Throwback: Why Hard Work Beats Happiness Every Time | Ep 696

In this throwback episode, Alex (@AlexHormozi) dives into the trap of chasing happiness and explains why striving to be useful is a better goal. Drawing on personal experiences, he breaks down how confidence is built through reps, how mastery is forged through editing and effort, and why doing the hard work repeatedly is the most sustainable form of personal growth. Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth. Wanna scale your business? Click here. Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition Mentioned in this episode: Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap

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

• 0:00Alex Hormozi?

  If you're doing work or you feel like you're not as good at something, you have to figure out what the input output equation is. You have to figure out like, what's the thing that I have to do a lot of? Because every skill is like this, is that there's a period where you have to do a lot of something. And if you don't know what it is, then you're not going to get better.

• 0:19Alex Hormozi?

  Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer and how to keep them longer. And the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe.

• 0:30Alex Hormozi?

  The nice thing with being useful is that in order to be useful, you have to be useful to other people. Like no one can be useful on their own. You have to be useful to other people. So there's a service element, but there's also a self-improvement element, which is to be useful to other people, you need to improve yourself. And so that's why I think being useful is, has been probably my day-to-day goal of what I need to do. And that's served me well. Not saying anyone should or shouldn't, they can do whatever they want. But for me, that's helped me. I mean, this is Tony Robbins quote. He said, "If you stay in your head, you're dead." And because it rhymes, it's true. But for real though, like when I was 19, the reason I said fuck happiness is like, I realized that I was in this cycle, this loop of trying to like, everything you analyze of like, does this make me happy? Does this pizza make me happy? Does this class make me happy?

• 1:13Alex Hormozi?

  I mean, I quit pre-med because I thought biology didn't make me happy. Now I'm very glad that I did because I like this a lot more now. But like, that was the reason I did it. I studied really hard, I did well. But I was like, this doesn't make me happy. Like, of course a fuck it doesn't make you happy. You suck at it, you're learning something. You're going to suck for a very long time. It's only when all these skills go together that you'll be good at something and you'll actually be useful to society. Of course, you learning the fucking chromosomes doesn't do anything. But it's because of what it shows a school that you're willing to put up with so that you might be useful to society in the particular skill set. And so, yeah, I think being useful is a far better goal. And this is me just shouting out specifically to men. Try this on for a month. If you're happy, do whatever fuck you, or really just do whatever you want either way. But if what you're doing isn't working for you, I would try this on for size.

• 1:57Alex Hormozi?

  One, say that you're going to stop trying to be happy. Just give up on it. Just stop thinking about it. Like, I'm not, you know what? I'm actually okay with being unhappy. I'm fine with it.

• 2:08Alex Hormozi?

  I'm still here. Like, it doesn't mean anything. Okay. And so then you can take action despite your lack of happiness and think, okay, how can I be useful to other people? And I think if you do that, you'll actually start focusing on the tasks and on people outside of yourself, and you'll be amazed at how much better you feel overall. And what happened to me when I went into my fuck happiness thing is that I stopped thinking about happiness altogether. And then like years later, I was like, you know what? Cause I was so used to, cause like, I wanted to label myself that way and be okay with it. People would ask me like, hey, XYZ, I'd be like, oh, I'm not a happy person. I would just like say that upfront. That way I didn't have to. And I remember catching myself probably like five years later.

• 2:48Alex Hormozi?

  And I was like, huh, I say that. I was like, but I actually really do like my life a lot. So I stopped saying I'm not a happy person. Cause like, I actually kind of do like my life. But I feel like I only got to liking my life by being willing to not like what I was doing for a long period of time. I think people just only think of the things that quote feel good, but there's tons of things that feel good that are not bad for you. Like sex feels good. It's not bad for you. It's just, we immediately jump to like cigarettes, booze, you know, whatever. But it's really anything in excess is bad for you. Even cigarettes, like if you have one cigarette a week, doesn't do anything for you. Probably you smoke more than that just walking outside. You know what I mean? For a week in terms of just, you know, CO2 from cars. So it's always in the dose. People want a binary when it's really a continuum.

• 3:33Alex Hormozi?

  And so I think, I think learning to work is the most useful thing that you can do. I mean, I think for me, I love finding input output equations that equal like success of some kind. So it's like, if you're giving public speaking, I'm going to give this example because it's perfect. So Caleb, who's my team, had said years ago when we met, I don't really like public speaking. I don't like presenting. I don't like any of that stuff. I went, cool. And I think he said, somebody to agree of like, I don't like it or I'm bad at it, whatever. And he did a presentation for the team and it was good. And then he had a bunch of things that he wanted to do better on the next one. Now, between those time periods, I had done the book launch. And so he had seen me prepare for my presentation. And so I did it 100 times over 30 days.

