Wie du dein Mindset auf Erfolg umprogrammierst

0:00I didn't know if I was going to win but I did know I wasn't going to stop and that was the only thing that I felt okay committing to because when we talk about fuel it was like well when it got back down to it the the wall that my back was against was going home a failure and to me I would have rather [Music] died Alex so grateful and honored for you to join me today because we spend so much time together so it's only right that we actually sit across from each other face to face how just for the audience sake how how have we spent time together Danny dude so many podcasts so many YouTube videos like a disgusting amount like I'm like are you kidding like I've spent so much time with you because you're such an incredible Communicator because you are able to to have 10 years of knowledge into three a three second clip I'm just like what is going on and so I'm learning so much about business about communication about life all from you so thank you so much for being you and and that's why we spend so much time together because I continually get value from the things you say Well I will do my very best to continue that Trend even though that is big shoes to to fill well I mean it was so funny because one guy I remember just not being able to talk to one guy because he's like oh Alex Heros I I don't get any value from him I'm like all right well we're just not going to be friends so that's uh yeah that's but this interview is about you not my spending time with you and that is I would love to start with a psychology assignment you had at 19 years old when you had to pick someone who had a psychological disorder and tell the story of how they went down that path will you tell that story please yeah sure so um I like many young men had lots of angst and felt like the world was not fair and that I had not gotten what I quote deserved um and that I thought that my parents could have done a quote better job of parenting me in general and I resented them for that um and so I had an intro to psychology course and the assignment was as you said pick somebody who had any pathology that we had cut you know studied over the whole semester and then write the story from their perspective of how that pathology might have developed right and um what happened through the course of going through that assignment was not what I expected uh because as I went through and I picked my mother and she's you know she's been public about suffering from you know depression and add and things like that um that I picked that um and in kind of inhabiting her shoes as an immigrant who came here not speaking the language and having you know a Serbian father who is very authoritative rightfully so we're talking 1950s you know what I mean just different different times um and what her upbringing must have been like and having a split life between being an American at school and you know getting beat up for not being able to speak because back then it was almost uh expected and and normalized to to beat up the foreigners um to to you know then being the the first person to you know first female class at at Hopkins um to be in that uh as a doctor and so thinking about that trajectory I all of a sudden like realized the amount of pressures that she had put on externally that other people had put on her externally throughout her whole life and what happened was I felt like I understood and uh blae Pascal who's you know Pascal's triangle some people remember him he was a mathematician and also a theologian um he had this quote that I love which is to understand is to forgive and I I believe that you cannot both hate someone and understand them at the same time and so like if I am very angry with someone it I it's become a check for me where I'm like oh I must not understand something like there's something about them or something about their experience that has made me not understand why they do what they do and then you have the secondary statement of most people if you were born with the same genetics and live the same life as that person you would see the world the same way as they do and so carried within that is this very jarring idea that what if our Viewpoint of the world is something that someone else hates entirely and in their mind we are wrong and but in their mind like hard to even really get into that and like empathize with someone else's point of view to that degree um but me going through that process has actually been one that I've repeated multiple times in my life when I was extremely angry with someone it's usually around loyalty or betrayals or things like that that happened to All Humans um but when I started writing narratives around how someone experienced life that would make it reasonable that they would act or behave or believe what they believe all of a sudden I felt like I understood and so in a matter of a few weeks what felt like a decade of hate and anger directed towards my mother I went back from school to complete the story and I remember she picked a fight about something I can't remember what it was and she you know we have you have your normal routine of getting into a fight with someone right and I just remember having no like emotional I had no adrenaline Spike and I just felt very like it felt like she'd hit a button but the button wasn't hitting the normal trigger path that it was supposed to and so I just remember looking at her and being like I understand and I'm sorry and she of course you know burst out into tears and it was you know you know a huge emotional moment but like at the end of the day it was like I I get it like you went through a lot and I'm sorry that you've had to deal with these demons and it wasn't about me and I think it's a lot of us we have these like self-centered Viewpoint because like we are the center of our own universes and therefore expect that everything that has ever happened is because of us right when we're children we just expect our parents got divorced it must be my fault because like you think that way it's like at a base level and so realizing that it wasn't my fault necessarily that she felt that way um and I guess in some way giving her permission to just be who she was and not constantly tell her why she shouldn't be this way or why basic her basic existence was insulting to me um unpacking that um made for a less contentious relationship because then the triggers were somewhat removed because if you understand why someone doesn't speak English and they keep looking at you and making noises at you it's hard to get upset because you know they don't speak the language and so even you can just replace like speaking English with speaking Alex and it works the same way it's so that's that's how that little intro to psychology assignment both changed my life with my mother but then also helped me unpack anger driven situations that I had with other close people throughout the rest of my life it's really interesting that your normal reaction to her wasn't the same and thus her reaction was different to you breaking down because it almost reminds me of how Leila your wife sometimes acts when you get angry she meets it with love and then you're like oh I see what this is which is very fascinating to speak to human beings in our nature of when we meet Fear With Love in some respect like the fear dissipates so cool to like make that realization I think it's just very hard to step out of the emotion in the moment yeah and Sid step it and try and get outside or above whatever analogy you want to try and say like okay what do I not understand and then it becomes a question to solve rather than a person to attack have you do you have any other uh examples Frameworks mental models that help you do that in a quicker way I mean with with something that's like super deep like anger stuff like that I mean that was years and years like I think it takes more more work to do that but in terms of frames around decreasing the stakes of a situation I have lots of them um so like for example one of them is you know if you zoom out far enough you realize that you can't even see the Earth and so when I'm really upset about like Wi-Fi or something I'm like okay maybe this isn't as big of a deal you know and if you if you go back uh you know let's go back 20 years like what thing really bothered me 20 years ago I probably can't even tell you what really bothered me 20 years ago and so I can probably expect that what's bothering me today I'll feel the same way 20 years from now and so if it's not going to matter then it probably shouldn't matter now and a different frame would be like okay well look at the ancient xns and when I say that I mean like the Romans the Babylonians the Sumerians and in 5,000 years we will be the ancient Americans um and we'll look back on this and we probably won't remember maybe even just the leaders names let alone the day-to-day stries that we deal with and again if it's not going to matter then then it's not going to matter now or shouldn't matter now um another one is the frame of the veteran which I like a lot which I got from Dr cashy which is Imagine whatever this bad circumstance is happening once a day M sorry mult once an hour every day for the next year okay so that's you know let's say it's 12 times a day times 365 a lot of times right what how would you feel on the 2,000th time of that happening well by that point if you really thought about it you'd be like well this is pro you'd probably just be like well this is just how this is this is how life is and then you wouldn't be upsit by it because you just adjusted your expectations which meant if I could change my expectations on my 2000th time of My Maids putting the spoons in the wrong drawer then I can readjust and I say that it's somewhat tongue and- cheek but you can replace that with whatever you know what I mean with somebody double parking you with your boss being short with you like if your boss was always short with you once an hour every hour of every day in a year it wouldn't upset you because you would expect that and so a lot of the like The Angst that we experience the anxiety the sadness the anger whatever it is it comes from the fact that our expectations are unmet and so either we can demand that an uncaring Universe changes to meet us or we can change our expectations um and I think that if it's you versus the universe unlike what most of the Americano propaganda will put out the universe will win and so I think that that is one where you surrender to reality through acceptance and you say like this is period and it's not good or bad which is probably the sixth frame which is that we have this situation let's say the spoons one because it's ridiculous right where I say I have this problem right and so one of my favorite ways to solve a problem is to stop defining it as a problem to begin with and so uh it's it's the least effortful way to actually solve stuff is like is this really a problem what if this was good and here's a weird one is that most short-term problems are actually long-term benefits so think about this it's like you've probably heard the story of the the man and the the boy and the horse so you know kid kid uh kid gets a horse everyone says this is amazing kid falls off the horse people are like oh that's terrible because he broke his foot and then Army comes to recruit but he can't go to to the war because his his foot was broken people say that was amazing and so like you keep going through this cycle and that it's only within the time period that you measure but over a long period of time we don't know whether the thing was quote good or bad and if we don't know if something's going to be good or bad then why even bother ascribing a label to it because the only thing we actually know is that it happened and so I see it a lot like the weather where you say like people will describe a situation like sunny days or rainy days and they say sunny days like they're good days and rainy days like they're bad days but if you're in a drought rainy day comes from heaven and and another sunny day comes from hell and on the flip side if you have a wedding the next day a rainy day sounds horrible and a sunny day sounds amazing and the crazy thing is that there's two people praying for the same thing at the same time one's going to be upset and the other person isn't and I remember when early