The Lie That Keeps Entrepreneurs Broke | Ep 915

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 ⁠

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

• 0:00Alex Hormozi?

  Before we hopped on, the chat was frozen because we have this like

• 0:05Alex Hormozi?

  screen thing that I can see the chat, right? And there was like six chats from the last time that were like frozen on the screen. And one of the guys said, "I've got a thousand dollars and 800 old contacts. What would you do if you were me, starting a real estate business?" And I read that and I've basically been thinking about it this entire time. And so I wanted to talk to it because it kind of moved me a little bit.

• 0:32Alex Hormozi?

  What I want to explain is it's, it's so fucking hard.

• 0:38Alex Hormozi?

  And when I say it, I'm saying like, when you start out in business, it's unbelievably hard. And the reason that business owners at the highest levels get compensated the way they do is because they were able to make it through that period. They earn the right to earn above average. They earn the right to earn more in a day than people earn in their lifetimes. And I think there's a sort of spiritual strengthening. And that's probably words you wouldn't normally say. So maybe I'll use my behavior frame, which is that you have to learn how to behave in hard circumstances

• 1:22Alex Hormozi?

  so that you can continue to make it through the hardships that will inevitably come as you grow. And growth comes from a deficiency between your current and desired or your current and required. You need to be here and you're here and that stretch hurts because you're inadequate. You have to look at yourself in the mirror and be like, "I'm not good enough." And they call them growing pains for a reason. And so if you're like, "Man, I wish I could grow really fast." You're actually wishing for a tremendous amount of pain for an extended period of time. And then when people don't have that, they hit their first pain. They're somehow surprised that it hurts. And the thing of the pain of business is it's not just like this.

• 2:06Alex Hormozi?

  This visceral, physical pain, of course, you have those from time to time. But a lot of the pain of being in business is not knowing the fuck you're doing and feeling like an idiot. Being like, "Why am I not good enough? Why do these other people, why are they doing so much better than me?" Like, what conclusions can I derive from that? There's only one of two paths. Either I have something outside of my control that I can cast my blame to, or I have to take the punch to my ego and say, "I'm just not that good." "That guy's better because he's unethical." Okay, sure, if that's what makes you feel better, and now what? And so, the things that make it hard is that, one, you have to accept that you're not good and you have to do it over and over and over again. Right when you think you're good again, you prove, like, the world proves to you that you're not as good as you think you are.

• 2:50Alex Hormozi?

  And this happens at all levels of business. And you get, like, the same things when you have those plateaus. It's been a year, it's been two years, it's been three years, right? And you've been stuck in this gear. Like, it means that you haven't changed. You've behaved the same, and so you're getting the same outputs. And the change is painful. And sometimes, the painful change means that you actually have to take two steps back. And your ego not only has to get hurt, but hurt even more. Because you have to realize that you built your thing wrong. You hired the wrong leader. You have the wrong team culture within a department. What do you do? Will you either leave it there and stay perpetually under your potential? Because you weren't willing to confront the difficulty of the inconveniences that are going to come to you

• 3:33Alex Hormozi?

  as a result of making the changes that you know you need to make but aren't making. And so, I bring this up because, like, everyone, humans, like, we're so interesting in that we believe that we're the first people to ever love the way you've loved. To feel the pain that you felt. To feel ignorant. To feel unwanted. To feel not enough. Like, we feel like we're the only people who experience this. Like, our pain is more than other people's. Our love is deeper than other people's. But when we do that, we rob ourselves of the ability to learn from others that came before us. The other people who already learned what this is like, who've described the pain. And listen, even if you, even if you try to take as much advice as you possibly can, you're still gonna get burned. It's still gonna hurt.

• 4:18Alex Hormozi?

  And in the earlier days, like, I have yet to see somebody who, who, who takes, again, and I'm talking about, I'm talking about Homo sapiens. I'm not talking about Elon Musk, alright? I'm not, I'm not talking about Mark Zuckerberg, you know, I'm not talking about Bezos. I'm talking about Homo sapiens. I'm talking about flesh and blood, people who are made of, of, of, of normal folks, alright? I have yet to see someone really start figuring out what's going on in less than five years. And I'm saying five years of being in the game, not five years of, I have an idea, I'm really passionate about this, I've been reading stuff on the side, I work on the weekends. I'm saying, I'm all in for five years.

