The Cheat Code to WEALTH (Do THIS to Become a MILLIONAIRE in 2024!) | Alex Hormozi

Today Lewis sits down with the incredibly inspiring Alex Hormozi, a first-generation Iranian-American entrepreneur who has made an extraordinary leap from starting a small brick & mortar business to becoming a multi-millionaire through scaling and exiting multiple companies. Hormozi shares his personal journey and the profound insights he's gained along the way, emphasizing the transformative power of working smarter and with more dedication. He opens up about his goal to reach beyond billions, not just for the sake of wealth, but as a testament to his evolving approach to business and the deep pride he takes in giving his all. In this episode you will learnEffectively utilizing money can help avoid pain, even though it doesn't directly buy happiness. With the right mindset and dedication, virtually every skill and aspect of life can be trained and improved. Prioritizing learning over earning is important in the early stages of a career or business venture. Taking initiative and helping oneself creates opportunities for others to offer support and assistance. Achieving excellence in today's world is more accessible and affordable than ever before. For more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1537For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960Want more episodes like this one? Alex Hormozi: https://link.chtbl.com/1522-podJenna Kutcher: https://link.chtbl.com/1271-podRory Vaden: https://link.chtbl.com/1148-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Alex Hormozi?

  The reason that I'm going to go from a hundred to a billion and 10 billion and beyond is because I am working harder now than I worked to get here. And it's because I've learned a better way to work. And so this is me sharing that better way to work.

• 0:11Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:35Lewis Howes?

  We both know a lot of wealthy people. People have made a lot of money. People have had huge exits. People that have private jets and multiple homes and massive bank account. Do you think the people that you know who have a lot of money are typically happier? Or do you know more people who are wealthy who are unhappy than happy?

• 0:58Alex Hormozi?

  I think it depends on how they got their wealth. So I think if they were given their wealth, absolutely, I would say bar none, they are not as happy. And I think it, I won't even get into the why. I'll say that just my observation. For the people who earned their wealth, I would say many of them are, I would probably say the same, same schmorgasbord as the rest of society, maybe with like one movement upwards because money cannot buy happiness, but it can help you avoid pain. And so I think that is the, that's the hard part that is difficult. It's the same thing as health where like you can, you know, money can help get the hospital, but you know, get you out of the hospital hypothetically, but it's not going to get you into super, super fitness status.

• 1:40Alex Hormozi?

  They're, they're completely different continuums that people see as one straight line and I removing pain versus gaining joy, I think are two completely different journeys. And so I think money helps absolutely decrease the punishment that we experience in life and the pains that we have to deal with our inconveniences for sure.

• 1:57Lewis Howes?

  Why do you think some people, I agree with that. And there's also some outliers where it seems like people with a lot of money almost have more problems, more pain, more stress, more overwhelmed. Maybe it's too much to handle or everyone wanting something from them or everyone's expecting something now from them. How do you learn to manage the approval or people pleasing of others once you have more money? Especially your own family, your own friends who are now saying, oh, you've gone beyond where the rest of us are financially. And I want some of that, or I have an expectation. How do we overcome that? Navigate it?

• 2:30Alex Hormozi?

  I wholeheartedly reject all of it.

• 2:33Lewis Howes?

  Reject what?

• 2:33Alex Hormozi?

  All of it, any, any expectations of me. And so my, my litmus test for doing deals, for giving jobs, any of those things for people that I know is that you have to, it's actually the first conversation I had with Leila when we were, it was our first date. So our first date, I pitched Leila on quitting her job and working for me. Cause I was like, this might not work out, but you should totally work for me. We'll make a bunch of money together. And I said, this compensation has to make sense for you, independent of our relationship. So like, if we're not together, does this still make sense? If it makes sense, then we're cool.

• 3:10Lewis Howes?

  It's on your first day of dating.

• 3:12Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Lewis Howes?

  If we're not together in a week or for two months, would this still work for you?

• 3:16Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's clear. I saw talent, you know?

• 3:21Alex Hormozi?

  And, um, and I think, and I think that, that litmus test has served incredibly well for me. Is like, if you want to hire your mom, would you give somebody with your mom's experience? The bookkeeping job? Now, if she's, if she's a 20 year bookkeeper.

• 3:36Lewis Howes?

  Then yeah, maybe.

• 3:37Alex Hormozi?

  Maybe. And to be fair, but would you pay the bookkeeper $200,000 a year? I don't know. You probably wouldn't. So I believe in making all deals as though you weren't friends, or you have no relationship. And if it still makes sense, then all of the relational benefit becomes as a bonus.

• 3:55Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 3:56Alex Hormozi?

  Rather than I'm going to amend the terms of the deal because of this amorphous value that we have, which can change. But the, if the deal is made logically, then conditions can change and you will still both always feel good about the deal. Because it was made without the relational component. Cause sometimes you have good days with your mom, sometimes you have bad days with your mom. And all of a sudden you're like, I can't pay her $200,000 a year, right? I wouldn't, she messed up the books and he don't, she embarrassed, she took a course online, you know, whatever, right? And so, but like, but people make that mistake all the time. And so I think that it has been significantly easy for me to just say like, would I give you the role? Or would I give you the thing if you were a stranger? And if the answer is no, the answer is no. And if that person really wants it, then I'd be like, then do the same things a stranger would do. And then I'll have a reason.

• 4:38Alex Hormozi?

  But now if I have two candidates and they're identical, which would be impossible, if they're identical, then yeah, maybe I would give it, but like they have to still meet all the standards. And then that way you give objective, quantitative, like do these things and then we can have this outcome.

• 4:51Lewis Howes?

  Right. Seems like a lot of young people want to make a lot of money.

• 4:55Alex Hormozi?

  People.

• 4:56Lewis Howes?

  People want to make a lot of money. But it seems like, you know, at least sometimes thinking of social media context. You see a lot of young people in their twenties, early thirties that are striving for that. And they're striving for it fast.

• 5:10Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Lewis Howes?

  They're striving for it, you know, I just graduated college and now I want to get there in the next couple of years. What do people in their twenties not understand about making money or reaching millionaire status? That they really need to know before they hit that.

• 5:25Alex Hormozi?

  So I will probably answer this differently than you expect. I believe that sex is colorblind, age blind, everything blind, because there are certain activities that you have to do. If you do the activities, you can get the outcome. Now, if you're in your twenties, it's very difficult to do the amount of activities for a long enough period of time in order to get that. Now, you know, you've got Ben Francis, who started Jim Shark when he was whatever, 16 or 17 years old. And he's, when he was 28, it was worth over a billion. So he was in his twenties and it was, you know, he made a billion dollar company. Is that the exception? For the most part, yeah, that's not as common. You know, I made my, I became a millionaire when I was 26, 26 or 27, I can't remember.

• 6:07Alex Hormozi?

  Between 26 and 27 is when I became, when I had my first million dollars in my bank account. And so, but I started business when I was 22. And so I still had had five years in, and now that's still fast. Don't get me wrong, it's still fast. But the accumulation of knowledge, because I spent almost all of my excess income on education. And so I wanted to, I wanted to pay down the ignorance tax as fast as I possibly could. It's rather than buy the Bentley or buy the watch so that I could flex on it. I still lived, split a room in a house with six other people while I was making 20,000 in my take home. Because I wanted to have all that money so I could go on the offense if I wanted to go to a seminar or buy a course or go to a workshop or whatever it was so that I could up level my skills and get there faster. And so I think the idea that you want to get there fast is fine.

• 6:53Alex Hormozi?

  It's just having a realistic expectation of how many skills you need to acquire to get there. Because if you have all the skills, because I think we'll have continuously younger and younger and younger millionaires and billionaires that are going to continue to happen because now a viral idea, I mean, Taylor Swift was sixteen when she started reporting music. That was a long time ago, right? She's thirty three now. Now she's billionaire.

• 7:12Lewis Howes?

  She keeps showing up consistently and building it.

• 7:14Alex Hormozi?

  Mr. Beast is a billionaire. He's twenty four.

• 7:16Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 7:16Alex Hormozi?

  So like it's, it's going to continue to go down as the access to education increasingly gets democratized so more people can access it for free. And so a nine year old can watch, like there's nothing that stops a nine year old from making and running a Facebook ad. There's nothing.

• 7:32Alex Hormozi?

  Like, and usually they're more tech savvy anyways.

• 7:33Lewis Howes?

  Maybe they just gotta get a credit card or something.

• 7:35Alex Hormozi?

  Sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so there, but the, but if we break it down to like the physics or the actions.

