Wie Angst dich finanziell zurückhält

0:00Alex hormozzi welcome to the book thinkers life-changing books podcast how are we feeling today life changing life-changing ah what an amazing word so I'd like to give our audience a little bit of background context and also give you some context in February of last year I read your book 100 million dollar offers for the first time and book thinkers was a much smaller business back then we were doing about ten thousand dollars a month in revenue and I was looking for a way to remove myself as a bottleneck to increase average deal size Etc and the book was recommended to me so here we are about a year later and we're only six days into the month and we've already done thirty thousand dollars in Revenue this month and that growth is a result of reading your book a couple of times and implementing virtually everything in it so I wanted to kick off with that context and just say thank you very much for changing our lives I don't know I don't know how often you get that kind of feedback I'm sure you get it a lot it's a very actionable book I appreciate it and that I mean that's uh that's heartwarming um I'm it's why that's why I write them I mean at the end of the day like I'm not going to be able to invest in every company Under the Sun but you know I've already seen I've always seen our platform as like there are people who will cure cancer there are people who will make the next you know Green energy thing and that's not me um but I can hopefully equip whoever that future person is with some of the tools to hopefully make that thing a reality and so that's kind of how I see like my role in this ecosystem sure well talking a little bit about some of those other bigger projects since you just mentioned that people are undertaking I'd like to kick off Today's Show with the subject of mortality it's a subject that you've been talking about a lot it's something that I've been focusing on for the last couple of years because it's helped me prioritize so could you just share everybody like when was the first time you realized we're mortal that we're all gonna die and that you should prioritize your time justly I think I've thought about it a lot most of my life um for I mean I I thought about it when I was in high school I thought about it in college um and I would say that my My World Views Contin you know continue to congeal you know I mean they continue to solidify crystallize um as I get older uh maybe I'm less likely to change my ways um but at least for me and I think I have a relatively contrary and viewpoint but it's just like I I don't believe that anything has inherent meaning um but for me that's freeing and so that means that I get to ascribe meaning to things as I deemed them um and I think that even though you know we're all human um it allows me to take a little bit less of a Sting from like other people's opinions who I know will die um eventually and be forgotten just like me and so then if it's like they're all if they're going to eventually be forgotten then so will their opinion about me which means that it's on a long enough time rise in irrelevant well you mentioned that you started thinking about death in high school I mean what prompted you to think about that that that's definitely not the average thought of a 15 or 16 year old kid I mean I don't know I think I think all right I'm gonna make some statements I think being happy is actually uh abnormal uh and the reason that I would have evidence for that is everybody wants it so it's actually far more normal to be uh less than happy or at least neutral and so I think that just even saying that out loud a lot of people would have less concern about their current state because they see themselves as less than or not normal when in fact it is far more common and so a big part I mean I've had a lot of Evolutions in terms of my thinking and the the mortality thing goes hand in hand with like subjective well-being in terms of like how happy I you know I don't even like the word happiness but when I was in college I think I was 19 or 20 years old um I was obsessed with the concept of happiness I studied positive psychology I was reading all these books going you know TED Talks um and it was only when I said [ __ ] happiness because I was so tired of trying to be happy and failing that I didn't actually think about the concept for years it like completely went dormant and I realized like three four five years later that um I actually kind of enjoyed my life a little bit um so um not to say that I'm the happiest man so but I just didn't hate my life which for me was at least a win you know as I Define it um and so anyways to to wrap rep to bring the bring the wagon around um I think I have contrarian views not because they are um like abnormalities but they're just observations of things that are apparent that most people don't think about and I think that that makes my it makes stress easier for me to handle um and I think that that feeds into the entrepreneurial Journey because dealing with lots of Founders and CEOs or portfolio companies and obviously lots of people consume the content um the biggest limiter of the business is always the entrepreneur and a lot of times it's their ability to handle stress their ability to handle anxiety their ability to stay the course despite it being uncomfortable uh handle change all of these things and it really happens between your ears and so having a world view or a paradigm that is conducive to entrepreneurship and the stressors that come with it I think is important for getting to where most people want to come all right I have one follow-up question to this before I kick it over to Luke so you mentioned that knowing you're going to die and the people that that might hate on you they're going to die so therefore their opinions are meaningless I think that's a great way to care less about what other people think of you we get a lot of questions in our community like hey what's a good book recommendation help people care less or help me care less about the opinions of others because that's making me mitigate risk in a strange way and it's funneling me into this lifestyle that I don't truly want so are there any other perspectives that you can offer a listener today to help shed the beliefs of other people and live a life that's more unique to what they want to do yeah so I'll I'll ask a question and then I'll tell a story so when I have major life decisions that I need to make uh it like it almost gets me choked up but just to say what would you do if you weren't afraid and a lot of times the answer of what you would do if you had no fear if you knew no fear you couldn't experience it you were immune to it and a different way of asking the question is because oftentimes nowadays fear comes from perceived negative judgments from people who don't actually talk to right like that's where a lot of our fear comes from um what if everyone thought everything you did