Why My Books Go Viral (David Perrell Interview) | Ep 856

In this reshare from How I Write with David Perell, Alex (@AlexHormozi) breaks down his writing process from outlining books to testing titles, and explains why obsessing over clarity, structure, and “usefulness” is what makes his content stick (and sell). 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?

  Welcome back to the game. Today is a guest spot on David Perel's podcast, How I Write. And so this is a super deep dive on writing, and I would say probably about 30% to 40% of it's on copywriting. And so the book and the books that I've written, the process, how I think through it. If you write for a living in any way, so you write emails, you write blogs, you write books, you write webinars, you write video sales letters, you write Slack messages. If you write words, then you might get value from this. I weirdly am not considered a writer, but it's the thing that I probably enjoy most in the world. And I actually got a full scholarship to college for writing. I decided not to take the scholarship and go to Vanderbilt instead.

• 0:43Alex Hormozi?

  But writing has been a part of my life for as long as I've had a brain and hands. I don't get to talk about it often, and I think you might find some value from it. Enjoy.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Alex Hermosy has written two killer business books that together have sold more than 1 million copies. And all that obsessive writing has gotten him to 9 million followers across social media platforms. And this is the first interview he's ever done that's all about the writing process.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  One of the things that super distinguishes you is you just like go into Hermosy Cave every morning and you just write, write, write. So tell me about how you do that.

• 1:24Alex Hormozi?

  I wake up and then I caffeinate and then I put earplugs and headphones on. I close all the windows. And I really only write on days that I know have at least like six hours or more uninterrupted, sometimes eight. Like, I definitely suffer from like Ziegernik effect, which is open loop, right? The idea of like, if you have something later on in the day, like it, it messes with me a little bit because I feel like I want to be able to lose myself in the writing and then like come up for air whenever I want to come up for air, rather than think like, I have to be done by this time so that I can prep for this meeting or take this call or do this thing. And so I almost exclusively

• 2:07Alex Hormozi?

  write on days where I have nothing on my whole calendar. And so I optimize a lot of my calendar around when I'm in a heavy writing season, around not having anything at all on my, on audit.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  And then when you sit down to write and say it's 6 a.m., are you like, I want to write for six hours? These are the things I want to get done. I'm gonna get to do list. How do you think about that?

• 2:27Alex Hormozi?

  Man, I feel like I'm incredibly unstructured with the writing besides just like violent effort. But that's about it. Like I, I write what I write. Um, I never had writer's block in my life. I usually have a game plan of what I'm going to write. So like, I would say from a writing process perspective, I outline a book with what the table of contents is first. I think we were talking about that before this started. Like the table of contents, the hardest thing that I spend my time on. Once I have that, that's like basically the game plan. And so each of the chapters, I tend to have the same structure because I write the way I would like to read. And so I like to have some sort of narrative or story that kind of puts context to what I'm talking about. I also write obviously nonfiction, and so this just gives color to that.

• 3:13Alex Hormozi?

  I give a very short description of what this thing is that I'm, that I'm going to be talking about. And then usually plentiful examples. And then I will basically put all of my Alex notes.

• 3:27Alex Hormozi?

  Basically is the end. And I pretty much stuck with that setup for all of the books that I've written. Um, and I think that that setup has just gotten cleaner and clearer between the books. Because they fundamentally are like my notes brought to life in a book format. But the hardest part for me is usually picking what story I want to tell. In each chapter that best embodies whatever the principle is, or whatever the, the, the core message of the chapter is. And what visual framework I can tie to that, that kind of like melts everything together. Or like ties it all together in a really clear way. That's what I spend, like, and I usually do words first.

• 4:12Alex Hormozi?

  And I'll then put these highlighted caps marks where I'll say like, a picture that looks like this. And then I'll move on. So I basically do words first, then I'll go back through, I'll keep cleaning words. And then I'll put rough doodles in. And then only at the very end will I come in and put the final doodles. Cause sometimes like my orders change and I'll put numbers in a doodle that if I move the paragraph around, I'll like have to redo it. But that's been my, my overall process for writing. But I just, I just write and I write as much as I can until I can't write anymore. Where I feel like my words preunit of time starts to like drop pretty precipitously.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Tell me about those notes. Where do they come from? Is that like a note on your phone? Is that stuff that you've written in emails?

• 4:56Alex Hormozi?

  I have so many books to write. Like right now, I have like 20 more books that I have outlined. My books are limited by my ability to promote and launch them more than they are limited by my ability to write them. Uh, cause I have what I know what my other books would be. Like I already know what my next two books are going to be.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:15Alex Hormozi?

  And I write a lot of stuff down because I don't want to forget it. Like I have this, this Excel sheet that has like 600 stories of my life. And when I go back through them, I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot that happened. And it's like, it's, it's in some ways, it's kind of scary because I'm like, man, this was my life and I barely remember. And I have to like retrace the synapses to like go back into the experience. And I think that, um, a great, a great fear of mine is forgetting.

• 5:44Alex Hormozi?

  And so I write to crystallize, um, the memory, but also whatever the finding was. So I feel like if you can't remember the lesson, you might as well not have lived it and learned it. And so I spend a lot of time trying to crystallize, uh, the knowledge into like artifacts that, and I refer to my own stuff. Like I, I use my other books for reference. I think there's an Indiana Jones quote that I like a lot. It's a, it's Sean Connery. It says, I think it's Indiana Jones three.

• 6:10Alex Hormozi?

  And he says, uh, he says, I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember it. And, uh, because he was like, you don't remember it? He's like, that's why I wrote it down. But, but it's funny because people write things to remember things, but they also write them because they think they'll forget them. So it's just kind of this really interesting dichotomy between like how, how writing serves people in different ways.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So then when you're writing your books, it seems like you're really good at crystallizing ideas in your head. So when you sit down to write leads or offers, how much fidelity do you feel like you had before you started the writing project? Versus how much of writing is a process of discovery for you?

• 6:46Alex Hormozi?

  I'd say it's two thirds discovery, one third getting the stuff that I already have out.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:50Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, like as I'm writing it, I'm like, I didn't think about that. I'm gonna have to clarify that. And that's kind of like, I feel like the most exciting part. That's the fun part is when I like encounter some apparent conflict between two ideas that I know are both true, but seem to be conflicting.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:05Alex Hormozi?

  That's where like, all right, where's the nuance here? Under what context? Where's the through line for this that can create some framework that actually applies to everything? And so the two modes that I use for the frameworks, or even the writing that I have in general, is utility and validity. So is this true? And in how many situations is it true? And is it useful? And so, for example, if I say sometimes things happen and sometimes things don't, incredibly valid, not very useful. Now, on the flip side, a lot of like, at least in the nonfiction world, a lot of like, sales and marketing lore, very useful, not valid.

• 7:46Alex Hormozi?

  So I can prove a time when there's some sort of tip or trick that works maybe in this scenario, but not that scenario. And so trying to distill out like, what's the fundamental principle that applies to all scenarios is what makes that interesting for me. Like, I have tons of anecdote, and that's what creates some of the stories that are like in the books that I have. But I, I call it like, how do I break this? So I'm like, how do I break this model? How do I break this truism? And if I can't break it, and I can't think of a way that I'm like, it's done. Like, it's good.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. My challenge when I do that is I kind of fall in love with my ideas, especially after I've just written them. So like, if I'm 2:00 PM, I did a morning writing session, I mean, it's like, I mean, it's like my mom, like, you can't say anything bad about her. But like, it kind of takes time. And so I'm pretty dependent on other people to help me break ideas. It doesn't sound like you have that same challenge, though.

• 8:36Alex Hormozi?

  I definitely rely on my editor, but I feel pretty strongly in saying that like, I have very little loyalty to my ideas. Like, I'm very willing to be like, okay, this is probably not right. I'm absolutely married to the truth. Zero about how we get there.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:55Alex Hormozi?

  And I think that's, that's, um, that's at least how I approach this.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  So what do you do? You enter these intense writing seasons? And is that like a season of no type thing where it's like an official thing?

• 9:05Alex Hormozi?

  So let everybody know I'm going to be writing and I do say it's a season of no. So, um, REA team knows that basically like I'll probably cut my calendar down significantly and maximize for full free days. And typically during that season, I'll only have two days where I'll take meetings. And so I have five days a week that are completely empty.