• 7:40Lewis Howes?

  It's not that hard.

• 7:41Alex Hormozi?

  There's nothing that prevents people. And so I think that the level of competition will continue to rise. I think young people are more tech savvy and so will in general have a continuously improving competitive advantage over older people because the rate of technological change hastens, goes faster. And so the, the advantage of being young versus old is actually, I think, going to continue to, to expand because tech moves so fast now. That I think there will be more.

• 8:04Lewis Howes?

  What do you think about, I mean, I had a mentor once told me when I was twenty four, when I was broke on my sister's couch and I was living for free and I was not paying rent. I was, you know, eating leftovers. Good life, man. And I remember saying to a mentor, I was like, man, I could really use some money right now. Like I could really figure out how to make some more money. And he said, money comes to you when you're ready for it. I was like, I feel pretty ready. And he goes, yeah, it could, you know, maybe you get it and you're not ready and you, you lose it all. Because you're not emotionally ready. So what advice do you have to people in their twenties? Who want to make a lot of money? But if they're not emotionally ready, what might happen to them?

• 8:49Alex Hormozi?

  Everything is trainable. And so if like, if we define handling money as a skill, then it can be learned. And so if you, and you can, you can look at anything like if you were somebody who continues to hop from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing, and you can't stick with it. It's usually because you don't have the skill of sticking with something. You haven't been rewarded enough in the past for staying with something, or you haven't been burnt enough from starting over. Like on your fifth time of starting yet another thing and not getting deep enough on it. You have to think to yourself, maybe this isn't the right way to do it. I love giving this kind of like S curve analogy, which hopefully your audience will enjoy. But there's five stages I see it as somebody goes through the entrepreneurial journey when they're starting out. In the beginning, you've got the midline, right where they start. Step one is they go above the midline and they go to uninformed optimism.

• 9:33Alex Hormozi?

  They see the grass on the other side, it looks greener and they're like, my buddy's doing drop shipping and he's making all this money. And that's going to be me. And then they buy the course, they start watching videos, they start to connect things, things break, they, you know, buy some inventory, they don't know how much to buy. And all of a sudden they go to the point two, which is now below the line, which is informed pessimism.

• 9:49Lewis Howes?

  This is hard.

• 9:50Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, they find out all the things that they didn't know in the beginning, they paid down some ignorance debt, but there's still more to pay. And they're like, okay, wow. So they keep going because they're like, I gotta figure this out. And then they go to point three, which is the value of despair. Right. Which is where they're like, this isn't going to work. This is never going to work. And one of the hardest costs, and this is like what entrepreneurship feels like, if I can, if I can give it to anyone who's new to this. Is the feeling of uncertainty that you don't know if all of the work that you've been spending all of your nights and weekends and off time investing in will ever pay off. And so it's this fear that you're wasting your time. But the reality is that the outcome isn't the thing that you're building. The person you are is the person that you're building and that continues to work. And so there's a proverb in the Bible, I'm going to butcher it, but uh, I think it's an all labor, there is profit.

• 10:35Alex Hormozi?

  And you can rephrase that as, um, I like, as the work works on you more than you work on it.

• 10:41Lewis Howes?

  Say it again.

• 10:42Alex Hormozi?

  The work works on you more than you work on it. And so it's about who we become while doing the work more than the outcome from the work itself. Because like I lost everything five years into my entrepreneurial journey, but I still had all the skills and beliefs that I had from before that. And then I was able to reapply those and then have a really, you know, big outcome in what we have today. And so I remember when I lost everything, the first time I thought, did I just lose five years of my life? Like I just, I just moved back, I'm at ground zero again. But I wasn't because I had all these skills that I had learned, you know, owning and scaling six gyms at that point. And so point one, uninformed optimism. Point two, informed pessimism. Point three, die of despair. And then go to point four, which is informed optimism. So now you do have a lay of the land. You understand that there's some skeletons.

• 11:26Alex Hormozi?

  You do have to understand how you manage some inventory. You got to get ahead of some of the stuff, but you start, you learn how to forecast. You can know that weekends you tend to do better and weekdays you tend to do less. And so you can dial back support on those days and dial it up on the other days. You start to recognize patterns. And so you start to, start to know what you're doing, right? You started paying, you're paying down all the ignorance debt. And then finally, step five is you achieve whatever the original goal was. But the problem is that most people go step one, two, three, and then they jump back to step one.

• 11:52Lewis Howes?

  With something new.

• 11:53Alex Hormozi?

  Right. And so they go to, yet, yet again, the grass is greener the other side. But what they don't know is that it's still fertilized with manure. There's still the other side too. And so there's always everywhere.

• 12:03Lewis Howes?

  Let me get into real estate now. Let me get into this.

• 12:04Alex Hormozi?

  Right.

• 12:05Lewis Howes?

  Best thing is stocks.

• 12:06Alex Hormozi?

  Right, of course, there's all these, you know, quick make money things. But if you look at the people who are making the most money in it, they spent usually a significant amount of time. And I'm, I'm saying this again, but I'm bearing it for repetition. It's that the Rocky cutscene lasts two minutes in movies and might last five years for most people or 10. And I remember my, so my neighbor I met when he was 15 years old, he now works for us at acquisition.com.

• 12:28Alex Hormozi?

  But he, uh, this is, this is a cool story. So he's 15 years old and he's like, I want to be an entrepreneur. And so I'm, you know, he worked out with me every day for a couple of years at my home gym. And so he.

• 12:40Lewis Howes?

  He's jacked now.

• 12:42Alex Hormozi?

  Never, never more jacked than me. And so he then goes to college. And after his first semester, he's like, I don't know, like this is, you know, I'm studying business. And I was like, dude, are you willing in this or not? Are you really doing this? And he was like, well, you know, I just, I'm not, school's not really blah, blah, blah. And I said, the world doesn't need another three, one business degree.

• 13:04Alex Hormozi?

  Either crush school or don't go. If your goal is entrepreneurship. He's like, well, I want to be an entrepreneur. And so I apparently told him this that he remembers because he's he brings it up all the time. But I said, you are afraid of going all in on entrepreneurship because staying in college is safe from an approval perspective. So you're doing all these side things, but you don't have to bear the brunt of not failing because you're still in school. Yeah. It's like, so you need to get rid of that. Not all in. Exactly. And so he quit school. And then he started on the call floor of my of Gym Launch. Now, that's not glorious. And to be fair, to the point we're making earlier, I said, I can't get you the job. I won't give you it up. So I can get you an interview. I was like, it's gonna be up to sales manager. I'm not gonna tell them that I know you. He was like, okay.

• 13:48Alex Hormozi?

  I was like, you better be prepared. And so he did get the job. To be fair, the qualifications for frontline caller is not not super high. And the reason that I started him there was because I actually walked in on him one day when he was waiting for me to go work out. And I heard him on the phone trying to do one of these wholesaling, you know, real estate deals. And I said, you know, did you close the deal? And he said, ah, no. And he said, I'm not sure of real estate, you know, the wholesale things for me. And I said, well, have you heard you on the phone? And he was like, what do you mean? I was like, you sound horrible. And you can't sell anything. You don't have the skill. Of course. He said, well, how do I get good at sales? I was like, you work on a sales team with somebody who's been there before and can tell you what to do. And so I got him the interview. He took the job. He became the top salesman on the on the Really? Setting team. Wow.

• 14:33Alex Hormozi?

  And then he became, sorry, the outbound team. Then he went to the setting team, which is the second rung of salesmen. They qualify the leads. Then he became the top one there. And then he got to the top of the Christmas tree, which is closers. And he became the top closer. He learned skills. Out of 26 guys. Wow. Big team. And a lot of these are men, you know, have families, kids. Wow. And how much can you make as a top closer? Two fifty. Two fifty a year? Yeah. It's pretty good money. Yeah, it is good money. For a 21 year old, 22 year old? Yeah. Yeah. Nineteen at the time. Nineteen, making two fifty? Yeah. That's life changing. Of course. And he had to learn how to talk to men. Talking to gym owners. Four year old gym owners, telling them how you can help them with their business. Wow. Right? Takes balls. And so I I I bring that up to say is that when you were when you're starting out,

• 15:18Alex Hormozi?

  you need to focus on learning rather than earning. Now, he obviously earned, but it was because he quickly fast tracked his learning process. And so I think one of the biggest hacks in the world is getting paid to learn. Like right now, we have this big societal context of like you pay in order to learn. But what if there are a world where you could get paid to learn? Well, that is what working at a company is. If you're mindful of what career path you want to get into. Now, if you're like, I don't know what I want to do, then I would recommend starting with a meta-skill. So, sales is going to like, if you learn how to sell, it'll work in any company. If you learn how to market, it'll work in any company. I mean, to be fair, if you get into HR, a zillion businesses need HR stuff, if that's what you like. If you're like, I don't know what I like. Well, you also aren't going to like anything unless you start, because we usually only like things that we're good at.