was awesome no matter what happened different way of saying it same concept and so for me um I had my [ __ ] happiness thing that was when I was in college um the hardest issues in my life still to date was when I quit my job and when I quit my job I had a good consulting job you know doing what I was supposed to do I finished three years magic Vanderbilt like I did all the stuff right um and I remember I was talking to my dad uh not talking about I was thinking about my dad because he wanted me to continue doing this thing and I would always say I want to start a business and Hugo's like ah yeah let's talk about it he basically talk me off the ledge every time just over and over and over again and um I knew that he would not approve of me quitting this job to like do what I wanted to do which was like to get into fitness at the time and I remember thinking at one point that I didn't want to wake up anymore so every time I'd go to bed I would just like so there's like different levels of like being upset at life um I was at the point was uh it was a passive ideation which is like if you you're like you know if the car just like went the other lane and I died like you know no one would know or if I just like just died in my sleep and I just didn't wake up I'd I'd be more content with that outcome um and so when I started thinking that way it actually gave me a lot of freedom because what ended up happening was I asked myself this question which was would I rather die to my father or die to myself because I can continue to live the life I have and not be alive because I don't want to be alive and so I equated that for just living a dead life um and so I said that was and so being able to face that question which is I will die to him or I will die to me who do I choose um that was what gave me the courage to quit the job and to be fair my in many cases people's concerns are unwarranted because people are like dude if you were unhappy I of course I would support you that's not always the case and it wasn't in mine he did not support the decision um of me of me doing this and you know I think retroactively he's kind of changed the way he he imagines that story in that time um but uh he was not and we didn't talk for a very long time um I mean it was intermittent you know two minutes every month maybe um but I I went against uh what he wanted me to do one against his wishes I did not comply um and I think that for me at least there's a saying that's uh every man becomes a man with his father when his father dies and so I think we can choose when we want to stop living for our parents vision of what they want our lives to be and so either it happens by force because they actually die in the real world and their Vision no longer matters because they're no longer there to judge you or at least your perceived perception of their judgment or you can choose to actively kill their your care about their perception of what they want you to be and so for me that was the moment at least in my opinion where I if I had to Mark a time where I feel like I became a man to myself which is really just like when do I get to be me and that was that moment I'm getting kind of choked up listening to you to be honest over here uh great great story and man how old how old were you when you just when when that switch flipped like what was going on in your life at that point that that that switch just was like I'm done with my what my dad thinks of me and what he wants for my life what was going on at that time I was 22. yeah I was a Management Consultant and I think that there are there are different times when people uh experience things or sorry go through a change and so um this is kind of a tangential but I think it'll it'll wrap around if you look at churches um or people who convert people into an ideology the reason the military recruits people at 18 19 you know that is because people are at a pivot point when they're basically forming their worldview right so it's in that 18 you know 16 17 18 all the way to like 22 23 you know somewhere in there um that people solidify the worldview I heard a different stat that like after 27 it's very difficult to change someone's worldview with the exception of a traumatic event now traumatic events are actually learning events so PTSD means that you went through traumatic experience your brain learned a lesson that was either right or wrong about how it saw the world and then you carry that with you so it changes your behavior and so those are the two windows and so I talked to a pastor at a very big church and he's like I either got to get them young or I have to get them like after divorce or after like come back from Afghanistan or like they like some something traumatic has to happen and then what they thought about the world was wrong because some evidence disproved that and then they have to go find a new way to see the world and so I was 22 and I think that you can have Rock top moments or Rock Bottom moments so some people get there when they're like cracked out on the street or they're you know the video a bunch of like heinous examples but uh whatever their Rock Bottom moment is I had a different experience which is what I would consider a rock top moment which is is this all there is and so I had done everything that I was supposed to do so I had you know I was good at school I was you know president of the of the fraternity I was vice president of the powerlifting team in high school I was president of the creative literary magazine and vice president of the newspaper like I did the clubs I got the awards I got the you know the prestigious job um but then I just looked at my life I just you know cast it out to 30 years and I was like I don't want to do this so I was looking out out of my my condo that I was in a high-rise on the you know uh in downtown Baltimore like looking over everything and I was like very empty and that was when I started I started thinking it was about a six month window of time where every day I would wake up and just not want to be alive and so I think I was like I this is uncomfortable enough that I either should choose to stop living or change how I live and man that's so good I feel like so many people don't even don't even get there you know like I'm I'm about I'm 29 years old and it's taken me it's taken me a lot longer than it took you to get to that point where I was like I don't want I don't want this this life anymore is not it's not worth it to me and I wish I got there sooner but do you think is there any like advice that you can give to people that are are listeners that um can get them there a little bit sooner like I mean I know everything you just said was was fantastic I'm just like like I said I got the Goosebumps got a little bit of tears coming out of my eyes and everything else but is there any actions that a person could like take today like just to change everything um I think playing it out so my two favorite questions to