• 4:18Alex Hormozi?

  So I did it three times a day before I gave the book launch. And you know, when there was 500,000 people or whatever that were at the launch, when we had 500,000 people registered for the launch and I was about to step on stage, the team that was doing it all said, we do this every day. And I've never seen anyone so like relaxed. And it wasn't a front. It was because I had done it so many times. And so, fast forward, Caleb had another presentation he had to give. And this time, he prepared three times as long. So he did, instead of 10 hours of prep, he did 30 hours of prep. And instead of having 80 slides, he had 330 slides. And the presentation went way better.

• 4:58Alex Hormozi?

  And he noted that he wasn't nervous at all going into the second presentation compared to the first presentation. And so, he messaged me afterwards and said, it wasn't that I was bad at speaking. I was just lazy. And I think that a lot of people mistakenly think they're bad at things. They haven't even learned how to try. And I do think learning how to try is also domain specific. And so like Caleb's an exceptional video editor and media strategist and great with building the team. And those skills, those had been skills that he knew how to work hard at. But this was a completely different skill. And so it's like writing. Like I have a lot of entrepreneur friends who are writing books now. Now, they don't know that I come from a background of writing.

• 5:40Alex Hormozi?

  I got a full writing scholarship to Tufts University, which is a good school. I got a personal letter from their writing seller, like, we love all your stuff. We want you to be, I ended up going to Vanderbilt, but like, I was the vice editor of the newspaper. I was the editor in chief of literary magazine when I was in high school. Like, I like writing. And so, I know what hard work looks like in writing, which is just editing and editing and editing and editing, which is basically like doing the speech again and doing the speech again and doing the speech again. And it's the same as ping pong, which is 500 backhands, 500 forehands. It's just repetition, right? And so, right now, if you're doing work or you feel like you're not as good at something, you have to figure out what the input-output equation is. You have to figure out like, what's the thing that I have to do a lot of?

• 6:23Alex Hormozi?

  Because every skill is like this, is that there's a period where you have to do a lot of something. And if you don't know what it is, then you're not going to get better. Sales is like, I have to do 100 calls today. I have to do 10 conversations today. Whatever it is, you do that every single day and you do that for a year, you get pretty fucking good. And so you have to learn what that input-output equation is, so that you can push as much, if it's me, once I know it, then I just jam as much input as I possibly can into that thing. And then that's where the whole, the whole quote that went viral was, confidence doesn't come from shouting affirmations in the mirror, by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are. Outwork yourself doubt. And so like, you become confident by giving yourself the stack of evidence,

• 7:07Alex Hormozi?

  the 100 times I went over the presentation. I felt confident going into that, because I had a stack of proof that I'd already done it perfectly the last 20 times in a row that I'd done it. So why would 21 be different? And if you've had 1,000 sales calls on your 1,001st, if people are watching, they're like, man, you sound so confident. You're like, it's just how it is. It's not like I'm confident, I just know what's going to happen next. And so, I prefer to think about it as like, do it so many times you get bored of doing it. And like, that's when you'll look confident to everyone on the outside. Because you'll have no emotional affect to the outcome, because you'll have recognized the patterns so many times, that there's nothing that's going to surprise you. And I think that most people just don't know how to work that hard.

• 7:49Alex Hormozi?

  Like, there is no way that anyone will know how hard I've worked on the books. They just imagine that there's a reason that they're all-time bestsellers for each of the categories they're in. And still, they're like, it's because you're following. It's like, no, you know why I know that? Look at every other fucking person who has a following and their books don't fucking sell, even though they have a big following. They launch it and then they stop selling. Why? Because the book sucked. They had a ghostwriter, they voiced it in, whatever. They make their, whatever, 5 million bucks or whatever it is. They think the book is finished when it has reached the number of pages that creates a book. Like, I can write a book in two weeks. If I was just trying to write a certain number of pages, but like I've usually written five times the amount of pages as what actually comes out in the final draft.

• 8:30Alex Hormozi?