• 16:03Alex Hormozi?

  And we usually aren't good at things that you start. Right? And so, the only way to get good at something is to do a lot of it. And when you start, you suck. And so, a lot of the time, there's this fallacy of finding the right thing or the perfect fit. But one, almost every entrepreneur that I know has had many, many, many businesses and mostly many failures before they had their success. It's because each one of them stair stepped. And so, there's this paralysis around like, I gotta pick the right thing. And it's really, you gotta pick something. And then you'll learn all the inadequacies that you have no idea about once you get into it. Like, I started a gym when I was 22 years old, like brick and mortar, signed a lease.

• 16:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you shouldn't have done that.

• 16:38Alex Hormozi?

  It was stupid. I had no idea what I was doing. But I did have, I did sign, I was, you know, kudos to younger me. I had a mentor early on who was in the gym world.

• 16:48Lewis Howes?

  That's great.

• 16:48Alex Hormozi?

  Right?

• 16:49Lewis Howes?

  So, you could get advice to learn from.

• 16:51Alex Hormozi?

  Yes, I mean, still, it was still incredibly hard. But I got, I was able to just get, you know, suck everything like a, you know.

• 16:59Alex Hormozi?

  Like a vacuum cleaner. To get all the information I needed to just barely keep my head above water until, and then things started to work out. Because I just, every weekend, I'd go and drive over to a gym owner and say, why do you do this? Why is your lobby like this? How many leads do you convert? How do you call it like whatever? And so, I just kept doing that every single weekend because I was such a young guy.

• 17:16Lewis Howes?

  Help this guy out.

• 17:17Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, of course, exactly. And I have a lot, I owe a lot to those older entrepreneurs who helped me out. And so, in some ways, a lot of what I do at acquisition.com is kind of my, my small way of paying it forward.

• 17:25Lewis Howes?

  And one of the cool things is when you're someone who's getting started and you're going out and humbly asking for advice, but you're taking the actions. Hey, I'm launching this thing. I'm taking the steps. I'm just trying to figure it out, but I'm taking the actions and I'm in the process. People usually want to give advice and support and say, hey, why don't you come check out and go out for lunch, whatever it is. But if you're just saying, I want to do this, but I'm not taking any action.

• 17:49Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Lewis Howes?

  People are less likely to help you. Maybe they'll help you a little bit, but they see you struggling and trying and like, leaping before you're ready. It's like, all right, cool, let's help you get it going.

• 17:59Alex Hormozi?

  I love the saying luck favors the prepared. So like if you, if you want to go ask, you know, Lewis to have you on or to get Lewis on your show. Right. Well, what do you do? You don't just ask Lewis. You show how much you've prepared. You say, hey, I went through 50 hours of your content. These are nine questions that have never been asked you before that I think will be really good. I've got two guys, two buddies of mine from college who are going to also video it. I've, I've got this church basement that I can get the lighting to look really cool. So we can make cinematic because to be real, I know I don't have the audience that you have, but I can help at least give you clips that will distribute and actually convert for you. And hopefully that's enough of a value add. Now Lewis might not say yes, but if you do that a hundred times, count in hundreds.

• 18:43Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 18:43Alex Hormozi?

  One Lewis will say yes.

• 18:45Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 18:45Alex Hormozi?

  And everyone loves to help people who help themselves always. Because the biggest fear that anyone who gives advice has is that someone takes the advice and does nothing.

• 18:54Lewis Howes?

  Exactly.

• 18:55Alex Hormozi?

  They didn't learn. They didn't change their behavior.

• 18:57Lewis Howes?

  That's true.

• 18:58Alex Hormozi?

  Right.

• 18:58Lewis Howes?

  It's a waste of the time.

• 18:59Alex Hormozi?

  So you don't feel like you're teaching. You only teach if they change their behavior. If they change their behavior, they learned. And so everyone, many people like being a teacher. I think a teaching role is nice. Most people feel good about it. But you only feel like you have a teaching role if you see a change.

• 19:12Lewis Howes?

  Someone takes action.

• 19:13Alex Hormozi?

  Right. And you can, you can hack the whole system. If you just show people that you'll take, take initiative.

• 19:17Lewis Howes?

  A hundred percent. If you take, I mean, that's what happened for me early on. I was just taking a lot of action and people were like, they wanted to add me in the room. They wanted me at the table because I was willing to take action, even though I was young and broke and struggling. They were like, hey, this guy's showing up. I would go to every conference that I could in kind of the social media blogging world early on. And somehow get to the late night dinners at 2:00 AM with all the speakers. And they'd be like, hey, why don't you come tag along, young guy, you know? You're bringing us a lot of joy at least, right? Even though you have no clue what you're doing, you can't offer anything else but joy. But you're asking me some interesting questions that people don't. So yeah, I'm happy to talk about myself for another 20 minutes.

• 19:53Alex Hormozi?

  Totally.

• 19:54Lewis Howes?

  And you get in the room, you get access and you take action, people will want to keep supporting you.

• 19:59Alex Hormozi?

  Totally.

• 20:00Lewis Howes?

  Cause you're applying their teachings and people like that.

• 20:03Alex Hormozi?

  Makes them feel important.

• 20:04Lewis Howes?

  It does. It validates, oh, I know something about my, you know, what I'm doing. And that's good. You want to keep helping this person grow. What do you think your 85 year old self? Needs to tell you now to get to where you want to be faster.

• 20:20Alex Hormozi?

  Oh, it's funny that that was the question. Um, I mean, he would tell me.

• 20:24Lewis Howes?

  Thinking of the mentors.

• 20:25Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, no, I mean, he would tell me, why do you want to go faster? Be like, why, why can't it take 10 times as long?

• 20:31Lewis Howes?

  Ah, from 200 to a billion?

• 20:33Alex Hormozi?

  Sure. Why not? Like, why?

• 20:35Lewis Howes?

  Why does it need to be five years or 10 years? Why can't it be 50 years?

• 20:38Alex Hormozi?

  Right. If you, if it took 50 years, but then it all happened at once at the end, would you like that?

• 20:45Alex Hormozi?

  I don't know. Right? It's, you know, it's kind of like the, the man who lives an amazing life and the last day everyone finds out he's a fraud. Or the man who lives his entire life with everyone thinking he's a fraud and then in the last day of his life, he's proven right. Which one do you rather be?

• 20:56Lewis Howes?

  If you're gone, you're not going to get the experience, the fruit of it all, but.

• 20:59Alex Hormozi?

  Interesting question, though.

• 21:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's like the painters that become famous once they're dead.

• 21:03Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. And so I, I think, I mean, 85 year old me, I'll tell you the recurring thing is that he works on with me. Patience is a big one. Uh, focus is a big one. Sticking with what I committed to.

• 21:16Alex Hormozi?

  Focusing on the controllables of like, what are the activities? What are the actions that I have to take? And being okay with potentially varied outcomes. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but being consistently divorced from the outcome. But trying my absolute damnedest to make sure that everything that is in my control was done to the utmost. And I like, I, we started there, but I just like, it's hard to understand the context. Like you hear this, you hear people say this, like, it's about the journey, it's not about the destination. And you hear people say like, you know, it's, it's, it's about, it's about doing the stuff. It's not about the outcome. And you're like, yeah, yeah, it's easy for you to say when you have the outcome.

• 21:53Lewis Howes?

  Right. When they've already made the money.

• 21:55Alex Hormozi?

  Of course, of course, I get it. But if you can, if you can make that flip, like, it's just, the hard part is the action is so much greater. If you really measured yourself by the actions you take, then you might be embarrassed. So you really hope to measure yourself on the outcome because you can get by on sometimes winning when you don't deserve it.

• 22:20Alex Hormozi?

  And so eighty five year old me never lets me win when I don't deserve it.

• 22:24Lewis Howes?

  Ooh, man, I would rather lose, but know I gave my all than win and be like, I just kind of just barely showed up today.

• 22:32Alex Hormozi?

  Right, you would know.

• 22:32Lewis Howes?