ask in business and in life are what problem are we solving and let's play it out and so it's like taking the next three to five moves right it's like okay I quit my job then what happens no like let's play it out like what actually happens okay I'm gonna have this amount of money well I'm gonna probably because people are like I'm gonna be homeless it's like that's probably not realistic play it out well you're not going to spend the same amount of money if you don't have the income okay well what do you think you would actually live on this okay if I actually ran out of money what would I do well I'd probably call my parents up and I probably sleep on the couch okay what pain would I experience in doing that I'd probably have to be under their rules which would blow right I probably might be difficult to have crossover right like you know there are there are pains and then the question is okay if these are the costs that are short-term cost in order to avoid the long-term consequence of this continued zombie existence where I do not want to be here is that a price I'm willing to pay and I think when people because what happens is they when you stay vague with your fears the fear is always death like if you extrapolate it out it's like I'm gonna lose my job then I'm gonna go homeless and then I'm gonna die like just you just play it out enough like that's what it is but when you get specific with it you realize that you that's actually not going to be the thing and so then you get to be very specific about what the real decision is and so it's like okay I had a there's a there's a big bit so when I was selling uh gym launcher Prestige labs so this may be hilarious to you guys but 46.2 million which was the purchase price to me felt like a really small number and I was embarrassed about the number I thought it was like I know like context this is what the thing is is that to somebody in Ghana the problems that you have are the same right context and for me I realized that there was actually just one person whose opinion I thought about and so then I rephrased the question and I was like well what this person thinks or what I think they think about me selling the business be the reason I don't choose to make this decision and then when it was that simple I was like well obviously not because why would I give that person so much power over my life because one of the things to wrap back to the an earlier point I know we're going non you know non-linear we're going to dance with me it's all good is uh and I might have even lost my train of thought but it was uh something about uh person anyways all good here's a good point but I'll I'll remember it again no we love this subject so yeah for sure I mean like you can just keep you can just keep going on and on we don't care um you were just you were talking about you know you uh sold your you were gonna sell your business and you did you want to give that person oh the power power so when I was um so a lot of people have difficulty whether it's a brother an aunt an uncle whatever and so if you think about distortions of reality right so there's three primary distortions that that happen the first is that uh the universe is out together like things aren't Fair things should be this way I make demands in the and the universe doesn't listen to my demands right that's when people Point externally to the reason that their life isn't the way they want it to be right it's not fair it's my race it's my and mind you I want to be very clear there are absolutely things that are circumstantial that can hurt prevent decrease the likelihood that you achieve something comma doesn't affect your actions you control the controllable right everybody's dealt cards you got to play the cards you dealt so that's not me saying that those things aren't real it's saying that what are we going to do about it so first layer of distortion is is the universe it's external circumstances the next layer is other people so it's like I can't do it because my spouse my mom my partner my my brother my uncle my friends my whatever right next layer and then the one after that is self right which is either people avoid the decision they delay the decision uh they have fear around why they should take a next step and so those are three layers of distortion of reality and so the thing is is that whatever you point your finger to as the reason you can't do something is actually where the power is so you just follow where you point so if you are upset that your uncle touched you when you were a kid you actually give your uncle the power over your life by saying that you are a victim of insert here you get it makes it makes them the Victor and it means that and I remember for me the realization I had when I was younger was that I used to blame my parents for why I was unhappy I was like it's their fault they raised me this way they gave me these unrealistic expectations blah blah blah blah and then I realized that it didn't serve me because I actually ended up making the people that at the time I'm not saying I feel this way now but at the time that I hated I made the people that I hate in charge of my life and them responsible for my outcomes and so once I broke that frame and was like well I want to be the one in power I want them to be the victims of my victory that I started to take control of my life and point to power point point the blame here so wherever you point the blame is where the power is and if I point the blame at me then I also have the power because I have the responsibility to change it and the ability to man you're so good at articulating those things I mean like I've heard I've heard you know that that concept plenty of times like you got to take control of your life Tom bill you talks about you know he says if there's a meteor hurtling towards his house and his wife dies from that then he's going to take the blame for that but man I like the the whole point and finger thing that was like that unlocks some stuff for me so thanks for sharing that I appreciate it Nick did you have did you have something you want to ask because I could oh no Alex do you study I know you've read a lot you've studied a lot of religions philosophies have you studied stoic philosophy with any particular interest so my closest friend and my editor Dr Kashi is like a hardcore ancient text guy and I would say that like that is I would say that 60 of our conversations revolve around the concepts of stoicism like I like at a future point I would like to write some sort of book that's a I wouldn't use the word sto system because I think people box that into like weird dudes who don't say much and like whatever um but yes I would say that a lot of my philosophies are aligned with okay I I love these Concepts so much we could spend the whole the whole show here we want to move on to the book in a minute but you know you you started to talk about some of these the first time I watched you was on the iced coffee