacrifice either way you're either sacrificing your goals or you're sacrificing that relationship and so some of you guys are like oh Alex that's sounds unbalanced I'm going to get a couple you know comments from the [ __ ] online therapists of like I think emotional well-being and mental holness is super important well first off the pendulum swimming back no one gives a [ __ ] about the soft stuff anymore thank [ __ ] God but at some point everyone who wants to achieve great things realizes that balance is a

myth and once they realize that they become someone who achieves great things at some point every person who wants to achieve great things realizes that balance is a myth and once they realize that they become someone who achieves great things and so there's this whole misnomer this whole idea think about what mediocrity is it's about being in the middle it's the medium it's being right in the middle right balance but anybody who is imbalanced is another way of saying more focused on the one thing will be better at that thing than you and the question

is just whether or not that thing that they choose to be better at will give them more leverage over all that other stuff later and so if you work very hard and you create something that's very valuable for society I promise you you will be able to find a hotter wife I promise you you will have the money that you want I promise you you can buy the time that you want to have you'll have all of that at your disposal but if you choose the balanced life there's nothing wrong with that I just see

that there is balance over a lifetime rather than balanced at every moment of life and so you might have seasons like I took basically a year off during the last year gym launch I just didn't really do a lot so I had more time than anybody and money right but I had Seasons before that where I didn't take any time off and so I think if you expand your time rizon for what balance really means that this is a softer way of explaining it uh then I think that that will you know make you sleep

well at night but real talk I work all the time because I like to do it and I think that once you get a fast feedback loop with the work that you like that also propels your goals then you're not going to to do anything else and that's it's not not like I or some of the people that all right it's not like the people that you look up to have some sort of Herculean work ethic or discipline that you don't they like things that happen to also bring them status and that means that they

went through a small period where they started doing that thing when they weren't good at it and it didn't bring them status but they were able to make it through that bridge until eventually did start working and did bring them status and then they just kept going so you just need enough Gusto to start and just get through that period to just get through your friends saying you suck for a little bit and everything you start will not be fun cuz you'll suck but getting good is fun getting better is fun and so I get

excited a lot of times when I see how bad I am at something that's new because I have enough generalized reinforcement for learning how to get better at things that you learn the skill of getting better like that's a meta skill you learn how to learn and so just see it as an opportunity to learn how to do anything better so if you have a first thing then that's the first thing that you get better at and then you'll learn the skill of getting better and you can apply it all over the place some of

you guys are listening to this and you're like okay you know this is great I'm feeling awesome the thing is is that people maybe it's you are waiting for this perfect moment but it doesn't come right it happens the moment you decide that you're fed up with waiting and decide to take action and it only becomes the perfect moment when you look back on it because today it just looks like now I had a conversation with a young man yesterday who said listen I have demons and I was like bro you don't have [ __

] demons I was like shut up and he was like I like the thing is this and I I was so visceral with my reaction because I used to say that kind of stuff because I thought it made me hard I thought it made me complex I thought it made me mysterious but it's you don't have demons you're not self-sabotaging you don't have mom or dad issues what you have is a lack of skills in how to behave in a certain condition So when you say you have demons what it really means if I say

okay what do you mean by that Define them that how do what is Define having demons right what I don't most people say that they don't mean they actually think they have spiritual Demons Inside of them I'm not even going to touch that what they really mean is that under these conditions I behave a way that is not ideal and so what that means is you have a skill efficiency no [ __ ] you're inexperienced of course you have a skilled deficiency you don't have demons you don't know how to be consistent you're not you

don't have I I just can't stay with anybody for a long time no it either means you have really high standards which is fine and youd haven't met that person yet or you just don't know how to behave consistently it's like when I have a sales guy who's like hey you know I'm 30 days into this world and I'm getting I'm getting kind of board taking sales calls I'm like oh your ability to not be able to continue after something gets boring and learn to love the incremental improvements the hundred or thousand repetitions is the

skill discrepancy that you need to overcome the best sales people bad sales people try and have a couple good days good salese get on hot streaks great salese never get cold and so that takes discipline to understand how to consistently get yourself hot how to consistently treat every sale the same way you do when you're on fire because there is no being on fire it means you simply behave differently it's not like you have magic you you pause differently you take longer spaces you ask the question your tonality shifts and those are skills because you

can learn them and so this whole thing of like this is this young man I'm traumatized first off you don't even a [ __ ] definition of trauma all right trauma is a permanent change in behavior from an aversive stimulus meaning something bad happens and forever it changes how you act now let's if we understand that as the definition of trauma is trauma bad well if I touch a stove and then I never touch a stove again when it's hot is that trauma bad it permanently changes my behavior from an aversive stimulus is that trauma

bad well it prevented me from getting burning the house down from you know permanently damaging my hand in the future no I would say it was good and so this whole appraisal of your past being tough or you don't understand bro no and no one cares either they don't understand nor do they care and so all anyone is going to care about is how you act how you behave what you do based on a series of conditions and so you just need to expose yourself to the conditions so that you can get the repetition so