  I won, but it's because I had an inferior opponent. It's not because I played my best. It sucks to lose. To know, man, I was freaking gave everything, every ounce of my energy and every trick and skill that I had to play this game and win it. I came short, it's gonna sting, it's gonna hurt, but at least I know I don't regret the effort that I put in. And I can be, like, here's a great example. This still haunts me today.

• 22:59Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Lewis Howes?

  Two thousand two.

• 23:04Lewis Howes?

  It was October, so twenty one years ago, is that right? October two thousand two. Yeah, almost twenty, almost twenty one years ago, is that what it was?

• 23:10Alex Hormozi?

  Were you seven?

• 23:11Lewis Howes?

  Two thousand two. We're playing, um, I'm playing football at Principia College, small school in Illinois. And we, it's my sophomore year there.

• 23:23Lewis Howes?

  My freshman year, I went to another school, so I transferred into this school.

• 23:27Lewis Howes?

  We're playing and it's a tight, tight game at home, back and forth. Can't remember the final score, but we lose by a touchdown.

• 23:36Lewis Howes?

  I score

• 23:39Lewis Howes?

  three or four touchdowns. I think I got an extra point, I got a two point conversion and I had seventeen catches for four hundred eighteen yards. And we lost. In the last couple of plays, we didn't score to, to go and win. And I remember being the last one out of the locker room, I was in the shower, I was so upset that we lost.

• 24:01Lewis Howes?

  And my coach comes in, it's kind of an awkward moment, because I'm in the shower, you know, an exposed open shower, you know, I'm just like kind of pouting and like sad and depressed or whatever and just like in there, everyone's gone.

• 24:10Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Lewis Howes?

  I'm sad we lost the game and he kind of comes around the corner and says, hey, Louis.

• 24:18Lewis Howes?

  Good game. Um, just to let you know, you broke a world record today. And I go, what? And I go, what do you mean? And he goes, yeah, you had 17 catches from 418 yards. No one's ever done that in the history of a football game.

• 24:33Lewis Howes?

  You're a new NCAA all-record holder. And I go, I'm sad and depressed and angry because I didn't do more to help us win. And we lost.

• 24:43Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Lewis Howes?

  And at the same time, I hear that I did something that no one in the history of the world had ever done in the football game.

• 24:50Lewis Howes?

  And it was, it was tough because I felt like, man, we lost, but I gave it everything.

• 24:54Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Lewis Howes?

  But I was like, but could I still give it more? It's like, I don't know.

• 24:57Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Lewis Howes?

  But I feel like, you know, at least we didn't win. And I played to a lower level and didn't create that result.

• 25:04Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Lewis Howes?

  At least I created something that for me, I can be proud of, even if we lost. It still haunts me that we lost.

• 25:10Alex Hormozi?

  Interesting.

• 25:11Lewis Howes?

  But it's, but I know because we were behind, I had to give so much more than I was capable of. And if we were winning, I wouldn't have gotten that effort out of myself.

• 25:20Alex Hormozi?

  Uh.

• 25:21Lewis Howes?

  So it's an interesting dynamic.

• 25:23Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. It is because I would wonder if you had that same exact experience, but you didn't break the world record. Or no one ever told you, whatever.

• 25:30Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. Right.

• 25:30Alex Hormozi?

  If you would still, because you said that you had the sting of the loss. And I wonder if Lewis today would feel that way because if you, because you said like, I don't know if I could have given more. But I feel like on some levels, like at least for me, like sure, we can get into the hypotheticals of like, you can always give more.

• 25:46Lewis Howes?

  Of course, yeah.

• 25:47Alex Hormozi?

  But there are certain times from like, I know I could sprint after the guy. Uh, even though I'm probably not going to get, you know.

• 25:55Lewis Howes?

  But I could give it the last 20 yards.

• 25:56Alex Hormozi?

  Right. Exactly. And I think that this is where 85-year-old me is the one that he is ruthless. And I love this David Goggins saying, I don't know if it's a saying of his, I heard it in one of his videos. But he said, there's no shortcuts for you, Goggins.

• 26:13Alex Hormozi?

  And I just really love that. Like, he doesn't even look for them because he said, you don't get those. You don't get shortcuts. There are no corners to cut. And that, to me, is like the embodiment of that, of that 85-year-old self, because he knows if I could have sprinted or not. And so it's if I can appeal to that man's incredibly high standards, which is why, like, commit to the journey is not the easier path. I think it is the harder path because the standard is higher. And when you really do that, the winning does happen by default. But even, even saying that still makes winning the objective. Right? And you're just saying this is a different pathway of getting to winning, but winning still kind of matters.

• 26:55Lewis Howes?

  It does matter. I, I think it's a both. It's a, the journey matters and the outcomes matter.

• 27:01Alex Hormozi?

  The more, the more.

• 27:02Lewis Howes?

  Because the outcomes also give credibility.

• 27:04Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Lewis Howes?

  They give more context, they give more experience, they give more wisdom.

• 27:07Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Lewis Howes?

  To the teacher.

• 27:09Alex Hormozi?

  Oh, yeah. I, I.

• 27:10Lewis Howes?

  If you had no outcomes, but you said, look at all the efforts I put in though. But I put in 10,000 hours.

• 27:15Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Lewis Howes?

  But I haven't sold a company, I haven't built anything because.

• 27:19Alex Hormozi?

  This is really.

• 27:19Lewis Howes?

  It didn't work.

• 27:20Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Lewis Howes?

  You need a both and.

• 27:22Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, this is really interesting because on some, so I think from a, this is, I'm like really liking this. So from a, yeah, from a, from a fulfillment perspective.

• 27:33Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 27:34Alex Hormozi?

  I believe that truly giving your all, actually, not like try your best. That's just like, it's such a, it's repeated so many times that it's lost its meaning. But leaving everything on the field, having the tank on zero or empty when you walk off and truly knowing and looking at yourself and being like, I could not have done anything more. And it's tough to do that because we're naturally built to conserve effort. Right? And so you really have to push and overcome the internal mechanisms that you have that say, don't sprint the last 20 yards.

• 28:04Lewis Howes?

  Put a little more, yeah.

• 28:05Alex Hormozi?

  Right. And that's why, like, when, when I walked on stage for the, for the presentation, I was like, I have done this before. I am prepared. I could not have prepared more for this in any way that would have been reasonable. And so. To that degree, I can still define success that way. The outcomes will happen. And I think it's still that little thing where it's like, do this in order to, you have to cut off the in order to. I really genuinely believe that. Because I remember when I was in my retirement year, which is I still own the company, but we were in the process of selling. I had nothing to do. And it was an incredibly depressing year for me, which is why I've oriented my whole life around work, because I really enjoy it. And I remember getting really angry about this and thinking like, it's not you work

• 28:49Alex Hormozi?

  hard so that you can. It's like, the hard work is the point. Like, the point is how hard you learn to work. And that's the whole point where like, what has changed from last year to this year is like, my understanding of my capacity to work continues to grow. And so I am able to work harder and therefore am more proud of the effort that I put into it, because at least for me, I feel like I am, I know in the mirror, did I give it my all? And if, I try to play out, this is a stoic frame, but like, if I had had like a hurricane go through and we had not been able to launch, because all the energy would have been gone. Let's just say hypothetical. And we did all this prep. Fear virtual event. Yes.

• 29:32Alex Hormozi?

  Would I have been proud of the effort that I put in? The answer would have been yes. You'd simply be let down and disappointed that you didn't get to do the thing. Yes. But I think that it would have been short-lived. Because I think that is like, you asked, like, early on, what has been the biggest difference for you specifically? And this has been, whatever you even call it, super hour secret, secret whatever, like, this is what has been allowed me to keep my internal temperature separate from the external temperature to the greatest degree possible, is knowing that I'm using my internal thermometer to gauge my success. And I'm not perfect by any fault. Right, right, right. But the more I do that.

• 30:14Alex Hormozi?

  To use your example, if I had worked my absolute hardest for 10,000 hours, and I knew that I gave it my all and I had nothing to show for it. Now, I've actually had that instance because five years ago I lost it.

• 30:26Lewis Howes?

  Right. No external results to show for it.

• 30:27Alex Hormozi?

  So I do know what that's like. I think at the end of your life, you'd still be more proud of the man that did his everything,

• 30:36Alex Hormozi?

  gave it his all, left it all on the field, even if he didn't win. And I think that would be the man that I'd be more proud to be.

• 30:43Lewis Howes?

  I hear that and I'm also like, if I reflect back, if we lost every football game.

• 30:47Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Lewis Howes?