you know dealings with Christianity and I was thinking about just having a God I remember praying for good weather because I had some outdoor event and I thought to myself man there's a farmer who's really praying for rain right now and I was like [ __ ] maybe this is flawed not to say that praying in general is flawed but just that construct of this it being my way is therefore good and I think getting used to not getting my way comma and saying that that's okay has been one of the big psychological hacks that I've had in my life that have decreased my anxiety levels and my anger levels around responding to stimuli that I wouldn't at the onset say was what I wanted because I might not know and me maybe today's rainy day is tomorrow's sunny day and maybe sun is neither good nor bad it just is it's beautiful it what I love so much about what you talk about is like there's a surrender there to the moment whatever it is but that doesn't negate hard work either and and a huge part of who you are and what you present is like you just need to do more Reps for the thing so it's like maybe you want it to be your way just do more of the thing and so I mean I think uh the best example to me that really hit it home was with the the Flyers on the cars so could you tell that story for people who might not know yeah so um I had a mentor way back when when I was starting my gyms and he was like yeah we do Flyers uh that's how we get customers I was like okay so I'll do some of those you say you should try that so you know print out 300 flyers and you know advertising was expensive and I was broke and so 300 was was the appropriate amount of advertising that I could stomach and so we put out 300 Flyers and I waited and then the next day I got a call I was really excited and uh as soon as I pick up the phone I was like oh hey it's like I got one of your flyers I was so excited and uh he says yeah you uh dinged my Mercedes and I just immediately panicked and hung up the phone I didn't even say anything thankfully he never called back but that was the only call I got from my 300 flyers and so I called the the mentor back and I was like hey you uh you told me to do you know think you know a decade plus ago uh and way more in ement I was like hey you told me this was going to work right and uh and I'm and and he didn't even respond to that he was like well how many did you how many did you put out for your test size and I was like uh what do you mean by test size he's like well what was the first batch that you tested on so that you could then scale it I was like well I mean I put out 300 in total and he just started laughing and I was like why I'm like I'm having this very serious moment you know what I mean I was like what are you laughing at he's like hard to know if anything works with 300 he's like well we test with 5,000 he's like and then if we get a half a percent back he's like then we're okay 1% I'm scaling to the Moon one and a half he's like I'm singing singing praises he's like if you had a half percent on that he's like you'd get one and a half people he's like and that's tough to see with 300 can't really know if anything's working and I remember thinking that moment like I might have been doing the right thing but I was not doing nearly enough of it and I think that there's a lot of early and like I think that story can apply to a lot of things to early entrepreneurship it's like we can get disheartened by our first month of making content that we haven't made money yet from it but it's like not that you're doing the wrong thing you just might not have been doing it either along enough or enough of it which time is really just also a proxy for doing enough of it and so I and I think what a lot of people don't get myself included when I was earlier starting is people don't get the amount of volume that it takes to be successful right like I actually I'll tell you I had a different conversation the other day it's a good friend of mine very successful and um like to the to the B level successful right and so he's he had a conversation with me he's trying he's wanted to start building a personal brand just because he wants to give back and um he was like dude why um he's like your stuff just crushes compared to mine like what am I doing wrong here and I gave him a couple tips and then he was like well how much content are you guys putting out a week I was like I think we're at like 350 pieces a week and he just like he looked at me and he was like thank you for resetting my minimum standard and because he's an experienced entrepreneur and so he could immediately translate that into what he needed to hear because he was like me with my one a day he's like he's like I think it's significantly less reasonable that I expect to have your outcome with with 130th of the level of volume that you're putting out but here's the context is that back to that flyer story he was saying 5,000 and then he said he would go to 5,000 per day after that meaning that in 30 days he put out 150,000 flyers and in that same 30 days I put out 300 right so I was I was doing one five time whatever five times 15 1 1500th divided by 14 500th of the level of effort that he was and so a lot of times people think in doubles and triples when it's the level of effort but just like the example I gave with the guy who's successful already it wasn't him doing twice the work he needed to do like 30 times the work to get that level of outcome and I will tell you this is that across super successful people independent of how they advertise and this is just specific to advertising but it it works with product iteration it works with editing for videos if you know two editors I can imagine I'm looking at my own my own uh chief of brand behind me um if you have two editors and you say hey how much time did you put into this video the new guy says oh I put a ton of time into this video I put like two hours into this and the experience editor laughs and he's like so that was the first round of edit that you did and they're like no that was like the whole thing he's like well hard to edit anything in two hours right in terms of like if you had a video right and so the the the the the huge discrepancy between someone coming in who's new and someone who's experience in terms of how much work they expect to do to get an outcome is the difference between mediocre and world class and like the context to your I'll give you I'm going to keep giving examples because I think it'll maybe drive it home but like my book the book that's coming out I put 2,000 hours personally into that book so six hours a day for almost two years every first six hours of every day was writing and rewriting and rewriting I wrote 19 drafts of the book before it will now come out right and people see the last book and that book sells 25,000 copies a month with Word of Mouth alone there's no paid ads it just and it grows more every month meaning people who buy the book read the book tell more than one person about the book and it keeps growing and so I have a bunch of other friends who are business people who are like oh I'll go write a book and I they'll text me and they're like dude I'm already halfway through started two weeks ago I don't I don't even need to know I can tell you right now the book's not going to be good because like nothing exceptional takes little time like great great work takes great struggle because if it were easy then it means it's lwh hanging fruit and if it's low hanging fruit other people have already done it and it's the high fruit that take the ladder that take the climbing that take getting cut by thistles and leaves and whatever that's still there for the picking and the thing is is that like most of the big winds in life come from the hard to attain fruit and the key to most of those treasure chests is actually right in front of most people it's just that there's just a Time clock on the treasure chest the key sitting on top of it it says wait five years and then you can unlock it's Plain Sight it's not a secret it's just the thing that makes it hard is not the complexity it's the [Music] consistency how do you know when something like the book is is ready to go after 19 drafts why not 20 why not 27 why not 127 because at that point there was nothing else that I could think of that I could do to improve it so most people will ship something and be like well because all like I'll give you the editing example so someone says this video I just edited it and I say cool if I give you two more hours what would you do they'd be like well I probably do this better I probably do this better I probably do this better I'd be like okay do that come back come back in two hours be like okay if I give you two more hours what would you do well I would probably do this this and this okay cool they come back now here's the trick one if I give you 20 hours what would you do well [ __ ] I would probably restructure the story entirely to make it really flow not just like the surface level edits but I'd really structure like really just rearrange the ENT thing to make it like way better okay do that and then that clip gets a million views and so it's like there's sure there's duct tape and and there's lipstick that you can put on stuff but like why go from version 18 to version 19 right because probably version 18 given the audience I've I had will probably would probably still be aell right but in my opinion the difference between great and world class is is so much more effort on the front end but so much more output on the back end meaning I could spend half as much time on this book right and I'd probably sell close to the amount of books that I'll probably sell like from the event and all that stuff like people will buy it right but it's the second wave that won't happen it's people will say this book was good but they won't be they won't it won't blow their minds right because it'll have just been like enough stuff that wasn't totally broken down all the way the hard work of digesting a concept that takes 4 days to break down one paragraph like my team laughed about this actually my CEO of gym launch um I I sent him there's a there's a there's one page in the book that's special I'll just I'll just leave it at that all right and I um and I sent him a draft of that page and uh I read it to him out loud and offhandedly I was like yeah I've put I've I've spent the last 20 hours on this over the last two days on this one page and he didn't say anything about it but he then made a clip about that because because to me that's how long it took me to write every page if you do the math like I spent 10 hours basically on every single page in the book and so for him he was like thank you for resetting my minimum standard and so a lot of times I think if you looked at the book and what it'll probably do afterwards um it it seems significantly Michelangelo used this is used to say my buddy Michelangelo uh he said if people saw how much work I put into my art they wouldn't think it's as exceptional as it is and so a lot of the exceptionalism is that people see the output not the input and so people said if I said hey I spent 2,000 hours on this book maybe it's not that exceptional when you think about it like that right but it is exceptional compared to people who put 50 or 100 and so if I put 20 times the work into a book and it becomes three times better than other books my output to input ratio on the front end is way worse than theirs but I would rather spend two years building an exceptional product and then let all the customers of that book spend the rest of their lives promoting it for me then spend two months making a decent book and then have to spend the rest of my life promoting it because no one else wants to do it for me yeah it it reminds me of how Steve Jobs thought of the iPhone you're thinking about the same thing for writing a book which to me is a revolutionary concept but makes sense another thing that I I love about what you discussed is like how your own bar for excellence continues to rise year-over-year how what you would have accepted as great work a year ago five years ago 10 years ago was much lower and that gave me some peace for some reason could you talk a little bit about that the more you do the more you realize you can do and so it's like you proved to yourself in some way you get a positive reinforcement Loop that like