  And I've rewritten end to end, the whole thing, not once or twice, but like 10 times end to end. But you know what happens when you do that? You get really fucking good at knowing what is important, what isn't. And you also give yourself way more outside life exposures that trigger new thoughts over that period of time that remind you of things that can make you better. And so it's kind of like a, like when you paint, it's like, it's like putting coats of paint and letting it dry. And so I kind of see editing drafts as like another coat of paint. And then you think you're like, you know what? I went to a new area today and I saw this new yellow. I wonder if I could throw that in. If you had immediately shipped it, you wouldn't have had the opportunity to see the yellow thing because time didn't transpire during the creation of the thing. And so I think there's a reason that books that take 10 years to write,

• 9:15Alex Hormozi?

  look and read like they took 10 years to write. There's just a depth to the quality. I find happiness in figuring out what my input output equation is and doing it as much as humanly possible. You want to make it as easy as possible to work as hard as you can. And so everything that is not that input output equation is interference.

• 9:32Alex Hormozi?

  Real quick guys, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the word. So we can help more entrepreneurs make more money, feed their families, make better products and have better experiences for their employees and customers. And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I ask you to do is you can just leave a review. It'll take you 10 seconds or one type of the thumb. It would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world for someone else. And so like relationships, I mean, I said this before, but everything that you are not willing to sacrifice to be the best, the person who's best in the world is willing to and already has sacrificed. And so I'm not saying good or bad, do whatever you want.

• 10:16Alex Hormozi?

  But if you want to be number one, and a lot of people say, I want to be the best. It's like, no, you want to be better and you can be really good. You can be really good and not sacrifice plenty of things. But if you want to be the best, then you just have to assume that the best person in the world has the genetic predisposition, has all the environmental cues aligned with their ultimate goal and is willing to give up everything that is not achieving that goal. And if you're not in that boat, then you're not going to be the best. People just like saying, cause it makes it feel good, but it's false.

• 10:46Alex Hormozi?

  And so in terms of aligning the environment, if you know what the input output equation, so for me, it's writing right now is the season that I'm in because writing kind of is the is the pillar of everything else we do content wise, internal communications, the books, everything comes from me taking time to write. Cause I'm I organize my thoughts better that way, not because I've become skilled at writing. So it's the best way. It's the most succinct way that I can communicate. And so there's a reason that the first six hours of my day, when I'm freshest, most well rested, I have no meetings and I have only one thing that I do, which is write. There's nothing else. And so if you know what the input out equation is, find the time, the four to six hours a day, every day, that you can do that.

• 11:29Alex Hormozi?

  And then allow nothing to interfere with it. And that's it. Like nothing interferes with it. And if you do that for five years, you'll be really fucking good. And you'll be useful and you'll feel good about it. Because the thing is that a certain point, the work itself becomes reinforcing. Like when editors edit and then they make a change and then the story goes or the video goes the way they want it to. It's like boom, that was reinforcing. And if I like work really hard on a paragraph and I could just shrink it to one sentence. I'm like, fuck yeah. And that might take, that literally might take two hours to just keep beating it down until I get it to like the one most succinct thing. But that's satisfying. And so the beginning you suck and you do the reps so that you can learn the skills. So that eventually you do the work itself because the work itself is rewarding. But that takes time to get to.

• 12:12Alex Hormozi?

  In the beginning, you start the journey because you have this big ultimate payoff you want to have. But that's way too far out to actually wait. Like you have to be an exceptional person who'd been reinforced in the past for waiting for a very long period of time. That's why I say the athlete's thing is kind of interesting because they've had to wait a long period of time. And so they have to practice for a long period before they get the thing. But typically they get enough reinforces early on that the act itself becomes reinforcing. And that's what mastery is. It's you transition from having some sort of external motivator to external. I believe all motivators are external, but from the work itself being intrinsically rewarding versus having a carrot of some kind that's been artificially put there, like status or an award or number one or a ranking. And masters enjoy the work more than novices do. So it's actually easier for masters.

• 12:55Alex Hormozi?

  I would say the hard thing that I have now is that my level of quality, the standard that I have is only mine. Like I know that I could probably put out the first draft and it would probably be a bestseller. It's just that I would know that it could have been better. And that would eat me alive. So it's actually, the hard part for me now is that I maintain my standard as the number one standard that I optimize for. And if the world so chooses to also like it, great. But it also divorces me somewhat from the outcome. Because if it were just about getting the bestselling book, then I would publish it on the first shot. Because at this point, I do have enough skill that probably would be a bestseller on its own. But I also think there's a difference between being a bestseller for a season and being bestseller for a hundred years.

