Mentale Stärke aufbauen

0:00mental toughness matters more than motivation. And so, mental toughness comes down to four things, which obviously when my mother died, I had to think through like, how am I going to respond to this obviously negative event in my life? And that she died all of a sudden, no one thought it was going to happen. It was just very fast. Which in some ways I can be very grateful for, right? She didn't have like a long suffering period. And so, there are four things that I think happen when any negative event occurs.

0:28Something against your preferences, something bad. Is that the first level is how much bad stuff can happen before you force it to change the way you live. The second component is, okay, something rattles you enough that you start you change the way you behave. Once you change the way you behave, basically how upset do you get? How low do you go? Somebody who's more mentally tough would take longer to get upset. And then if they do a get do get upset, they do snap, they only change their behavior a tiny bit. That's it. So, they're not like, "Oh, I'm going to go start taking heroin and I'm going to go cheat on my wife and I'm going to go, you know, drive drunk." They're like, "I might have some ice cream tonight."

1:05Right? And then once they're on that negative path, the next level of our element of mental toughness is how fast do you come back? Which is resiliency. How fast you rebound back to where you were. Are you somebody who, you know, someone says a cross word to you? Old school cross, right? Bad something mean to you. And then you let it bother you for a week, let it bother you for two weeks, a month before you rebound? Even if it was a small thing and a small change of behavior. If you have low resiliency, it just takes you a long time to get to baseline. And then the fourth element is, when you do rebound, how much do you rebound? Do you just rebound below where you were? Did it per- By the way, that's a traumatic event. It permanently changed you, your behavior.

1:49Do you get back to baseline? So, it didn't permanently change you, it was not traumatic. Or you go above baseline. You adapt, you're better than you were before the bad thing happened, which by the way also traumatizes you. Because for those of you who hear this all over social media, translate the word trauma into a permanent change in behavior from an aversive, bad, stimulus.

2:14Thing that happened. So, trauma means that you just change. You permanently change the way you act when something bad happens. Is there a world where you can change how you act permanently? Where you behave better than you did before? Yeah, many of you, many humans, not the current generation. Let's say a generation or two back, were traumatized by your parents many times. Sometimes with a belt, sometimes with a hanger, sometimes with a spoon, sometimes with a hand, sometimes with a shoe or a slipper, sometimes to your head, who knows? The point is is that you did something, you got smacked, and then you permanently stopped doing that.

2:53They traumatized you. Was trauma bad in that situation? No, it's only bad if it permanently changes your behavior in a way that is against the type of person that you want to be or the types of behaviors that you prefer to to act in or do. And so, when I thought about those things and I was forced this year to like actually define like what is mental toughness. People throw this out a lot. Like, how can I measure this? And then if I can measure it, then it means that I can improve it.

3:20And so, when someone says, "Hey man, toughen up or get mentally tougher." Now at least you have four variables that you can think of in your mind. I want to take longer for something to change the way I act. If it does change the way I act, I want it to change as little as possible. And if I notice that my behavior has changed, I want to rebound as quickly as I can as soon as I notice that it changes. And then not only that, I want to be better for it, not worse. And then that's what happens and the shift that occurs is that life starts happening for you, not to you. You become the victor of your circumstances rather than the victim. You become the person who's in the driver's seat. And the reason that so many people are aversive to that concept is because it is so much easier to cast blame outwards.

4:02Right? Your power follows the direction of where you point blame. So, if you say, "I'm this way cuz my mom didn't hug me enough. I'm this way because my dad didn't hug me enough." Then guess who actually has complete control over your life? Them or your perception of them. But if you said, "I am this way because I am not resilient enough. I was not adaptive enough. I was not I didn't have enough tolerance to be able to handle that level of stress." Well, then guess what you can now do? You can do something about it.

