Embrace The Cringe | Ep 961

Join Alex Hormozi at the 2-Day, Interactive Scaling Workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas In this Q&A episode, Alex, who sold his e-commerce company for $46.2 million and set a Guinness World Record, answers key questions from business owners looking to scale. He advises them on how to overcome growth bottlenecks by optimizing ad spend, testing new keywords, and building a defensible brand. He also tackles challenges around talent acquisition, outsourcing, and improving financial forecasting to scale effectively. In this episode 00:00 Why caring and trying hard is perceived as cringe 03:10 The importance of documenting the struggle 04:46 Alex’s first ads and posts 06:08 The iterative process of getting better 06:44 Samples of Alex’s early (cringe) videos More Value: Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube Join The Live Scaling Workshop In Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials: ⁠⁠LinkedIn ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠YouTube ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Acquisition ⁠ DISCLOSURE Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies, and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Hormozi?

  This is the first piece of content I ever made. This is the first ad I ever made. Fast forward today, we make 450 pieces per week. I broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest selling nonfiction of all time, with $106 million in sales in a weekend. We own a portfolio of companies that did north of $250 million in aggregate revenue last year. In this video, I want to show you just how far anyone can come, and not to judge your first chapter by someone else's 25th or 1000th chapter. Here's one promise I can make to you. You will be cringe. And so, let's define these terms real quick. Shame is breaking someone else's rules. Guilt is breaking your own rules. Cringe is supposed secondhand embarrassment. Someone saying, "Oh, that's cringe." Saying, "I'm embarrassed for them." But in reality, it's a defensive status play, which means you should interpret it as if someone says, "Oh, that's cringe, they said that to you."

• 0:45Alex Hormozi?

  It means I'm beginning to change my status relative to other people, or relative to them, and therefore, I'm on the right path. And so, we have to ask the question like, whose rules are we breaking? Did we agree to their rules? If we set the rules, what outcome do those rules optimize for? A rule is an if-then statement. Is that true? How do we know that? And why does that matter? People seeing you try hard will say, "Why are you taking this so seriously? Why do you even care?" But the truth is, they've never cared about anything in their lives. Like, when's the last time they took anything seriously? Of course, never, and it shows. And so, I had a guy once come up to me and tell me that he saw how hard I was trying with content, and then he said he'd almost outsourced all of it, down to 2 hours a week. And he was like, "Yeah, I like bragging about it."

• 1:30Alex Hormozi?

  And I said, "Yeah, it shows." And he just like, looked at me, and I was like, "Yeah, it shows." Right? He was trying to be cool about the fact that he didn't try hard, but all it looked like was that he was losing. But back to point, is it cringe to care? Yes, of course it's cringe. You can make anything cringe by just caring about it. And the only people who think caring isn't cool are people in high school, or people who got older, but never grew up. So, be real about this for a second. Just changing how I talk about something can make it sound cringe. So, in the fittest world where I came from, right? Bodybuilding, you could be obsessed over muscles, oiling up and posing in tiny trunks on a stage for strangers. Right? Maybe competitive chess, right? Staring at a board for hours in dead silence,

• 2:15Alex Hormozi?

  obsessing over wooden pieces like your life depends on it? Making YouTube videos, cringe, setting up light. You're gonna set up your little lights and talk to your little camera like an idiot? Like, no one's listening, right? Editing for hours just for a couple of views and comments? Oh, writing a book, that's cringe. Locking yourself away for months or years, pouring your soul into words that most people will never read. Like, you're just gonna sit away and type at your keyboard, right? Anyone can make anything cringe, right? Because anyone who cares about anything is cringe. But the worst, and I think Dom Mazetti said this, and I love this, the cringiest thing of all is to be scared about looking cringe. So why are you hating on someone else who actually has a passion or interest or actually tries? Like, do we really want a world where people care less?

• 2:59Alex Hormozi?

