The Amount of Preparation You Need to be Exceptional | Ep 709

This episode delves into the extensive preparation required to achieve exceptional outcomes in business and personal endeavors.

1. Success in any field requires an exceptional amount of preparation, often more than initially anticipated.
2. Preparation should be tailored: regular tasks need consistent, though possibly less intense prep, whereas new or critical tasks may require extensive groundwork.
3. The effort put into preparation directly correlates with the quality of output and the likelihood of achieving desired outcomes.
4. Surrounding oneself with high achievers can elevate personal standards and highlight the rigorous effort needed to excel.
5. Effective preparation is a skill that improves with practice and can significantly enhance performance in any activity.

1: Importance of Preparation

Hormozi resets expectations about the necessary level of preparation for success, emphasizing that it often exceeds common assumptions. Alex Hormozi: "More important than the will to win is the will to prepare."

2: Real-world Examples

Shares stories from his experiences and others', illustrating the deep prep involved in exceptional performances. Alex Hormozi: "You'd be amazed at how much smarter you can look with 20 minutes of prep."

3: Strategies for Effective Preparation

Outlines strategies to optimize preparation for various scenarios, whether they are routine tasks or new challenges. Alex Hormozi: "Volume negates luck."

4: The Power of Repetition

Discusses how frequent and thoughtful preparation leads to mastery and reduces the reliance on luck. Alex Hormozi: "We need to be reminded more than we need to be taught."

5: Leveraging Preparation in Business

Explains how preparation impacts different aspects of business, from sales pitches to content creation, and how it can be a competitive advantage. Alex Hormozi: "An ounce of prep is worth a pound of posts."

1. Regularly assess and increase your preparation levels: Consistently evaluate how much preparation your goals require and adjust your effort accordingly.
2. Differentiate your prep according to the task: Allocate more time and resources to new or high-stakes projects.
3. Learn from the best: Surround yourself with high performers to understand their preparation levels and strategies.
4. Develop a prep routine: Make preparation a habitual part of your workflow to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.
5. Utilize tools and resources: Leverage technology and methodologies that can aid in more thorough and faster preparation.
6. Reflect and iterate on your preparation processes: Continuously refine your approach based on outcomes to improve future performance.

“The more you prepare for stuff, the more frequently you do it, the better you will get it preparing.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) emphasizes the significance of thorough preparation as a key differentiator in achieving business success. Highlighting real-world examples, he underscores the need for a significant increase in both the quality and quantity of preparation to excel in tasks, overcome imposter syndrome, and improve overall performance and efficiency.

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.

People

Alex Hormozi

Companies

acquisition.com

Books

Grit by Angela Duckworth

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Alex Hormozi
My entire goal of this podcast right now is to reset your expectations of the amount of preparation that it takes to be good. People are like, why isn't it working for me? It's not working for you because you're not working nearly as what is required to get that level of output.

The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, the game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon, partner with us to get to $100 million and beyond. I hope you share and enjoy.

Today's topic is going to be preparation within the context of work and how most of you are underprepared and are thinking about it as though it's anxiety. You think that you have imposter syndrome, when the reality is you just haven't prepped nearly enough. And so what I want to do today is actually reset your bar for what preparation looks like for the highest achieving people that I know within different contexts. So whether that's sales, whether that's marketing, content, whatever, customer success, all of these contexts have different types of prep. There's two different ways to prep that I'll talk about and give you some tactics that you can use and maybe send to your team as well, because, hey, if they prep more, you'll make more.

A lot of people know the saying, ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Well, I think the same is true in sales and customer success, in marketing, in making content. Like, an ounce of prep is worth a pound of posts, right? And I've never heard that said, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna coin it myself.

And so I want to share a couple of, uh, quick hitting quotes, and then I'll. I'll get into, like, really tactical stuff. That's really helped me make. Make the most of prep in the shortest period of time to make the most money. So, more important than the will to win is the will to prepare.