if I spend an extra 50% longer on this I get even more positive feedback and so in some ways you could say that I've just become addicted to that Loop which is that the more obsessive I become about anything the more positive feedback I get on a longer time Horizon and that's the part that most people struggle with which is like think about this for a second I spent two years writing and editing this book you years and it could also flop right it could you never know it could flop no I'm going to be tweeting it every second it won't flop but it it could flop but most and I think this is like this is a muscle it's a skill right that you develop over time and so I don't if if you would asked me 10 years ago there's no way and I and I mean this this isn't me like trying to trying to posture on this like there is no way and I can say this confidently that I would wait for 2 years for anything I wouldn't have waited two years for anything just I I couldn't do it there's no way I could do it and so you know the marshmallow test that people talk about with the kid one marshmallow two marshmallows right well what's interesting about that is that I would love like a third test of this and maybe somebody can send it to me if they if they've done this but it's how long can you make the kid wait for the marshmallow because we have a binary of okay wait 15 minutes or wait 30 minutes and if they eat the the marshmallow in the 30 they're not long-term thinkers and if or they have some level of impulse control and if they wait 30 minutes they get they get the second marshmallow but what if you said you have to wait a day to get the second marshmallow what if they said you have to wait a month to get the second marshmallow how many kids wait now and it's certain at some point the kid starves to death so like the the analogy breaks right or it's no they'll eat their foot off but the idea but like you can still take the concept and apply it which is I can I can almost guarantee that the kids that can wait a month to get the second marshmallow will win no matter what whatever he does and it's because the amount of input that they're willing to do before getting a result far exceeds everyone else's you said before that you know you couldn't it would be impossible for you to wait two years for anything 10 years ago that implies that you were able to increase the amount of time that it you were you became more of a long-term thinker over time how can somebody listening to this become more of a long-term thinker intentionally you have to figure out what to do in the meantime like patience isn't actually active and this is a big finding for me was that people like be patient it's a terrible directive because no one knows what to do when you say be patient right now I'm being patient for every other thing in my entire life except for this podcast cuz time is elapsing and other things are going in progress I have long-term 10 goals that right now I'm being patient for by being on this podcast with you and so I think what a lot of people need to do is figure out the games they need to play in the meantime and so experts at things don't really have more impulse control I think it's a fallacy they figure out more ways to win in the meantime so if you've been on a on a treadmill and and and you see 30 minutes right and then you and then you're like you you get five minutes in and you're like okay only five more five minute chunks right right that is in a nutshell what an expert does when they approach a project they don't try and think I'm going to run 26 miles right if they're running the marathon they say how do I break this into a chunk that I can manage right and then what they do is they create more ways to win and so in those two years it wasn't like I just sat and suffered for two years and then the book's going to come out right I was I would have many many victories along the way that would happen like oh we just destructed this whole this chapter I just rewrote it again and it's killer or just got this beautiful visual that just completely explains this thing with three three shapes and it just you know it explains the whole concept right and so you get these little mini reinforcers and then you have the long Loop of reinforcement that is for me that I have now learned over and over again is that the longer the more time I put into something not necessarily longer but the more time I put into something the the fact that time elapses is secondary the more time I put into something the better it is and what happens too is when you're buil working on projects you're working on anything is that if you work on it over a longer period of time you have more time for Creative Solutions to come to you to the problems that you're thinking through like the best launch I ever did in in my life so far uh was actually a Prestige Labs myself s company and it was because we actually planned it for a year other companies and other projects I because I was impatient was like let's do this in 12 weeks right and I hear and I can quote the conteneurs you got to break [ __ ] and move you got you know I mean I I do all that but you know what worked really well when we had thought through every agcy in every scenario and we were completely staffed up and we had done a beta test and we had done a five times bigger beta test and we had ran processing through we made sure payouts were on time we made sure we had inventory tracking that was automated we made sure that we had the right ratio between customer you know service people and the number of tickets that were going to get bought we knew we had supply chain lined up so that we could ramp up at a 10x or 20x month over Monon type of scaling because we're going to thousands of locations right like that doesn't happen in a week and so like great great Triumph takes great sacrifice just is what it like there's a quote um in BF Skinner who's a behavioral psychologist and he starts one of his books he says many variables exist and therefore many variables must be studied and it's just about the context of human behavior and so a lot of people want to make these idioms or these truisms that are like 1 plus 1 equals two it's like the human behavior has a lot of variables and so everyone wants to have the shortcut and he just was like many variabl must be studied it just like you can't shortcut the work the work has to be done and so I think kind of like that level of acceptance to go full circle with what we were talking about earlier is like I we have this expectation that we want this amazing big outcome and we aren't willing to put in the level of work required to make that outcome and so interesting like Corel on this is like if you want a double like if you want a double output outcome you might have to work five times harder and if you want like a triple output you might have to work 10 10 times harder and you're like wait there's there's an inefficiency there and it's like the answer is yes but there's also an Asm toote on the other side so let me give you an example so if I said Olympic sprinting right these guys trained for four years to shave a tenth of a second off their runtime and let's say one guy works twice as hard as everybody else and he just gets one tenth of a second faster than the second place guy right so he wins the gold the other guy wins the silver what is the material difference between first and second everything everything and so even though the results there's a diminishing Return of the results that you get from the input that you put in in terms of work there's an outsize return on each diminishing increment of improvement because teaching a high school kid how to run with good form they probably in one training session will make more improvements on their running than an Olympic caliber Runner will make in the last four years of their running but which one matters more the last four years right and so I see the same thing there it's like if I want to create or write one of the best business books of all time that people will put into the Canon which is my ultimate goal like my team knows that is like when people make the list of like these are the five books you have to read I want all of them to be books that I've that I've written not because it's a me thing but just because I want that to be the level of quality that that we put out right and and in order for that to happen I might have to run for four years every single day to get this much better but so that the first book not the third book that someone says is the book that I wrote does that make sense yeah it does what have you learned about yourself from writing this most recent book the work needs doing it's just like there's no way around it like it just has to be confronted and I think it just like it just comes down to that is you just have to confront the work and a lot of people put a lot of extra things between them and the work that they try and romanticize they try and create superstitions around it they have all these fancy rain dances that they do but like at the end of the day the work doesn't care who you are it just cares that it gets done and I think in some way that's one of the Great equalizers about product is that like in a lot of ways and this will probably be triggering to some people but like it doesn't matter who you are like in in a fitness example 500 lb is 500 lb it doesn't care who you are like anyone like Arthur can pull the sword from the stone if you're strong enough right and so like there's a level of work that has to get put in to learn how to run ads a level of work that has to get put in to learn how to to do cold calls a level of work that has to get put in to learn how to be patient when someone's angry with you right or how to run a team or how to stick your projects in a sauna or whatever it is right um and it doesn't matter whether you're old you're young you're male you're female you're black white asian whatever right it just needs doing and I think that a lot of people waste a lot of time not starting and so I I I've told this analogy before we've probably heard it but I'll say for your audience um there's a study there's probably a lot of studies been done with this but you can become proficient in any skill in about 20 hours so playing the piano you know riding a bike whatever it 20 hours of concentrated effort gets you proficient it's the largest gain in skill Improvement is 20 hours of concentrated effort the problem is is that people will wait a decade to start the first hour and so you'd be amazed at how much progress you can make if you cut down the time between when you acknowledge the work and when you start doing the work and I think that over time in my career what has happen is just that my my delay between when I real I need to do something and when I start doing it has just shrunk so that I can get to the gain and proficiency that much faster and then if you think about that over 10 years right where one guy does nothing and then he starts and another guy does 20 hours and 20 hours and 20 hours and 20 hours and 20 hours and 20 hours by the end of that decade they're not even recognizable they're not even the same they're not even the same Stratosphere yeah what when you think about a good writer or a great writer an Unstoppable writer what comes to mind and what separates the amazing writers versus everyone else other than the work saying the work people do thousand put 2,000 hours into a book what makes for an Unstoppable incredible writer I don't think there is something else I I I'll qualify this which is that the work needs feedback so you gain proficiency with Expert Eyes giving you feedback on the work you do because if I I'll give you the content example if I post a short every day for for 10 years and I don't change what I'm doing and I just post the same thing I might not make any progress and I know people who've been there who've done made content for 10 years and they have the same size following right because they don't learn they don't improve like I'm going to rewind real quick on this is that the work is required for you not for the output somebody who naturally gets it on the first try who really just understands it and this is an easy example if if if if Mr BEAST's account got canell tomorrow he can start another one and get it to millions and millions of followers because he has the skill and so it's