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0:00Heroes and villains always have the same backstory, pain. The difference is what they choose to do about it. Villain says, "The world hurt me. I'll hurt it back." The hero says, "The world hurt me. I'm not going to let it hurt anybody else." Heroes use pain. Villains are used by it. And full kudos here. This is a permutation of what uh Donald Miller said um who's a great writer and he has a number of of books and he he he talked about the first element the second element of that quote is the part that I added to it um about heroes using pain and villains being used by it. And so one of the things for people who are not where they want to be is that they have pain like oodles of pain. And I remember when I was starting out I was looking for passion. I was looking for purpose.

0:48I was like, I just want to find something that I'm motivated by. But it's the it's the cat and the cheese. It's like we're looking for cheese, but we have all these cat behind us and all we have to do is look and remember that they're behind us and chasing us. And so if you have the cat and you're staying in your current situation, you're being used by the cat, right? You're being used by the business owner who, you know, it doesn't treat you well and is, you know, and you're in this job that you don't really want to be in, right?

1:14or you're being used by the situation or the context of the relationship that you're in with the girl that you're like not that into, right? Versus saying like this is terrible and because of this terribleness, I now have something that I can run away from. And then and then and then like rather than not looking at the knife or trying to take painkillers to not feel the pain, it's like completely sobering up, taking the knife and twisting it in your own heart and being like, I'm going to [ __ ] do something about this. And I think that that's that's what the heroes like if we're heroes in our own story, it's not avoiding pain. It's choosing for from the very beginning the alchemy, which is like you have these terrible situations. It's like and you have the opportunity to turn turn them into magic and and and skip or shortcut all the growth you're going to have in a really short period of time simply by twisting the knife and being like, I'm going to do something about it.

2:07>> Yeah. I think because people presume in the beginning that passion and purpose and meaning and joy and and fulfillment are the things that get people going. But as I've said, of all of the high performers that I've spoken to, the vast vast vast majority of them are driven by insufficiency and resentment and terrible parents or terrible upbringings or a chip on their shoulder about bullies in school. Pick your poison.

2:34They have decided to use that to create the activation energy, right? You can lower your action threshold and increase how many points you have to prove. It's like, oh, I want to live a better life. Yeah, that sounds good. It's like, I want to prove the bullies that said I was a worthless piece of [ __ ] in school wrong. It's like that's some [ __ ] potent fuel. I do believe that scaled over a long enough time, it's toxic. And I don't think that it's necessarily

3:01>> how long. >> Well, that's the that's the question. Like a lifetime, right? Like but I mean it'll it'll fuel you for a decade pretty well. >> Yeah. And I think that I look at me, I look at, you know, I was bullied pretty badly in school and was an only child and had expectations from parents and and, you know, I combined all of those things together. And I did have a chip on my shoulder and I did want to prove to the world that I was worthwhile and I did want people to to realize that they had doubted the wrong person. [ __ ] yeah. Yeah, damn right I do.

3:37I think being really specific about your pain is helpful. So like or even being specific about the cheese really specificity in general is helpful but like even more so like what is the twisting the p what is twisting the knife? Like what is how do you operationalize twisting the knife? Right? Instead of being like I hate my life, right? It's I hate the way Andrew makes me feel when he says that I'm a piece of [ __ ] and I'm not going to amount to anything, because he's right.

4:07Like, why does it hurt me? Like, if someone says, "Alex, you're a piece of [ __ ] and you're not going to amount to anything." >> If someone accuses you of being poor or fat, >> right? I I would have I'd be like, I have evidence to the contrary, so this will probably not bother me. But the things that bother us are the ones that, you know, have an element of truth or sometimes not an element are comprised almost entirely of truth and we just don't want to look at it. And so I think it's it's the the twisting the knife is looking in the mirror and saying, "What if they're right?" Real quick, if you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of the functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstrain the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out on the thank you page. You can just book a call with my team and we will look into the business, see if we can help. And if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.