hour maybe outside of some Instagram content and when you got to how we determined value and how we assign it and a lot of these Concepts I was like oh Alex is one of us man like he loves these subjects but Luke I'll kick it back to you what were you gonna say no I was just gonna say the the final hermosi book will just be Mosey philosophy or something like that you know would be great well I'll tell you everyone would buy it I'd read it it'll probably called never skip dessert a philosophy on life in business boom Live Forever by eating dessert every night everything's planned I love it well um man I know I know we want to kind of get towards the a little bit of the meat of the book so um we can start out money making stuff the money making stuff um there's a lot I mean I think you answered I had some questions like around the the beginning of your book because you I feel like you've kind of already answered this because I was going to ask about you know you had two like really major big losses like and somehow you kept going and I like I feel like so many I know personally of so many people that have losses that are less than that that just give up so like and maybe you kind of touched on this but what what like what motivated you to keep going like how did you just not like just like throw up your hands and be like you know what I can't do this I can't do this business thing forget it all I'm just gonna get people paid and then be done like why did you keep going um well also uh there are people who've had significantly greater losses and continued and so just frame um besides that I think that you know most human behavior is it just comes down to carrots and sticks and uh we do things that we have been rewarded from in the past and we recognize a similar situation and we try to and we extrapolate what happened or our behavior that worked for us then to that new situation that looks similar enough um and so for me the whole not wanting to for me it was like it was hatred that that fueled me um for the beginning for sure like it was not like it's it's so funny like you hear the Silicon Valley like entrepreneurs are like you know these guys who find you know fundraise the show and they're like we just really wanted to make this impact and we want to change the world like I was trying to not be broke um like that was that was my my world mission was like don't be broke don't let my dad be right and that was it and I knew that no matter how much pain I was going through it was less than the idea of having to go back and tell him he was right and then have to in my opinion because I had escaped and I'm using that as strong language but like it would it took everything of my willpower literally literally facing my own death um in order to get me to you know die to him which I very much did the idea of having to go back to that situation in order to live the rest of my life there was just not acceptable and one of my favorite Frameworks for like getting through hardship is it's amazing what you can accomplish when you have no choice and so I remember when I was going through those times uh especially in the earlier days and I actually used to think of what I would think is like probably the worst you know living situation which would be like imagine I was a slave for the rest of my life there are people who worked every hour of every day at the threat of whip and death for the entirety of their lives and yet they were still able to do it and so if they can do it so can I right and so and I was like well then what were the conditions that they were able to do it well their alternative was death right and so they chose to live and so for me I think eliminating the choice I had no choice because for me the alternative was death because I just I knew it's kind of like the scene in The Matrix where um Trinity opens up the door and when Neo doesn't want to go with her and she's like you've been down that road you know where it goes that's what it felt like and I just didn't want that there are a lot of people in our audience who understand what you're saying conceptually and maybe they're listening to a podcast so they're in the logic side of their brain right now and they go I get it Alex is successful he's teaching us something it makes sense but when they're faced with these situations they end up on the emotional side of their brain and they have a hard time gaining control of themselves so do you have any advice around centering yourself in a moment like that is it just asking the reframing questions or did you spend a lot of time meditating so now you have more time between an input to your brain and your reaction I've I've like really never meditated I was like the only time I could say that I maybe meditate is like when I lift it's like I can take my head off things and so like a lot of so all my tweets if you ever see on Twitter like 90 of them just come between sets um so I've got one frame back here by the way one of your tweets I'm so curious what it is this one is I think this one's one of your more recent ones uh it says what's the one thing that if I stop doing today would immediately destroy my business yes now reverse I just want more of it exactly exactly um like so I think it it it comes the reason I think World Views are so important is because it frames everything we do and so like if you change someone's world view you change their life and so I think that if people got their worldview solid or at least could articulate what they actually believe then you work from you work from the widest aperture down because if you believe that nothing happens after you die at least as I do and that nothing that we do has inherent meaning then we're riding a ride that we just we're playing a single player game and we get to choose the rules and so like it's only a failure if you call it one yeah right and so people were like well I don't want to fail it's like why not so there's two ways you can frame it one is you can say it's not a failure or you can say failure isn't bad either one works yeah very true you have me going back to that question you said earlier I wrote it down which is what would you do if you had no fear I think that we've all got to stop in those moments and just ask ourselves and then you can become the boldest version of yourself in that moment so I love this concept all right let's kick it to the book for a second so you um you highlight in the beginning of 100 million dollar offers that in 2016 you found yourself with a thousand dollars in your bank account things were not going well kick forward to 2023 we all know the success that you're currently having you're documenting your way to a billion dollars so what's the biggest difference between Alex 2016 and Alex 2023 is it just as simple as a world view change or was there a specific set of actions that you implemented they created this entire whirlwind so that's so there's a big unpack there so I'm going to do the best I can