not that the output requires him to go work for five years in order to build the following his skill required him to work for five years to get the skill but then the output does the work after that and so like the the time delay that people talk about like myself included when I'm trying like this is where Nuance of device comes in right where it's like I tell people hey I want you to do 100 reps every day I don't want you to do the same 100 reps every day I want you to get better with all the Reps and if you haven't looked at the end of the day and said what could I do better how could I improve and if you don't have somebody on the outside eyes being like hey you stumbled here on this call or hey when they said this let's drill this let's let's do this a couple times that's how you get better right so you have to be willing to do the work and get the feedback to improve like the work works on you more than you work on it and I think that's the piece that people miss like my prescription like of doctor money um of working is for the for the person's skills not because I care about the fact that you made 10,000 phone calls I care about the fact that you got better 10,000 times how many sales calls do you think you've been on in your life I've closed over 4,000 oh my God so what at what close rate well mine were in person before the days of the telephone not really but like I I was I all myself almost all sales room person but from from a volume perspective do you think that that is a major contributor for why you are such a good communicator an incredible Communicator I would say I think it's part of it I think it's part of it um but you know it's funny a friend of mine saw some of my old gym launch content and they were like dude have you like taken speech lessons they're like I saw an interview with you like in your garage and you're were like yeah I me I don't know just do [ __ ] make money and go away if you don't want to work whatever and um and so and so and at that point I'd already closed 4,000 sales right interesting but I'll give you something that that will probably just you know discourage some people I don't think that the sales skill that I had necessarily translated into the content skill I had to get 4,000 reps here and so when I say that we make 350 pieces of content every week I have a lot of reps and here's the beautiful part about content in my opinion is you such fast feedback Cycles you can immediately see what happens and what worked and what didn't right and then you can learn you can get better and not to get in the nuances of like don't be algorithm Chaser and things like that but at least from a skill perspective content is one of those games you can get really good at really quickly sales you have really fast feedback Cycles you know if the person buys you can see if they change their body language whatever like oh I shouldn't say that next time or o that worked like I'll say that again right um where the problem actually gets in in this learning cycle sometimes you learn the the wrong things sometimes the person was ready to buy because their friend Sandy preferred them and then you do something fancy and then she says yes and it wasn't because of you you she bought despite you right and so then you get false data and this is where like skill acquisition gets really interesting um but overall I think the reason that I became quote more articulate is because I have just committed time to doing this yeah that that seems to be a recurring theme I have six years of podcasts yeah the first four years that like I just looked at a graph at uh like yesterday I looked at a graph and the day that we sold gym launch um is like the de it's it's like a straight line because I stopped so I started taking all the excess attention that I had from going to the business and taking a portion of that and being like I'm going to learn this skill and so it straight line grew after that but it was like four years of flattish nothing because realistically I don't think I took any feedback from my podcast I just consistently made the podcast so there's an element there where I'm like I like I say this and I'm not saying it to preach I'm saying because I lived it right like I made a podcast for four years and didn't grow right I did like 400 episodes before it actually like started growing I got the same 2,000 people who listened every month that's monthly listens not daily monthly listens of 2000 right and then I was like I'm going to try and learn this and then I started trying to learn it and trying to get better yeah and one of your core skills is being a good learner I feel as well so this is this this is a good I appreciate that but I want to segue into this for the audience is that I think there are skills like and there are meta skills So Meta skills are skills that help you learn skills right and so like being a good writer is a meta skill for communication in general so if I'm a good writer I'll be good at writing copy I'll be good at writing emails I'll be good at writing captions I'll be good at write scripting tweets I'll be good at making short like all of those come from one skill but it's a meta skill right if you get it reading it's like well then I can absorb a lot of information so I can then learn how to write copy I can learn how to make ads I can learn how to all of those things faster and so in my opinion the education system should only be on meta skills so that you become like a a a stem cell for knowledge is that how do we get the person so that they can become anything right like we don't need to teach 17th century Aztec literature what we should do is teach people how to learn and then let them learn whatever they want to learn because people all get interested in something and just and then when they have the skills then they can get good at it and then they can make a living doing it okay aund million doll learner what are some of the chapters here learn um repeat successful actions get feedback from people who are further ahead than you uh expand the time rizon that you measure your output on but shrink the time rizon that you measure your inputs on so measure what you do today faster but measure what happens from what you did today longer that's it like find people ahead of you figure out what they did if that's what you want to learn do the inputs and measure them quickly shortterm get feedback and then don't and then wait a long time until you get the outcome that you want but I would say instead of optimizing for the outcome I optimize for progress and so a lot of my team knows this is that like I I'll tell you I'll tell you quick story so when I got into when I decided to start making content I hired a a YouTube agency or whatever because I didn't know anything about any of this stuff right like nothing it's kind of it's funny because people are like ask me to talk about content and like I didn't do this two years ago um and so anyways I get on the phone and I said hey just so you know I'm committed to doing this for 10 years and he was like what I was like yeah I was like I will I will follow the system that you outlin for 10 years before I need to see an Roi he was like that is the weirdest thing I've ever heard in my entire life he's like and and and that was the first conversation it was fine or whatever right and I told him after that I was like to be clear I was like I want to make progress I want to see that our videos are doing better you know month over month over month in general not this video to the next video but month over month I want to see that like if I'm putting attention to this that we're getting better that's all I want to see and so 6 months in things started really cranking right and I think nine months in I ended up saying I'm going to bring the whole team in house and and we had an amicable amicable party right and on the last call that I had with him he said I just want to share something with you that has changed my life and I was like what he said that first call he said I have never had anyone in my entire life friends family mentors ever talk to me about a 10-year time rizon for anything he's like every client I sign up is like I need to Roi in 90 days or I'm not going to pay you or or like if this doesn't make me money in a month like I'm out right and he's like and it completely shifted the way that I have approached my business just seeing how you approached YouTube and I have been in the business game longer than I've been in the content game and so some of those lessons have carried over for me and so I'm like of course it's going to take a while I'm competing against you know Mr Beast and I'm not saying competing against him he's he's he's amazing right but like I'm competing against guys I've been doing it for 10 years of course they're better than I am why would I expect to beat those guys right but I'd like to be better in a month or two than I am now and as long as I have a path towards that I'm satisfied and I will continue on that path because if I can draw the line between now and 20 years from now then it is a good outcome and I think that that being able to draw the line and say like I just want to see that I'm getting better that's all that people in my opinion should focus on now if you're not getting better and you're doing the inputs and you're putting the real time into the thing then it means you need somebody to give you better feedback because you don't like if you don't know why you're not not doing better like if I say hey editor make this video better and they're like I don't know what to do that's when you need someone to say like here's six things that you can do better and then they're like oh so you need the awareness you need someone to be able to get to bridge that knowledge Gap so that then you can Bridge the effort Gap when was the first time you realized the importance of putting in progress leading to a long-term result I mean what comes to mind for me initially is the the gym teacher who took you under his wing with lifting weights but is is there something else that comes to mind for you I I if I if I gave you an answer I'd be making it up I think I've always measured progress you know I just want to know I'm getting better yeah makes sense which of your earliest jobs are playing the biggest role in your current day-to-day I mean realistically none of them um like you know what I mean like I I cherish my time as a blended tender at Smoothie King um and you know as a as an Orthodox Jewish caterer um and as a you know fur coat brusher in a warehouse but you know none of those things realistically taught me any skills now I learned through observation to see what some of them were doing but I would honestly when I tell stories about even the fur coat dealer some of those things I actually had to learn business later and then retroactively looked back at that situation was like oh that's what they were doing like I didn't even have the context to make the Judgment at the time and like I remember like in the Smoothie King I was like we would do the sale tally at the end of the day and it was like $2,000 $3,000 every day and it never even registered for me like it like I never even thought of it as money it was just like the number and there was a certain amount that I had to write that was cash and I put that in the safe and then a certain amount that I was like credit cards and you put it in you to tally it up with the cup count or whatever at the end of the day and I and but like I didn't think about that being being a million dooll business or what the revenue run rate was or what the margins were like I didn't think about any of that stuff I was just trying to I was just trying to like make smoothies and so I I'll I'll I'll do a tiny segue for for the audience here is that like I I reject the concept of being a born entrepreneur I think that we get better at things that we are reinforced for doing period And The Natural Born entrepreneurs are just typically people who got reinforced for doing entrepreneurial type behaviors early so like I was a very security-driven person for most of my life so like I just had jobs and then I went to college and then I got a white collar job that had Prestige around it and the most terrifying thing in the entire world for me was quitting that job it took me six months to quit a job and I was 22 or 23 and I had $50,000 saved