• 9:27Alex Hormozi?

  And one of those days will probably get hijacked. But I would say I'm pretty good about keeping that schedule because I also really like writing. Writing has definitely been a, um, a guilty pleasure. I love writing and it doesn't, it doesn't make the most monetary sense for me, but I really enjoy it. Like I was the, um, VP of the school paper. I was the editor in chief of the literary magazine. When I was in high school, I got a full scholarship to Tufts for writing. When I was in high school, I didn't go to Vanderbilt, but like that's, so like I, I really love writing. And I think that a big part of it is I love learning. And I feel like if I really want to understand something, I write a book about it.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:09Alex Hormozi?

  And that's been the process. And so I love business and so I love the components of business. And I come in with like my preconceived ideas. These are these anecdotal frameworks that I, when I have four, five, six, eight, 10 frameworks that all of a sudden start have like a through line that I see, I'm like, oh, there's a book here. But then when I dive in, it's sometimes, sometimes it goes great. And I'm like, wow, I was right. And then sometimes I'm like, oh my God, I was wrong. That's when it's like really going through the muck, sometimes not as fun. But I want to like get to the other side and into the value of getting to the other side. Cause that's where I feel like you get the most, uh, fulfillment where you're like, this is true. Like you either talk to people one on one or you talk to people one to many. They're either people who know you, they're people who are gonna fight me. You know what I mean? It is valid.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:51Alex Hormozi?

  And it's useful.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  I love the idea when you're writing and you feel like you've just gotten X great vision on how reality works. It's like, I've looked at a hundred sales letters and I just saw like the core component that just went in all those. That for me. The line that people say sometimes is I don't like writing, I love having written. That's how I feel about the craft. It sounds like you enjoy the process a lot more, though.

• 11:16Alex Hormozi?

  I like both. I really do think I like both. I really enjoy writing. I do enjoy writing and I enjoy having written. Those moments where you have those like little mini breakthroughs or whatever, we call them, or at least my editor and I, we call them like fight me, fight me statements. Where it's like, we say these things like, like, that is true. Like, there's nothing you can say about that, you know? And when it's also useful, that's when it's like, we create these, at least as little monikers to live by.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Tell me about usefulness. You've mentioned this a lot. Usfulness, utility. How do you think through that?

• 11:45Alex Hormozi?

  When someone uses this thing, because I write nonfiction, right? And so when someone uses this framework, this tool, this tactic, do they get to the desire, do they get the desired outcome? And so if it is valid, then it is true. But if it's not useful to anyone, there's no context in which they would actually use it and it would materially change the decision-making process or their behaviors in a way that would ameliorate or make their lives better. And so I, like, the best frame, like, the value equation was, is probably the core framework of the offers book, right? That's the, like, that was the meat. That actually took, like, multiple years before I actually, you know, crystallized that.

• 12:26Alex Hormozi?

  But that framework is useful all the time, everywhere. Like, it's useful for ads, it's useful for sales letters, it's useful for making offers, because fundamentally, it's what do people want?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:37Alex Hormozi?

  They want things that are fast, they want things that are easy, and they want things that are risk-free. And if you try to find another component, that's, that's, that's not one of those variables. It's like, it probably is one of those variables. I have yet to see, and maybe we'll see it later, but I, I've seen many people republish the value equation either as their own or they, like, change the icons, but like, no one has changed the four. Like, they are the four. And so I see that as like, it is valid. Now, when I see, like, I think bad frameworks, as you can make a framework in anything, you put a triangle, you put three things on it, it's a framework, right?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:12Alex Hormozi?

  But that's not a good framework, because I can break it pretty easily. If I see lots of people starting to morph things around, then it means that it's not correct. Right? Whereas the, like, value equation has, like, stood the test of time, at least for now.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:25Alex Hormozi?

  Only a few years.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Do you know the concept of M E C?

• 13:27Alex Hormozi?

  Hmm.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  So this is, they use this a lot at McKinsey and different companies like that. So it's mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. So an example would be, ah, we're struggling with our content strategy for the business. All right, well, we got three options. We can do more.

• 13:46Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  We can do better, or we can do different. But actually, there's no kind of content.

• 13:50Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Improvement plan that isn't part of those things. And every single thing would slot into one of those buckets.

• 13:57Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  So when they teach people to break down problems and, and stuff, they'll use the word M E C.

• 14:03Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  And then that's how they think about it. So it can hit all the options, but also all the options are different from each other.

• 14:09Alex Hormozi?

  Wholeheartedly agree. And that's the, that's a hundred percent how I think about it. I can't think of something, that's where I think of breaking the model. Like, if I can think of an example that doesn't fit in this, the model's wrong.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 14:19Alex Hormozi?

  And I just keep doing it until I get those, I mean, more better news, or more better different, or, um, is a great moniker that I use a lot, just in business too. Um, but it's like, are there, are there other of those in different subsegments or subcategories that don't exist or that, that people aren't using? And that's, that's what I enjoy trying to discover.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Let's do this. Take a hundred million dollars in leads, and I want to walk through how you think about book marketing. So let's just focus on the cover.

• 14:46Alex Hormozi?

  Okay.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  And then just show it to the camera. And what I want to hear is, as you talk through it, how did you think about leads, the icon?

• 14:56Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  The subtitle, and then we'll talk about the back of the book after.

• 14:59Alex Hormozi?

  Okay. So the cover, I basically had to make the decision. So this is the first book. I was like, am I going to do something totally different? Or am I going to just basically make this into a series?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  So immediately, what we see is a hundred million dollars, the same. You took out the testimonial at the top. That's what I see.

• 15:15Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. Um, and so I just went with another color. There was really no rhyme or reason for blue. I was like, blue sounds fine.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:24Alex Hormozi?

  In terms of the icon, I'm pretty sure I wanted to do a magnet. I just kind of was like, you want to attract leads and I couldn't think of, it was either going to be fishing or a magnet.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  I think I saw somewhere that you A B tested the heck out of them.

• 15:39Alex Hormozi?

  Yes. So I B tested the heck out of this. I A B tested probably like three or four of the image of different, basically different, um, different magnet variations. But the word leads, I tested the hell out of. And so I had a hundred million dollar promotion, a hundred million dollar advertising, a hundred million dollar leads, a hundred million dollar marketing. And leads was the one that won. Uh, and so I was like, okay, if leads and kind of interesting though, because leads is the output of advertising. And so no one wants to advertise, people want leads. I mean, that's, that's Alex's conclusion. I could be wrong. I haven't tested it, but like,

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:16Alex Hormozi?

  But if I, if someone said, why do you think that, that would have been my, that would have been my answer. And so, um, I tested it because what's really interesting, I mean, and to be fair, it's like kind of the contents of the book. Is, um, people do judge a book by its cover.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 16:29Alex Hormozi?

  And if you're going to go through all the, all the, the work of writing the book, which is significantly harder than testing the cover and the title.

• 16:37Alex Hormozi?

  Like, do that.

• 16:40Alex Hormozi?

  Right? You know what I mean? And I think the first time I heard about this, I think Tim Ferriss, uh, tested four hour, a four hour work week.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:46Alex Hormozi?

  For his book and he hated the title, but it, it crushed, uh, all the other titles. And so he, cause he's like, I don't even really believe in like, just only working four hours a week, but it just, it murdered. And so that's where the book came and obviously became a bestseller. And I read this, um, there was this, uh, like white paper that was released by this, uh, publishing company or that helps self, self publishers. And they talk about this, uh, dating help book that sold like no copies.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  I saw this.

• 17:11Alex Hormozi?

  Okay. Yeah. And then all they did was they changed the cover and they changed the headline or the, you know, the title of the book. And they became like an international bestseller. And when I saw that, I was like, all right, this is important. I should take the time to actually like, make sure. Now, the big picture, that was basically how I picked the, the headline and then the image. And then the subhead, I also tested a ton too, which is how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  And how do you test that? When you say? This, what I would assume as I go to Google and Facebook and I see what drives the most traffic, but how do you test the subtitle?

• 17:43Alex Hormozi?