I think that's wooden, or it's Vince Lombardi, or either way, it's one of those guys. Then you've got, on one side, this massive camp of people who want to win, and then you've got people who want to do what it takes to win, which is a tiny, tiny, itty bitty camp. This one I heard from Jimmy Carr, which I love. Everyone is jealous of what you've got. No one is jealous of how you got it, which I just love.

And this is me rewording the Navy SeAL one, which is, we don't rise to the level of our expectation. We fall to the level of our preparation. I like that, that phrasing of it. And my personal one, you'd be amazed at how much smarter you can look with 20 minutes of prep. And so what I want to do is actually just reset the expectations about how much work you have to do to get good.

And one of the biggest benefits ive gotten from preps, ill tell you a couple of quick stories thatll maybe set this up for you. And I do want to differentiate between two types of preparation. So youve got preparation for things that you do all the time. So, like meetings, like if you have a sales meeting or you have a meeting with your company, meeting with your employees, those are things that you do on a regular basis. And I think theres a different type of preparation that we do for that.

And then you have things how you prepare to do something that youve never done before that youre doing for the first time, which is a different type of preparation. So im going to delineate both of those. All right, now I'll give you an example of, like, a resetting that just recently happened for me. So I'm obviously very big on the amount of reps that it takes. Like, volume negates luck is, is the, is the number one quote that we have in the sales team wall so that the guys understand, like, it's just about the reps, and we just say it all the time.

It's repeated over and over again. Because we also believe repetition of the same beliefs is something that will drive them to remember this thing, because we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. But recently even getting into this content game, this is about a year ago, I was talking to Eric, and so Arak is a content creator who has 1015 million subscribers, something like that, on YouTube. And we were saying, I was like, hey, what can we do to make our YouTube videos better? And so he said, oh, just send me over your prep case for the videos.

And I was like, what do you mean? I was like, you mean the notes on my phone? He was like, no. I was like, can you send me one of yours so I know what you're talking about? And so he sends me his most recent prep for one of his videos.

And it was like 22 pages for like a 15 minutes video. And I was like, oh, okay. So my understanding of how much work it takes to do something at this level is wildly under what the reality of it is at that level. And so I attended something. He invited me to, like, a little creator meetup with some of the biggest guys on YouTube.

I'll just, I'll just say it this way. You would know everybody in the room, and when we were there, they were all discussing how much time it took them to prep for videos. And a lot of these guys were spending two, three, four straight weeks of 12 hours a day to make one video per month. And I will tell you this is that it was in no way surprising to me, after going there for two days, what it took and why those guys were the number one in that industry for making content that was exceptional. And so it completely reset my standard, reset my bar for how much preparation was required to be exceptional.

And it was because, and this is why it's so silly for me, because I feel like I keep learning and relearning the same lessons, but just in new domains, is that the people who are doing way better than you are just working so much harder. And the thing is that people think that someone's working, like, two times as hard or three times as hard, because we tend to think in increments. We're like, okay, well, I work. I work this much. Someone must be doing twice as much work, but it's not even close to that.

These guys are doing, like, literally 100 times the work. And it's not only that they have a team of ten people spending four weeks to prepare 115 minutes video, like, the order of magnitude in terms of effort there. Do you multiply it by ten times 12 hours a day times four weeks, all of a sudden, you really are at 1000 times the work, 1500 times the work to create, to be fair, an outcome that is 1500 or 10,000 times better than the average YouTube video or whatever it is that you're making. And obviously, I'm just using this as a content example, but it applies to anything. It applies to sales meetings, it applies to how you prep for a date, applies to how you meet the parents or the in laws.

And so I'll tell you a second story. So I, um, I used to do some consulting stuff, and I had a guy who was a friend or, you know, business acquaintance who said, hey, man, I would love it if we could spend a day together. And I was like, I don't really do that. And he's like, just name or price? And I said, fine.

Actually told a fun side note story with this. I was like, fine, I'll do it for 50 grand. And this was ages ago. And he said, how about 35? And I said, how about 75?

And he was like, all right, 50 is cool. And I was like, all right. And so just a side note, when someone says, hey, can you do it for less? You can always say, hey, I can do it for more. And every single time I've used that overcome, it has worked.