up and I was petrified and to this day it was still the most afraid I've ever been in my entire life was quitting that job which is ridiculous to me now in retrospect but it was because I had never been rewarded for that so it was such a huge change in behavior for me from following the trotten path because I've been rewarded over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for doing what I was told makes sense so I think in some ways the guys who did fail out of school and things like that and then became entrepreneurs it's like well they never got rewarded for following the directions I had been rewarded for following the directions which is why it was so much harder for me to quit in that story about quitting it's like you were acting were you acting in fear or faith in that situation and both yeah makes sense could you also talk about the distinction between shifting your world from Fear to Faith so I will say that I did not have fear and anger what drove me to take action like I didn't have a lot of faith I had a lot of anger and that's what I had and so that's what I used and it took me years like years not like a year like six to like I would say even switch to not always being driven by anger and trying to prove people wrong and make the point that I was right you know what I mean um and I wouldn't say that I'm purely Faith driven now I would say that I have elements of it um and so I just I just don't know if it's a binary for me I would just say that over time I have less of that and I have more of some other stuff like I enjoy what I do now a lot and so I do a lot of it and so you know trying to find what the fuel is now I don't think about it much I just do the things that I enjoy and that I've been rewarded for doing in the past and so like I work hard on things because the harder I work on things the better things tend to work out for me and so the projects that I work on now I have a way longer time rizon than I did like gym launch was just like I mean I told Lila when we started making like I'll say crazy money in quotes here but we were taking home like a million a month and we're in our 20s like like I didn't think it was going to last so I was like we need to live so cheap and take every dollar we possibly I told her as soon as it started working I was like we have 18 months I told her I sat her down I was like we have 18 months before this is going to not work so like we need to just make this work and here Jim launch is six years later still crushing it you know what I mean but like I didn't know that right and so there was no faith zero like people were like what was the vision of gym launch I was like the vision was don't be broke like that was it that was the whole vision and so I think what happens is like you have to get your head above water so that you can even breathe and like look around but like if it's kind of like the air masser which is overused but like if you're looking at how you're going to pay rent and how you're going to make payroll and all that stuff like it's very hard to make strategic decisions like in some ways it's like I do I do like having the idea of some entrepreneurs who have saved up enough from a job or career that like they're not worried about shelter they're not worried about food so they can actually think on a 10 your time Horizon like it's easy for me to stand here be like guys be more long-term thinking except you're like well rent's [ __ ] due tomorrow so what do I do now right and like the reality is you decrease your liabilities you decrease all of the things that stress you out and so if the things that stress you out are the things that you spend money on a regular basis then it's like decrease those to the absolute greatest degree possible so that you're not in fight or flight every month so that you can breathe and then you can actually make the better decisions cuz like if you're in that state it's it's so hard to win because other people who are competing against you aren't there you're sleeping on the the gym floor where you're fully in that state I assume yeah so take me through that scenario and also like wanting to be seen as the person who was sleeping on the gym floor so I that was not external so that was more okay so I'll unpack this so for everyone who's listening so I um I quit my job drove across the country uh mentored with a guy for 3 months then opened uh uh my own gym and I didn't have enough money for two rents my rent was $5,000 a month which I was 20 like it was all the I couldn't even I mean it was insane like it was 5,000 I was like that that was more than that was like my salary you know what I mean I was like what am I going to live on for everything else right and so I I moved out of the place that I was at which was just a spare bedroom um and I slept at the gym and I remember like you know I would read the Instagram motivation Manifesto when it was just like stock images of girls that were like Chase your dreams you know like whatever and I'd be like like you know uh and the thing is is that like I had a very different idea of what that suffering would feel like right like it was very praised and louded l u d d um by Instagram and the world and motivation Manifesto but like when I was alone in a city I didn't know in a dark Warehouse that was underneath of a parking garage and people would drive over the metal cracks in the in the in the concrete on the ceiling six seven times a night and he he was like and it was like this it was like this gunshot and there'd be kids my age partying on the roof illegally and I'm trying to like wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning to to do the first sessions like it wasn't fun like there was there was no like like the rocky cut scene last 30 seconds in the movie and last five years in your life it's powerful that's powerful and so you have to find ways to win in the meantime and that's where the patience comes in it's like I didn't I didn't I I've said this before but I didn't know if I was going to win but I did know I wasn't going to stop and that was the only thing that I felt okay committing to because when we talk about fuel it was like well when it got back down to it the the wall that my back was against was going home a failure and to me I would have rather died and so that was it so like I I love this quote which is it's amazing what you can accomplish when you have no choice and so like and this is a really visceral example but I'm going to use it for the sick of being vessal slavery has happened for thousands of years we think about out of America with our American slavery but slaver has existed everywhere right thousands of years slaves work all day every day and some and the idea of being a slave right now for many people who are free is in incomprehensible right and so I remember as Twisted as this is maybe I started thinking this when I was younger is that I would be in this gym alone not having slept for a long time doing all the jobs and being like this is horrible and then I would think well being a slave and being whipped every single day and not being compensated and having sunburned everything with everything chapped and peeling constantly and the only respite that I would have would be a meal at the end of the day and then eventually maybe a day off once a month and then eventually have the good grace of dying and yet those slaves continued to work and I was like how are they able to do that they would do it because they had no choice the choice was death or work so they worked and so when I thought about it like that within the context of the gym I was like for me I wasn't in an extreme scenario like that but it felt that way because to me the idea of going home a failure might as well have been death it had to do with your dad too right of course yeah and all the people that you know and all the people real and fake in my mind that were speaking against me and and I still probably have this issue is that like I will fabricate other people talking [ __ ] about me who aren't even thinking about me right and so in that time though I had gone from what would be considered a high status setup you know I'd been doing everything right KN like my dad could brag about me at the cocktail parties and I could see guys at the reunion and be like oh yeah I've got a good consulting job like I've got a 401k whatever right and going from that to this setup I was I'd already swallowed the pill of looking foolish like why would I leave my white collar job to be a personal trainer and I don't say that as an insult to personal training I just say that in the general rung of status White Collar Management Consultant is perceived as higher than personal training and so I had swallowed that pill once and I was like I'm not swallowing it again like I will not go down a rung and then fail and so it's just like there wasn't an option like I if I if the if the gym had gone if I somehow wouldn't have figured it out I wouldn't have told anyone I would have just kept working and found a way and I've already told my plan B before but like my plan B in my head which allowed me to do this was that I was going to drive Uber and I would strip that's what I would have done because I knew that if I lived on you know $1,000 a month and I made another 150 the next year if I did driving Uber and I stripped at night then I could start over again and I would have done that cycle as many times as it took until I won and so like the the thing that I could commit to is that I my actions were under my control and that was the only like I didn't know if I was going to win and honestly there was many times where it didn't look like I was but the only thing I could I could commit to was like okay well slaves continue to work and so can I take me through those voices that you make up in your head currently oh I mean they're they're like what I would call fake enemies you know what I mean like they're not they're not real I know they're not real but sometimes it's just it just it just gets the juices going like what um and I'll tell you this a lot of times it's uh like some of my content like my more spirited content comes from me seeing someone post something that I'm like this is such hor [ __ ] and then I just go off on basically that person but I'm doing it to a camera and anonymizing it um but I think I think I I I I resent the passion thing not long term but in the short term for people who are starting and I think that's because it sets too high of a bar I understand the intention behind it and I think the intention is pure and I think the intention is right but I think the execution of that is where people fall short is that they wait for something that they're going to fall in love with and you don't fall in love with things unless you're good and you only get good at things if you suck first and so I think it's really about like lots of action even if it's disjointed until you're like oh I have seen some progress on this I will do more of it and then all of a sudden you get good at whatever the thing is and then you like it then you find your passion but you didn't find your passion you created it and you created it through excellence and through finding ways to consistently win over time and so I think if we lowered the bar for a lot of people were starting out like the it's kind of it's kind of same thing with like romantic Partners right now for a lot of younger younger people it's like you have the Paradox of choice is that there's so many fish in the sea there's so many swipe rights there's so many opportunities to meet girls or meet guys that you're looking for this perfect key or this perfect lock that's going to like unlock all the the amazing romantic thing that and it's just not like that and I think that you could probably look at careers the same way and so people haven't connected like there's some element of people are like okay marriage isn't perfect and there is no perfect partner well there's also no perfect career and so it's like everything has overhead that's a basos quote like everything has elements that you don't want and I think the expectation that everything is going to work out makes it so that nothing does for most people wow I needed to hear that so so much thank you for for laying that out what do you think the what do you think the modern-day version of the cigarette is the thing that we accept as