  I can tell you. I have the actual tests here. So it's like, okay, I had the realistic versus the cartoon version. So I tested that out and so the real one did better. It also was aligned with the real image. I have the first one, so I was like, okay, that's good. Advertising crushed promotions. I was like, okay, advertising is the winner. And then I did advertising versus leads, then leads was the winner. Then I did leads versus marketing. Now that one was interesting, really close, but leads still won. So that's why I ended up doing leads. In terms of subheads, I only showed two of the tests here, but I ended up doing like probably five or six. How to get more people to want to buy your stuff? How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff? So strangers narrowly beat out more people. Now, this is the one that I thought was the most interesting test of the whole thing. So how to get more strangers to want to buy your stuff?

• 18:26Alex Hormozi?

  How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff? Seventy-one percent to twenty-nine percent. Like just one word. And so when I saw it, it's like, it's so sensitive. And I just, I just come in with like no ego about what I think it's going to be. And even because some people are also like, hey, you should do a shorter version. So just get strangers to want to buy your stuff versus how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff? Seventy to thirty with how to in front.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:51Alex Hormozi?

  And so even word concision wasn't necessarily the thing that people kind of like optimize for.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:57Alex Hormozi?

  And so anyways, yeah, I tested that, the howl of the title, the image and the subhead. Because fundamentally, anybody who's in my audience who has read the first book, they have a high likelihood of buying the second book if they got value from the first one. I'm not making that for them. I could just call this book two and they probably would have been willing to at least take a shot on it. I have to make this for all the people who don't know who I am. And I have to optimize for that one split second decision where they're like, eh, it's like, you know, actually it sounds pretty good. Like, and it's clear, like, what does this book do? Get strangers to want to buy your stuff? Okay, what's the output of that? Leads. Okay, this makes sense. I need leads, so I'll buy this book on how to get strangers to want to buy my stuff.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Right. Back cover, talk to me about that.

• 19:36Alex Hormozi?

  So this is like my little mini sales letter. So I just wrote this as like, kind of like blind bullets of the stuff inside of the book. And so I basically just took the chapters and tried to translate it into a bullet that doesn't say what it is, but gives kind of like the benefit of it.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  But hold on, when you say this is my mini sales letter, that is like uber hermosy brain going to that. So what matters in a sales letter?

• 19:59Alex Hormozi?

  So you can get 2X, 10X, or 100X more leads than you currently are without changing anything about what you sell. That I think is fair, like it's a fairly compelling promise. And so then it's like, okay, I want to learn more about that. Now, the next kind of like bigger fun is I wrote this book just to solve your leads problem. And if you talk to small business owners, the largest reason that people will say, if you look at like the small business surveys, why they go out of business, they say lack of, lack of lead, lack of marketing, lack of new business, whatever. Second is running out of money, but I see that as.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Lack of leads.

• 20:27Alex Hormozi?

  Right, then it should get you a chicken and egg. And so then I put a little bit of proof. So it's like today our companies generate 20,000 new leads per day across 16 different companies or sorry, 16 different industries. And they do it using eight never go hungry playbooks inside. Once you see them, you can't unsee them, they're so powerful, they work without your permission. Right? So like, once you, once you use it, like you don't, you don't have to believe it's going to work. It just works back, period. And so, you know, the easiest way to get another five customers tomorrow. So that's warm outreach. That's the first, the first of the core four. So what's the benefit of the core four? That's warm outreach. It's the, how you get first five customers. The hook retain reward system, so that's content. So that's the second chapter. And so I just talked about the media's part of it for that. You know, six part ad framework that gets more people, especially strangers to want what you sell. That's going to be the paid ads chapter. And so I just took the chapters and turned them into the benefits of the chapter.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Those are super specific. That's what strikes.

• 21:16Alex Hormozi?

  The bullets?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, right? Cause if I look at these bullets, right? The six part ad framework that gets more people, especially strangers, to want what you sell. How to get people to want what you sell would be like, ah, but you're like, there's actually a lot of things going on. Six part ad framework, the specificity leads to credibility there. More people, especially strangers, to me, that nuance is like, yo, I've thought about this. I know how you think well. And these are just very concrete.

• 21:45Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, so that's how I thought about the front and the back cover of the book.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  I like it. How is your writing different for when you're writing for books like that versus video? And what comes first? The books lead to the videos? The videos lead to the books? How do you think about that?

• 21:59Alex Hormozi?

  Totally in process, yeah. So mainly because of the volume that has to go out. If I'm on camera, I'm not very scripted. It's more like these are bullets that, you know, we'll probably make sure that we nail the introduction because that's very important. So nailing the introduction, nailing what the roadmap is for the movie, for the video. And then like, it's almost, I'd say this, the YouTube videos are far closer to what my writing outlines look like than my final product. Because if I were to write the YouTube videos as though I were writing the book, it would take me probably a week of sure, five days, five full days to write just the video, to make it, to airtight, air seal all the words.

• 22:43Alex Hormozi?

  But we can do, you know, a writing outline in like 30 minutes or an hour, you know, for a video. And that's much more mental, given like I actually do other stuff for a living.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  How do you think about those hooks?

• 22:57Alex 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. And 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 enter 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 to watch the part

• 23:41Alex Hormozi?

  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.

• 23:52Alex Hormozi?

  So we will look at other industries that have higher performing videos typically, and look at packaging that seems to have performed well. And we say, is there a business version of this that we could do?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  So what's an example of that?

• 24:05Alex Hormozi?

  There's this one where this girl said like, my, my memory, my, my system so that you can outlearn anyone or something like that. And I think we made a version of that that was like, how you can outwork anyone. And I think that's what we ended up doing for the video.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  So then as you think about the interactions, the hooks, the frame for the videos, what matters? Because it's interesting. You basically said, I'm pretty unscripted, except for the very beginning, which a lot of work goes into.

• 24:31Alex Hormozi?

  Kind of like the book. What's that? The book is very scripted all the way through. But like, but like, the amount like 80, 20 on the effort of like, where's the biggest? The biggest bang for the buck is always going to be, it's, you know, hook, packaging, title, thumbnail, first, you know, 30, 60 seconds is going to be where you have probably the biggest leverage on performance for a video. And this is just something we learned. Obviously, average duration long term is going to be something that lifts a video, but right out the gate, it's hard, not impossible, to overcome a video that's just tanking.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:01Alex Hormozi?

  We want to make stuff that people want to consume. And so I think that like solving for, making sure they want to consume it is the title and the packaging and the introduction. And we have to just solve for congruence. Like, is the thing they clicked on the thing that they're going to get and making sure that they feel like they're going to get it, like that that promise is going to get delivered on.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  And how do you think about, when you're delivering a story, how that is different in video versus writing?

• 25:28Alex Hormozi?

  I actually feel like my stories in video are pretty, are pretty comparable to my stories in writing. Yeah. Because I think I have a pretty cool, we all kind of tone that I use in the stories and writing. And I, my writing more mirrors how I talk when it comes to stories.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:42Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. So here I am in the middle of nowhere, right? Like, you know, like, and a guy pulls a gun.

• 25:47Alex Hormozi?

  Stephen King, like if you're not sure what to do with the story, just bring in a guy with a gun. Yeah. Same, same kind of idea, but I just, I tell it like I would be telling it to a friend. There are probably different styles of writing, I assume you would know this better than I do, but I tend to try and get everything out as fast as I can. Yeah. And then I kind of look at it as like coats of paint. And that's the description I like. It's just like, yeah, I let it breathe, then I come back to it and then I do another coat, then another coat, another coat. And for me, most of the kind of coats of paint, I'd say the, the vast majority of my editing that's not socialized is me crunching. It's crunching things down, crunching things down, crunching things down. How can I use fewer words? How can I use simpler words? How can I use fewer words? How can I use simpler words?

• 26:27Alex Hormozi?

  And I keep doing that until I feel like anything else that I would remove would materially detract from the substance of the book. Once I do that, and the, that process right there is usually like 10 drafts. So I do a lot, a lot of drafts. You did 19 for Leeds. Yeah, and Leeds was unworthful. And I basically started from scratch at about halfway through those. So like, at like, I think it was, I think it was draft 12, I feel like I remember it. It was like draft 12 was like, I was like, I'm done. Like this is it. This is, this book's awesome. And then that's when I socialized with like 10 or so readers. It was like, okay, let me know what you guys think.