  I think winning matters also. You've got to have some wins. You know what I mean? You've got to have, if I'd have lost every game for four years, I'd probably have been like, this is not fun. Sure, I'm becoming a better athlete and I'm competing against great people, but just always losing would be a challenge.

• 31:04Alex Hormozi?

  Absolutely.

• 31:04Lewis Howes?

  Because you'd be like, this is not fun. It's fun to win. It's not fun to lose consistently.

• 31:09Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Lewis Howes?

  You learn more in your losses, probably. You learn more from the bigger breakdowns and the challenges you face than always winning.

• 31:17Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Lewis Howes?

  The difficulties, the challenges develop us. Having easy wins doesn't make us stronger and better. But I think having all losses

• 31:26Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Lewis Howes?

  may just say that, okay, maybe this is the wrong thing you're in. You should be in something else.

• 31:31Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Lewis Howes?

  Use this energy and effort and attitude towards a different thing, a different purpose, a different sport, a different mission, a different art, after a period of time.

• 31:41Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Lewis Howes?

  It's always so much losing you consistently.

• 31:43Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, I want, I mean, I could jam with this for.

• 31:45Lewis Howes?

  Because I think the confidence comes in the effort and the journey, but it also, you've got to back it with some external results, I think.

• 31:53Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Lewis Howes?

  Or some type of credibility somewhere.

• 31:57Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. It depends if, so the credibility is if you're trying to be an expert and a spout and give advice.

• 32:03Lewis Howes?

  But credibility to yourself. If you have no external results.

• 32:07Alex Hormozi?

  I still.

• 32:08Lewis Howes?

  If you were broke today.

• 32:09Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. Yeah, no one would listen to me. That's okay.

• 32:12Lewis Howes?

  But how would you feel about you? After 10 years.

• 32:15Alex Hormozi?

  Totally.

• 32:15Lewis Howes?

  15 years, I'm busting it up.

• 32:17Alex Hormozi?

  Dude, I did it for five years. I get it.

• 32:18Lewis Howes?

  Okay, but 10 years though.

• 32:20Alex Hormozi?

  50 years, right?

• 32:21Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 32:21Alex Hormozi?

  I think, but that's where I'm saying like, what has changed about me that has made me better, stronger, faster? Is because I genuinely believe that the more I can divorce that win, even when you say like, you know, you've got to win sometimes. It's like even that small statement still makes it king.

• 32:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, easy for you to say with a couple hundred million.

• 32:42Alex Hormozi?

  All the wins.

• 32:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, easy for you to say at this stage, like you said to others.

• 32:45Alex Hormozi?

  But I think that the reason that I'm going to go from a hundred to a billion and 10 billion and beyond is because I do genuinely, like I am working harder now than I worked to get here.

• 32:56Alex Hormozi?

  And it's because I've learned a better way to work. And so this is me sharing that better way to work. Now, to be fair, maybe I have certain skills that if I don't work as hard, I can still win. But I would still know. And so I think that if you can, like if the whole point of anyone who's listening to this is that you can open up another level of effort. I think that is the next level of effort because I,

• 33:21Alex Hormozi?

  if I had thought the way I think about business now and work now, I would have been here faster.

• 33:28Alex Hormozi?

  And that's me catering to the audience who wants to win. But I'm saying I would have become who I am faster. And I think that as a result, I would have evidence that would support that for every, for the court of public opinion. But for the court of Alex,

• 33:43Alex Hormozi?

  it's, it's just, it's, I, I know what it's like to, for me to give it my all. And it's the absolute proudest I am of myself. And there's nothing anyone can do to take that from me. And that's when I feel bulletproof and there's not many times I can do that. And so when I have realized how much work it takes to do something well, to gain the approval of my 85 year old self, I also realized hand in hand that there's only a few amount of things that I can do. Because I have to be dramatically more focused because the amount of work it takes to do something well is so much greater than I used to think that I can't do 20 things if I'm going to do it well. And so it goes back to like one of my favorite sayings, which is if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. And the thing is, is that most people focus on the back half. But I think it's focusing on the first, like most things aren't worth doing.

• 34:28Alex Hormozi?

  If it is worth doing, then it is worth doing.

• 34:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, cut out the things that aren't worth doing.

• 34:32Alex Hormozi?

  Right. So that you have all of the energy to actually give your all to something. And I would say this is that most things aren't that hard if you really try. It's that most people don't know how to try hard.

• 34:47Alex Hormozi?

  They just don't have, they don't have the skill to try hard. And so the, the number, I mean, you probably know the stat from the podcast world, right? Which is, uh, it's 90% of people only upload one podcast. Of the remaining 10%, 90% of them don't make it past 20 uploads. So to be in the top 1% of podcasters, you have to upload 20 podcasts.

• 35:15Lewis Howes?

  Right. It still may not be successful.

• 35:18Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Lewis Howes?

  You still may get downloads, but you're doing a lot better than the other 90%, 99%.

• 35:23Alex Hormozi?

  The price for excellence has never been so cheap.

• 35:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's showing up consistently.

• 35:29Alex Hormozi?

  Everyone is so soft now that to win, you just have to not be made of glass. And be willing to have someone tell you, I don't approve of your life. And you say, that's okay?

• 35:43Lewis Howes?

  Why do you think so many people are soft in our society today?

• 35:47Alex Hormozi?

  Well, I think we've put a lot of guardrails up that prevent people from getting hurt. And I think that ends up resulting in people who don't know what getting hurt feels like. And they feel like it's death, but it's not death. You know, I think that's just, I mean, at its absolute core, no one knows how to have hurt feelings. And I think people think their feelings matter a lot more now than they used to. Yeah. I don't think they matter that much.

• 36:12Lewis Howes?

  Why don't you? Why would you think people's feelings matter that much?

• 36:17Alex Hormozi?

  Why should their feelings matter? Why should my feelings matter? Like if I, if I hurt someone and I say, well, what makes me feel good? And why does that matter? You hurt somebody. So it's just looking at the actions. And that's, I mean, to be fair, I'm very extreme in that manner. But I think that if we can, for me, the more I can ignore my feelings and simply do the things that are required, the more I tend to see the results that I want. And one of my favorite internal sayings, like the things that you repeat yourself, I'm sure everybody has like a couple of things that like you say to you. Whenever I have something that I'm like, I want like the next rewrite of the book or hey, man, we got to reshoot that whole thing because the mic was off or you know, the

• 36:56Lewis Howes?

  The worst. The worst, man.

• 36:59Alex Hormozi?

  Is I have this, I have this refrain that's been trained faster and faster, which is I will do what is required. It's not what I want, it's not what I feel like, it's I will do what is required.

• 37:09Lewis Howes?

  It's unenjoyable.

• 37:10Alex Hormozi?

  I'll do what is required.

• 37:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:12Alex Hormozi?

  And that's it. And so like, there's not, there's not a question, there's not an if, it's just I will do what is required. And that has helped me a ton.

• 37:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. You try to learn from the pain or the challenge that occurred, so it doesn't happen again, but you gotta do what's required. I saw this clip recently of this podcast called the All In Podcast, which I saw the, I see these clips a lot online. I want to start actually listening to this whole show, but I think they go too long.

• 37:38Lewis Howes?

  But they have a lot of great insights. It's like these four like venture capitalists and they're all billionaires and they all like are puppet masters in their own world, right? And one of the clips was of a guy, I can't remember his name, but one of the guys who said he was spending a lot of time in Italy over the last month or a couple of months. And he was saying, you know, I really like spending time over here because my friends in Italy know how to relax, they know how to have great conversations, they know how to talk about life and art and

• 38:09Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 38:09Lewis Howes?

  magic and wonder and music and not just focus on more money because this guy's a billionaire, a multi billionaire. And he was like, there's more to life than just making lots of more money when you already have a lot of money. What do you think about a, a point like that or a conversation like that where it's like, you know,

• 38:29Lewis Howes?

  live in Europe and

• 38:31Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Lewis Howes?

  take three months and relax and travel and

• 38:35Alex Hormozi?

  I think there's an overarching assumption, which is that life should be a certain way. And I think that I would, I would reject that notion. And so it's like, we should, because implied in that statement, I think is we should be more like them. And whenever I see a should, I kind of don't really accept any should frames. It's like, why? Why should we? Because you prefer that, which is fine. You could say, I prefer to live the same. Why don't you guys go live that way? But to then say, everyone should live that way. Or, you know, then now you're casting your personal preference on everyone else. And I reject that wholeheartedly. So if you, if you want to, if you want to play video games all day and be the absolute best in the world at it, and you are the best in the world at it, and you get Twitch sponsorships and you have all that stuff and you learn to eat

• 39:19Alex Hormozi?

  because you're so good at it and you're so obsessed with it. Who am I to stop you from doing that? You're gonna die and I'm gonna die. And at the end of your life, would you rather just go, you know, be a foreman at a factory? That's not a disrespectful thing. I'm saying more so that if you love doing what you were doing, choose to not do what you love because you now are legitimate in the eyes of people who you don't care about.