So right now it's like 100% overcome for using that. Highly recommend using it in a sales situation because people are like, okay, I got it understood. Like, that's your price, right? I hate negotiating on that stuff. Or rather, I just refused to.

So that was story number two, or, sorry, first half of story number two with the consulting guy. So when I, when I did that day, what I did was I started that morning, I think that we were going to start meeting at nine. And so I woke up at five and I spent 4 hours reviewing his business, right? Because I figured my day was going to be shot. This is going to be my day.

Like, I'm not going to try to do anything else. And so I spent the 4 hours prepping and I came into the day with, I think, four or five pages of notes of like, okay, here are things we could do here that would be better. Here's things on your follow up sequence, here's things on the, on, on your, on your, on your landing pages. Here are things that you can do from a content. Here's how I think your CtA's could be better.

All of this stuff, right? And so I came in with it, and the next like 4 hours I just spent showing him what I had spent the morning going over, and at the end of the day, he was like, I have genuinely never had anyone come this prepared to something. And to me, I was like, it was 4 hours of prep. It wasn't like a crazy, you know what I mean? To me, 4 hours of prep is nothing.

You know what I mean, in terms of work. But it was really confirming, because this guy obviously had the money to spend 50 grand for a day or whatever and that he had not had that type. I was like, it still bewilders me. And I see that more so that it is remarkable how low the bar is to beat everyone else. And so that's what I take.

That's my takeaway from that. Like, on one hand, you've got Eric and some of these super creators who are spending thousands of hours on a one single piece of content. But I think if you like, do consulting or you do some sort of work where you do the same thing over and over, again, like, you can have, like, a four to one ratio. If I go into a meeting and it's a 60 minutes meeting, you can take 15 minutes before you get into the meeting. And I think, like, a four to one ratio is really our one to four ratio.

Like, if it's a eight hour day, spending 2 hours. If it's a 60 minutes meeting, spending 15 minutes. If a 20 minutes meeting, spending five minutes before you get on will make the 20 minutes two, three times more effective by just having that little bit of block to say, who's on this meeting? What's the background of this? What's the agenda?

What problem are we trying to solve? It just absolutely focuses you and makes you a driver in the meeting. I can just absolutely promise you that. Now, third one, when we have founders who come into that portfolio. So when we invest in a company, one of the things that happens most commonly is a lot of them are running paid ads, or they start running paid ads.

So it's either way. So either they're running ads and they hit some sort of plateau, or they want to get into running ads. And so I'll tell you the story that I explained to almost all of them, which is, I say, all right, how many, you know, what do you, what do you guys spend in a day? And they're like, all right, we're spending 5000 a day. Okay, fine.

So how many new ads are you making per week? And a lot of time, they're like, oh, we record ads once a month. And I'm like, okay, well, how many ads do you make? They're like, usually five or seven ads. And I'm like, okay, so let me give you some context.

We make about 30 ads a week, and that's new, unique video. Now, that's not repurposing of that. That's 30 core pieces, which then get zillioned out in terms of, like, let's take the hook for number one and put it as number three and then redo the same video. Those would be permutations that go from 30 to, like, 100 pieces of creative. And as soon as I explained that, they're like, oh.

And I was like, so you're doing five to seven and you're complaining that you can't scale. But the reality is that you just can't scale, given this level of creative. Like, if your creative is a five out of 1010, you can get to 5000 a day profitably, but you're not going to get to 50,000 a day profitable because you're not getting that one out of 100 ad that can scale to colder audiences or newer people. And so it's just the, like, if you have a mediocre ad, like, many of you guys who start running ads are like, oh, I get it to $100 a day, but I can't get it to be profitable at dollar 500 a day. It's like, yeah, because your ad is so bad, it can only go to the absolute hottest audience.