• 27:08Alex Hormozi?

  And the feedback that I got, I was like, I have to rewrite the book. And so I rewrote the book.

• 27:18Alex Hormozi?

  But most of the time, the editing from the socialized post is, I actually use Stephen King's kind of like method there, which is, if people have like little tidbits, I'll usually clarify those pieces, add those in. That's easy. If I have many people who have different comments about one section. Their comments usually don't matter. It's more that there's something wrong with the section. And so in the third book that's coming out, there was, there were like two chapters that were short that I put at the beginning, which is, you know, prime territory in terms of, you know, people falling off of some super sexy to the front end feedback. And there was just like, every reader had something to say about this chapter.

• 28:03Alex Hormozi?

  And I just cut the chapter entirely and then just like edited the book to not reference the, the material in that chapter. And I thought of the chapter as a pretty core chapter to the book. And so then I was like, okay, how can this book exist without this chapter? And I ended up being able to do it by literally just do a control R, control F for a word that I basically hardcore defined as this as one of the core concepts. And it was like, I just will fully explain it every time I have it throughout the book. And as soon as I cut, uh, it was, it was actually, I think it was three chapters, one section. It was like the book was just, it's like breeding downhill. Yeah. I mean, it's just like, you just, you just keep rolling. Totally.

• 28:44Alex Hormozi?

  And that's kind of how I see it. So little things I'll just, if I agree with them, I'll quick fix. If I don't agree, I'll just ignore. But if many people come in one section, I'll strongly consider deleting it entirely. Or I have to just delete, well, delete the whole thing and then rewrite it, or I'll just delete it entirely. Most times I'll just delete it if I can.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And then when you say the pain is the pitch, I mean, I understand what that means conceptually, but tactically, when you're sitting down to write copy, you're working with a business and you're trying to get more leads or something like that.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  What do you do with that sentence?

• 29:17Alex Hormozi?

  So you fundamentally have two, two, two methods of persuasion, right? You could go forward. I can go into that, but like you have more good stuff, less bad stuff. Fundamentally. So you got promise, you got pain. These are your two weapons, right? And so my goal is to highlight both of those. Now, from a selling perspective, you make an offer at the point of greatest deprivation, not at the point of greatest satisfaction. And so for example, let's say you're, you're incredibly hungry. And you come to my steakhouse and I say, do you want a steak? And you say, yeah. So you have a steak. And after you had the steak, I'm like, how was it? And you're like, oh, my God, it was amazing. Thank you so much. And I say, awesome. Do you want another steak? And you'd be like, uh, no, I'm good. And I'd be like, what? You didn't like the steak?

• 30:01Alex Hormozi?

  And you're like, no, I liked the steak. I'm, I'm, I'm good.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:04Alex Hormozi?

  And that's because I'm trying to sell at the point of greatest satisfaction, not at the greatest point of greatest pain. Whereas if you walk in the second time, a week later, and you're starving and you walk in and say, hey, you're really hungry? And you're like, yeah. And you're like, what, two steaks? You might be like, yeah, I'm two steaks hungry, right? And then you buy, you buy more.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:24Alex Hormozi?

  And so we sell the point of greatest pain, not the point of greatest satisfaction. Now, the caveat to this is people are like, wait, you should sell when you provide value. Only when the value that you deliver creates a new problem that you can then solve. And so, for example, if you are a marketing agency, whatever, and you help a customer get a whole bunch of leads, all right? You, once you solve their leads problem, if you say, hey, do you want even more leads? They're like, no, I can't even handle them. So at that point, you solved the first problem, but now they need somebody to help them work the leads. They're now hungry for dessert.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:56Alex Hormozi?

  Right? Or whatever. So they have a new deprivation that we can then sell the next day. And so I see that as a big mistake from a copywriting perspective is actually the timing of when the copy is being delivered in the, in the larger context, uh, rather than the sub-context of the, of the, of the prospect. And so when I'm thinking about the pain is the pitch to bring this full circle is I want to think about as many very concrete examples that someone would experience pain. And so I remember when I was, uh, so when Leila and I were really poor and I just lost everything. And we decided that we weren't going to actually do the gym business anymore. So there's, there's this like, you know, 30 day period where we decided we're not going to do the gym fit. And so, uh, I said, okay, she had lost a hundred pounds and attended a fitness competition and all that stuff.

• 31:40Alex Hormozi?

  And I was like, all right, I'm going to write a sales page of your story. Because my story isn't compelling. I've had a six pack my whole life. No one cares.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:47Alex Hormozi?

  And so for her, she had all this weight loss wear. And so I wrote her life story and she was like, this is more compelling and I'm the one who lived it. And I didn't live any of it, but I just thought about like how she would wear a cover all when she would go to the beach and she would get chafing between her thighs when she was walking all day. She was overweight.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Back to that specificity.

• 32:06Alex Hormozi?

  And not wanting to be in pictures and just be always in the second row or to the side because she didn't like having a picture taken. And I'm like, how many of these moments, right? And so like pain happens in moments. And so it's, I want to capture the moment because anyone who's had that pain is like, I never want to live that. I will never, never want to have that happen again. I think that if you can accurately describe a prospect's pain in their own language, in their own experiences, you can persuade them to buy whatever your product is based on how well and how knowledgeable they believe you to be as a function of how specific you were about the pain they're experiencing. And so if I, if I'm talking to a business owner that's doing $10 million a year, and I'm like, this is what's going wrong in IT, right?

• 32:51Alex Hormozi?

  And this is what's going wrong in sales. And this is what's going wrong in your marketing. And this is what's going on. And if they're like, okay, I get it. I get it. You know, you know where I'm at. I'm like, right. Do you want my help? I don't have to make a promise. If I can describe the pain so acutely, they're like, he can't know that pain this well and not be able to deliver it.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 33:09Alex Hormozi?

  And so that's where the pain is the pitch comes from. And so oftentimes, um, when people are trying to write sales pages or even they're trying to do a sales pitch, they, I think many people will over emphasize promise and there's nothing wrong with having promise, you know, private it's compliant, all that stuff. But the thing is pain is what motivates a lot of people to take action.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  It's cool to hear you speak because what really stands out is how much of an engineer you are. And you have this almost mathematical, not formulaic way of speaking, but you are in search of formulas in the way that engineers are. And basically trying to break down reality into formulas to basically say, yo, I'm trying to figure out how things work, simplify it, get it to a place where it's super clear, concrete stories, examples, and then I'm going to share it for you so that any problem that you have.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Here's an answer.

• 34:02Alex Hormozi?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  I feel like that's a lot of what you're going for in your writing.

• 34:05Alex Hormozi?

  It's a hundred percent what I'm going for. It's actually very well described. When I get like in my deep emotional places, I'm like, I just feel like I want to understand the world better. And a lot of times I feel like I don't understand it well at all. And so a lot of my writing is an attempt to just understand one tiny quarter of it. And that's just happens to be the quarter that I spend a lot of my time in. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about business. And so a lot of my frameworks, a lot of my writing, a lot of my content is in search of simplified formulas of seeing the world accurately. And so fundamentally, if you can predict, you can control.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 34:37Alex Hormozi?

  If you know all the variables that you can influence to create an outcome, right? Which means that if you have a perfect predictive model, so this would be like from a science perspective. Like if you have all the variables that predict an outcome, then if you reverse that, it means you can also control the outcome.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:50Alex Hormozi?

  If you can manipulate the variables. If the weather is one of the variables, fine, if I can't control the weather. But if I can put someone indoors and mimic the weather, then I can in a very way, in a real way, uh, control the outcome.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  So what you're saying is that businesses have these similar equations and you can say, I'm sure there with this, I can pull the lever on leads and then I know what's going to happen here or there.