size big question so if we just talk about the entrepreneur in general right so you've got you've got skills trades beliefs right as I as I Define them right um and I may tweak that definition over time but for right now that's my working model um so we have the the skills that the things that we are able to do right we have the traits which are the the activities that we recurrently do and then we have character traits which more and more traits and skills I have I'm they're getting closer and closer to me that like because patience in a way is a skill because it's a how do you behave in this particular moment and if you can train it then how different so like this is why I think language is so interesting because if we can if we can change traits which feel innate and harder to change into skills which we can learn then all of a sudden a lot the world becomes a lot more malleable because what traits aren't learnable right I know so this is so that was my kind of old model and I'm like in the I'm in the in between right now uh just to give context um and so I just lacked a lot of skills that I have now that's the simple the simple answer I lacked a lot of personal skills a lot did a lot of interpersonal skills and I lacked a lot of um just knowledge uh which is like I just didn't understand how things worked and a lot of like the biggest difference between me then and now I'd say two greatest ones are my anxiety level then was through the roof um and so that was number one and then should I add the other one um oh my focus [Laughter] not a good example right oh no but it was it was it was uh it was the my anxiety levels and my focus and so and I think it might have interplayed because I was like so stressed all the time that I felt like nothing was working and so I wanted to change things all the time because I changed things all the time nothing worked and so it's just this vicious cycle because I never gave time time I never allowed myself the ability to fail repeatedly so that I could learn the skill right and so that's where like defining the thing it's like well if I think so do I Define failure as a requisite for Success do I believe that success can happen without failure no so if I fail then why like this is why those definitions are so important um which is why like the beginning of the next book which is leads um first chapters what's a lead yeah I'm breaking it down yeah if I get an Instagram follower I can message them is that a lead what about a YouTube subscriber I can't message them are they leads what if I buy a list of names and I can call them but they don't know who I am are these leads right like it becomes a little bit more interesting when you start thinking about it anyways the books I'm I'm very in for it but we'll I'll we can talk about the offers but I don't know if we're gonna get the next one too yeah I know and honestly we're excited for the for the leads the book too I can't wait to I don't know I'm waiting to pre I don't know can we pre-order it yet I want it at my door whenever whenever it comes out I'm ready for it we'll devour it in a couple hours it's gonna be great do a big launch it'll be it'll be cool I'm gonna do some fun stuff this time because I want to actually use all the concepts of lead generation in the book to promote the book just to show kind of like a meta of like I'm going to use all the strategies that I talk about in real time so people can see it that's what Robert Greene did with the 48 Laws he I asked him he said I used all of them for the book launch which was really interesting yeah yeah so real quick um on that point that you just made about skills skills how do you consume knowledge how do you implement knowledge where where have most of your modern skills come from is it YouTube videos books people that you spend time with mentors where does that come from uh number one source of new information for me at this point is talking to people uh that might not be expected um I actually don't read nearly as much as people think I do um I spent more time writing than I have reading and I I would say I learned really tactical skills from watching YouTube and stuff but at this point at least for me this is like context for everybody who's listening like I might be in a different season you are more of the skills that I have have to be like prospective changes um and like big picture skills like okay what does it look like to raise a debt fund what is that like what does that entail like what are that what are the what are the deal structures I should look out for right what are like like that's there's not a lot of YouTube videos on it right um just so a lot of like the higher level type stuff there's not a ton of info and it's I seek out experts and I've always done that to learn any skill so like even when I wanted to learn Facebook ads way back in the day I um I went to a guy who was an agency owner and I said hey I want to learn how to run ads and he was like well I don't sell my time and I said well it's America everyone sells their time it's just you know we just have to figure out a prize um and so finally he said 750 an hour and I was like cool all right so once a week we'll hop on 700 an hour and you don't have to do anything else I was like but I want to control the computer and I'll do the clicking and you tell me why I'm doing it and it took me I think like eight hours with him to like learn how to run Facebook ads six grand maybe millions and millions and millions of dollars you know what I mean and um that's how I I'm a big fan of 101 tutoring um if you can and most times people are afraid to spend like the money for the hour and a lot of times the the deliverer is also afraid of it but you can learn a lot if you're actually paying attention because they're also going to teach you in the most well if you have a good teacher but like they're going to teach you because they don't want to spend a lot of time with you either and so you'll learn as fast as you can and just do the homework like be a good student like that's that's that is how I have learned the vast majority of my things is by other people and doing like I didn't buy anything related to sales until after I'd already closed like four thousand deals so like I never even I didn't even know the term sales was what I was doing until later I was just like yeah I'm signing people up like I didn't even think it was sales I was like I'm just talking about thing to get them to eventually give me money what was your uh what was your first sales job well technically the first time I ever sold was um I did like an apprenticeship internship with a gym owner learning from other people who've already been there um and he was like oh this person came in go sign him up that was it that was my whole preface and I went out there told the girl I just was like oh yeah it's uh 129 a month and she was like oh okay I left my card at home and I was like okay and I walked back and I was like uh yeah