And then as soon as it goes outside of that very hot audience that kind of knows you a little bit, it stops working, right? And so if you had, if you went from a five out of ten ad to a seven out of ten ad, then all of a sudden it's like, oh, I can get to $500 a day. And if you get to an eight out of a ten ad, you can get to a $5,000 a day, right? But the nine out of ten and the ten out of ten ads, like, that's what converts the world. But in order to get that ten out of ten ad, you have to do so much more preparation before you do the ads and actual total volume of work of doing the ads itself.

And so I share this stuff because my entire goal of this podcast right now is to reset your expectations of the amount of preparation that it takes to be good because it's so easy. It's like mediocrity is so easy to do because you just do something and, hey, anything's better than nothing. So if you're doing nothing, then absolutely start. But what happens is people are like, why isn't it working for me? And it's not working for you because you're not working nearly as much as what is required to get that level of output right.

So let me tell you a different story. So I had a buddy of mine, a billionaire, and he wants to start making content, which is, I'm a huge proponent of this because he actually has stuff to say, but he's still learning the content game, right? And so he's like, hey, man, can you look at my instagram and tell me, or, sorry, can you look at my. He said, can you look at my social media and tell me what I'm doing wrong or what I should be doing better? And so before I pulled up his thing, I was like, well, how many posts are you making a day across all platforms?

And he was like, one. I'm doing one a day right now. And he said it like that kind of like, he was like, yes, I'm doing one a day right now. And I was like, all right, man. We make.

At the time, we were making 50 a day. We make more than that now. And he just looked at me and he was like, you don't need to say anymore. He's like, I got it. Like, he understood in that moment the same thing I did.

When Eric showed me his prep case for his YouTube videos, I was like, I get it. Like, he said, thank you for resetting my. My measuring stick. That's what he said. It was like, you reset my bar, reset my expectations of how much work it takes to get to that level that I want to get to.

And so I share this stuff because I think one of the biggest gifts of surrounding yourself in a championship team. So there's a book by Angela Duckworth called Grit, which is a good book, but one of the things that they talk about in the book is that one of the best ways to develop grit is to surround yourself with people who have grit. So one of the for sure ways to get better at a skill is surround yourself with people who already have that skill, who are ahead of you. And so that's why joining a championship team is one of the best things you can do to understand what is required to win. And so when you're in the story that she tells in the book is swimmers who want to get better at swimming.

If you can make the state team or whatever of, like, a championship team, all of a sudden there's standards of work that you didn't understand is what everyone's doing. So you go from like, oh, well, I'm swimming twice a week, and that's what you can do to be best in your high school or whatever. I'm making up the numbers. But when you go to the championship team, you realize that they do 3 hours a day, twice a day, and all of a sudden, you're like, oh, and it's that same moment I had with. I was like, oh.

And the same moment my friend had one when we talked about the social media was like, oh, it's just this massive bar reset of like, oh, this isn't like a two times as. As much thing. This is like a 5100 times as much. And so it's just when you realize how much work it takes to get good, you realize how few things you can get good at. And that's where the focus becomes so important, because the only way to get that good is to do a few things.

And so that's where the strategy of picking or prioritizing the things that you want to get good at becomes more important. Because you just can't do a hundred times the work on a hundred different things. And so making sure that you're allocating your resources to the one thing that matters most, which then forces you to prioritize what you're spending your time on, which, by the way, I think is a really good activity. If you could spend a day or a week saying, okay, if I could only have one thing be true about our business, if I could have, like, if we have more traffic than anyone else, we will win based on this model or whatever it is that we have. If we have more referrals than anyone else, then we will win no matter what.

If we have the best advertising in terms of paid ads, if we just had that one thing, we will win. If you can be very clear about that one point of leverage, then you attack it with absolute onslaught of value, onslaught of hours of work and repetition and preparation for those repetitions that then you'll do even more. And so it's like, I'll give you the ad example I was saying earlier. If I, if I'm doing 100 ads a week and my competitor's doing seven ads a month, I'm doing 400 to his seven. All right?

So I'm doing, I don't know what the math is there, but a lot. Let's. It's at least 50 times, 60 times more. Right. Than he is in terms of volume.