• 35:10Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, we don't have enough demand. Okay, well, demand is straightforward. Are we going to talk to people one on one? Are we going to talk to them one to many? Well, what, how many customers are we going after Fortune 100? So it's probably going to be a one on one approach. Are we going after mass market weight loss? It's probably one to many. Okay, cool. If we're doing one to many, like, are we going to do paid ads or are we going to be making content? Okay, well, we could use one on one to get affiliates who then are doing paid ads or doing content on our behalf. Well, then we can use that strategy. But fundamentally, the only four things that you can do as the entrepreneur or whatever is cold outreach, warm outreach, paid ads, content. That's it. It's the only thing you can do. But what about affiliates? Well, you do one of those four to get the affiliate. You reach out to them, you make content saying, hey, I'm looking for affiliates. Or you run ads saying, hey, I've got an influencer program.

• 35:53Alex Hormozi?

  You're going to still have to do that first core four to get other people to come do the other stuff on your behalf.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Ah, here's the other, Alex. There's, dude, there's two lines that I feel like I've really, that, that I think you really nailed.

• 36:09Alex Hormozi?

  Okay.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  The first is, we'll talk about this one first, that if you put in 10 times more work into a book, because the quality is better, you end up with 100 or 1,000x the word of mouth.

• 36:22Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Talk to me about that.

• 36:23Alex Hormozi?

  It's kind of the difference between, you know, gold medal and fourth place. The real difference is small, the practical difference is enormous. So what's the difference in terms of someone's life when they're the gold medalist of something? They get endorsement deals, they're forever the gold champion, like all that stuff. Fourth, it's like you get nothing.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:40Alex Hormozi?

  And so I think a lot of people don't even get fourth, to be real, you know, like they're like number 100. And they, but the thing is, they still try pretty hard.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:49Alex Hormozi?

  It's just that all of the best returns come at the end of work. It's like those, it's the, it's the 16th coat of paint that really just makes it that little bit better. And I think in an increasingly connected world, more things are winner take all.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Well, the way that I put it is that the curse of the internet is global competition.

• 37:08Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  The gift of the internet is global reach.

• 37:11Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  And because of that, your stuff has to be way better in order to stand out. But then the rewards on the other side are way bigger.

• 37:17Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, I think Naval has a good quote on this. He says, um, "Technology democratizes consumption and consolidates production." And so it means that if you're the best in the world, you get to do it for everyone.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:29Alex Hormozi?

  And so then it's like, if you get to do it for everyone, then it's like, then trying to become the best in the world. And the best in the world, definitely not going to do it on four yards a week. It's higher leverage to work more, which sounds ironic or counterintuitive, right? Cause then that's kind of the point of what, of the, like, I think why you like that statement. It's like, how are you telling me that this unscalable effort where I'm putting in N equals whatever, many more repetitions, like I'm getting diminishing returns here, right? How can it, how can that be more efficient than doing half the work or having a ghostwriter? It's like, well, if I have a ghostwriter, no one's going to tell, talk about my book, right? Like, I'm just going to have a marketing campaign. I'm going to sell whatever it is before people read the book and that's it. But the long tail on time is huge.

• 38:14Alex Hormozi?

  And so the fact that like Rich Dad, Poor Dad still sells 100,000 copies a month, 40 years, I don't know, 50 years later than when he originally wrote it. I'm like, I want to build assets, not.

• 38:27Alex Hormozi?

  Magazines with hardcovers.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 38:30Alex Hormozi?

  And that's also why I spent a long time on all the books to try and make them to make them evergreen. Like, think about writing a book on advertising without talking about any single platform. Facebook is not in there. Instagram is not in there.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  So as you were thinking about these, you were like, in 2080, I want this book to be as useful as it was when I wrote this.

• 38:48Alex Hormozi?

  And the easiest way to do it is I backtested it.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  What does that mean?

• 38:51Alex Hormozi?

  Does this make sense 2000 years ago? People still want things to be risk-free. They still want them to be fast. They still want them to be easy. You can reach out to people one-on-one that you know, that you don't know. Reach out one-to-many

• 39:03Alex Hormozi?

  that you know, that you don't know.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 39:06Alex Hormozi?

  Like, reaching out one-to-many is standing on the corner, corner of a street and shouting.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:10Alex Hormozi?

  That's what it is.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:11Alex Hormozi?

  Right? You could put a billboard up. You can have a sign. Like, this works 2000 years ago. And so that's, so rather than try to predict the future, I just look at the past and say, does this still work?

• 39:21Speaker 01

  This one's good, too. It's from Michelangelo.

• 39:23Alex Hormozi?

  Uh.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  If people saw how much work I put into my art, they wouldn't think it's as exceptional as it is.

• 39:29Alex Hormozi?

  I love this, um, this visual, which is that if you look at a marathon, right? If you've ever like gone with somebody to some marathon that they're running and you wanted to support them. Ninety-five percent of people are in two places, at the beginning and at the end. But the marathon is everything in between. And so we, as a society, the highlight reel is only these two places. And so what happens is most people in their mind assume that that is the race, starting and then finishing. But the 26.2 miles that happens in between, like the mundane middle, right, master of the middle, is the part where the champion's made. And so I think that, to the same degree, like, if people saw that I wrote 19 drafts of this book, they wouldn't think it was that special.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Can we do this? Can we open up to that table of contents? And once again, I just want to remind you, take as much time as you need to find, so it's the second sticky note here. So if you go right here, it should get opened up right to it. But give me as much time as you need to go through the table of contents. And I think it'd be really cool to walk us through how some of these ideas changed. And also, I just want to emphasize before you start here. This table of contents, it's not like, oh, Alex made a table of contents. No, no, no. This, the table of contents is the outline for your book.

• 40:46Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  And so it does a lot more than a standard table of contents.

• 40:50Alex Hormozi?

  And I feel like that's how. Alex's opinion. I feel like that's how books should write. Like if you want to, if you want to figure out, if you want to read a book, I feel like you should read the table of contents and be able to make a good decision.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 41:00Alex Hormozi?

  And that's kind of, and I try to make my, my titles and chapter headings like pretty descriptive. Like this is about all my reach.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  So what's going on here? So when you start, what am I looking at?

• 41:11Alex Hormozi?

  So believe it or not, this book was, was, the original through line was going to be about leverage. And I ended up cutting all of the leverage concepts from the book for the most part, except for one chapter right before lead getters.

• 41:24Alex Hormozi?

  Because I just, it was so difficult to try and weave it in that it felt forced. I still believe it to be like the actual essence of that. But, because it's like, how can I, as one man, get 20,000, 30,000 leads a day? Like how, well, I can't do it. I do it through leverage.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 41:39Alex Hormozi?

  And so that was kind of like the catalyst for wanting to even like begin writing about this.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:44Alex Hormozi?

  But anyways, so this was kind of like my rough ideas. Like, okay, you know, I have to define some terms, right? I have to define media, lead gen, leads, content promotion. The three contact types, which is not even a thing. I thought it was going to be a thing. It wasn't a thing. Promotions, I ended up just cutting entirely from the book. And using somewhere else. I'll just leave that there. You know, and you know, I was going to take this very like, like everything we used to talk about marketing is wrong. Right? And I do believe that to a great degree, that is, that is somewhat true. But it's like, okay, now you got to define the target. So there's like the market, you know, deeper, up, down, adjacent, different market types. I ended up cutting that from the book.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  So, but what I see you doing here is you're kind of trying to do a full pass. Give yourself enough fidelity to see where you're going.

• 42:31Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  But you're not married to this. I mean, we did 19 drafts here and we completely rewrote it after number 12. But you're not married to this, but it's crucial that you're actually putting enough on that you're like, I can at least start walking now.

• 42:43Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. And so I would say that one of the biggest filters that I use for utility is whether it can be operationalized. And so the fact, it's unsurprising to me now, because this was however many years ago that I wrote that. The activity box is what I called this. I didn't even have the name of the core four yet. But the idea that, like, what can I tell someone to do if I can't change their behavior, they cannot learn, which means that there's no point in writing about it unless it changes their what they do. Right. And so that has pretty much been the the biggest lens that I use from a cutting perspective when I'm making the book. And so I think the reason a lot of people are like, man, the books are from what I understand. People say that it's they're they're really digestible, they're really easy to use, really easy to understand. It's because I talk almost zero about theory.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:26Alex Hormozi?

  I only talk about what you do.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:28Alex Hormozi?

  And by talking that way, it's it it demystifies a lot of it. I will eventually write a book on branding, but I looked up all the all the definitions of branding on the internet from different marketers. And I was like, I don't know what any of this means.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  They're all fluffy.