• 39:40Alex Hormozi?

  Like, there was one rule for me is do you.

• 39:42Lewis Howes?

  Do you, yeah.

• 39:45Lewis Howes?

  I want to ask you about this. This book launch just happened and I know you did a vlog on this recently, which I want to dive in deeper. But can you give big context? Why this book? Why the launch style that you did? How many people showed up? How many people bought? And upsells, everything? And how did you get that result to happen? Not that we focus on results here, but the efforts, how did you get it all to come to fruition?

• 40:14Alex Hormozi?

  So my first book, $100 million Offers, was a book that answered one question, which is, what do I sell? And so now that has 17,000 five stars and, you know.

• 40:22Lewis Howes?

  Incredible, nice, great book.

• 40:23Alex Hormozi?

  Actually, it's still on Amazon charts, top 20 of all Amazon. And so is that one. So it's two of the 20. Yeah, alright.

• 40:28Lewis Howes?

  Not that we're calculating results or success here.

• 40:31Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, of course, of course. And I didn't even sell it on Amazon. I sold on Shopify. So all those sales didn't count. But anyways,

• 40:37Alex Hormozi?

  this book, the purpose of this book was to, once someone knows what they're gonna sell, they ask the next question, which is, who do I sell it to? You need leads, right? And so this book is about advertising. Now, I split test the title four times to figure out what people like. I tried marketing versus advertising. I tried advertising versus leads. I tried leads versus promotion. And leads won as the categorical leader for what to name the book. And so that's why I called it $100 million Leads. But advertising in and of itself is the process of making known. If no one knows about your stuff, no one can buy it.

• 41:07Lewis Howes?

  Say that one more time.

• 41:08Alex Hormozi?

  If no one knows about your stuff.

• 41:10Lewis Howes?

  Sorry, the first part. Advertising what?

• 41:11Alex Hormozi?

  Is the process of making known.

• 41:13Lewis Howes?

  Is making, advertising is the process of making known.

• 41:16Alex Hormozi?

  Period.

• 41:16Lewis Howes?

  If no one knows about your stuff.

• 41:18Alex Hormozi?

  No one buys it. Right. And so what happens is most people have an offer and no one knows about it. And so you have to make it known. You have to advertise it. And so this book, so the first book all hinged on something called the value equation, which is people talk about, hey, provide value, provide value. But how do you mechanize that? How do you operationalize value? And so it was actually solving a problem that people want, increasing the likely that they think it's going to happen. In other words, decreasing the risk that when they buy, they're not going to get the thing that they want, decreasing the time it takes them to get whatever the outcome is, and decreasing the effort and sacrifice that's associated, the work that they have to do in order to get the outcome. So there's the four variables. You decrease the last two, you increase the first two, and you have a more valuable thing,

• 41:59Alex Hormozi?

  which we covered in a different, in a different video, so you can watch that one. With $100 million leads, I talk about the advertising cycle. And so there's eight pieces to this. So it has a little bit more pieces to it, but I think it's simpler to understand in some ways. So the first four is a core four. It's the only four ways any person can let other people know about their stuff. Advertise. And so it's just a four box. There's one-on-one and one-to-many. And you've got people who know you and people who don't. So if you're letting people who know you one-on-one, you're doing warm outreach. You reach out to your friends and say, hey, come to my book event. If you're letting people know one-on-one who don't know you, that's cold outreach. That's reaching out to strangers. If you're letting people know one-to-many to people who know you, that's posting content. And if you're letting people one-to-many know who don't know you,

• 42:44Alex Hormozi?

  that's running ads. So there's the only four things that you can do to let other people know about your stuff. Now, the natural question is, are there other things that you can do? The answer is yes and no. No, in that you can't do anything else. But yes, there are other people who can let people know about your stuff.

• 42:58Lewis Howes?

  Referrals and yeah.

• 42:58Alex Hormozi?

  Right. And so there's four, which I call the lead getters. So you've got customers who can send you referrals. Now, in order for them to send you referrals, they use the core four. They either reach out to friends, they post content. They do the same four things, because they're the only four ways a person can let other people know about stuff. The second is you've got employees, right? Like, so when I was making content for the book, I didn't actually make the content. My team made the content and then they posted it on my behalf. And so I got leverage on the amount of content I committed out because I had other people help me. From the paid ads, sorry, from the lead geter number three is agencies. So you can pay agencies to help you make content, you can pay agencies to help you run ads. And for me, for this book launch, I had agencies run the actual ads for the book.

• 43:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 43:37Alex Hormozi?

  Because we're a holding company, we don't actually transact, so it made sense to contract that out. But my team made the ads, their team ran the ads, but it was still leverage. And then finally, we had affiliates. So that's another business who refers you business. And just to find for the audience.

• 43:52Lewis Howes?

  And they get a commission?

• 43:52Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. They get paid in money, free stuff, or both?

• 43:55Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 43:56Alex Hormozi?

  And so we had 27,000 affiliates.

• 44:00Lewis Howes?

  27,000?

• 44:01Alex Hormozi?

  And we had 104,000 people we attended from affiliates. We had 137,000 people. 137,000 people came in from paid ads. We had just probably just like 210,000 people came in from content.

• 44:11Lewis Howes?

  Organic.

• 44:12Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. And then the outreach. And then I would say that employees kind of factored into into that piece, right? And so I used all eight methods in the book to advertise the book itself. So I could have just made a, I could have just emailed my list and just, you know, done a presentation or just released it. And I probably would have sold a lot of copies. But I wanted to use everything in the book to advertise the book, to demonstrate that everything, proof that everything that I do here works and that it'll work for them too, if they just follow the steps in the book. Because I purposely followed the scripts that I have in the book for making ads. I followed the scripts that we had for making content throughout the whole thing so that people could look back at my ads, they could look back at the content that I made and be like, he followed this to a T and resulted in a, you know, world record breaking event.

• 44:57Lewis Howes?

  And so how much did you spend on the ads to get the leads?

• 45:00Alex Hormozi?

  Two seventy-five.

• 45:01Lewis Howes?

  Two seventy-five?

• 45:02Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. Which is not for anybody's, that sounds like a lot of money, but for the context of how big of an event this is, it's nothing.

• 45:07Lewis Howes?

  And then how much did you pay out affiliates, which is another form of advertising? How much does that pay out, I guess?

• 45:13Alex Hormozi?

  Zero.

• 45:14Lewis Howes?

  Zero? They got free stuff? How many people? 20,000?

• 45:18Alex Hormozi?

  27,000 affiliates.

• 45:20Lewis Howes?

  They didn't get any commissions?

• 45:21Alex Hormozi?

  Correct.

• 45:22Lewis Howes?

  On nothing? Really? Why did they promote it then? What was the leverage or the the value add for them?

• 45:29Alex Hormozi?

  Thing is goodwill. Wow. And they also knew that the last book was good. And I'll, I'll give you the, the, the tactical piece of this is that most people require money to advertise to their audience because it's extracting goodwill to a degree. Yeah. And so what I made, rather than saying, hey, the top 10 affiliates get Lamborghini's, which only benefits the affiliate, not their audience. I said, the top 10 affiliates, I'll do a live Q and A with your entire audience. Wow. And so it benefits the audience to have the person who's promoting it win. And it doesn't extract any goodwill. In fact, it builds goodwill because he's like, hey, I've got this amazing event. Yeah. This book, I, I know Alex, I've been following this stuff forever. It'll help you out. So go do this thing.

• 46:12Alex Hormozi?

  And if we're in the top 10, we'll also get, you know, time with Alex and we can answer his, you know, answer questions and do this stuff. So we can apply to us. So like, it's a win-win for everyone. And so trying to find like, in my opinion, I talk about this in the book, like the best way to use affiliates is to find a win-win-win, which is it wins for me, it wins for them, and it wins for their customers. Interesting. And usually it's only two wins and one loss. And that's how most people do affiliates is why they have to pay an arm and a leg in order to get them. Now, a lot of times also they haven't built trust or goodwill with an audience before making an ask. So I spent two years doing hopefully nothing but providing value. And everyone expected the launch event itself to be probably a pitch of some sort. And I tried to sprinkle that in because I wanted to build up the anticipation and the tension for the event.