normal currently but that the rest of in 50 years will look back and be like how are we so dumb to do this thing I think um I think brain meds uh are like we have no idea what's going on on in the brain and so like we take you know it's kind of like electro shock therapy of like 50 years ago we're like I can't believe we did that or like labotomy you I mean like can't believe we used to do that um and I think a lot of the the psych drugs that people put kids on really early um is tough I think there are there there the problem with this stuff there's part of me that even hates that I got into it but like there wherever there's a need there's always a 10 times bigger amount of abuse of of of a of a solution right and so it's kind of like workers comp Charlie merer talks about this but it's like it is absolutely wrong that someone should work and get injured on the job and not be compensated by the company that that they were doing work rightfully so for right the problem is how do you how do you manage that when there's no way to hold people accountable and so what happens is you actually sacrifice the system for a select few and so I tend to be a global Optimizer but a local minimizer what that means is like I'm willing to sacrifice the small I'm willing to sacrifice the pawn for the game and Society is not willing to sacrifice the pawn for the game because the pawn is a headline and that's the problem with how how media I'm not even getting into that but like that's that's what that's what makes it hard and that's why it's very it's it's hard for sometimes cultures to move forward but I think most people on a common sense level would rather have the whole benefit but they cannot make the decision in the short term and so like total side note on this if you want an amazing razor for prediction predicting people's behavior just look at what will reward them the fastest and you can with favorable certainty guess what people and groups of people will do should we print more money or should we real things back well short term this one's better that's what we'll do it's it's it's near impossible it's hard for one person to do it for themselves it's almost impossible for a group and so groups will always optimize for the short term until eventually they run out in another group wins it almost seems like there's a heaviness within you when you're speaking about it is that accurate because your your mood and complexion change completely yeah I just I I don't like into this cuz it's it's it it gets off the the beaten path of it's just a bummer and I I would get more into it but I don't like getting into the politics around things that's I've never been I've never been in it um ever I've like just never gotten involved I I because I try to play games that I have variables that I have control over and so um I got this from my dad actually but he said I only play games if I know I'm going to win and people might take that and take a lot of different things from him but I'll tell you what he meant by that was that he wanted to do all the preparation and have all the unfair advantages he possibly could before taking the first step into a game and I would say that that's probably the biggest difference between people who are big time winners and everyone else is that like once you learn the rules of the game then you learn how to stack the deck and you can do it ethically and you can do it legally right like easy way to stack the deck wait longer than your competition right like you can you can come in with unfair advantages simply by measuring success on different time Horizons or measuring a different metric for Success right like right now what am I optimizing for I'm optimizing for brand I'm not optimizing for money right so I'm measuring something different than somebody else might be and so someone who maybe made started making content the same time as me might be making more money than me today but are they winning I don't know we're playing different games right and so I think that that lens uh can be used by most people and most people don't do that because they don't even know the rules that they're of the game that they're trying to play and so they are Pawns in someone else's game and so I think that's where the the heaviness of this whole thing comes from for me is that like I hate not feeling like I have an element of control over the outcomes in my life and a lot of the stuff that's happening in the world I don't feel like I have control over and that annoys me and so I focus on the few things that are controllable for me and I direct all of my attention there makes a lot of sense I I've also taken a similar approach and then I'll hear from loved ones or you should be paying attention to the news you should and and it's like well I mean I'm going to control the things that I'm going to control and and part of me is like maybe when I'm that age and I can impact it more I will but in this moment I can't is that a similar approach you take as well yeah yeah yeah I I I am the question always comes down to what am I going to do right and so if the input like I consume all this media right I get quote educated which getting not even getting into like where you get sources of information which can and it's a tough it's tough for anybody right now like to even know what an informed decision is right because no one actually can touch the situation anymore everything's it's it's banana foam times 100 right right now across all media so it's really hard to have an informed decision and so for me and I I I really thought about this and I was like the reason I actually haven't I voted one time in my life the reason that it's so tough is that if I'm going to vote I would like like to be an informed voter in order for me to be informed voter people are like it only takes 10 minutes I'm like if you're an idiot it only takes 10 minutes to literally click the buttons it takes weeks to be informed about what buttons you're pressing and so for me that's where the time tradeoff has not been good and this isn't me saying I'm an advocate for not voting I'm an advocate for being informed but the cost of being informed relative to the amount of change I can make with my vote is relatively small and so for me I look at the opportunity cost of that time and could I with that same time more positively impact my life than what my one vote will impact my life through and for me the answer is yes and so then I choose not to and so I am uninformed which is why I try not to give a a political opinions because that's exactly what they would be opinions I have no idea so it's same as me making up answers because I don't know so I try to talk about only the few things that I feel relatively confident that I know about I had a DM the other day who was like I watched one of your videos and you said um you don't know how to get to nine figures a month and so I wanted to tell you mind you the only person is going to say this is not someone doing nine figures a month but we'll leave it aside the point is is that I will only talk about getting to eight figures a month because I have been there and so I know what it takes to get there and I said once I get to nine figures a month I will tell you that not that I don't have a map or a roadmap of how I plan to get there but I won't talk about it until I've walked it yeah and so like right now I don't don't feel like I could walk any political discussion because I would get truned by anybody who's more educated than me and I'd be like you're probably right I don't know and then I would be like why am I here i' be like oh this is a game that I don't know the rules to I'm going into a game that I don't have an advantage I don't want to play and so I play games that I know that I can win could you see yourself going into that realm after I don't not on any time rizon that I associate with the current identity that I have dude so good I like my life a lot and so like I don't like I'm I'm good like I like the path I'm on I like what I'm doing I like I like the impact that that that we're making I love I love seeing the businesses that come in every day I get stopped in the street from you know every day from multiple people being like dude I read your book I quit my job and I'm doing a million dollars a year and I'm like that that might not have happened if I hadn't taken the extra 20 hours on that one page it's true and my editor said this to me and it's been like it's it's haunted me to a degree when we were when things would get hard right in the editing process like there are times where we you know I mean we're the closest to friends but we would really argue viciously over point because we wanted to get to the truth we want to the bottom of it and he was like Alex he's like there's a 16-year-old kid who's going to sleep with this book under his pillow he's like you owe it to him man and I was like [ __ ] he's right he's right so let's keep let's let's keep working through it let's make it simpler let's not cut the corner like let's explain it let's define the term let's make a visual you know even though it's going to take me another five [ __ ] hours like I didn't you know like it's it's that's the hard part you know and and I and it was during the writing process that I tweeted this tweet though pretty whatever got a lot of lift it was um whenever I whenever I like it gets really hard and I just think to myself like why am I even bothering why should I why should I even keep doing this I just remind myself that this is where most people stop and this is why they don't win and so that's that's a quote that has helped me get through some of those like really tough times it's like well do I want to win more than I want to fail yes it's like well then this is a Trevor quote who's my my editor and my closest friend he said well whenever someone says they can't stand it anymore he said well if you're alive you have proof that you can stand it and if you die you won't have to stand it anymore so you can always stand it and I think that's a really powerful message it's really simple but like if you are going through it then you are going through it you may be uncomfortable it may be painful you may hate it but you're still here and I think like to me it reminds me of this uh the Morpheus quote I think it was in one of the matrixes and he says I stand Here truthfully and Afraid not but because of the path that lies before me but because of the path that lies behind me and so I think that that's like the gift that we all have is like we all have stood life to this point and I think that's like all the proof you need that you can keep standing in or just sit down and then get back up for a second sure yeah I would love to talk to you about a couple of your tweets here I have a bunch listed but yeah they're they're so good and your writing is is like it's really one of your gifts or or one of the things that youve built to be amazing at it so really just want to give you that acknowledgement um oddly effective had a coaching call with myself I typed up a chat conversation with some problems I was having and pretended to be my 85-year-old self I got some really insightful replies worth a try after all no one cares about younger you as much as older you thought that was really cool impactful and a practice that anyone can do I'd love to learn about uh Are there specific prompts questions things you say to yourself that that make for the best conversation this is the perfect question well done so this is something that I learned about later that stems from a psychological concept called the Solomon Paradox and so the Solomon Paradox if you don't know who anyone's listening is there was King Solomon who was known for being wise and he had he was one of the richest men of all time Etc and so people Kings rulers would come to him and ask for his advice the reason that it's a Paradox is that he gave exceptional advice to everyone else but his actual life was in Ruins his he you know his son was was you know a terrible son and he had many wives and he cheated and he had this lust for money and all these things but his advice to other people was amazing and so the Solomon Paradox and it's been studied in multiple facets that people give better advice than they follow themselves and so they've studied this with relationships they'll have somebody in a weird uh romantic relationship