• 43:40Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, it's all like the feelings, impressions, experiences that a prospect has and associates. And I was like, I don't know what any of this is, right? It's like, well, if I want to brand, I have to figure out what I do, what I do to brand. Right. And and answering that question has pretty much been how I try and answer everything within businesses. It's just like, okay, how like, what is sale? Sales is just having a conversation that increases likelihood that someone purchases, right? It's like, okay, cool. So then everything that increases the likelihood that someone purchases within the context of conversation is sales. Right. And so then like, okay, now I can start working through this, right? Okay, so this is the first version. And what I will say that often happens is like, I'll write all these ideas that I want to have in the book. And I'll probably end up being able to make the book like 10% of it.

• 44:22Alex Hormozi?

  So like, if I look at all of this, I cut out, like, I cut out so many people, like, I have this, the who, just this one line was the second half of the book. Just this one line. Like, operational drag, reliability, method, platform, all of that was cut. More to better, I actually put at the end of section one around the activities. Like, anyways, I move.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  So actually, this is really interesting that you don't actually have a very good sense of what ideas are going to be the best ones. Like, you love more new better. You absolutely love that idea, but look where it is. It's section six, bottom line, almost looks like an after.

• 44:56Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  So that this idea right here, that's like an embryo that then really grew through the process of writing this book.

• 45:04Alex Hormozi?

  Oh, yeah. So like, once I get tired enough of something, I'm like, all right, I'm going to rewrite it from the top again. And so this is me rewriting it, the sections, right? And so I'm like, okay, now it's actually just define the target, where, when, give, ask, evaluate, scale. So I thought it was going to be this like incremental process that I'm leading somewhat because again, leverage was like this through line that I wanted to have through the book. And so then I got to like, okay, maybe I can try and visualize this a little bit better. And so, you know, marketing, like, where do people actually come from, right? Because people exist, how to get them to find me, like, I would have forced them to find, which fundamentally is what I think advertising is, you force people to find out.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  It's also just striking that you're doing a lot of drawings to basically work out the high level thing. This isn't your writing and then you're drawing. It's like you're drawing and that's how you kind of get the conceptual map of where you're going to go.

• 45:52Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, I do almost all doodles. I'm kidding. Yeah, so doodles are at the beginning, at the end.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  And this isn't an iPad thing?

• 45:57Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, yeah, just like, just, yeah, just notes or whatever. I mean, there's a huge amount of time that I was like, you know, media different, this is a book on advertising. So I'm like, okay, well, media is a huge thing, platform's a huge thing, audience selection's a huge thing. And so the whole time I'm thinking like, okay, maybe that's media, section one, platform, section two, audience, section three. And I'm like, that's not, that's going to be so boring. Like, it's going to be a terrible book. And then I was like, okay, what about the process? Like, how do people buy?

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Now, real quick, when you get there, you're like, oh, it's going to be so boring, it's going to be a terrible book. Are you down on yourself or are you at this point like, you know what, I'm going to work through this?

• 46:30Alex Hormozi?

  I need to find another way. So right here, this right here, these four little lines ended up being the second half of the book.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 46:36Alex Hormozi?

  Right? So like, it totally, like, it just keeps, and a lot of times it's like this cutting away process, right? This is actually just continued from the one before. Because I went, this is all leverage, all this stuff was leverage. So I'm like, okay, this is the first time I'm like, really, I've got this attract attention, interrupt attention. So I was like, maybe that's going to be like an angle. Yeah, because I didn't, I didn't, I didn't.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  But see, this is the Mose method, which is like, you're always trying to find either mutually exclusive, collectively, collectively exhaustive, or these contrasts, where you're either on this side or you're this side.

• 47:06Alex Hormozi?

  Which I think is how you can make the Mises.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:08Alex Hormozi?

  Like, if you draw, like, if you draw one line, it's going to be valid. If you draw two lines, it's much harder. Right? Not be valid.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:15Alex Hormozi?

  Because are they all true mutually exclusive?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:18Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, so this is me trying to put sentences in place of all the different ways you can get customers.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:24Alex Hormozi?

  God, this is so like, and then I tried to make it this like leverage equation of like you times promotion, times offer, times the medium, times the platform. Like that's all the variables that exist. This whole thing ended up being one paragraph.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 47:37Alex Hormozi?

  In, um, in the second half of the book.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  That's absolutely striking to me is how you just don't actually have a very good intuition for which one of the ideas are going to be good. And that's not, I think that that's all writers. We just kind of have to wait and see.

• 47:51Alex Hormozi?

  And I was like, I'm supposedly good at marketing. So that was a little humiliating. This has been my big filter is like, what, what do I, yeah, what does someone do as a result? And if I, if I can't clearly define that, then I probably either just need to break it down more or I just need to cut it. It's just not a thing.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:05Alex Hormozi?

  That's been probably my number one filter for everything. Like what is a change about someone's behavior? And that's why defining learning was so important for me. Like if I want this book to educate, educate, it's about changing behavior. But if you don't change your behavior, you learn. Just like in the simplest, like that is how you define learning. And the speed of, the speed of the rate of, uh, of learning is intelligence. So if I have to show you the same stimuli multiple times before you change your behavior, then you are dumber than somebody who can change it immediately.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 48:30Alex Hormozi?

  Right.

• 48:32Alex Hormozi?

  So growing, you got to do more, pay more, new platforms, more frequency, more uniques, more like I kept like working through this. And so this was actually just continued there from that same, that same page. And I'm like, okay, scrap all of that. Let's start with just like, what about the basic questions of like, okay, maybe it's just who, what, where, when, how, how much, how long?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  And what's crucial is you don't get here unless you have all these pages.

• 48:58Alex Hormozi?

  And so that I, for a minute, I thought this was going to become the table of contents. And then what it really became is this became the action. Uh, at the end of every chapter for, uh, yeah, go for it. Yeah. So that's the final result of me being like, oh, this isn't the table of contents. This is what I need to show for every way of advertising. So when you're posting content and you make your action checklist, you just have to say, okay, who's my customer? You know, what, what am I like, what am I going to do? Where am I going to do it? What medium or platform? When am I going to make this post? So this is basically how you make your list of this is what I'm going to do.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  I love how messy all this stuff. I don't know. I find that to be so gratifying, you know, cause it's so clean in the output. And it's just that this is a train wreck.

• 49:42Alex Hormozi?

  Thanks.

• 49:44Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, three ways. I mean, I could keep going on this, but it's

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Do this. Go to the very last one or the table of contents in here.

• 49:50Alex Hormozi?

  The finals, yeah.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's go to the final.

• 49:51Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. And so I got to here and then I thought, and this, this is what was so painful. I thought this was going to be a thing forever. Like I thought that I had this like friction framework thing like filters. Cause I thought it was like, maybe it's like a distillation process. Like you just still like raw attention is the input and then leads is the distilled output of that. And so I kept doing that lead distillery, like lead distillation process. And so then I was like, maybe I could make an acronym around this. And then I'm coming back to this method medium thing. That's a forever to try and work through. And then I was like, can I do P's? Like, I don't know if I can find an acronym, I'll use it. And I kept going. I don't even know where the end of this thing is.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Right. So right here I see start here, get understanding, get leads, get lead getters, get started.

• 50:33Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. And then this became the final. So this was like a couple of versions before the final. And then that was the final.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 50:41Alex Hormozi?

  That very messy process got me to here.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Wow. I mean, this is the work, man. It's all, it's draft after draft after draft.

• 50:50Alex Hormozi?

  So we look at how much stuff is here.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:52Alex Hormozi?

  Right?

• 50:54Alex Hormozi?

  The amount that actually made it to here is like this, this line. This became one chapter and that's it. Everything else I more or less threw up. So that's how I came up with the table of contents. And then I was like, all I gotta do now is just write the book.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Right. So then once you did that, then it was basically game time.

• 51:15Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. Then it was easy.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Tell me about this. How do you think about? Who you're writing for? Cause one of the things I learned from you is there's this difference between being known and being respected. And it's really easy to look at the analytics and say, number go up, therefore good. But no, you're trying to reach a specific kind of person. So how do you think about that?

• 51:37Alex Hormozi?