  Because when you make that claim, like, who do you really hate? Who does the person who says that's cringe really hate? Do you hate them for committing to something? Or yourself for lacking the guts to commit to anything? I wanna show this in the realist form I possibly could. I went through the archives. I scrolled all the way back and I am, I'm a weirdo about like, I try to keep everything. So I have like my lifelong texts and videos and pictures, and I'm very grateful for that. So I'll give you a tiny piece of advice to anybody who's on the journey right now. Document more. Like, I would say I don't have many regrets in life, but one of them is that I didn't document the struggle. I didn't document the journey because I was ashamed of it. I didn't want anyone to know. It's kind of like the people who like, when they're overweight, they don't wanna take pictures of themselves because they're ashamed. But it's like, one, you gotta face reality.

• 3:42Alex Hormozi?

  And two, if you believe that you're going to win, this will be part of the story you tell. And so you, like Kanye was documenting in the very early days because he believed so hardcore that he was gonna win, right? And I'm grateful because I knew the first, the moment that I actually started documenting purposefully was the day that I had a thousand dollars in my left in my bank account after I lost everything. I was like, I will never let this happen again, and this will be the beginning of my comeback story. Hey, guys, real quick, many of you guys are getting started in business and don't know, but other entrepreneurs have already tried to help. And so 3.6 million copies were donated by other entrepreneurs in my book launch, and I'm donating these books as well. And so if you're starting in business and you would like the ultimate business backpack, all three books. This one shows you how to figure out what to sell. This shows you how to get people to find out about it. And this one shows you how to make money from it.

• 4:26Alex Hormozi?

  When you have all three, you can actually get started. All right, on top of that, if 30 days of school that you can get absolutely free. And all of this, including the books, including school, including shipping is 16 bucks. Yeah. Like, we lose money on this. So go grab it. It's the ultimate thing I can give you, my gift. Enjoy. If you go there and it's shut down, it's because we ran out. But as long as the link still works, there's books. And so I want to show you some real stuff. That's, it's tough. But I hope you enjoy it because I think everyone, you know, many people will compare their current chapter to like my chapter, somebody else's chapter, whoever your person is. But it's not real. It's made up. Like, like compare it to this. This is the first ad I ever made.

• 5:08Alex Hormozi?

  Now compare that to my first professional ad that I ever made. It's super cringe. Okay, here's my cringey first post where I was trying to get people to give me money. Right? I'm just like, hey, I started this thing. Please, please give me money. Right? Here is my first content piece that I ever made. Sounds very dialed, right? There's a strong hook, strong meat, strong payoff. No, it's horrible. Right? And this is the first YouTube video that I made when I started making YouTube content. And this is my first IG post. Now, 90 days after that first ad that I showed you, I lost everything for the second time. And that's when I made my first podcast.

• 5:50Alex Hormozi?

  And so my goal was to document the lessons so that I had something to look back to as I moved up in my career. And I thought it'd be really cool if Buffett or Bezos or Musk had done some sort of like video diaries of the come up, not just the, the top, right? As something that like an artifact for us to learn from that we could follow in their footsteps. Unfortunately, the world is too rational of a place to reward the undeserving. That's a Charlie Munger quote. In order to get what you want, you must deserve what you want, which really means that you've got to be good. And the only way to get good is to be willing to be bad for a very long time. And so this is my promise to you is that you will be cringe. These videos, these pieces of content, your first product, they will be cringe, but you will also not be alone. And so the point is this, you'll figure it out as long as you start, take feedback to

• 6:35Alex Hormozi?

  get better and never stop. And if this motivated you to stop judging yourself, because hopefully these are super cringe, I made an entire video on the editor process that I followed to get here, which you can watch.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Hey guys, and in your next installment of the Mind Game series, I just want to talk about love versus discipline. And it's a topic that I feel like gets totally misconstrued within the fitness industry because... Hey guys, welcome. Okay, so measuring yourself is a really important thing for tracking progress so that you can make adjustments to your meal plan. Makes sense. You want to track as many variables as you possibly can. The reason for that is not because you want to see...

• 7:12Alex Hormozi?

  What? I don't know.

• 7:16Alex Hormozi?

  A trainer? Like, I have no idea.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Hi guys, I'm Alex and I'm the owner of United Fitness. So, welcome to our family. Thank you for the opportunity to earn your business. So, I just want to tell you a little bit more about what we do. Uh, United Fitness, we strive to be the leading body in life transformation business out there. Are you tired of fitness places that don't make you have fun? Or give you the results you want? Well, United Fitness is ready to change that. And you know how? We're gonna have you lifting weights.