tough tough setup and they'll whitewash the names and say hey there's a lady and she's getting beat by her husband once a month and it's happened for four years and this time she says that her husband says that it's not going to happen again what do you think that that woman should do and then the person would give advice and it completely conflicts with how that woman actually lives her life even though she's giving advice to somebody who's not H right and they have postulated why this is now you could say you've removed the emotion from it you've removed the the tensions whatever you want to say but what we do know is that people give better advice than they follow and so if you pair that concept with the idea that no one has more context on your life than you do then you have a very powerful combo and so one of the issues that I've had with like therapists and performance coaches and things like that is that I I've done a hand I would say maybe I've spent like five maybe 10 hours in total in a setting like that I'm not very good at it um and it's because I usually feel like I'm spending the majority of my time trying to give them enough context in order to give me advice right but they don't know every one of my skill sets they don't know every one of my backgrounds they don't know the how that business deal like he kind of looked a little dodgy but I didn't have time to give more context to it so that they could give me the advice right and so I have failed at most of those things and so when I tried this experiment it was because I was actually really stressed about a decision and so I said okay and this has been a mental practice of mine was just talking to my 85-year-old self but I was like let me formalize this a little bit I'm actually going to write it out in a document and so I I started talking to my future self and it was kind of interesting is um it I could hear myself laughing at myself so like I'm like this thing isn't happening fast enough like I don't know what's going on and then I'd be like what did you expect you're trying to build a billion thing in what a year and then I'm like well I mean no and I'm like well what's the objective and I'm asking the same questions I would ask a portfolio company or CEO right or whatever and I'm now getting coached by me and some people might take that as like wildly egotistical which hopefully they don't but the other side of it is that like this person has two things that no therapist has they have complete context on my situation and they have completely aligned incentives and there's no one else in the entire world who has that and I would argue that most people know what they should do they just don't do it so I'll relate this back to weight loss sales way back in the day I'd sit across the table from Sandy and she like I don't know what to do and I used to just like play into that be like oh yeah well I'll help you educate and all that stuff and as I got more and more experience with sales i' be like sure you do and they would look at me because they didn't expect that and I'd be like what do you mean that's also it breaks the frame and all of a sudden you actually get their attention but I would say that and they look at me cross-eyed and I'd be like if you had to lose weight what would you do and they be like well I probably like I'd work out for I'm like okay I was like what else would you do they like I probably eat a little better I'm like okay I was like you pretty much got it I was like but that's not the issue is it and I'm like well no I was like it's that you're not doing it she was like yeah I was like I can help you with that and so the issue is that a lot of times we think that we like that we have a knowledge Gap but a lot of times it's not that we have a knowledge Gap we just need someone else to hold us accountable and so the Ultimate gift that I think you can give yourself in life is holding yourself accountable like if you can do that if you can really hold yourself accountable you can do anything and so sometimes it's really hard to hold yourself accountable and so I'm just asking my 85y old self to hold me accountable to what I say I want right because even the flip side and I said there's two things there's the knowledge and then there's the incentive right somebody might be able to help you out but their incentives aren't on line so as terrible is what I'm about to say may sound there are therapists that I think are very good and really help people but there are also therapists that are human and have bills to pay and have and have families and they look at their business like a business and have a recurring Revenue stream and say like if I solve your problem you won't leave and so you come here and you vent to me and I say let's do the same same time next week they're not trying to solve your problem they're trying to make you feel better in the moment but not Solve IT long term and so I want someone who has complete context and completely aligned incentives and there's only one person who has that and that's me and so the question is like how can I give me advice it's like well me giving me advice isn't working so I need old me to give advice who has 85 years of context and the nice thing is is that most of the time he just laughs at me and makes fun of me and tells me that none of this is going to matter and so it's been a very nice razor for focusing on the few things that do and so when I am stras or I have a big business decision I also know that I don't have to educate a therapist or a coach on at least my level of business acument to get good advice right and so that has been what I've called the Solomon project and so I've a recurring I have a recurring calendar meet up with myself for an hour on Mondays it's the first thing I do and I have a back and forth dialogue with 85-year-old me and I I mean it's a dialogue it's just like a chat and so I chat to me and then I click enter and then I chat back and I do the whole thing like I like it's and I'm like well dot dot dot and I'm like what dot dot dot and it's like well you kind of know and I'm like what do you mean you know like I have the whole thing um but I can't tell you it's been one of the most rewarding experiences that I've been through because like I old me has absolute Grace for young me and old me appreciates the sacrifice that young me right now is putting in for old him and it's like I wouldn't be living the life I have if you weren't doing what you're doing right now so thank you and it like it hits because like there aren't many people who thank you for doing what you do but like there's no one that it benefits more than you right but actually to be thanked it's very weird it's very meta but like it's been a really powerful experience for me and I think from a mental health or anxiety or long-term planning perspective it's allowed me to pump the braks on reactivity in my life whether it's with relationships or business decisions and be able to just be wiser if we call it that but really just you know most of wisdom is just thinking over a longer time right and so it's like might as well talk to the guy at the end and see what I should do today and that this is through a Google doc or just a go just a Google do yeah yeah let's just click enter simple I mean it's I can tell who's talking like I know who whose turn it is you know what I mean yeah I love it it's it's really powerful I'm going to do that right after this um and I I got to get another tweet with you while we're here um in a similar vein advice to my younger self document your life more otherwise you'll forget the details and the details are what make it worth remembering that's powerful I always tell my friends we got to we got to take more pictures more videos whatever the amount that you take it's not enough like always take more not because you want to show anybody but just because when I have those from the years past I'm always so grateful I do so what role has that played in your life and how do you have you done that well I was Notorious for not documenting anything for most of my life and I think I have a different tweet that says the biggest regret I have is not documenting the failures is like not documenting the low points because everyone wants to document the success story but the only way you have a success story is if you show where you came from and where you came from is the shitty part and so like I did 30-some launches of gyms I only made one recording and it's like two minutes damn and that one recording made me like $10 million because I ran it as an ad wow imagine if I had 30 other ones but it was me in some random gym being like look at this random gym I'm in in the middle of nowhere you know like and I'm like isn't this weird I was like I just sold 200 people into this thing look at the stack of contracts and I was actually not making it an ad I was sending it to a group that I had just joined to try and show that I was cool like they were all these internet people and I was like I do cool stuff too you know I was like I I I do stuff look look all these contracts it was me flexing to a group it wasn't even an ad and then I ran it as an ad then it murdered like people in the gym world were like I remember that ad right because it was so crazy because it was real and so I think that the biggest mistake that I made from marketing perspective maybe a life perspective biggest is strong one of the mistakes I made um is that I didn't document the low points and so like I have a screenshot in my first book that's my when I had $1,000 in my bank account um and for the audience who's listening the $1,000 my bank account for me um I had had you know six locations before that so going from six gyms to $1,000 in a matter of like 90 days was very hard for me and but it was hard enough that I do remember screenshotting it and being like [ __ ] remember this like don't make this mistake again and it was a little bit of like at the time like self-punishment of being like you will not forget this but as I've gained a little bit more Gra to my younger self I have those screenshots and I I've used that one screenshot of $1,000 in my bank account probably more than any any screenshot I've had from my past and I've used the I took one picture of me sleeping on the floor at the gym one and I just sent it to my dad being like first night here you know and I'm so grateful that I took the picture because if I had it I would and I have so many other crazy things that happened but I have no documentation of it and so it's easy to say hey document but the thing is is that documenting is a local cost for a global benefit it costs you now but it benefits you long term which is why most people don't do it and so what I've tried to do with what we've or how we've oriented our life is that I give myself local benefit and Global benefit so I get fast feedback loops for documenting what we do now and so we document everything but I also get really fast feedback because I post it now the problem is if you're not posting things then you have no feedback cycle for remembering them especially if they're tough and so I think that one of the one of the the genius concepts of capture don't create Etc is that it actually gives you a feedback loop on something that otherwise has no benefit because in the moment you remember it it just happened and some in some ways you're trying to forget it yeah right but like when you think about The Human Experience when I think about my 85-year old self like what makes The Human Experience in its entirety The Human Experience is the highs and the lows and so like there was a we were talking about frames of mind for like getting through hard things earlier but I'll give you another one which is there was a guy um friend of a friend successful entrepreneur and he got really bad cancer like super bad really really fast right and I think he lost his like trachea and some other stuff and like they thought he was going to die and ended up making it um and uh and he was telling my friend he was like man so grateful and it was like about you think it was like the whole I see Life a different way now it wasn't that it was while he was going through it and his reasoning was how cool is it that I get to live this part of the human experience he's like so many people don't get to live this like I get to know what it's like to have cancer like