she she signed up and he was like you got the card I was like oh no she's just she'll be back and he was and like he was with like seven dudes and they all laughed at me and so I had very fast reinforcement that that was not how you sold and still I never got taught how to sell but they were like you have to get the card and so the next time I was like okay well I can't leave I can't let them leave without the card so no one ever taught me how to sell I just like kind of figured it out through reps dang that's awesome I mean I like I feel like you have you've had this ability just to learn things like really quickly because I know I'm just thinking about my life and I wish I wish I figured a lot of this out at a younger age and it's like I'm at the point now where I'm like okay I'm figuring out how to learn a little bit faster I'm making mistakes but I'm learning I'm figuring it out but man and I honestly too I feel like there's a lot of people that I know in my world that are kind of doing the same thing where there's it takes them it's taken them a long time to get there do you think you were like born differently like than other people or is like how are you raised or no I think it's the speed between when you want to start doing something and when you start doing something a lot of people don't give themselves permission to actually start implementing until they feel like they have complete information but you only get in complete information after you start doing it and so it's a it's a logical fallacy and so people just believe the fallacy because it's safer because you don't fail you feel like you're being successful when you continue to learn to read yeah true I remember a whole lot more about sales in your first 10 conversations about sales than all the books you've read put together I agree one thousand percent I ran a house painting business when I was in college for two summers and in my first hour of door-to-door sales I learned more about selling in business than I did in the two years previously learning in class so one thousand percent no here's an interesting one once you have done a certain amount of something then if you read something you'll have context because it's very difficult to learn something you know latticework to hang it on right you don't have like bones and skeletons of experience that you can oh yeah I did do that oh I could have done that differently but if you're doing it against an amorphous like maybe someday I will I don't even think you really learn it um I wonder if there's a base if if there's a base set of experiences people should go out and have before they start trying to learn business in general like you know some type of internship thing that's really cool I think from a belief perspective um people think that it will be easier than it is and if if you have a fundamental belief that you will fail in order to succeed and that it will be hard and that is why most people don't do it like if you actually believe that then what happens is expectations match reality and then you don't have anxiety about your quote failure because it's not a failure because it's meeting reality and so it's just that I think most people are deluded most people are just delusional like 52 of senior of high school seniors in a survey said that they think they're going to be millionaires by 25. they're delusional that's all there's delusional yeah like 80 of people think they're better looking than average type of thing yeah and 70 think they're better drivers like you know like yes all of those things people are delusional and those delusions which is why those distortions of reality affect how they see things like the people that at least in my viewpoint of the world the richest people in the world simply see reality more clearly with fewer distortions and so like the reason somebody who's a billionaire can lose it all and then get the billion back is because they see things differently than everyone else and people think that these billionaires are quote eccentric and if we're just not defining eccentric as not normal then yeah duh but it doesn't mean they're wrong it just might mean everyone else's which is why everyone else is normal hmm how can we how can we get a better view of reality is it just through listening to guys like you no no I mean I think Aristotle was the first one to do this but just I think you know or people have ascribed you know first principles thinking which is what has to happen and then you can you can you can run everything through that because honestly like the amount of times I hear people say stuff that and I I had a bunch of comments on YouTube video but like they just make noise with their face they don't say anything they just like repeat words and they jumble them up and then they just like look at you and you're like oh I'm supposed to respond now I guess um like most people don't say anything they can't communicate much um and so you can run what people are saying through that to see if it makes sense and so whenever I'm trying to analyze advice I think can I break this and the more scenarios I run the advice through where it applies the more valid the advice is and so when I have a thinking model I want it to be two things useful and valid useful does it help me achieve something valid is in how many different settings and so the value equation for example in the book I hope based on the fact that many big people have republished it and the reason that I feel like it is valid is that no one has changed it so I've seen many people like you know Spruce it up in terms of like the graphics and whatnot but the same core four elements are there and so to me that means that I boiled it down to what I believe were the first principles of what makes something more valuable how long did that take you to come up with the value equation long time because it's like it looks simple now because it's like well yeah there's those four but before that I had all of these different things that were these amorphous ideas and there's like do these go together did these go to keep circling and reshuffling and then you distill them down and you repackage them and you try and break it and because like all those examples I give in the book it's like well the perceived liket of achievement was the last one I added because I was like all right well if you have two surgeons and it's the same promise and the same time right same effort why does one surgeon how is how are they able to charge one people believe that they have a higher likelihood of getting what they want guarantees function under perceived like of achievement something that has a guarantee is more valuable than something that doesn't because you increase the perceived active achievement something that has lots of reviews increase the perceived likely of achievement right something that has reviews from people just like me many of them getting to exactly where I want to go increase it even further