• 4:59Alex Hormozi?

  And you just start, you just begin to get a grasp of what it takes to, to be good at business. And the difficulty is that it's so hard to teach business in school because it changes so much. The principles remain the same, but the game changes, right? And I'll say, I'll say one of my, one of my favorite quotes from The Wire. Cuddy, who was a, you know, who was muscle for one of the gangs, comes out after like, doing a murder, hit, taking a murder charge. Anyway, gets out, gets out, you know, 15, 15 years later, whatever. And he goes back and he's right back on the street and he went back to the gang. And he's like, man, he's talking to the other, you know, the, the other guy who's muscle before they're about to go, you know, shoot some guys or whatever.

• 5:45Alex Hormozi?

  And he says, he's like, man, he's like, the game changed. And Slim Charles says back to him, right, as they're like putting their gloves on, about to like cock their gun, he's like, nah, man, he's like, the game the same, just more fierce.

• 6:00Alex Hormozi?

  And so it's like, the level of game always continues to rise because the players get better. Business is an infinite game. And I think that we judge ourselves because we somehow believe that we're behind other people. It's one of the most painful things that we can do is that we just, obviously you compare yourself. And then after making the comparison, there's nothing wrong with comparing yourself to other people. That's how you figure out discrepancies. But then you label, then you say, and I suck as a result, and I'm worthless, and I'm not never going to be good enough. Right? But if the first part is valuable, that guy's better at ads than me. What is he doing that I'm not doing? I should learn that, right? Not, that guy's better than me at ads and therefore I suck as a human being and will never win. So what label do we ascribe to that discrepancy?

• 6:43Alex Hormozi?

  And so if we see, if we make that comparison, right? Then we can learn the steps to get better, fine. But if we zoom all the way out and really think about this, because this is a little bit trippy. The game of business has been going on since the dawn of time. There were merchants in ancient Egypt 5,000 years ago that were in the game of business. And the game of business will never end. It's an infinite game. Who was the number one merchant in Egypt 5,000 years ago? No idea. Who was the number one merchant? 4,000, 2,000, 1,000 years ago, 200 years ago. No one knows. And so we have this idea that we're somehow going to become number one.

• 7:28Alex Hormozi?

  But I'm like, at what? At net worth? And then eventually your kids become trust fund kids? And then that gets divided up 10 more ways because no one's got game like you? And eventually you just, you've got, you know, eight family members on the Forbes list? Okay. And none of them are the ones that actually made it. And none of them know how to multiply because they aren't in the game. They never learned the skills of the game. Like if you see the game is constant, only thing that changes is the players. So my mom used to say this thing, which was, the news is always the same. Only the names change. Something about that. So you look at the headlines, right?

• 8:09Alex Hormozi?

  It's like bankers get greedy. Sounds, does that sound like, it sound like new news? No, they just changed the names. You know, jealous husband kills wife then self.

• 8:24Alex Hormozi?

  Same, same news. It's not even news. It's just humans, being human. And so business news is also the same way. Hot new technology comes out, grows really fast, find out actually not good, crashes quickly, investors lose millions. This stuff is the same. It's the same. Like, boy learns how to sell. Boy learns how to advertise. Boy learns how to make product. Boy eventually makes lots of money. Boy eventually gets old, tries to, you know, give back to a certain degree, becomes a philanthropist, old in his age, retreats a little bit. The next of kin comes in line, not as good as that person,

• 9:09Alex Hormozi?

  maintains, third generation destroys. It's just humans doing human shit. Right? And so I say this because a lot of the hardship of business is comparing yourself and labeling that comparison and saying that I'm not better or worse than these people, but all the players on the board are gonna get swapped in a hundred years. All the players. The whole board gets wiped. The game still goes on, but the players change. And so I think, like, if you can, and it's not easy, I want to be clear, it's not easy. Humans, you know, we're, we're, we're status-driven beings. And that's kind of built into how we, how we, how we procreate. But to the degree that you can, if you can, if you can actually give yourself

• 9:53Alex Hormozi?

  a pat on the back, as long as you do one thing, which is that you stay in the game. You keep playing. You keep rolling the dice. This is the story of the many-sided die. So I wrote this, I didn't hear this. This was just like a concept I wanted to, to share. So imagine you and a friend play a dice-rolling game. You're each given one die. One of the die has 20 sides. The other has 200. On each die, only one side is green, and the rest are red. The point of the game is simple. Roll green as many times as you can. The point of the game is simple. The rules of the game are as follows. You can't see how many sides you have.