But not only that, but when I go into that advertising day, what am I doing beforehand? I'm prepping all the, I want to prep all the hooks at a time. I want to do research of, of past ads that have done really well. I want to take different ad styles that I've seen across social media in general that I liked. I'm like, I wonder if we can make a version of this for how we're going to advertise our thing.

And by the way, I love taking from other spaces, like seeing a hotel ad or an Airbnb ad and being like, ooh, that would work really well in this software company that we have. Oh, we've got this, you know, we've got this dry cleaning business that would work really well. This ad for a gym or whatever, right? And I have this little swipe file on my phone where whenever I see an ad I like, I, I save it and then I also screenshot it so that when I get into my prep sessions, I already have my stuff that I want to use to prep in front of me. And so one of the, one of the big, other things besides resetting your bar of expectation of how much prep it takes to win is that the more you prepare for stuff, the more frequently you do it, the better you will get it preparing.

So preparing in and of itself is a skill. 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. And so, like, the first time you prep for making ads, the per time you prep for making content, it's going to take you longer and you're going to be less efficient at it. But if, you know, for example, this is your hundredth time preparing for making a podcast or whatever, like, this is my prep for this little podcast here. I wrote this out ahead of time.

I was like, these are all the things I wanted to hit on because I think they're important, right? And so I think in terms of resetting the bar, start thinking at hundreds rather than ones and twos. So it's not that somebody's doing twice as much work or three times as much work. They're doing 100 times the work. And in the example I gave earlier, sometimes way more than 100 times the work.

And so, two more quick things on this, and then I'll let you go about your day so you can start preparing. So, Elon Musk recently talked about something. Well, not recently, but I've heard. I heard an article or an interview from him that he said he referenced Parkinson's law. So.

Parkinson's law, for those of you guys who don't know, is that work expands the time allotted, right? And so I think what you don't want to do is over prepare for the wrong thing. And let me. Let me put my caveat there is that I actually think there's tremendous roi to cramming, meaning he uses Parkinson's law in reverse, which is that it also, if work expands the time allotted, it can also shrink to the time that you shrink to. And there's a reason that kids cram.

It's because it's really high RoI on their time, right? If they. If they prep for weeks and weeks, and then they. They take the week before the exam off and don't look at anything, sometimes they do worse than just cramming right before the test. And so people aren't idiots like we know that cramming works, which is why we do it.

But I think I'd highly encourage thinking about prepping as cramming. I actually think it works amazingly well in a business context. But people somehow. Somehow have said it's, like a bad thing, because I don't even know why teachers say it's a bad thing. At the end of the day, like, you either ace the test or you didn't.

And so, whatever. Now, in terms of long term, like, I think, you know, not sleeping the night before probably impacts your. If you, like, probably impacts your performance more. But if you just study the day before and you study the morning of, I'll promise you that the studying the morning of will get you more than what you did the night before in terms of immediate result on the test, more than long term retention, which is different, just to be clear. But the thing is, if you're doing a meeting, you're going to take notes, and then you're going to delegate stuff.

And so you being able to run that meeting effectively based on you cramming for that meeting, super high RoI on your time. And so I absolutely love the concept of cramming within the world of business, because a lot of times, you do have something you just need to do once, and you need to impress the client, you need to impress the boss. You need to. You need to just come prepared for a company, a presentation that you're doing in front of a whole team or a department or the whole company entirely. And so going back to the two types of work there are, is that.

Or two types of preparation you have. You have preparation for things you're going to do that you do many, many, many times, which you get better and better preparing for it, which means you can actually shrink the amount of time you need to prepare. And I think the closer you do the preparation to the event itself, the more valuable it is. And so that is why take the five minutes literally. Actually take the five minutes before the meeting to say, okay, this is John.

Let me look at his profile real quick. Okay. John's. He's out of Milwaukee. Okay.

The bucks are doing well. Let me see if he. If he follows the bucks. Okay. He tagged something there, and his wife's name is Joyce.

Okay, got it. So you get on the meeting, you're like, dude, John, how's it going, man? Dude, the bucks are killing it. Oh, that's fantastic. How's Joyce doing?