right a third-party accreditation is another thing that reverses risk and so you can think about perceived likely of achievement in the positive or the negative and so all of those attributes of value you can flip them just for from a thinking process so it's like one is time delay the inverse of that is how fast can you do it effort and sacrifice is how easy can you make it right uh perceived likelihood is risk so you just like just just from a contextual perspective of like how can I think about the elements of value in order to make the thing that I'm selling more valuable to the person I'm talking to wow yeah I'm digesting and thinking at the same time how do we respond to this well Alex I'll tell you um in the in the book going through this equation you know I was looking for because it let me get back up a little bit in pricing in the book and pricing when you're talking about commodity you highlight three ways that businesses grow they get more customers they increase average deal size or they give them to purchase more times right so I was looking for okay how do I increase average deal size 5x decrease the number of people that we work with or maybe even transfer some sort of like subscription thing into the background um but I'll tell you the thing that I've had the hardest time with and funny enough it's the next book is how to get more customers um ugh I wish you could share some stuff can you share some stuff from the next book like some of the concepts that you'll be sharing yeah I'm going to be talking about how to all the different ways you can get leads and how you can get what you really want so I'll just break down I alluded to it earlier which is like what is a lead right well we have to define the term if we're gonna go get them so a lead is just a person you can contact that's it that's all it is but what you realize is when that's the definition that's not actually what you want you want to engage leads you want people you can contact who've shown interest in the stuff you sell that's what you want and so once we have that definition clear now I can't call the book 100 million engaged leads because no one would know what it means but I can Define it in the book and explain it later um it's like okay well now that I know what leads are how do I engage them next chapter like here's how you occasionally it's it's like great now they know how to engage leads how do I communicate to that to them next chapter how to communicate it to them okay great now they know how to communicate that how do I deliver that to as many people as possible well there's only four ways to do it you can publicly and privately you can go one one to many that's it okay great that's my framework what am I doing into these buckets okay cool do I have to do it on my own how to get other people to do it for you and so that's kind of how I walk through in the book um to help people get a lot more leads because you know fundamentally at this point like I've used each of these methods I've used Affiliates um like right now we've probably done about 75 million in Revenue just from Affiliates um just from companies that we you know had majority ownership in um we've done zillions through paid ads um we've got a huge cold call team for outbound I now have or you know content because I wanted to do that for acquisition.com I thought that would be like a fun challenge for me because I'd never grown it that way any any company or brand that way um and so content's another way so all of them are different ways to get leads um and there's there's pros and cons to each of them and I think that a good business can do them all yeah it makes total sense we um how many ways to already get leads you never worry about getting more customers it shouldn't be the constraint of the business yeah oh we've got plenty of constraints but we can work through them in real time with you right now you know what's cool is after reading the book um going through the value equation we we came up with our grand slam offer we've since increased pricing on that multiple times because once you sell it as the Dan Kennedy quote goes then you don't really smile anymore once you pitch it again so you kind of have to increase the pricing multiple times so we're on our journey to doing hundred thousand dollar packages at this point which is going to be amazing um you know just as a little as a little call to action for readers to go pick up this book 100 million dollar offers because it it literally does that for your business which is amazing and the nice thing too um is that and I would encourage anybody who has a business who's listening to this um it's good to have a what I would consider like a whale offer which is what are you going to sell the most like what's the most expensive thing put something on the menu that's 100 Grand and even if you don't sell any of them everything else you sell will look really cheap so you'll actually increase your conversion against everything else and so like everybody should have a hundred thousand dollar offer and just think to yourself well what would I be happy to deliver on for a hundred thousand dollars probably a lot and so if that's the case then like write down the terms under which you would be willing to fulfill something for a hundred thousand dollars and then do that yeah that that's the single biggest takeaway that I had from your book and your pricing videos on YouTube and stuff and then you know from my experience being on a lot of sales calls the minute that you present that and we haven't had the 100K I don't know why it's so stupid that we haven't but once once we present the highest price thing the other ones are so easy to talk about I mean it's true we've done this a thousand times now it's so easy to talk about what used to be your highest offer is now your lowest offer yeah and they sell they sell and you look at the things that somebody might value or might not value you can start the trim and Stat right you're like all right and the thing is the the hardest things for most businesses it's like zero to three million ish um a year is product Market fit is what do I sell right it's just getting the combination of the price uh and the and the and the offer itself and then ultimately the delivery because in the way I I approach this is I get as many people as possible to say yes so I just give away the farm and I'm not as concerned about profit in the beginning now will I be up like will I be focused on it absolutely but fundamentally I will I will probably charge a premium price but I'll probably do more than I should for that price because I want everyone to say yes and then I think okay of these things one which ones do they value and two which of them cost me a lot of money if you look at that cross reference between the two there are some things that cost you a lot of time and effort that they don't value first ones to go and then the ones that you'll have a hard harder time is like what