  I think it's the validity utility piece. Like, is this useful? And I think that people will consume things that are useful for them. Like, does it make their life easier? Does it make things happen faster? Does it make things less risky? Depending on who you talk to, like, if I talk about food, then that applies to everyone. If I talk about leads, it's only apply to people who are advertising, which is usually business owners. And so I think about this in context of deep and wide.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Deep?

• 51:59Alex Hormozi?

  Versus wide. And so wide I define as something that is only useful for a beginner.

• 52:08Alex Hormozi?

  And deep I define as something that is useful for anyone.

• 52:12Alex Hormozi?

  Like in a, in a vertical. And so how to get your first five clients is useful really only for a beginner. Cause anybody who already has customers is like, I know how to get my first five clients. But if I talk about strategy, that's useful for somebody who's starting out and somebody's got a billion dollar company. Cause I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I can have something that's deep and wide. And those, that's, that's kind of our sweet spot for what we try to do. Now, we don't always succeed, but like, that's our, that is the intention. Is I'd like to have something that a beginner can get value from and somebody who's super advanced can also get value from independent of their context.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  And how do you think about the general strategy of what you're doing? Like, what was the genesis moment of? We're gonna make rockin' business content and then that'll be the first domino that then makes all these other ones fall.

• 53:01Alex Hormozi?

  Tim Ferriss has this concept of like the big domino. So you kind of like, I don't know if you're purposely referencing it, but basically like, is there one thing that is so important that I can do that if I do that, it makes the rest of my to-do list irrelevant? And so it's like, if you have a hundred things on the to-do list, it's like, there's probably not one that's important enough. Because if it were important enough, it would make the other ones disappear, either shrink into irrelevance or accomplish by consequence. Right? And so we're investors, right? And we have capital. And so what does every investor want? They want proprietary deal flow and you want to shift the supply, demand in your favor. And so if I can have unlimited people coming towards me who have good businesses that wanted to do deals only with me,

• 53:44Alex Hormozi?

  then I can decrease the likelihood that basically I can decrease my skillet picking and, and negotiating and still probably do well. I saw the ultimate way of maximizing my luck surface area as building, you know, our hope is the most valuable business brand out there to business owners. And if we can build that, then I don't need to worry about all the negotiation tactics. I don't need to worry about having the most capital. I don't need to worry about having the best term sheets. I don't need to worry about any of these things if I just have more people who want to do business with me than I can possibly do business with. And then after you you you match the supply demand of like, okay, there's more people who want to do business with me.

• 54:26Alex Hormozi?

  Then it's how, what quality of person, like basically, then you can just consistently continue. And that's kind of an unlimited, I think, continue to raise the bar of the quality of company and entrepreneur that you work with.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 54:38Alex Hormozi?

  And so like the companies that we that we invest in now don't even look close to the companies that I invested in four years ago.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Talk to you about this, the number one creator mistake is building new products for their audience rather than building more audience for their product.

• 54:54Alex Hormozi?

  Okay, I'm gonna tell you this little side story and then I'll answer the question. So I I'm really a pretty big stickler with written word. And so it's been very difficult for me to have anyone write for me at all. And so as Rosal, basically, the only thing that's fair game that my team can use to put captions on stuff is stuff that I have said in a video and they can just transcribe it. Or tweets.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:18Alex Hormozi?

  That's it. Anything else that you've seen that's written is me.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:21Alex Hormozi?

  And so like just put context on like if all the words that are out there like I have written all of them or I've said them. That's it. And so to your question, it's more of a business mistake than I think it's just creators fall in the same traps. And so let's say they they spend this time growing their audience and they get to call it, you know, a hundred thousand followers, whatever. And then they come out with a product and then they sell the product and they make money. And then they're like, huh, I should come out with another product to make more money. But what it did was it reinforced the wrong activity because it was late. So the activity that made the money was building the audience, not coming with a product. And so what happens is you find these creators who have like six businesses essentially, which is really just like six different products.

• 56:02Alex Hormozi?

  That each of the businesses in and of themselves could be hundred million dollar plus businesses, but they don't have enough audience. And so they do the short term fix, which is come up with another thing. But long term, you end up drowning in the fact that you have six businesses in your attention split. And so there's two components to this. So one is that if you just launch a product on its own and there's no repurchase rate or it's not consumable and there's nothing recurring about it. Then you're going to have to keep coming with products, which means that's kind of a strategic mistake, right? You should have just thought of something that like, if we've launched it, people were going to buy it quickly, but then keep buying it. Now you have a regular stream of income and you can take that income and keep doubling down on the audience to grow it. Or pay for other people's audiences or pay for ads or like all the other strategies that are in the book of like expanding, expanding your reach.

• 56:49Alex Hormozi?

  But fundamentally, that's the trap is that rather than saying, cause like you just think about a long enough time horizon. Do you just keep starting new products and then you in in twenty years, you have thirty products that you're doing? Or when I say products, a lot of times it's businesses because the products are actually not, they are too differentiated to be like a second product in the same line. I guess someone has two different T shirts. I don't see that as a different product. If someone goes from T shirts to selling consulting, that's a different product, right? Versus the alternative, which is like, I just make T shirts and I keep advertising and all I do is I keep getting more and more people finding out about my T shirts and my my brand. And that's how I grow my sales and it's going to be more steady, less pops, but that's how you can build a really big company.

• 57:31Alex Hormozi?

  Whereas if you have seven businesses, which are like the most common thing that I see. You end up just going to be split thin and all the products should be crap.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:40Alex Hormozi?

  And I see it all the time.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  So when you say, hey, I'm a real stickler about words, how does that show up?

• 57:46Alex Hormozi?

  We have by and large solved this problem by me having lots of video content. And the team being able to take any snippet from anywhere, if it's appropriate to use it as, you know, like a caption or something like that. Like LinkedIn is the only thing that I don't write, right? So captions in LinkedIn are are the basically things that I don't manually write, but they are taken from either tweets or they are taken from videos. And so that's but emails I write, books I write, copy I write.

• 58:17Alex Hormozi?

  Not ad copy. That's one that I don't write as much, but that's a problem. So I'm fixing it.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  So tell me, what is the business model of these books? Break it down for me because it's you sell them for cheap. They're you spend a bunch of time on, I mean, the the sort of naive person could be like, what are you doing?

• 58:33Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, it makes no sense. So that's part of it is that it does make no sense. But the other part is that long term, like I think that I'll die and I my hope is that these will still be around.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  But but I don't think that's true. Isn't this the thing that sort of initiates everything else kind of?

• 58:47Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Gets you to the mean expertise.

• 58:49Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, oh, yeah. So. From the asset perspective, I write these because I really want them to be assets. I want them to help a lot of people. And that it like, I think that anybody who reads my books can feel my intention behind what I'm trying to do. Like, if it were just a lead magnet, which is why I think it would cheapen it to describe it that way, they wouldn't be bestselling books.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:10Alex Hormozi?

  I think they would just be lead magnets and suck. And so I think the ultimate lead magnet should be timeless assets. And I think that's where a lot of people mess up when they do what it like. Ninety nine percent of people will never buy anything from you. And but ninety nine percent of people are what create your reputation. And so I would want them to consume something that is still exceptionally valuable, because they are ultimately the ones who will create the reputation you have. Now, of course, be like, well, you don't know him, or you've never done this with him. It's like, yeah, but the internet doesn't really deal in nuance. And so, yes, this is the gateway drug. But really, before this, the gateway drug is the content. And so the content's really the first thing that someone consumes, and we want to make that really, really good. And then if they got enough value from the content, they're like, maybe I'll give one of his books a shot. And if they read the book, then they get way more value.

• 59:55Alex Hormozi?

  Then, you know, maybe they come into my world, may show up at our headquarters, come to, you know, come to one of our, you know, advisory events.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  And when you speak to people who come to the advisory events, and they're not, what kinds of people, what kinds of businesses do you recommend that the founders be writing like you do? And then if if they do that, what do you tell them so that they can be successful and?

• 1:00:18Alex Hormozi?