She's good. Great. And I saw. Do we have. Is this Mike?

Is this my. He's your. He's your vp of customer success. Hey, Mike. Nice to meet you, man.

I was just looking you guys up before, before I got on. Really cool stuff that you guys are doing at XYZ Corp, right? As soon as I say that, they're like, immediately, in 60 seconds, they're like, this guy prepared. And that's what it communicates. And the thing is, is that the idea that someone knows that you prepare literally separates you from so many other people who just show up and they're like, you know, I'm not trying to use a less explicit term, but, like, dick in their hand.

Like, oh, what are we going to do today? Right? And so, sure, you should absolutely be prepared in terms of the agenda, in terms of your scripting for how you run these meetings, but you get so much return on demonstrating that you prepared. Like, people know if you prepared, it just, it completely blows them away. And I still, to this day, I get, people are so, they're like, dude, thank you so much for taking the time.

Like, you, I feel like you knew our, our company. I feel like you knew our business, like, even better than people that I've spent, you know, I've had all, you know, I've had vendors who did all this stuff, and I was like, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to walk into a meeting not knowing who I'm talking to. Like, what are we going to do? Spend the whole time fact finding before I can actually make a recommendation around something? Well, that's such a waste of time for you and me because I know what I'm looking for, and it's going to be really inefficient for you to exchange it via verbal.

And I can just click around and find out what I need to do, especially if you're looking at it from an external way in to like, okay, why are prospects not converting? Well, I don't need to talk to you. I should look at what somebody who doesn't talk to you would see so that I can make the recommendations or conclusions. And sometimes that kind of preparation is more valuable because they're not going to color, they're not going to give me the whys and the why. It's difficult because I don't care prospect.

Right. At least I'm going to put those glasses on. And so back to the one time thing versus the many time thing. If you do it, a lot of times, you're going to get better, better prepping. And I would say prep as close to the event as you can.

And I think a four to one ratio in the beginning is good, 15 minutes to 60, 1 hour to 4 hours in terms of prep to how much work you're going to do for whatever the thing is, and over time it can shrink a little bit. So you can be like one to ten. So it's five minutes for a 60 minutes meeting, but for the things that you're going to do one time that you have never done before, that's where it actually expands the other way. It goes like 1020 hours of prep for 1 hour of presenting. And so the so determining how much you're willing to prepare for something that you're only going to do once, rather than something that you do all the time, in my opinion, comes up to the stakes and the returns.

And so if you're going to go do a speech in front of a thousand people and you've never spoken before, and it's a, ideally, hopefully it's a topic that you do understand, but you just haven't spoken in that environment before, then I want to control for every other variable that can approximate me speaking in front. So one, I want to know, I want to master the material for sure. If you're getting up there and you don't know what you're talking about or like the things you're going to talk about, well, dear God, no wonder that you suck at talking. Now, beyond that, it's how many ways can I approximate this? Like, for example, going live on social media can help you approximate a live audience in person.

Is it perfect? No, but is it better than just talking to the mirror? Probably. Now, if you aren't going to, now, this is a real one. This is actually from the fitness world.

If you get used to squatting, for example, I'll bring it home. If you squat in the mirror every day and you can see yourself and you're squatting if you go to a competition. This actually happened to me in my first competition. I worked out at a gym that had a mirror in front of the squat rack. And so I just, I just always squatted there.

I didn't think about it. When I got to a competition, I had the squat rack and when I looked out, there was no mirror. It was just a crowd of people watching me squat. And I was like, oh, this is weird because I didn't even realize, but it was actually so different from how I trained. And so from that point going forward, I turned around in the rack so that I would be facing the gym, at least that I wasn't looking at the mirror so that it was closer approximation to competition.

And so as many of those variables as you can control for you want to have in the prep so that the prep, as closely as possible, approximates the performance. And so there's cramming for. For, like, you having information that'll better arm you for consulting sales, customer success, whatever. Which, by the way, if you're in customer success, like spending five minutes before you get on the call with a customer, like reviewing the call notes, reviewing the. The notes from the sales team, looking at the person's profile before you get on.

