3 Signs You’re Going to Be a Successful Entrepreneur | Ep 997

Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube What holds back million-dollar business owners is not tactics but character. In this episode, Alex shares the three behavioral patterns that separate entrepreneurs who scale from those who stay stuck, and why the traits required to win in business are fundamentally anti-human. The traits relate to how you decide to move forward, and most entrepreneurs keep making the wrong decisions. In this episode 00:00 Three traits that help entrepreneurs scale 03:22 Adopting a third-person perspective 06:31 The importance of surface area thinking 08:33 Taking the known-hard option More Value: Book Your Spot at the Live Scaling Workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle Watch My Latest Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi/featured Learn How to Scale Your Business to Millions in Revenue: https://www.acquisition.com/ Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi Additional Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So there's three reasons that entrepreneurs do not succeed that are not technical. So what I mean is this, I get questions a lot about tactics and I have tons of tactics and I've walked through lots of videos and you can watch the other videos for that stuff. But when I talk to entrepreneurs and I talk to plenty of them, because we have people come out every single week here in Vegas. And this is to be clear, not small entrepreneurs. So we're talking, you know, 1 million, 10 million, 50 million. That's kind of the range of the people who come through our headquarters. So legit businesses, right? The things that limit them are not the tactics they seek. And so there are three things that are required to be super successful in any business.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  And the reason that I think most people cannot do it is because they are anti-human. So hear me out. And also, when you see some of these really successful CEOs and billionaires and whatnot, and they come off almost robotic, I don't think they started that way. I mean, in fact, sometimes if you look at some of the earlier videos, I see it's robotic there than I do now. It's not, it's not on purpose. But the issue is this, is that we as humans want new stuff. We want it now and we want it to be easy. And those three things are actually the antithesis of what is required in order to be successful in business. We need to not do new stuff, right? We need to keep doing the old stuff. We need to not pursue shiny objects, right?

• 1:27Speaker 00

  That's what focus is. We have to be willing to delay gratification and not get it now, but be willing to work now, get no reward and hope that we will get something later. And when we fail, which we inevitably will along the way, we have to be willing to continue and not question our original, is it worth it to begin this pursuit? And so when you back that out, the three, I would say, character traits, which would just say behave your patterns, how you behave in a number of different conditions are focus. You have to be able to do one thing. Patience, you have to do it for a long period of time. And frustration tolerance, you have to be willing to get kicked in the nuts or the face or whatever.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  The gonads, there you go, that's co-ed. For extended periods of time. And so I say these things because when I talk to entrepreneurs, they always seek the tactics. But I have decent pattern recognition at this point. I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs. And I can usually guess, I'd say, what range of entrepreneur they are by how they behave.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  And that's because all businesses can get very big. Not all entrepreneurs can get very big.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  And it's because they can't stay focused, they are impatient, they quit too easily. And that means that you do not lack tactics, you lack character.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  And I find that to be really interesting. And so the question that comes, okay, well, if that's, if that's what's required, and I don't think anyone's going to really argue with me on this, like, yes, I should be more focused. Yes, I should be more patient. Yes, I should be more long-suffering, enduring, being able to continue when, when things become frustrating. I don't think anyone's really going to fight me on this. So the question is, how do you do it? And so I think, taking a different perspective of, if I were the worst or the most dangerous competitor, somebody I would not want to compete against, what would that person do in my specific situation? And interestingly, when you, I think it's like called third-party bias or something. There's some fancy psychological term, but basically when you, when you are not trying to live your life through your own eyes

• 3:37Speaker 00

  and you try and give someone else advice, you give way better advice than you follow for yourself. And it's like, why is this? And I think this is called the Solomon paradox. There we go. But we give better advice than we adhere to because we do not have an emotional tie to the situation. And I think that that is kind of that robotic thing that I was referencing earlier, which is like, as much as Hollywood and the movies always try to make it seem like, you know, the humans against the robots and then the humans somehow pull it out in the end. It's like, no, like try have humans go against a robot in chess and humans lose literally every time. And I would imagine that in cockpits for, you know, airplanes, like humans will lose against AI, you know, fighter planes, right?