• 10:38Alex Hormozi?

  You can only see if you roll red or green. If you roll green, one of your sides turns, your red sides turns green, and you get to roll again. If you roll red, nothing happens, and you get to roll again. The game ends when you stop rolling, and if you stop rolling, you lose. So what do you do? You roll. When you roll red, you pick up the die and roll again. When others roll green, you pick up your die and roll again. When you roll green, you pick up the die and roll again. You keep telling yourself one thing. The more I roll, the more greens I get. At first, you roll green once in a while. But as more red sides turn green, the green happens more.

• 11:21Alex Hormozi?

  With enough rolls, hitting green becomes the rule rather than the exception. So what does your friend do? He rolls a few times and hits red each time. He sees you roll a green and complains that you must have a die with fewer sides. He reasons it's the only way you could have rolled green before him. And although you did, you also rolled many more times. So which is it? In either case, he rolls a few more times in frustration and hits a green. But then he complains about how long it took. He spent more time watching you and complaining than actually playing. Meanwhile, you've hit your green streak. It's so much easier for you, he tells himself. You get greens every time. This game is rigged, so what's the point? And he quits.

• 12:04Alex Hormozi?

  So who got the die with the 20 sides? Who got the die with the 200 sides? If you get the game, then you see that once you roll enough times, the die you're given doesn't matter. The die with fewer sides might roll green sooner. The die with more sides might roll green later. But a die with a green side always has a chance of rolling green if you roll it.

• 12:30Alex Hormozi?

  Every die hits its green streak when rolled enough times. All of us get a many-sided die. And looking at the other players, you have no idea if it's their 100th roll or their 100,000th. You don't know how good other players are when you start. You can only see how well they do now. But if you understand the game, you also know it doesn't matter. A few begin playing early, others begin much later. The rest sit on the sidelines complaining about how lucky the players are. I guess so, but they're luckier because they play. And when they hit red, which they do, they didn't quit. They rolled again. Learning how to advertise is a lot like the game of the many-sided die.

• 13:15Alex Hormozi?

  You don't know if it's going to work until you try. And no matter how many players there are, or the number of sides in the die you're given, you start to see the only two guarantees that the games will give. Number one, the more times you roll, the better you get. And number two, if you quit, you lose. So I read that story because that's obviously a story of an infinite game. You and your buddy get given two die. One of you has a 20-sided, the other has a 200-sided die. You don't know who has which. They're all, you know, you don't know how many have reds, how many have greens. And there's one green on each. You roll it, and if you hit the red, nothing happens.

• 13:59Alex Hormozi?

  If you hit green, you get one of your many sides that turns green and you get to roll again. And the only statistical probability there is that if you keep rolling enough times, all of the sides will turn green on both die eventually. But you just don't know how many sides the die that you're given has on it that are red. Which means you just don't know how many shots you're going to have to take in order to win. And that's why having high frustration tolerance, having high fortitude, having low or high resiliency and high adaptability, those skills of mental toughness are what allow you to stay in the game of business. It's what allows you to keep rolling the dice even when you get smacked 20 times in a row as reds, because maybe you have a 2,000-sided die.

• 14:43Alex Hormozi?

  But if you know that the one fact of this game is that if you keep rolling, you keep playing, and if you keep playing, it means you're in the game. And if you're in the game, it means you've won. Because in infinite games, there are no winners and losers. There is only players and quitters.

• 15:00Alex Hormozi?

  And so I think that it took me a very long time to learn that. And so when you are starting out, you were just early. You were just, you have more reds left to roll. You've just got to get them out of the way. You've got to get the failures out. It's the only way you figure out how to play. You just don't want to lose so bad that you die. But as long as you don't die, you can keep playing. And I feel like that actually is a pretty hopeful message. Just out of my relatively aggressive demeanor.