that you can learn how to overcome it the thing that determines whether it's good or bad is whether it creates a behavior that's condusive to your goals and so that means that fundamentally you can have a stimulus like touching the stove that creates a behavior that is conducive to the goal in that way trauma was good so by the way parents when you punish a child the hope is that you traumatize them is that you permanently change their behavior from an aversive stimulus it's just that people don't Define words and they just shout them all

over the place say say it's stored in your body it's energy it's like no one even knows what the [ __ ] that means means show me on someone's body where it's stored give me an x-ray show me where the no come on like you're saying you're you you're storing your emotional Trauma from your father and your liver like I can just say words and make things up and get people notd if I say them with conviction it doesn't make it's true and so you may have been fooled because sometimes it's more convenient to say

you can cast your power onto this thing that happened that was outside of your control as the reason why you can't be successful because it's easier to say that than to say that I chose not to do anything about it anyways and again listen you can do whatever you want you can just keep wallowing in that you can keep saying that that's the reason and wherever you point is where your power is right but the only time that you have more power is if you say it's on you period because all of those things may

have happened and they may have all been terrible and what are you going to do about it right because the only like no one cares like the world doesn't care you care which is fine but like no one else does and the sooner you realize that the sooner you can start doing something about it and so also think about this it's the equal opposite if trauma can create good things then it also means that good things can create bad behaviors and so if you win the lottery and then you have all these behaviors that happen

afterwards that are negative then was it good for you like we talk about these rich and privileged kids because it creates behaviors that people that actually make it less likely they achieve things like later and so just think about what occurred and what behaviors you take as a result and separate good or bad from it and just think does it make it more likely that I hit my goals it makes life a lot easier and then it stops you from speaking in Voodoo and speaking and appealing to mysticism and Magic like there's this this Force

around of demons it's like dude no like you had a girl who cheated on you okay now what does that change about your behavior I have trust issues no it just means that under these conditions you are slower to give someone access to your bank account or slower to move in with someone comma who cares and is that a bad thing and so I'll walk you through a three-step framework that has been unbelievably valuable to me and this is from Dr cashy logic evidence utility logic is what does that mean so you have demons okay

what does that mean Define it in terms of behavior what does that mean okay got it now how do you know that evidence so you say I have demons we unpack that and it means that uh for you you self-sabotage which again Define that okay it means that I show up late to meetings after I get into a job after two months of being on time okay so after 2 months of be on time you start being late to stuff that we translated from I have demons to I self-sabotage to that is the behavior that

occurs got it now I would say how do you know that now a lot of times people like well it's happened but when you actually look at it you're like it happened three times over in you know in my my last job okay is it really a a problem as you define it or it happened in those three occurrences okay got it so now you know now most times people like I don't have any data and you're like okay so then this is basically made up and when I say made up I'm not saying it's

like you are a High I'm just saying that humans work in narratives and a lot of times we add narratives stories to things that don't actually mean anything but it's convenient and it's fun and we like talking about it but it doesn't mean it's true and so then you move to the third one which is and so what utility who cares why does this matter and so then you say okay well this matters because it decreases the likel that I will be able to retain future employment fine then what do we do about it and

so you can walk through things that you have struggled with in the past with simply saying let me Define this in terms of behavior how what evidence do I have that this is actually true and that I've defined it based on these things and who cares I have demons in the kitchen all right just as a completely ridiculous example okay well in my past I I've had bad things happen bro like what like what occurred I touched the stove and it burns me okay great now we have something evidence-wise how many times it happen one

time okay and it never happened again in the future okay what did that result in I don't go into kitchens anymore okay now this is good or bad when you say who cares it's in relation to what my goals does you not going into the kitchen prevent you from achieving your goals well if you want to be a chef yes if you want to be an entrepreneur no if you want to be a kitchen entrepreneur probably right and so the question is just who cares why does it matter and so so much of our time

and effort goes into explaining things things to people that don't matter at all that you could literally just move on from and just literally forget about you could get over that quote trauma by changing the behavior that it changed aversively so in this context or in this condition I behave this way and it's not conducive to my goals great that's good that you've identified it cool so what do we need to do so that when you're in the condition how can we increase the likely that you do act the way that you want to and

then you start stacking the deck to start Shifting the pendulum in your favor and you start attacking each of these little problems from skill that you have whether it's Behavior with people or it's skills at work or with a relationship and you just do it one by one by one and if you do it over a very long period of time you get better I promise you and I'm saying this to somebody who I struggled with my demons you don't understand bro like I have stuff like okay but it doesn't help you and it also

doesn't make you look harder it just makes you less capable losers talk about what happened to them winners talk about what they made happen despite it hardship is a reality for losers to Winners hardship is just your origin story and like I promise you if you can use this Frame like I was texting LEL the other day like the bigger the monster the more epic the hero it's the story that you're going to someday tell when you're 85 you're not going to want more boring stories right the idea is that if you're going through hard