Dear God, will, they think it's absolutely amazing and it takes this much work. Like, you'll. You'll like, they will think you're three times cooler with five minutes of work for a 60 minutes call. Like, I almost think that you saying, hey, give me five minutes at the beginning of the call, and starting five minutes late will still, even though I hate starting late, would still yield you a better outcome at the end of the 60 minutes than starting on time and not being prepared. So with the approximation for performance, it comes down to the return on effort and return on time.

And so if you're going to talk to a thousand people, and this, and these are, let's say, your ideal customers, well, if I was going to have 1101 meetings, how much would I prepare for each of those one on one meetings? That was 60 minutes. I might prepare ten minutes, right? Well, if I have ten minutes times a thousand. Okay, that's a lot of.

That's a lot of. It's 10,000 minutes. I don't know what that is in terms of hours, but let's see, that'd be a thousand divided by six. That's like, I don't know, 167 hours, right? Something like that.

And so if 167 hours of prep for that one thing, now, realistically, that might not make sense, because you do have diminishing returns. And so that's why speaking one to many is higher return. But just to give yourself a context is like when we did the. The book launch, I was like, dear God, how much do I prep for a thousand person audience? And I'm going to have half a million people there.

I'm going to have 500,000. Have 500 times. Well, I better not waste anyone's time while I'm there and make sure that every second, the value per second is super high. And so I think, again, we have to reset our expectations of how much work it takes to prepare for the one time performances based on what you expect to get from it. So if it's if you're going to do one time performance to ten people, then maybe, maybe you prepare for 4 hours, right?

But if you're going to talk to a thousand people, then maybe you prepare for 40 hours. And if you're going to talk to 10,000 people, then maybe you do prepare for 400 hours. Or it does have a diminishing term. So maybe it's 200 hours, right? But I think what most people miss out on is they get up and they say their talk once and they do it once to their wife and once their dog, and they're like, you know, I'm super nervous and so I'll leave you with this.

You are not nervous. You're underprepared. It's not that you have anxiety. It's that you didn't do the work that you know you should have done. And so if I have anxiety about something that's coming up, that has become my telltale sign that I am underprepared, that I didn't do the work that I know I should have done, and that's when you get nervous, when you can get up on stage and you can do or whatever, whatever your version of the performance is and have absolutely zero anxiety, it's because you've absolutely habituated to the stressor.

And so, for example, if you want to get someone to stop being afraid of spiders, the fastest way to do that is get them into a room with spiders and let them sit there, have a fucking panic attack, pass out, wake up again, pass out, wake up again. Until eventually they habituate. They just realize that they don't die and they're still there and there are spiders and they keep living and then the phobia is gone. They habituate. And so what you want to do, or at least how I like to do it, is I want to habituate to the stressor, which is if I'm stressed about this thing, then it means I haven't prepared enough.

And so it's, it's, it's not imposter syndrome. You're just inexperienced. You're just not good enough yet. And so I want to make sure that I can control for all the controllables first and then leave room for the uncontrollables, but have all of my bandwidth available so that when the mic cuts out or the, the presentation isn't working or my clicker runs out of battery, all of these things have happened that I still, I'm still prepared enough that people then are like, damn, he handled that really well. It's because this wasn't my first time.

And that's the difference is that, like, when you. You don't want people to think it's your first rodeo, and so many of you are going into every meeting, every call, every appointment, like, it's your first rodeo. And they can tell. Everyone can tell. And the people who can tell the most are the people who you want to impress the most.

Like, it's very easy to impress poor people because they don't know any better. Much more difficult to impress a wealthy person because they know how the game works. And so I see this with the, like, the Rolex flex or the. I render the lambo for the day. And look at my instagram picture.

Anybody who's really in the game is like, dude, my jet costs 500 lamborghinis. Like, I could give a fuck what you drive. Right? Like, the way you impress them is you outwork them. So to impress poor people, you outspend them.

To impress wealthy people, you outwork them. That's the difference. So if I see a kid who's not flexing any of that stuff, but I see how hard this kid's working, that's what impresses me. If I. If anything, I see a younger guy who's, like, blowing cash to, like, flex.