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Like, it's not, it's not reality to think that we're going to, we're going to win. Like we do a memory contest, computers win, right? And so the idea is that the things that are, that it takes to be successful in business does not necessarily make you more human. And so I think that is, that is kind of like an interesting notion. We have to behave more logically. And I would say this, if your emotions encourage you to take an action and that action is aligned with logic, then great. But it's not the emotion that caused it to work. It's just that the logic was, was out and it was just also aligned with how you felt. But being able to make the correct decision independent of how you feel, I think is where it becomes more difficult. And so this is the kind of tactic that I'll share with you, which is embracing emotional discomfort

• 5:04Speaker 00

  and not making the fact that you were uncomfortable, in pain, frustrated, have this feeling, this itch to take action on something because you feel bad, because you want to change how you feel, you feel like you need to change your business and that in changing your business, it's going to change how you feel on the inside. Now, you taking action oftentimes does alleviate anxiety, but it doesn't mean that the action was still correct because it might take time for us or for that to play out, right? And so while you're, while you're in it, you feel better. But then you look back at the carnage or the rubble of you breaking your business yet again and shifting your team's focus and said, well, he said it was this priority last week and then the next week it's this next priority, right?

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Is that you're constantly whiplashing everyone, including your customers, which more realistically looks like very confused messaging and marketing, which means that you stand for nothing because no, no, it's because you change your mind all the time, right? And so, and that's because you read an article or you watch a video or whatever. And it's like, actually, that's, this is the most important thing. And so you, you have to be able to stick with things for extended periods of time and not start new projects. So you can see things through because fundamentally, like all great things come from doing more work in a very narrow place that other people are willing to do. Super real. I think about it like, um,

• 6:23Speaker 00

  surface area of thinking. How, how much time have I given this idea? How much air, like how many, how many coats of paint have I put over this problem where I walk away and I come back and look at the paint, make adjustments, go back, look at the paint? And the reason I think this is important is that like, over time, you're in different moods, you talk to different people, you, you look at that painting with different eyes, different lenses, different perspectives, different things you're comparing it to. And the more diverse the lenses that you look at a solution through, the more complete and elegant the solution will come. And that only comes from having that many repetitions over periods of time on a specific problem. And when I say specific problem, it doesn't have to be just a problem in the business.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  It may be the business as a problem as a whole. And I think that is why the people who are unfocused do not necessarily win. And to be clear, this is actually less a question of intelligence. This is why I say this is, this is a character trait issue. Like a focused fool will beat a distracted genius.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  The man with focus will beat the man with intelligence. Real. And so in thinking about that, one, how can a, how can I behave this way? Which is, what would the most dangerous competitor in my place do? Let's do that, number one. Number two, if I feel an emotion, is the action I'm taking to try and make this emotion go away? Or is it what my business needs me to do? And those are often not the same thing. More often than not, what you need to do is keep doing what you were doing and just let this, let this emotion pass. Because emotions are like the weather, they come and go, right? And so we have to sometimes just give, give them time, give them space, acknowledge they exist.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Great, I feel you and I'm going to continue doing this thing. And then finally, blathering up to those big three, those big three character traits, patterns of behavior.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Am I, this, this new, this second business that I'm considering, this second revenue line, this new idea that I have, is it really required? Is there anything that, that logically stops my existing business from doing twice as much or five times as much or 10 times as much, besides the fact that it's quote hard? I somehow think this other thing is easier because I haven't done it yet. But I promise you, it will also be hard. And so it's just unknown hard versus known hard. And so you just take unknown hard. Don't do that. Like take known hard.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  In terms of patience, the patience, I think is, is giving yourself that surface area of thinking, is being able to have multiple coats of paint over the same problem and coming and revisiting it with different perspective and different eyes.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  And then finally, the frustration tolerance component is, am I able to sit with discomfort and continue to take the actions that I thought I should take before my emotions tried to convince me that they were inconvenient or incorrect? And so, um, just something I've been thinking about on this Sunday as I just review the week and I think about some of the conversations I had with different entrepreneurs and how almost none of them, they were all seeking tactics, but what they really needed were traits. They needed to change the way they acted in their business because it didn't matter what tactics I provided. They were never going to scale because they are not the type of person who can. So yeah, happy whatever day you're watching this on.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Rock and roll.

• 9:59Alex Hormozi?

  If you like this video and you're a business owner who wants to break through your current revenue ceiling, I distilled every lesson from scaling 10 businesses past 10 million and three businesses past 100 million into a completely free scaling roadmap that I've used to go from zero to one, zero to 10 and zero to 100 plus. And so you can click here and you can check it out again, absolutely free. And since you're a business owner, appreciate you and enjoy.