[ __ ] now that's the story that you're going to tell and if you believe yourself to be the hero that you want to someday become then the harder it is you're like bring it this is my my story this is the Spider-Man getting bid this is him getting beat up by the bullies this is the origin story no one cares about a hero who never had it hard I bought a lottery ticket years and years and years ago when I was in college because it was like a a billion or something like that back

back then that was one a billion dollars meant something um but I was in college and the and my girlfriend at the time I was talking to her and the drawing was that night we bought him for fun we bought one tick I wasn't expecting to win but it was just a it basically I was buying her for the conversation and I thought about it as like the drawing got closer and I realized I had this big pain of anxiety cuz I was like What if I win and I had this moment of Terror because

I realized that if I won that I would never be able to achieve anything that anyone thought was my own and that thought terrified me and thankfully I didn't win the billion dollars um and I got to make the life that I have and so I think that I think epic tius says this but it's something to the degree of what a shame it would be for someone to never encounter hardship because they would never be able to see who they are and so I think that if you have gone through hardship or you are

going through hardship this is the opportunity to prove to yourself not anyone else that you are who you say you are and you are made of what you say you are made of and you can choose to allow that hardship to make you harder to make you more resilient to make you more persistent to make you more Relentless to make think you more driven towards whatever you want to do or whoever you want to be or you can allow it to be an ankle weight you can allow it to be your trauma right that is

your demon that you're fighting every day but the thing is is like everyone has demons everyone has hard [ __ ] and I want to tell you this frame that'll hopefully change someone's perspective which is that your hard stuff may have been harder than other people's hard stuff but if I take a human being who is never encountered anything and then I poke them with a needle that will be a 10 out of 10 hardship for them and so I believe personally that humans experience pain the same way it's why when a man feels disrespected

it hurts just as much as someone else going through another crazy hardship and you know what even if that guy's white a 10 out of 10 Pain still feels like a 10 out of 10 pain now could that pain be less on the absolute scale of worst scenario yeah it could be but also who cares and so my point here is that every single human being on Earth has gone through their version of 10 out of 10 pain which normalizes pain across the Spectrum which then leaves you with the only natural thing you have left

which is what do I do now and if you wanted to design the perfect version of You The Savage competitor the Gladiator at the end of the life that has the scars and the scraggly beard but has been through [ __ ] and has done things and has and has realized their potential What would you do to maximize the likelihood that you become that Savage hero would you give them the padded lifestyle would you give them the immediate win would you give them the Easy Life probably not you would probably put you through what you're

going through right now to become that person and so why would you resent the chapter you're in because it's a requirement for becoming who you say you want to be let's say you've gotten over your little demon thing and when I say gotten over you just stop giving it Power by saying it now is the reason that you can't be successful awesome so what do you do now right so you got to start figuring things out and that figured out muscle is probably the most powerful muscle you can build it's just saying oh I don't

know how to do this I will figure it out why because I figured out things in the past and I can do it again and if that person can do it and they're no smarter than I am they have two hands in a brain I can do it too so the next time that you say you can't figure something out just set a timer for 20 hours and actually try for 20 hours before you quit what you'll often realize is it's not hard you just haven't even tried yet if you you can shrink the time

between saying you want to learn something and beginning to try the thing and extend the time before you say hey this is hard then you will be able to accomplish way more than you think you can learn most things in 20 hours the problem is that most people delay the first 20 hours by years and if you really measured Yourself by the amount of action you take not your desire not your deservingness or even your effort you might actually be embarrass because what you're looking at is reality it's about what you do not what you

say you're going to do how much you want the outcome from what you're doing how much you think you deserve the thing that's going to happen after you do it or how hard you try because one no one cares two reality doesn't care either because the only thing that matters that you can control is input and you would be absolutely astonished at what you can accomplish when you give yourself no choice every third time I do a Q&A I get asked the question what keeps you going when things were tough like what did you think

about and I could come up with something that was really compelling but the honest truth is I just never considered quitting it was just not it was just not on my choice of options at the table because for me the idea of going back to Baltimore as a failure was so much worse than anything else that I could encounter that it just it just wasn't even a consideration and so the only natural option I had was to persist was to endure was to continue and so I think if you use that frame as there have

been people who have gone through significantly worse than what I'm going through right now and for those of you who claim the demon card of like I've been through [ __ ] then prove it was it worse than this great then you can prove that it was so hard by being hard now across time frames in history across countries across cultures across age groups across race gender everyone respects the man who works because as men we are always judged by what we can do and if you are doing things then people know that you are

contributing that is how you prove utility work ethic is the currency of respect if you want to earn respect you earn it through work and sometimes that's working on yourself that's sometimes working on a skill working on a product but it is all through work through effort I will tell you something that shifted my life which is that entrepreneurship is not a game of best man wins it's a game of Last Man Standing and there's a lot of games that are like this and fundamentally that's an infinite game frame versus a finite game frame and

I will read you the quote that Lila had framed and put in my office ask the girl shoot the shot launch the business run the ad quit the job take the risk because when you're 85 years old and on your deathbed you're not going to wish you had fewer crazy stories