are the things they value a lot that cost me a lot and then you're like all right is there another way I can repackage this there's no way I can deliver it can I change the ratio of of me to meet a person now mind you this sounds like it's from a service-based perspective um and some of the pricing strategies of the book uh do lend themselves more to uh cost like so if you have a service based business like it applies there uh just the pricing all the value stuff applies to any business uh but the pricing specifically because like if you had zero cost zero incremental cost at a customer like a software business might um then it may make sense to try and optimize the entire strategy around having the lowest cost getting the most market share Etc but like the thing is is that people may disagree with what I'm saying in the comments but I try to be useful and valid which is 99 of people who are actually starting businesses are not Silicon Valley Blitz scaling raising millions and billions of dollars in order to lose money the entire time only for an IPO later and so like does that work yes in a very small minority circumstances but for the vast majority of people charging more delivering more value ultimately gets you better customers gets them to buy more gets them to stay longer send more friends who are also like them and then also only makes you more money hmm go for it Nick I was just gonna say I know I know we're getting kind of a little bit tight on time so I'm like I have I literally have pages of questions written up for you obviously we didn't get to them all which is completely which is completely fine oh man um I the the I guess the the final question that I'd like to ask and it's something that I I like to ask a lot of our uh podcast guests which is you're dead you know we started with mortality maybe we can end it with mortality I don't do you want to ask do you have any questions before I ask this question no listen mortality I Alex I actually have Memento Mori remember your own death tattooed on my chest so I like this as a roundabout way to finish up the conversation um and you know I don't know where I got this from so I can't get I I can't take credit for it but uh basically you're dead everything you've left behind is forgotten but you can leave one short piece of advice um that will live on what would it be it's gonna happen anyway right yeah yeah you don't matter live accordingly and that one's a good one that's I feel like that's just mic drop right dang yeah I think so too well just like Luke we we teed up a lot of good questions from the book we're not going to cover them today [Laughter] um I think we I think we got a lot of really good life stuff and honestly Alex it was it was really just an opportunity for us to connect with you and Express gratitude for the changes that you've enabled us to make in our lives so that was really the biggest thing for us and and to share with our audience that they have to go read this book and your next book um when do you expect 100 million dollar leads to come out and where can people find you if they want to learn more about you or that book well they can follow me on the social medias um if they want to make sure they get like notifications just go to acquisition.com and just opt in anywhere um and you'll just get out of the email list and I think I've to date since August sent two emails so like I probably won't you know harass people about stuff that I think is interesting or cool um but before the book launches I'll definitely let everybody on that on that list know um because last time it sold out in like 10 minutes or something and so I'm trying to not have that happen but if to avoid that if you want to make sure that you're that you get it um yeah do that uh other thing is uh you asked about oh the the launch date so right now like I hope to finish the the final draft by the end of this month um and then the big question mark is really just uh printers because printers can take forever if you're familiar with like printing especially in like large quantities yearbook's unique too they're in a unique shape yeah yeah it's a weird shape um for anybody who's who can't see this it's a it looks like a children's textbook it's very it's very large and has big text and yeah yeah I wanted it to not be intimidating so I wanted it to feel like I wanted someone to be able to pinch it between their fingers and be like I can do this in an afternoon uh to hopefully make the information feel more accessible um to everybody so that was kind of the goal that's why the that's why the language this one is actually even simpler language I try to get it below third grade um in terms of language patterns I took out cuss words because I was the only the only one star reviews I got were just that I had cuss words in the other one um sorry at the other 11 500 you know uh but but I took it out so that people could listen to it with their kids on the way to work and all that kind of stuff um so just took feedback from the first book to try and make the second book but I added more Doodles um more pictures in the second book than the first one because I was uh people like that um but yeah it's just going to be a question of how quickly I can get the books printed and I have to figure out I'm gonna guess how many books I'm gonna sell I have no idea because right now it sounds like 25 000 copies a month um with like no ads or anything um and so there's a lot of people who bought the book we've got like 300 000 people who bought the first book in the last 18 months and so I don't know are they all going to want to buy the next book and we'll know other people I have no idea so that's kind of where I'm at right now yeah well you've got a couple of yeah you've got a couple of automatic sales right here well Alex we'd love to have you on to talk about the next book once we've had a chance to read and implement it and uh thank you so much man it was it was definitely our pleasure my pleasure was mine I appreciate you guys um thank you for implementing uh yeah that is why I write it you know as much as you know it's great to hear people say like oh this book was awesome and then not do anything um for the uh for everybody who's out there who's listening right now he's like no I would do something just be that person um I will say this a lot of people one of the one of the most common things you see in internet marketing is like the secrets the rich don't want you to know from everybody that I know who's wealthy they shout from the rooftops all the things they did to actually become wealthy it's just that poor people don't want to listen and so just don't be that so like just don't believe that false narrative like you become Wealthy by providing value to other people and so even the idea that the rich people have some secret that you don't know if you believe that it's what is keeping you poor because again you have a distorted view of reality [Music] foreign [Music]