so many people lived their whole lives and then die not knowing what cancer was like I get to know that and I just thought about that it's like a very interesting frame it's like whether it's bankruptcy going to jail like even the depths of human suffering and some people who are still going through that trauma I'm not saying that like I'm not justifying it it's just a frame on like being human is the rainy and the sunny days like you can't skip weather so I think like embracing the totality of the experience can give you gratitude for what feels locally like a low point but most of the defining moments in our life broken leg then he doesn't have to go to war right when you expand the time RIS and those are the things that create us and so again I mean I talk to my 85y old self a lot which sounds really weird um but whenever I'm like complaining about something one of the common things he'll ask me back is like well who do you want to be and I'll be like well I want to be like this he's like do you think that person would not go through hard times I'm like yeah he's like well it sounds like you're wishing for the outcome but not willing to pay the price he's like are you willing to pay the price and I'm like well yeah he's like well this is what paying the price feels like embrace it because these will be the stories you tell and so I think that's that's given me the ability to weather rainy days sunny days because like there are a lot of those days in the entrepreneurial Journey because that Rocky cut scene is 5 years not 30 seconds and so I think you need as many of those tools as you can possibly put together in your tool belt to just keep going so so beautifully said I I want to highlight too the part about sleeping in the basement and then sleeping in the gym and taking a picture of it you post it on social media that day and it gets zero likes you post it on social media today and it gets a million and I think there's something interesting to that is like the more you build the story the more the low points actually mean and the greater the yeah you have something I'll actually give you I'll give you something that you probably didn't expect from me on this one it's actually I think it's a smiley face so if you post it when you're going through it people will respond saying keep chasing your dreams keep at it Etc and then when you start succeeding all of a sudden they won't do that and then later they'll be like it's cool that you came from that but like when you're on the come up and I remember I wrote this I wrote this essay and I've actually tried to find it and it was because I I I liked creative writing I had a creative writing scholarship back in then like I didn't actually take that scholarship into but anyways point is I've liked writing for a long time and I wrote this essay to myself because I'm a weirdo um I said everyone believes in the American dream until it comes trip and so that was like the heading and it was it was this weird observation that I had because like everyone was rooting for me when I was sleeping on the floor so like in my head I had back home everybody that I was running away from but everyone in the local like the people at my gym and stuff they were like rooting for me you know I mean they're like good for you chasing your dreams like you know you're you're sleeping at the like you're gonna get it you're gonna make it man right but like nine months later when I had like a team and I had a manager and like I wasn't at the gym every hour of every day I was working from home sometimes because I got more done because it wouldn't you know disrupt me um and I would show up to the gym or i' show up to a second location and they'd be like oh big man like can't be too bothered by us like don't forget us little people right you know all that stuff and I remember being like when did I be I was like when did I go from the Underdog to the man as in like working for the man which is a saying that Jen Z probably doesn't even know but um I think that there's a quote that I think uh Chris Williamson said that I really I think he was quoting some I don't remember what it was but anyways he he said people root for you on your way up because you remind them of their dreams and they try to tear you down once you're there because you remind them that they gave up on them something do and I I have lived that and it's it's weird because I think there's these Cycles as you kind of gain an influence it's kind of like the crab story like in the beginning like all the crabs try and pull the other crabs back into the bucket so I think like you start succeeding and people are like good for you that gives them hope and then you start passing them and it's like everyone wants you to do well just not better than them yeah right and so then you start passing them by the objective measure whatever you want to call it and then they start cutting at you right well he cut Corners he's not ethical he's you know they start making things up whatever right but then what happens is people who are not from your hometown start recognizing for who you are now and they they didn't see the path they didn't see you suck in the beginning they just see who you are now and they're like wow this guy's great he provides so much value whatever it is right and I think there's a say that Jesus Jesus wasn't the Messiah in his hometown right like the the it's counterintuitive but you think that the place that someone was from is the place that they that would root for it but it was the last place that accepted him as Lord in the story right and I think there's a lot of Truth to that and so it's also why I'm a big advocate of leaving like if you want to become a different person then change your environment because the environment you have is reinforcing the person you used to be it's it's so crazy six months ago I know you probably you gotta go soon but six months ago I moved to Austin and haven't had more growth personally and professionally in my own life because I moved to a different place and then I go home and I notice the patterns again that I was once living with so that's how life goes but um I yeah thank you I'd love to I end these podcasts with a challenge ask the guest for a challenge of the audience to do something and take the action from the hour and a half we've spoke does a challenge come to mind Define the input output equation that gets you closer to where you want to go and then 10x the input so whatever your thing is like if you're like I want to be an editor I want to be an agency owner I want to be a whatever whatever the thing is the first thing you have to do is figure out the input output equation which is what do I have to do that will get me closer to where I want to go step one if you can't Define your input output equation then you need to Define your input output equation because otherwise you're working for no goal once you define that then do 10 times more this is the flyer story like you probably you might be doing the right stuff you might be working out but you're working out 5 minutes a week and being like I don't know why I'm not losing weight it's like you're not even close you're like no I think need to double it to 10 minutes a week it's like no you're not even close the thing is in Fitness we have some context right but in business you have no idea and that's the big disconnect is that people might be doing the wrong the right stuff but doing the wrong amount they're doing way too little of it and they think you they think in doubles not in orders of magnitude as in 10x 100x but like the like you want to make a 100 times more money than you are you need a hundred times more input like hold on I'm I'm going to hit this home real quick because this is this is this is important I have right now 10,000 times the input that I used to used to have when I was running my gyms I just have leverage on my input and so for example I could do 200 cold calls a day I could double that to get to 400 400 Co calls a day I could also do 200 call calls a day to get someone to recruit for me and then that person starts sorry I I'm going to rewind real quick so I could do 200 Co calls a day and get a certain amount of sales the next level is I could go get somebody to do those 200 phone calls for me and then I make the same amount of sales but that don't do anything more leverage another leverage above that is I go call do 200 phone calls a day until I get a recruiter and then that recruiter brings me a new person every week and then every week I get another added 200 phone calls per day that keeps stacking and the number of customers that comes from that but what did I do there I made calls for a week to get one recruiter and then from that point going forward every single month I get more and more sales and so that's three levels of Leverage they're more than that and so what you unlock in the game of Entrepreneurship is leverage and the way that you un unlock Leverage is through relinquishing control and so the tough part about the entrepreneurial journey is that the thing that got you to quit your job is the very thing that you have to stop doing and so what happened is you felt out of control and so you quit your job so you could take complete control of your life and when you're self-employed you take complete control you are you hunt you kill you produce you do everything right and then the thing that you got the big massive reward for because you quit your job you started making money living life you're own terms you now have to unlearn that and you have to say now I'm going to give up control again and then the rest of the journey is unar the control that you so hardcore were rewarded for on that first action because in the beginning you have to give up doing production or doing delivery right on the back end and then you have to give up doing admin work and then you have to give up doing sales and then you have to give up doing marketing then you have to give up doing management then you have to give up doing leadership then you have to give up doing financing then you have to do like you have to give up all these things until eventually you're like but I'm not needed and then you have to give up the desire to be needed by your business MH because many people make their business to to fulfill personal desires but the business doesn't need to do that it doesn't exist for you it exists for the customer you're not required you think you are because it makes you feel more important and so that's the unlearning experience and that's where leverage comes from and so right now to answer the question the challenge for the people is figure out what the input output equation is and do 10 times more and if you can figure out how to do 10 times more figure out how to do 100 times more and the secret is that if you're trying to do 100 times more it's probably not just you Alex Heros thank you so much for being you you are a world class human being and I'm so grateful for you and the world is a better place because you're on it and I I truly mean that you roll your eyes but it means it comes from the bottom of my heart I I really mean that thank you thank you for being here thank you for having me I appreciate it and we accomplished the mission you asked great questions thank I appreciate appreciate where should we send people1 million leads Andy well it depends on when this come out but if the uh the if this is before August 19th then go to acquisition.

1:36:36leads uh you can register for the event it's free put a million dollar from the event we're going to be giving away insane stuff I've got a secret project I've been working on for four years that I'm going to be releasing uh I can't tell you what it is for everyone who's listening but I can tell you that it's more than a gift card and less than a Tesla and every single person in attendance is going to get one all right so it's it's going to be really cool and I've been saving for a really long time to do this um so if it's before August 19th then go to acquisition. leads and guess what if it's after August 19th also go to acquisition. leads and it will redirect you to the book that got launched I cannot wait to read it it'll come out before but I'm sure people will be watching this interview many many times in the future thank you so much for being you and have a wonderful day my man you too man appreciate you …