I'm. I'm not even neutral. I'm less impressed. I'm like, dude, what are you playing? Like, who?

I. Immediately I'm like, who are you trying to impress? And then whatever they say, I'm like, it's the wrong person, man. Cause the right girl also is impressed by hard you work. Because they know what that leads, because people take wealth as an approximation for character, and that's not true.

They say, I have this Lamborghini, therefore I work hard. But if you just spend way beyond your means, which is what I see it as, especially if you're younger, I just see that as irresponsible and insecure. And so it's making sure that you're putting the right bait out. And the best bait for getting the right people is the effort that they know you put in when they weren't looking. And you only do that by when you show up the first time, it looks like it's your hundredth time.

And they know it's the only meaning you have with them that you took 20 hours to prep for it. They're like, all right, this kid's got it, or this guy's got it. This gals got it. She gets it. Like, that's all I look.

I'm like, immediately. It's just like, I had that conversation with my billionaire buddy. He was like, you don't use anymore. I get it. And I feel that way with vendors.

So if I get on the phone with someone and they have clearly 10 hours of preparation, 20 hours of preparation for that call, they don't need to sell me that hard. I'm like, I get it. You've demonstrated in advance the value that you want to provide. Before we started working together. Like, I get it.

Like, whatever the bill is, send, the invoice team will take care of it. Let's start working together. When someone spends all their time trying to sell me, and I'm like, what did you do to prepare? And they're trying to overcome with their words, you already lost. And so, so many of you guys are losing before you step into the arena.

You're trying to ride a bull for the first time on your first rodeo and then thinking that you need to have some special talent or some natural whatever that's going to make it work. Like, why so and so is different or better? It's because that guy has spent 3 hours a day, morning and afternoon, every day for the last two years, riding bulls, and so he doesn't have to think about that. His only thing that he's thinking about when he's on the ring is the uncontrollable, so that he can use 100% of his bandwidth for, oh, I had the meeting, and then he brought two people I didn't expect. Well, tell me more about that.

Oh, that would work well with page two. If you turn to page two in the. In the. In the prep file, I think this will be really applicable for you. And when we get there, I'll definitely need your insight.

Oh, wow. He included them in. But if I didn't have that prep ahead of time, I'd be like, oh, wow, I had a game plan, and now it's totally screwed because there's two other people who are stakeholders. So, tl doctor, you're under prepared most of the time. Most of you.

And I'm saying this because I talk to you guys a lot. Five minutes of prep for a 60 minutes meeting will do more than trying to razzle dazzle your way through with your words once you're on. I think Sun Tzu said, every battle is won before the battle begins. And I think preparation is one of those things that an ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure or pound of post. And if you want to be the most efficient with your time, and this is the thing, is that I can already hear the obstacle where someone's like, I just don't have time to prepare.

You don't. If you don't have time to prepare, you don't have time to afford not to prepare because you get so much more out of that five minutes than you do out of the 60. And so if anything, shorten the meeting to 45 minutes and then take the 15 minutes of prep because the 45 will still be worth more. You don't have time not to prepare because you will get so much more out of the time the rest of your time that it's the highest ROI time that you have. Hey, guys, if you got value from this and you think it's going to help you make more money, then don't be lame.

Share the game. The way that we keep making stuff is based on your feedback. And so you've probably noticed, I'll continue to iterate content based on y'all's feedback. But if you like this and want us to make more of it, this is what you can do. Screenshot whatever it is that you're consuming this podcast on and share it to whatever social media you have and tag me in it.

If you tag me in it, I'm gonna. I'm gonna share as many of them as I can because it means the world to me. And this is how we know that we're on the right path for the type of stuff that business owners want to consume. And if it means sharing it on your slack channel, sharing it with your team, sharing with an employee, sharing with your spouse, who. So they can understand why you have to prep, why you can't go to the game tonight, why I can't go to the bar, whatever it is.

Because Prep is just as much of work as the work itself, if not more important.