Wenn es leicht läuft, mehr geben statt bremsen

0:00When it's easy, do more. When it's hard, do different. And so I told this story years ago and I'll tell you guys again. So, when Gym Launch just barely started to work, all right? So, I'm like 3 months into Gym Launch working. Guess what? Guess what brilliant Alex thought he should do. So, I went to this meet up of 10 entrepreneurs. All the entrepreneurs were eight-figure entrepreneurs, so 10 million plus per year. I was not making that. I we were pacing probably three or four hundred dollars a month at the time. It was just me, Leila, and I think we had an assistant over Kitchen Sink, right? So, it was I was making the most money I'd ever made in my life and probably to this day because it was the most material change in my life by percentage. When you go from no money to hundreds of thousands a month within 90 days. Me looking at bankruptcy attorneys six months earlier to that, it's I can't I can't explain how crazy reality shifted. But I had this guy who came up to me after I gave my little presentation of like, "Hey, this is what's working." And so of course what I want to do now is start a supplement company. He came up to me and he said, "If what you're saying is true, if the economics of the business that you've outlined really do work as well as you say they do, when it gets easy is when you go hard. It's when you double down on what's working." And he said that to me and I remember he said because what's going to happen is that if it really works this well, someone bigger and better is going to take all your stuff and immediately try and do it with their distribution, their audience, and their leverage. And so if there's ever been a time to focus on the thing that's in front of you, it's right now." And I remember Leila and I felt this huge weight of pressure that started at that point because literally I think I was I was really content for like six weeks.

1:36And I was really thrilled. We had just gotten married. We're six weeks into being, you know, married. We're making really good money. She's 23 or 24. I'm 26 or 27. So, like we're young. I was like, "Holy cow, this is amazing." Our rent for context was $1,200 a month. I was taking home 400, right? Like and so I've always lived far below my means. At this point though, we went back home with the devil inside of us in terms of the fear of us losing everything that we had. And so we basically worked around the clock like someone was trying to put us out of business. And the thing is is that people did eventually, but by the time they did, we had gone so far ahead that they were way behind us because we were working against a hypothetical enemy who was trying to destroy us, not the ones that were actually mediocre and distracted. When it's easy, do more.

2:24Once it starts working, put the blinders on and hit the gas. And I would challenge you with this tactical setup. Right now, if you've never worked for 30 days straight, I would encourage you to try it. In China, there's something called the 996, which is basically the standard for Chinese tech work hours, which is you work 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. 6 days a week. That's the bar. And so I like to state that because we think we work so hard, that's just the average.

2:53And so I would encourage you. Remember hard times, hard men, right? Good times. Well, we need to act as though it's hard times because if you don't, you're surely going to become soft. My challenge for you is work 30 days straight. Work 10, work 12 hours a day, 30 days straight. What you will realize at the end of this is one, how much work you can actually do. Two, that you're not going to die, you're not made of glass. And third, you'll know that you have that gear if the time calls for it.

3:24Now, I will be very real with you. I work more now than I have ever worked in my life, save maybe when I opened my very first gym. So, I work in absolute hours more than I ever have, and I produce significantly more than I did then. And this year, I think I've taken something like 10 or 11 days off in 2024. I would measure a day off as any day where I worked probably fewer than 4 hours. I put this as context and I had a I had a security guard who was here at acquisition.com earlier this year and he was talking to uh some of the younger guys on the team.

4:03And he said, "You should never let Alex work more hours than you because he's already ahead of you." And so, if you want to catch up with him, certainly don't let him outwork you. Some of the who do mental health whatever people are going to disagree with me. Also, don't give a And so, the thing is is you can just go and make those mental health people happy or you can get with the you came here to get. You can do what you came to do. And I have found that in my life I've gotten significantly more purpose and more drive from a long day's hard work, from earning my shower at the end of the day, than anything that I've ever had from a pleasure-seeking perspective.

4:51As much as it's great to go to the pool for a day and hang out with some people or maybe just watch movies, as great as that may be, there's nothing that I get more fulfillment out of than knowing that at the end of a day that I work 16 straight hours, that I have some product that I pulled out of my brain and into the world, that this thing got life now. Looking back on the best days of my life, it was those types of days. And so, when I realized that, I stopped trying to satisfy what everyone else told me my life was supposed to be like.

5:23They're like, "You should take vacations." I took my first vacation this year and it was supposed to be a 2-day vacation and Leila and I left after one. Because what happened was I got there at this beautiful resort, five or ten thousand dollars a night, very expensive. And I I say that just to say that it was ritzy, right? It was luxurious. I get there. I sit out on the back of this beautiful patio for this really expensive room and I look out on this, you know, mountain view, and I think to myself, this is beautiful and I don't care.