  Honestly, the I I basically try to dissuade most people from writing a book. And I think that's because it's people who aren't writers, who don't love writing, see my book and think, oh, I'll do that. And it's just like, it's the Michelangelo quote. You don't understand how much work it is. And you, I could already tell you if you've never written before, you aren't willing to do it. Like, I've been writing for a long time. I have been writing as publicly from a books perspective, but I have four books. Like, it's not like I'm. And before that, I I loved writing, you know, in my, I've loved writing since I was a kid. And so it's something that I can do and can. Immerse myself in and really lose myself to the to the craft. And a lot of people can't do that.

• 1:00:59Alex Hormozi?

  The amount of people who are entrepreneurs who I know who are like, hey, man, I wrote my I wrote my book in in 12 weeks. And I'm like, that's amazing.

• 1:01:08Alex Hormozi?

  But it's it's probably not that good. And I try to like God say that in a mean way, but it's like, yeah, I'm like, first draft, they're like, yeah, just knocked it out. I'm like, that's. Okay, you know, sure. Good luck. How you launch a book determines how good you are at marketing. How well the book is selling two years later determines how good the book is.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Is there a tactical way? That you get more Amazon reviews? Or is that just one of those things? Or, you know, if the book is good, people are going to review it, but you really can't influence it that much.

• 1:01:39Alex Hormozi?

  I'm always scared to make a review ask. Because my own insecurity is like, well, what if it sucks and they remember to leave a bad review? Right? But I think that in some ways, it's almost a litmus test of how confident you are about the quality of the product. Like, if you're willing to ask everyone to leave a review, then you're really confident that people will like it. And so I have a review ask in the middle of both of the books. And I figured I put it in the middle. So it's like, if someone got to the middle, then they probably liked the book.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:08Alex Hormozi?

  Enough to get to the middle, right?

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Not on page five.

• 1:02:09Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, exactly. Not exactly. By the way, you know, like, it's like, I haven't given you any value yet. So like, no, I put it after they hopefully have gotten a significant amount of value. I do think that making an ask increases the likelihood that they leave a review. But I think if you have a crap book, then they're like, no, or they'll leave you a bad one, which is, you know, arguably worse.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Okay, I don't know anything about your love for writing as a kid, and I want to hear about that.

• 1:02:33Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, I wrote short stories or poems.

• 1:02:37Alex Hormozi?

  And I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that stuff, the free. That's why the literary magazine is probably where I spent, like, that's where I wrote more of my stuff. So it was all student submissions for short stories, poems.

• 1:02:48Alex Hormozi?

  And so I managed them and art and art too, like kids who put art. So like the cover art, you know, we'd get a bunch of paintings and we'd be like, okay, which of these is going to cover? And then between stories, between poems, we'd put other art from, you know, the art department from the kids who are, you know, making painting or whatever they're doing, you know, pictures of statues, sculptures, things like that. And so we, you know, we do a review every week. And so that that helped me get better at writing, just being able to like, look at other people's writing.

• 1:03:15Alex Hormozi?

  And so I just, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that writing significantly more than everything else I signed to it. I didn't enjoy that writing. And that was actually a really interesting breakthrough for me is that like, I didn't like reading that much. And that's not common. Usually writers like reading, I think.

• 1:03:29Alex Hormozi?

  I didn't even know that nonfiction was really a genre till like, like after I graduated high school. Cause everything you read, just about everything you read in high school is fiction or a textbook.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:38Alex Hormozi?

  Textbooks suck.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  They're all.

• 1:03:39Alex Hormozi?

  And fiction I thought was useless. And so I enjoyed making my own fiction. But like, think about like, from a learning perspective, what does this change about my life? Nothing. Like, okay, some person, some random man just did some thing and whatever, it doesn't affect me. And so I never really understood the point. As soon as I became an adult, or whatever, I got introduced to nonfiction and I was like, oh my God, this is useful. And so then I got more into reading for specific purposes, but I'd still almost separate that as like, I was trying to learn a specific thing, not analyze the writing.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:09Alex Hormozi?

  And so, yeah, I just, I really liked writing. And so I just, it was one of the few things. I feel like I can get the flow really easily with writing. Like writing and drawing, which is why all my books have lots of drawing, lots of writing. And I like doing my brainstorming with a pen, cause I don't know, it feels more tactile. I, I lose myself in it more easily. That, that was pretty much my experience. And I did take a bit of a break from writing when I got into the business world. And it was only like, gosh, it was probably.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Was this like the gym launch days?

• 1:04:37Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. Well, I wrote the gym launch book, but getting, I think I wrote that book in 2018. So writing the gym launch book was the first like real writing that I had done. That wasn't like copy or things like, you're like writing, writing? That I'd done. And I think as soon as that happened, I was like, oh, I missed this. It was like, I'd forgotten how much I liked it. And so then I, I pretty much haven't stopped writing since.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Last question. So you get a call from UNLV. They're like, hey, Alex, we want you to teach a writing class. How you structure the curriculum? What are the core things that you want to teach people?

• 1:05:08Alex Hormozi?

  I'll bet you the first day I would probably define terms.

• 1:05:12Alex Hormozi?

  Or first week, I mean, I break this into sections rather than the sessions, but like the first section would be definition of terms. The next one would be clarifying the objective of why, why are we writing? What are we writing for? How does writing serve us? Why is it even, why is there, why does it even matter? And then I would probably transition from there to the rules of writing.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  What are the rules of writing?

• 1:05:35Alex Hormozi?

  So there's, at least as, as I see it, and I would probably be parroting a lot of Stephen King's on writing.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Alex Hormozi?

  If I were to say, but like, I think that's one of the best books on writing out there. As few words as possible, like if you can use a simpler word, use that word.

• 1:05:50Alex Hormozi?

  You know, very sentence structure, so there's a rhythm to it, you know, short, short, long, you know? And then from a stylistic perspective, I purposely try to use lower grade language. Because I want more people to understand it. I don't think there's, I don't have an ego to people thinking that. I'm sorry, I also have no, nothing against people who use bigger words. It is like, also word concision uses more complex words, right? But I want maximum comprehension rather than maximum word concision. So I use concision only as a tool to increase comprehension at large.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:06:23Alex Hormozi?

  So short words, short sentences, big promises.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  So you have rules of writing, anything else?

• 1:06:29Alex Hormozi?

  That would be, yeah, that'd probably be the next section. And I would probably practice super constrained writing for people if I was trying. So if the objective of the course was to teach people to write.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Alex Hormozi?

  Then it would be like, I want you to write an entire paper on this thing in one page. And really force people, because I think like Twitter, I think is, or X, I think is a wonderful platform for learning how to write. Because it just, you have, you have to force the, you have to keep crunching them down. And I think that's, honestly, I think X is one of the best tools for learning to write because you get fast feedback. The other one is I would probably use like Hemingway as, because that also gives you real time feedback.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Alex Hormozi?

  And so typing into there is so helpful because, you know, Stephen King pretty much says this, it's like, just don't use adverbs. By large, just don't use them. Like there's a better verb that you're not using. X? And Hemingway would probably be the vast majority of the remainder of the time that I had. It would be repetition of them getting fast feedback on the writing that they're doing under specific constraints. And I would probably have a lot more free, like freedom in terms of topic and far less in terms of rules. Like you have to obey these rules, but you can write whatever you want. You have to do it in page or you have to do it in half a page and you can write whatever topic you want, but you have to obey these 27 rules.

• 1:07:56Alex Hormozi?

  Now write, because fundamentally, when I'm writing, for the most part, I, now they're like a lot more or less ingrained in how I write. But if like a section still doesn't seem good, I'll paste it into Hemingway and be like, ooh, that's fine. Like, and like, you know, long sentences, like there's just, there's things that you just learn that you're like, oh, this might've sounded good in my head, but no one can read this. And so, not to get super writing tactical, but that's.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  That's why we do this, how I write, mate.

• 1:08:21Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  It's called how I write.

• 1:08:23Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, that's probably how I'd like that. So definition of terms, why this matters, and how it's useful for you. And I basically sell them on why they should even do this, rules of the game, and then practice. And that would probably be everything. The rest would just be practice.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Rock on. Well, I just want to thank you because I've read a lot of your stuff, consumed many, many, many of your videos, had a lot of questions and feel like you answered them well, but also you've been a big inspiration. So thank you.

• 1:08:50Alex Hormozi?

  Oh, I appreciate it. I'm glad they, hopefully they were useful.