• 46:54Alex Hormozi?

  But, you know, upon the events, we had five, so the official count was we had 542,000 people who, uh, who registered for the event. We had 188,000 click to join live with us. And it was, uh, it was wild, right? How many book sales in that first day, do you know? We sold a hundred thousand in like 10 minutes or something. Yeah. Yeah. That's insane, dude. It's incredible. And that was with no large bundles. Wow. So that wasn't like buy a hundred, get this. It was like one, two or three, maybe. Three was the largest one that was incentivized. Wow. Yeah. So I just said, if you buy three, you get a hat. And the main reason that I did that was because, um, the whole mission of acquisition.com is to make real business education accessible to everyone. And so it's like, if you share my book with two friends, you've earned this hat. And so this can't be bought.

• 47:38Alex Hormozi?

  Only earned. And so you earn it by giving it. And we had 50% of people who chose to.

• 47:44Lewis Howes?

  Get three. That's incredible, man.

• 47:46Alex Hormozi?

  And so.

• 47:46Lewis Howes?

  Was there an upsell after that? Or how's the?

• 47:49Alex Hormozi?

  How was it?

• 47:49Lewis Howes?

  How was it? Wow.

• 47:50Alex Hormozi?

  The, I mean, if I, if I had wanted to make money.

• 47:52Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 47:53Alex Hormozi?

  It would have been, I would have been a very, it would have been a very different, you know, I would have, I would have structured things very differently. But the objective of the event was to demonstrate that the concepts of this book work. And the objective of my last book was to show that making an amazing offer can grow the sales on its own. So that one I did zero advertising for and it sold 500,000 copies.

• 48:11Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 48:11Alex Hormozi?

  None. No paid ads, no event. I had 10,000 followers on Instagram when I posted that. It was before Alex Ramosi became Alex Ramosi. It was literally an internal SOP that Leila encouraged me to post as a book. So I said, fine. And I added stories in it to make it interesting for my team. Cause I was like, if they don't read it, it's not, not going to matter. So I added stories in it. And then I posted it as a book and then, and it just continues to sell more month over month. And so that is the hope, you know, obviously with this book too, is that you make the product so exceptional that you get that, that, that lead getter bucket of customer telling other customers and affiliates telling other people. And I think that the goal was if I, if I asked people to promote something and I say that it's going to be worth it, that I have to absolutely deliver on that. So that next year or two years from now, if I say, hey, we promote my next book, they'll do it. Now, if I had gone and, and sold

• 48:57Alex Hormozi?

  whatever, some, you know, coaching thing or something like that, right? That would have been the last time they would have promoted me. Cause I would have been.

• 49:03Lewis Howes?

  For free.

• 49:04Alex Hormozi?

  Right. Yeah. I would have been siphoning their audience or whatever.

• 49:08Alex Hormozi?

  But I wanted to just install even more goodwill at scale by doing something that hopefully would be memorable that no one else would do. And so I made a huge pitching presentation to stack all the value that I gave, you know, with this book. And I pricing it at $12,000. Then I started.

• 49:27Lewis Howes?

  Started dropping.

• 49:28Alex Hormozi?

  Dropping down. And, and then I was like, it's free. And then everyone, you know, it became a much more memorable event. And then.

• 49:36Lewis Howes?

  The book was free or was very?

• 49:38Alex Hormozi?

  It was free too. The book's free too. So the course is free, the book's free on my podcast. So on the game I have, I actually also made my offers book free as well. Um, just because people are like Alex makes his money on the $2 that the book costs. So I just, just to dispel the myths, uh, offers and $100 million leads are both on my podcast in sequence. You can just listen to them straight through. But if you want it all together in a physical book, you gotta pay for it. If you want to pay for, yeah, I mean, if you, physical books cost money to print and ship. So Right, right. But it was, you can have everything. For free on your podcast. Right. And we have to just. And the course is on my site with no opt-in. You don't even have to opt in for it. You can just have it. And so what I will say this, this, you might find this interesting is that it's always the scariest thing in terms of give, like giving is always scary. No matter how, how much you have, whatever it is,

• 50:23Alex Hormozi?

  like if you work really hard on something, there's a part of you that wants to monetize it, right? It's just, it's innate to us, right? You want to get something back. And so that's why it's so hard to delay gratification for such a long period of time. But it's also what will make you stand out in a marketplace of takers. And so, um, that was what I, I have consistently, I mean, I've preached this message of just give, give, give, and you will be able to grow faster than you can imagine. And the event was probably the largest demonstration of that that I could do. And what has now happened since then is, you know, we're number one in business on Spotify. We're, you know, we're 19 in all podcasts. Um, from doing that, we get a, you know, 150,000 unique views a day on my site. Wow. Because the course is free. That's huge.

• 51:08Alex Hormozi?

  And so people share it. And that's the thing. And people share the podcast because they got value from it. And they know that they, you know, it's a $20 book, I think on Audible, Audible picks the prices for that. But like, it's, but because there's intrinsic value, people will share it. And I think it's, that's the thing is people give away free fluff that sucks because they will spend no time on it. And then people consume it, realize it's junk, and then associate that junk with the person. And then say, you have a junk brand because I've associated you with the one thing that I've consumed from you. And so despite the fact that, uh, your customer is only going to be 1% of the people that you ever advertise to or less, your reputation is made by the 99. Wow. And so if you want to control the reputation that you have, then you need to give away more stuff. And in a world where trust is going to continually decrease and the amount of information and content

• 51:53Alex Hormozi?

  is going to only increase with AI and things like that, uh, I believe that personal brands and trust and authority are going to be increasingly important. I think that more companies will have celebrity partners, uh, in order to gain trust because cost to acquire customers on paid ads has gone up 100% in a very short period of time. When you have, when you have CAC, so cost of our customer increasing at that rate, you have to have something that is going to counteract that. And that's what brand is. And so brand has never been more important than it is today, and I think will only increase in importance. And so this was a brand play.

• 52:24Lewis Howes?

  That's incredible.

• 52:24Alex Hormozi?

  And so, yeah, we still, you know, we sold 190,000 copies so far.

• 52:27Lewis Howes?

  Oh, the first, what, week and a half, two weeks?

• 52:29Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, 10 days or 11 days, whatever.

• 52:31Lewis Howes?

  Wow, man. 190,000, that's crazy, man.

• 52:33Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, with no, with no thousand pack bundles.

• 52:36Lewis Howes?

  It's amazing. It's inspiring. What are the, um, what are the, how many pieces of content do you put out a day on all social media platforms right now?

• 52:45Alex Hormozi?

  We put 300 a week out.

• 52:46Lewis Howes?

  300 a week?

• 52:47Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 52:48Lewis Howes?

  And if you could go back to two years ago, when you only had 10,000 followers,

• 52:54Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 52:54Lewis Howes?

  to now you have 5 million on all platforms in two years, what would you say to your younger self, two years younger, about the path to getting here?

• 53:05Alex Hormozi?

  The honest truth, I wouldn't say anything because I wouldn't want to mess anything up.

• 53:08Lewis Howes?

  No, no.

• 53:09Alex Hormozi?

  It's like, that's the, the real real.

• 53:11Lewis Howes?

  Do you think you can get there by posting less?

• 53:14Alex Hormozi?

  Uh, no, I think the volume, the volume is, you know, quantity creates quality. Like you learn, you learn how to do things better by doing more of it. And so I've, I've wholeheartedly embraced that, that perspective when it comes to making content. Um, but I do believe that it's not just like, because there are people who will post every single day and they get zero engagement, et cetera. You know,

• 53:34Lewis Howes?

  You're not learning from it.

• 53:35Alex Hormozi?

  Right. You need feedback. You still need feedback. You need to take the feedback from the market. And ideally you can also have feedback from people who know more than you. And so you use those two feedback mechanisms and the faster you can make that feedback loop, the faster you'll learn and change your behavior and get better. And so you want to do tons of volume with tons of feedback because the, like, quality is better than quantity. But you only get quality through quantity. And the only thing better than that is quantity with quality.

• 54:01Lewis Howes?

  Correct. Then you really start to grow.

• 54:02Alex Hormozi?

  And then you, then you get, you get wild, um, in terms of all the different platform distribution. Yeah, it's been a, it's been a super fun ride. I'm very proud of the book.

• 54:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's great, man.

• 54:12Alex Hormozi?

  I know that there's nothing else that I could have done to make the book better at my current level, maybe in two years.

• 54:16Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 54:17Alex Hormozi?

  Um, I might have been able to. I wrote it. I did nineteen drafts. I had four, four rewrites.

• 54:23Alex Hormozi?

  I did six hours a day for two years.

• 54:25Lewis Howes?

  That's great.

• 54:26Alex Hormozi?

  So I worked from, I worked from six to noon, uh, every day.

• 54:29Lewis Howes?

  On the book.

• 54:30Alex Hormozi?

  On the book.

• 54:30Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Unless you were here doing an interview with me.

• 54:32Alex Hormozi?

  Of course. And then the afternoons, my afternoon is when I do my meetings and take calls and, and do the remainder of my actual job.

• 54:39Lewis Howes?

  Right. The only thing that I would add to this conversation right here, I'm sure there's a lot more, but the thing's popping out for me is people could hear that and say, okay, you could keep working on this for another two more years until it's perfect. Cause you said, I like what you said, is you put it out at the current level that you're at. You couldn't have done anything else to where you're at right now. Maybe in two to four years, you would have been like, ah, I could have changed this a little bit. I think a lot of people get hung up on that. They wait, wait, wait, wait. It's not ready yet.

• 55:06Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Lewis Howes?

  And this isn't ready for yourself ten years from now, right? It's, it's not as good as it could be in ten years writing it.

• 55:14Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 55:15Lewis Howes?

  But it is as good as where it is right now.

• 55:17Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 55:17Lewis Howes?

  For your current self. And I think people need to learn how to also ship quality with, with what they can do it now.

• 55:23Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah.

• 55:24Lewis Howes?

  And not just wait forever.

• 55:25Alex Hormozi?

  I think a lot of people, uh, hide under the guise of perfectionism when it's really just laziness and fear. So the reality is they're like, it's not ready yet, but they're working on it three hours a week.

• 55:36Lewis Howes?

  They're not going all in and obsessing about it.

• 55:38Alex Hormozi?

  So I mean, like, I, I think the whole, like, it's, it's tension between two extremes, right? You've got the MVP, which means minimum viable product. Ship it as fast as you can. If you are proud of your first product, it sucks, right? And on the other hand, you have, uh, you know, Apple that ships new products every like three years. Or, you know, and they, they really only have four products. They've built a three trillion dollar company. So where, you know, where on this continuum do you lie? And I think it's, it's learning the rights, it's honestly probably matching your personality to the work that you do, but regardless, work has to be done. And so. I can say this, it's like if you work on something for six hours a day, every single day, and you truly work on it. When I say work, I mean like you set a timer. And when the time, when you step away or you look at your phone, you stop the timer.

• 56:22Alex Hormozi?

  When you six hours of actual work on something every single day, you will know the things that you could do to make it better. And if you do all of those things, and the difference is, is being very clear on the problem definition. So that's, okay, so this might round out this whole conversation. If you're really clear about the problem that the product, if you're, if we're talking about making product, is supposed to solve. And so I could then, of course, write a whole book on sales and I could write a whole book on, you know, monetization, I could like, so then, then the scope would then change. So you have to be ruthless with the problem definition of the scope of whatever thing that you're trying to solve is. But then within that very narrow line, is this everything I can do in this tiny little sliver?

• 57:05Alex Hormozi?

  If it's everything that I can do, then you can chip it. And so I think that's the, that like, you're not going to create the everything solution. You're not going to create HubSpot CRM when you're a coder in your basement. But you can probably create an autoresponder that works exceptionally well.

• 57:18Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:20Alex Hormozi?

  And so do that. Just do that. Don't add the other dude. Just make, one of my favorite stories about product iteration was Dragon Dictation. Do you know Dragon way back in the day?

• 57:28Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 57:28Alex Hormozi?

  Nineties.

• 57:29Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 57:30Alex Hormozi?

  And so you got it, you got a headset and you would talk and it would type. And this was like a CD, the whole thing.

• 57:36Lewis Howes?

  I remember this now.

• 57:37Alex Hormozi?

  And they got lauded, praised by like Tech Magazine or Crunch or whatever it is, for Dragon 2.0. And in Dragon 2.0, they literally added zero new features. They just made it work better. And I think that is like the spirit of true product innovation is that a lot of people think they need more bells and whistles. But if you just fulfilled the first promise that you made and really did it and did it better, then you can make 10 times more money by doing something twice as well. Because it's just how much better, like if I said,

• 58:08Lewis Howes?

  More efficient, yeah.

• 58:09Alex Hormozi?

  If I can, if I said, I can get you customers, I don't need to also hire your staff. If I can just do that.

• 58:16Alex Hormozi?

  I fulfilled my promise and this book specifically only sits between somebody who doesn't know you exist and someone says they're interested in what you have to sell. That's it. As soon as someone says, I would like to find out more, that book is done. Everything that that 280 pages is to get you from, I don't know who you are, to I'm interested to buy, to find out more. I would, I would like to consider buying your stuff, which is why the sub-headline is how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff, not to get them to buy your stuff. To buy your stuff is sales.

• 58:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. And that's the third book. Stay tuned for that. They can get the book for free on your podcast. You got a course on your site, acquisitions.com, acquisition.com. They can follow you everywhere, Hormozie.

• 58:55Alex Hormozi?

  If you love hard copies, you can go to shop at acquisition.com and grab a hard copy.

• 58:58Lewis Howes?

  I would get this. Get a few copies for sure.

• 59:01Alex Hormozi?

  It's pretty, right?

• 59:01Lewis Howes?

  It's on, where can they get the hard copy? It's on Amazon too.

• 59:05Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, it's on, yeah. The, I think, I think paperbacks are, but hardback, if you like hardbacks, I have them, I have shop dot acquisition.com.

• 59:11Lewis Howes?

  Shop dot acquisition.com. I'm sure if you just go to the site.

• 59:14Alex Hormozi?

  Where I make all my money.

• 59:15Lewis Howes?

  All your $2.99 in books. Exactly. If people are business owners that are looking to be a part of your portfolio, I'm sure they can go to acquisition.com and they can learn more and apply and see what's going on there.

• 59:29Alex Hormozi?

  And business owners, it's just for, for absolute clarity. It's really like if you're doing 2 million or more in profit. And we have actually narrowed our focus a little bit more to brick and mortar chains. So we've just, we've just thrashed all the brick and mortar chains that we have invested in. And so we are smart. We are at least.

• 59:44Lewis Howes?

  It's also what you know best of. You did brick and mortar.

• 59:46Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. I mean,

• 59:47Lewis Howes?

  So you're speaking into it. You did gyms.

• 59:49Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. Photography studios, teeth whitening. We've like, like if you have like a, if you have like a health or a beauty, I call them like body services, anything.

• 59:58Lewis Howes?

  Tanny salon.

• 59:59Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah, exactly. Tattoo removal, laser skin, hair removal, that kind of stuff. Like that is our, that is our jam.

• 1:00:08Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 1:00:09Alex Hormozi?

  Yeah. That is our jam.

• 1:00:10Lewis Howes?

  They'll reach out to you. They can message you. They can go on acquisition.com. Get a few copies of the book. I think this is really inspiring. I love this stuff. You know, I've been. Doing a lot of this for the last 10, 15 years on myself and I went through this and I was like, "Oh, there's actually some stuff that I can really start to apply even better." Even though I've, you know, mastered to a certain level, there's so many different things that I was pulling out from. And I was like, "Okay, cool. I can steal like an artist here, here, here, here."

• 1:00:36Alex Hormozi?

  Control X.

• 1:00:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I was like, "This is really smart." Yeah, so it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or if you're, you know, got a big business, you're going to learn something from this and make sure to get a few copies. Give them to friends. I can't wait for the next one. I can't wait to have you back on in the, in the future soon. Grateful for you, Alex. Thank you for being here. Is there anything else you want to add before we wrap up?

• 1:00:56Alex Hormozi?

  You guys are savages. I appreciate you all and, uh, man, I was about to curse.

• 1:01:01Lewis Howes?

  Can I curse on this show? We bleep it out, but you can.

• 1:01:03Alex Hormozi?

  Okay. Anyone who tells you otherwise, do you?

• 1:01:07Lewis Howes?

  I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend. Leave us a review over on Apple Podcast and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels, at Lewis Howes. I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better. And if you want more inspiration from our world-class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life,

• 1:01:48Lewis Howes?

  then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com/newsletter. And if no one has told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.