5:54I wish I felt something. And all I wanted was to get back in the game. And so, I realized that even that little mini vacation was something that I had done because I thought it was an expectation. It was unspoken or spoken from someone else in my life. And so, I have this quote that I live by, which is, if you don't know why you believe what you believe, it's not your belief, it's someone else's. At that time, it's like I had this belief that I should take a vacation. But why? Now, if I can't explain it, which I really can't, then I shouldn't do it. And now, I want to be very clear, this doesn't mean that there's no time for rest, but I like to think about the hypothetical extremes. I like to think about the 996 that is just the standard in China. And I like to think about people in the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages. They worked above their shop, and they didn't have like the seven-day or five-day workweek is something that was invented in the last 100 years. This is not pointing to your human capacity, this is pointing to a societal constraint. I think that a truly liberated individual operates purely from first principles of, what do I want, what does it take to get it, and then what are the things that hold me back? And those those things that hold you back are going to be physical constraints. You can't operate without sleep, not for an extended period of time. So, I'm not saying don't sleep, sleep as much as you can. I'm not saying that you can work physical labor all hours of the day without rest. You need rest, and sometimes you need mental rest, which is different than physical rest, and that's okay. So, if you need, and I'm going to put need in quotes here, if your way of unplugging is watching Netflix, cool. If your way of unplugging is gardening, cool. If your way of unplugging is working out, cool.

7:33Do what works for you. But fundamentally, the goal is to increase total net output over the longest period of time. And so, So not about, okay, I'm going to work 24 hours straight. Well, you're actually going to take from tomorrow. So your net output over two days is going to be much worse. It's so it's really balancing that and I learned that much later in life. I was able to get significantly more out of myself working 7 days a week and working 10 hours, 12 hours on those days rather than working call it 18 every day. That was for me a little bit too much. Now, I have had seasons where I call it three shifts. So basically I work 6:00 to noon, noon to 6:00, and then I work 6:00 to basically sleep time when I get back home. I only usually have to go into that gear probably once a year for maybe 6 weeks to 8 weeks is when I have to go into the third shift. But most of the times I can pretty much sustain 12 hours of work a day kind of indefinitely. I bring this up to kind of set the bar for at least where I'm at. So maybe you have some sort of benchmark. But if you're wanting to get ahead, I can promise you working less is probably not the way to do it, especially when you don't have as many skills. Because the fewer skills that you have, the more labor or volume you have to compensate with in order to make up for the ineffectiveness per unit of time you work. And so in the beginning is when you actually have to work the most. But in the end is when you want to work the most because of how much more you're getting for it. So my team wanted me to make this point because they've obviously seen me work and then they're like, I don't think this is coming through in this video. Which is that I have an obsession with speed. This seems kind of weird in juxtaposition with patience. But this is the very classic micro speed, macro patience, you know, whatever whatever whatever ism you prefer. The idea is though that you want to pull reality forward. And so I always like to break things down whether it's me or my team into how many hours and minutes something's going to take. And then I like to stack those things back and forth. And rather than using arbitrary deadlines of okay, let's get this done by next week, you use actual deadlines based on how long it should take. And then when you find out how long something takes, you then ask the next question, which is, how can I make this take less time? How can I automate this thing? How can I automate portions of this work? How can I How can I give away chunks of this? How can I deem some of this unnecessary? And so, that continuous cutting and pulling forward of tasks is how you can move so much faster through life and towards your goals. And so, I have this weird mental belief that there's like this this big path in front of me that I have all these skills that I have to achieve to hit these milestones. That is laid out on this time span. And so, I reject the timeline, but I accept the skills. And so, the idea is like, okay, it's like I'm a Pac-Man of like eating those little dots and each of those dots is a skill. It's like I want to pull it towards me as fast as I can so I can so I can ingest the skills and basically power up myself faster because I know that these skills are requisite. I can't move on to calculus without knowing arithmetic. I can't move on to calculus without knowing algebra. There's no way around it, but I can choose to learn algebra faster. And so, then it's like, okay, what is required to learn algebra?

10:38Oh, and if I do more problems faster than the standard person, then I'll get there faster. And so, if the class says, okay, I need you to do these 10 problem sets and they're due next week, well, then how long does it take for me to do those problems? Maybe 30 minutes. Then why can't I do my second lesson 30 minutes later? And then do another 10 problems, and do my third lesson 30 minutes after that, and do another 10 problems. Well, if that's the case, then I can do an entire year's worth of work in a week.

11:05And this is how, in my opinion, pulling forward is one of those things that I've seen so many of the most successful entrepreneurs do is they simply question timelines aggressively and ruthlessly eliminate any waste or gap between the actions required to win and everything else. Real quick, if you're a business owner and you're 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 scaling roadmap, 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 into 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 just book a call with my team and we will look at 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.