4:33Because you admitted at least you were in charge. You were the one in control or you have some control, some influence over the outcome of how you act. And so, defining this was really helpful for me obviously going through my mother's my mother's death and accident and thinking like, "What kind of man do I want to be? How do I want to show up to my family? How do I want to be there for everyone else who's going to be at this, you know, at this funeral? Our extended family, the people from my mom's church who are going to be there." Like, "How do I want to present myself?" And to be clear, I'm not saying that you that you shouldn't suffer, that you shouldn't mourn. I think that people mourn in 100% unique ways that are entirely of their own and for anybody to say that you somehow think someone should mourn the way you think they should mourn, [ __ ] you.

5:13Real talk. People can mourn however they want to mourn. And your choices in those harder times can serve as [snorts] evidence of the type of person that you want to be so that when hard times come again, you can look back and say, "I know I can get through this because I got through that." And then it becomes the stack of undeniable proof that you're not just saying you are this way, you can prove that you are this way. And it's not that you do this to the external world cuz the external world doesn't give [ __ ] and they're not taking track anyways.

5:43But it's for you because you're the one with the tally marks. You're the one who's got the scars to show for it. You're the one who gets to say, I know I can get through this because I have been through worse. And what's really interesting that I'll share is that the younger you are, in my opinion, the harder life is. Because you have the same hard things that occur to you. 10 out of 10 bad thing is a 10 out of 10 bad thing. Maybe your 10 out of 10 is different than somebody else's, but everyone has a max out pain scale. The difference is that when you're younger, you don't have the tools to protect yourself, you don't have the tools to respond, and you don't know how to make sense of the world yet.

6:20And so, no matter what you go through now as an adult, I always think to myself, there is something for sure that I went through when I was younger that was harder than this. And every time I look for it, I find it. And it reminds me that one, this too shall pass, and two, I'm still [ __ ] here. And so, this year had a lot of hardship, not just my my mother's death, but it served as a reminder of the things that I can put in my backpack, on my checklist, of things that I can say I have also survived this. So, the third thing that I wrote down for myself was record-breaking outcomes take record-breaking work. And so, when I was kind of in the in the thick of preparing for the book launch, this launch, the Guinness World Record-Breaking launch, right? The guy who owned the record before that, Prince Harry, had almost doubled the guy who ran who owned the record before that, which is President Obama, right? So, Obama was at 800-something thousand, Prince Harry was at 1.4 million.

7:18And I'm thinking, these guys have tremendous resources at their advantage, and they wanted to have a, you know, tons of book sales and show, you know, show that they had lots of people who loved them and all that stuff. I was like, how am I going to try and outsell these monarchs, literally, right? And it's like, well, what are the things that are controllable? It's the work that we put into it. And I was like, well, I don't know how hard Prince Harry works. I have no idea. Never met him.

7:45But, I was like, I know that I can work 4 years on something without anyone knowing about it before revealing it. And I think about it a lot like the Olympics. So, people will train for 4 years to have 10 seconds where the world sees them. And what's interesting is that people see those 10 seconds and assume, okay, 10 seconds when they ran, maybe it's, you know, 100 times that for how much they work. It's just not really fathomable for somebody who doesn't even know how to work long and hard to think about how much effort that really takes.

8:17And so, when I was in the thick of it, I just kept thinking to myself like, man, this is so much work. And then I thought to myself like, yeah, no one has ever done this before. So, no one has ever done this before. Of course it will take that much work. Did I expect to do something that no one had ever done before with a level of effort that had been repeated many, many times? Of course not. The amount of times I did double-check every single email flow from every single potential combination is 400 pages of copy. There was more copy written just in the emails than words in the book.

8:51And then, every single VSL, so video sales letter, I had six of them. Every single one of them painstakingly crafted where I have to say, I got to get it shorter. I got to get it shorter, but I have to stuff more in here. I got to get it shorter. How can I put more visuals? How can I put more narrative in it? How can I How can I minimize the downside? How can I express more of the of the upside potential of this particular thing? And then, as I was creating the slides, right, for for the webinar, I wrote out every single word first and then went through multiple passes of editing. And then, after editing the actual words, every single word that was said was prepared. And then, those words had to get on the slides. How many?