• 13:39Alex Hormozi?

  And so I'm trying to write these books to be bestsellers when I'm dead. So they're still useful. And there's nothing else I can do to it to make it better. Same thing for the presentation. There's nothing else I can do to make this better. I can't practice it more. Because even at a certain point, when you, if you get past a certain point of practicing, you start knowing it almost too well, then you start cutting corner because you're like, it gets too natural. Like, I actually, I borderline overprepared for the GMATs. I like peaked, I like, because I took tests every week. And my math score, sorry, my English score peaked before my math score did. So my math score peaked at the test. My English score, I had done it so many times, we were like, shoot. You recognize so many patterns that you're like, man, which pattern is this one? Because like, I'm so good at all, I have to remember what, like, you peak, right? So there is a point where it's not even diminishing returns, you actually start

• 14:24Alex Hormozi?

  getting worse. At least in my opinion, at least in my experience. And so if you regress something down to a simpler form, and then I just cut the sentence at half, I lose material. I lose stuff that would, that needs to be there. And so you get it as simple as possible, but not as simple. A really fun thought exercise for somebody who's just like, all of this is like, wow, that's so much work, I'm not really prepared for that. Well, I'll walk you through what it looks like in a micro example. So if a video editor comes to me and says, hey, do you like this clip? And I say, yeah, I do like the clip. If you had another two hours to work on it, what would you do? And they're like, well, if I had another two hours, I'd do this, this, and this. I'm like, okay, go do that, come back. They come back, and I'm like, do you think it's better? And they say, yeah. And they showed it to me, and I'm like, it is better. Okay. Now, if you had another two hours, what would you do? And they're like, well, I'd do this, this, and this. I'm like, okay, cool.

• 15:08Alex Hormozi?

  They go, they come back, same conversation. Like, okay, if you had a week, what would you do? Well, then they're like, well, shoot, I would, I'd probably scrap this whole style overall, and I'd actually make a totally new framework for how I'd approach the video. And I'd want to come at it from this angle altogether, it would just take, you know, a lot more work, but I think it would still make a better outcome. It's like, okay. So that idea, just do it on five years. And so Everybody just wants to get it done rather than get it right. And getting it right is where all the money is. At a certain point, you start to develop mastery even around pursuing goals. Like, this is book three from the $100 million series. Every month, I get thousands of reviews and DMs and people who say their lives changed from the first two books.

• 15:53Alex Hormozi?

  The hard part was book one, when I have none of that for a year and a half. But once that one's out, leads, I'm like, well, I'm getting reinforcement every day from my writing. And so I write. And so now I have two books worth of that. And once the third book's out, there'll be three books worth of that. So maintaining that gets easier and easier just because I have regular enforcement for writing, not necessarily this book, but writing in general. And so that means I can generalize past good experiences onto how I act and work now. You've become an expert at pursuing goals because you have pursued goals in the past. I just use writing as an example, but I've pursued goals in the past and sticking it out has had big payoffs. And so when I feel like I'm sticking it out again, I'm reminded of the past times I've stuck it out and it's been worth it.

• 16:38Alex Hormozi?

  The hard part is for the people who haven't stuck anything out because they've never seen it work. And so the first one's always the hard one. It's like you just have to have faith on some level. You just have to fucking believe that it'll work out. And the thing that carries you over the bridge in the short term is that you are getting better. And if you can just focus on that, then even if the crowd doesn't cheer when you give your presentation, or you don't sell books, or whatever it is, you'll know. And so it's funny because I look back at the presentation that I gave five years ago, and I really am embarrassed. But I'm not embarrassed at the effort I put in then. Because the effort I put in then, I really did think it was really good. I just didn't know what good could be because I also gave myself 20 hours rather than 200 hours. And so if I only had 20 hours, maybe that is the best I can do.

• 17:23Alex Hormozi?

  And maybe today, that's still the best I could do. I just give myself way more time. But the problem with giving yourself way more time, once you see how much good, good can be, is that you realize how few projects you can do. That's why the biggest guys and biggest business titans in the world talk so much about focus, because it's not that like focus is the thing. It's just that it takes so much fucking time to do something right that you can't do more than one thing.

• 17:55Alex Hormozi?

  Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Leila and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, HR, you've got finance. We show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have

• 18:38Alex Hormozi?

  to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap.

• 18:51Alex Hormozi?

  Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Leila and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, HR, you've got finance. We show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have

• 19:34Alex Hormozi?

  to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap.