Choosing Your Own Path in The Game | Ep 704

This episode focuses on overcoming personal and external challenges to succeed in business and personal endeavors.

1. Success should be defined on your own terms, not by societal standards.
2. Overcoming fear of judgment is crucial for personal growth.
3. Past traumas and failures should not dictate future actions.
4. It's essential to continuously redefine personal narratives to foster growth.
5. True success comes from authenticity and aligning actions with personal values.

1: Introduction

Hormozi opens with a discussion on why people cling to problems and excuses, using them as a crutch to avoid success. Alex Hormozi: "People want to have problems because it gives them a reason to suck and it be okay."

2: Redefining Success

The host talks about setting personal benchmarks for success and ignoring societal pressures. Alex Hormozi: "I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with acquisition.com."

3: The Impact of Others' Opinions

Exploration of how external opinions can hinder personal growth. Alex Hormozi: "They don't want the best version of you."

4: Psychological Barriers to Success

Discussion on overcoming mental barriers and redefining one's narrative. Alex Hormozi: "The best thing that I ever did was not listen to other people's opinions about my life."

5: Concluding Thoughts

Hormozi concludes with advice on embracing one's journey and focusing on personal growth over external validation. Alex Hormozi: "The time to document your life is when it sucks, not when it's great."

1. Define Your Own Success: Craft your own metrics for what success means to you, rather than following conventional standards.
2. Dismiss External Judgments: Focus on your personal journey without weighing others' opinions too heavily.
3. Utilize Past Experiences: Use past failures as stepping stones rather than obstacles.
4. Embrace Authenticity: Align your actions with your values, ensuring they reflect your true self.
5. Document Your Journey: Keep a record of your struggles and successes as both a reminder and a motivator.

“It'll be more inspiring to other people is a much more powerful frame The more disadvantages you have when you start the more epic story you have when you win.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) explores the mindset barriers to personal and professional growth, emphasizing the transformation of past traumas and unrealized potential into success stories. He shares compelling insights into overcoming adversity, advocating for proactive change, and the power of personal narratives in building a billion-dollar business.

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 on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.

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Alex Hormozi
People wanna have problems because it gives them a reason to suck and it be okay. It gives them ego padding so they can protect themselves for the reason why they're not successful, for the reason they haven't accomplished what they said they were gonna accomplish. And so they lean on their potential, comma and their trauma as the two reasons that people prop up. I've got lots of potential, but I have all this trauma, and neither of those matter.

Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning. I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with acquisition.com. I always wish bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey, so I'm doing. It for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy.

If you have your menu option of things that you can do in life, just remove quitting as one of them and then try your next idea. And if you are in that rocky cutscene and you're two months in, three months in, remember that the rocky cutscene in the movie lasts a couple seconds, and the rocky cutscene in real life might last a few years. And so whenever I get to a low point where I think, why do I even bother doing this? I just like to remind myself this is where most people stop, and this is why they don't win. And as hard as this is going to sound, the best thing that I ever did was not listen to other people's opinions about my life.

They don't want the best version of you. They want the version of you who best serves them. And unfortunately, the closer people are to you, the more similarly they'll see themselves and you, and the more your success will make them feel bad about themselves. And I can promise you this from somebody who might be a little further. I have more people who root for me now that I've already won than people who rooted for me along the way.

No one is doing as well as you think they're doing. So by comparison, everyone is better off than they think because the cumulative median, visually is probably three times higher than what the actual median is. And so if you're like, oh, I'm average, or slightly below average compared to the perceived median of society, you're probably way above average. And that's okay. And being above or below average doesn't even matter anyways because you've got a lot of innings left.

There's a lot of quarters left to play. And so, like, until the day you die, you still have hope, you still have a chance. You can still keep moving forward. Whenever someone gives you their opinion about what you should do with your life, it's really them saying, this is my preference of how I want to live my life. And I say, great, live your life that way, and I'll live my life this way because me living my life has no effect on you.

So live your life the way you want to live it, and I don't want your life either. They make those statements because they feel uncomfortable, and so they have to, like, release it. And so they say that to you to make themselves feel better, and that's their problem, not yours. I think I've learned a lot of frames around not caring about other people's opinions out of necessity, because I was so crippled by the opinions of other people for what felt like such a long time that I always had to face my death in order to get myself to move. And so I talk about death a lot because it has actually been one of the few things that actually motivates me to change my behavior.

And so when I had done all the things that I thought would impress other people, one, I realized that they didn't really care. And secondly, I realized that I deeply cared about how much I hated my life when I was like, is this what winning feels like? Because if this is what winning is, then I don't want to play by thinking I'd rather be dead, then continue to play this game. I was forced to change the game I was playing, which is like, well, what is a game that I would like to win at? Well, I'd like to win a game that is by rules that I set out, and there are things that I can control.

And then those people, because you break their mold of what they're supposed to be doing. And they might be miserable, too, but they are not willing to take the risk that you're willing to take because they care about other people's opinions more than you do, because they haven't gone through that little journey that you just went through. Fine. You do it your way, they do it their way. I mean, I went from prodigal son, my father, super proud of me, graduating Vanderbilt in three years, president of fraternity, vice president of the powerlifting team, management consultant to minimum wage employee.

Thats a pretty significant drop in status. I have these frames because people will say whatever they want. But for me, that relative drop in status was a lot. I went from about as high status as you can get as a 22 year old to about as low status as you can get. I mean, I remember having people be like, so did you go to college?

And I was like, yeah, I went to college and I fucking murdered it. And I did everything. Because the implied question is, why are you here? And so that's what in the beginning, hurt a ton. But then I just realized that they just didn't know and they were asking genuinely.

And all of my judgment around that was just my own problem. How I'm perceiving this question is affecting my mood to such a great degree. What if I applied this to every question? All these people are asking me things and I'm either getting offended or getting complimented. But the statement doesn't change.

So that sounds like a me problem. And so the more I started diving into things like that, the less bothered I became by everyone else's opinion. Because they also have no context, even if they did mean it as an insult. So what if they're saying, well, I'm better than you. I'd be like, yes, you are.

A lot of even really successful people frame their success around trying to prove someone wrong, right? But when you try and create your entire existence in opposition to someone, you actually give them complete control over your life. It means that because of the things that this person has said, I will choose to change all of my behavior. Which basically means that the directives from that person have commanded you to do whatever you do. And if you like to be a free person and want to be somebody who acts of their own volition, then I choose to accept insults so that I can live my life rather than living in contrast to them and giving my control to the person who insulted me.

That would mean I put me changing your mind above my goals, which I don't know. My goals are more important to me than changing your mind. I'm super sensitive to. I am statements, labeling statements like this. Like, I am a neat freak.

I'm the type of person who. So whenever you're dating someone, you're getting to know someone. People like to blanket. I am statements really early on to set the stage like, I'm this type. I'm the type of person who likes to show up early.

I like to clean things, I'm a labeler, I'm a whatever. And then, and this is the insidious part, they then say because. And then they insert a reason that they made up or that sounded good in the past and people nodded their heads and agreed with because my mom never loved me enough, because I didn't get enough hugs. Because I gave a speech once and everyone laughed at me. Because you don't know.

And the reality is you will never know. All we know is that you do a certain type of behavior. That's it. By giving these, because statements all this power, you actually put all the power into something that is unchangeable in the past, and so you have to keep dealing with it. Whereas if you just said, I do these things, period.

Now, if I want to change what I do, then I should just reward myself in the present for doing something different. And that makes it a lot more malleable. And it makes your identity and what you do as a result, or rather, what you do and your identity as a result, something under your control. Hey, guys, love that you're listening to the podcast. If you ever want to have the.

Video version of this, which usually has more effects, more visuals, more graphs, you know, drawn out stuff, sometimes it can help hit the brain centers in different ways. You can check out my YouTube channel. It's absolutely free. Go check that out if that's what you are into. And if not, keep enjoying the show.

You don't want to blame the things in the past that you can't change. You want to blame things in the present that you can. So if you said, I have trouble getting close to girls because my mom and I aren't close. One, you give your mother all the power in your love life. You give power to something that happened in the past that you can't change, to things that are happening in the present that you can change.

And so would it be more useful to say, in the past, I have struggled to get close to girls, period. Now, that could be for a number of reasons. Thing is that you don't know what reason it is. Because I could say, let's say, imagine all these things happen. You struggled with your mom.

Let's say you had a bad breakup. At some point in your life, you're not in shape. I could say I struggle getting close to girls, and I could use any of those three as my reasons. But which of those serve me? None of them.

All we know is that you struggle to get close to girls. Okay, well, then just look at what it would take to get close to girls and then do that rather than having this other thing that's attached to the behavior that you can't do anything about. It just makes changing who you are and what you do a lot easier. Sometimes people are such douchebags, they will tell a young child, you will never have a successful relationship with a woman because you don't respect or love me, a mother. Or the reverse could be true of a father.

They're a fucking douchebag for saying that because they are labeling you with something that you can't change. But that's their problem. It also is no basis in fact. When people are like, look at how the son treats the mother. That's how he's going to treat his wife.

Why the fuck would I treat my wife like I treat my mother? Dear God, that's just a statement that sounds good, but has no basis in fact. You treat your wife like you treat your wife, you treat your mother like you treat your mother. There are different people. People want to have problems because it gives them a reason to suck and it be okay.

It gives them ego padding so they can protect themselves for the reason why they're not successful, for the reason they haven't accomplished what they said they were going to accomplish. And so they lean on their potential comma and their trauma as the two reasons that people prop up. I've got lots of potential, but I have all this trauma, and neither of those matter. I've gone through three stages of, like, mental development in terms of how I see changing my behavior. In the beginning, I attributed my behavior to my past traumas.

The second phase was that I chose to change the story. What if my mother was just trying to feel better and it wasn't my fault? So then I changed my behavior in that sense. The third phase, which is where I'm at now, maybe there'll be a fourth phase, but the third phase was I behave this way, period. The because statement in the second half is completely irrelevant.

One, because I don't know it. Two, because I can't change it. So I might as well just choose to do the thing that I want to do. Irrelevant of my past, the single strongest predictor of my behavior is what will make the more epic story. I've thought about that frame a lot, and it's still continued to win out.

And so when I'm forced to make a decision between two things, I prefer to choose the one that's the more epic story. Because either you have an epic story of failure, or you have an epic story of success. But no 85 year olds regretting their epic stories. They are regretting the stories they never told. Our minds are meaning making machines, and they have to be because they create associations between things we know and things we don't know.

That's how we learn. The problem is that our brains will make wrong associations, and then they will plague us for the rest of our lives. But we can just redefine what the association means for ourselves to make our lives easier, because whether you miss the game winning shot when there's a huge crowd or you miss it when no one else is there, the only reason it hurts more is because you choose to let it hurt you more. Now, there are things that you can do prior to the game winning shot that increase the likelihood that you make it, which is that you practice way more in high stakes conditions over and over and over again. If you do, that increases the likelihood your confidence that you'll be able to make it.

Why? Because you've made them before. And if youre like, well, I missed my first ever game winning shot. Now what do I do? Well, you practice in every other condition.

Thats as close to that as you can, until eventually you make one. And then when you do make one, youll have evidence that youve made one, and you try and make one again. What you probably dont know is that Michael Jordan has missed more gain winning shots than he has made, but hes remembered for the ones that he made. But how was he able to make them? By missing and being willing to shoot again on that basis of story.

The many excuses that we give ourselves in reverse can make a more epic story. And so rather than say, like, these are all the reasons that I can't succeed, I think reframing that as these are all the reasons that when I succeed, it'll be even, even better story, and it'll be more inspiring to other people is a much more powerful frame. The more disadvantages you have when you start, the more epic story you have when you win. Donald Miller has one of the most powerful frames of heroes and villains I've ever heard of. Heroes and villains always have the same backstory.

It's pain. They're always an orphan, right? Or the villain has some sort of disfigurement to show that, that they went through hard times. The difference is what the character chooses to do about it. Villains say, the world hurt me, I'm gonna hurt it back.

Heroes say, the world hurt me. I'm not gonna let anyone else hurt this way. So heroes use pain. Villains are used by it. And so I think all of us have the choice to become our own heroes, our own villains in our own life, simply by how we choose to deal with the pain that we all inevitably experience.

So pain is a constant. The choice about how we react to it is the thing that dictates the path of our lives. There are certain rules of playing the game that have served me really well. One of them is, and that's okay. And I probably use that frame more than anything else, which is I'm not close with XYz relative, your parent, your mom, your sister, your brother, and that's okay.

I spent a lot of my mental effort trying to untangle stories that I told in the past about things that were my fault or were a problem. And the easiest way that I found to solve problems is to decide they're not problems to begin with. I have a handful of pictures that I took for the first five years of sucking during business, and I use those pictures all the time, every day. And the zillions of pictures after I became successful, I barely use any of them. The time to document your life is when it sucks, not when it's great, because those are the stories that you're going to tell, and those are going to be the reminders that you use in the present day of things that you have been through and proof as to who you really are.

Because my favorite line in the matrix is in the second or third matrix, when Morpheus is standing on the hill and he's looking out towards everyone, and he said, I stand here truthfully unafraid, not because of the path that lies before me, but because of the path that lies behind me. And so the struggle, period that you may be in right now is the path behind your future self that you are building so that that man or that woman can stand on the pulpit and look at you straight, dead in the eyes, in the mirror, and say, I am confident, and I stand truthfully here unafraid, not because of what I said my goal is going to be, but because what I've been through to get here.