9:241,700 slides. How much AI was used in the making of those slides? Zero. Me, because as of right now, there's nothing that makes slides like me as of yet. Maybe there will be. Currently, it doesn't. Not the style I like. And so, I'm there pasting these I was like, holy [ __ ] this And then I was like, okay, well, I also have to have a visual on every single slide. I did use AI for the visuals. But, I had to go through that and you like you're like 300 slides in and you're like, oh my god, this was 2 days. And you're like, I have I have another four I have another 1,400 slides to make. And that's just for the That's just for the webinar.

9:56That's just for the first part of day one. And then I've got I've got the prep that I have to do for every one of the interviews. And then I got to talk to every one of those guys and tell them what I'm going to say. And then make sure that I can steer the conversation that it's interesting to the audience and then also still promotes the book and the other stuff. And so, with each of these things and even when I when I when I had the the playbooks, right? When I explained those, I practiced being able to walk, say the slide, and position the props at the same time. You think, oh, well, that that just looked normal. It's like, I had to do it 50 times, 100 times, so that I knew that when the the screen would come on, I would pull I would reverse order, so I'd put the the letter in my pocket, I'd take my hat from underneath my arm, I'd pull it back up, and then I'd say, business owners, money makers, ballers, I don't remember what it was. I made this for you. And then I'd transition to the second part, right? And so, at every single one of these points, I had to practice all of it over and over again.

10:50And I was just like, I just kept thinking, I was like, no one will do this. I was like, no one will do this. And the reality is that you will not get credit for the work you do. You We have this desire, at least I do, maybe on some level, that I want someone to stand next to me when I'm working and just be like, great job. Great job today, Alex. You worked super hard. No. You don't get that. Like, you have to be that person.

11:15And so, it comes down to it and I and I say this a lot, but it's because it's like it's what gets me through this. Is I always ask myself, I'm like, what kind of man do I want to be? And so, when I'm in that, I'm like, am I the man who will cut the corner? And I'm like, no, I'm going to [ __ ] do it right. And it's like, right, get back to it. That's it. There's no parade. There's no applause. There's no confetti. It's like the work needs doing. And it's either me or somebody else. And this was a a project of love. I was like, this is something that I had work I mean, the first all three of my books were actually written at once. So, you talk when you talk about a long-term plan, I began writing these four plus years ago.

11:49And it was one mondo book. And then I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if I could culminate the $100 million series with a $100 million launch. But each of the three books had to had to represent what the concept of the book was about. And so, I have had this waiting for four years before I could share it. And so, I think like I like telling yourself in your mind the story that you're going to be able to someday tell when you're going through the Rocky cutscene allows you to take the licks that you're going to take during that period where no one is watching. Because the winning always happens when you're alone. People only get to see it when you when you when you demonstrate it. But the demonstration, the 10-second race, the one fight, the me getting on stage and doing the presentation, that is a microcosm of what it actually takes. And it is one of those unfortunate things that no one will ever be able to observe it because the amount of time it would take to observe it would be the amount of time it took to do it. Unless someone else is going to wait for four years just to see that, you just have to guess. And so, no one will ever know how hard you worked and no one will ever care. And so, you have to create another game or another story that allows you to succeed even when no one else cares.

13:03Which is why you have to be the one who who who cheers for you when no one else is watching. Just know that no one will understand and that's okay because you know. And you're the only person whose respect you need to earn. And you're also the hardest person's respect to earn because you know when you're bullshitting you. And so, this is also me talking to the winners right now. You being the best one in in state, the best one in your high school, the best one in your in your in your company, in your division, in your apartment.

13:30That's a low bar. I can't remember where this quote is, but I think I think we know that DaVinci DaVinci said this, actually. I think he said something to the degree of like, "The curse of the winner is not that he he aims too high and misses, but that he shoots too low and he achieves his goal his goal." And I think that you can't have your own respect if you know that you left some in the tank, which is why going bigger and asking yourself, "Am I capable of this?" is the only way that you can ever truly say. And you can only do that if you're willing to fail. Real quick, if you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the 100 million dollar scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so, we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can book a call with my team and we will look into the business, see if we can help. And if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.