The Unseen Battles of Entrepreneurship | Ep 703

This episode delves into the intricacies of decision-making in entrepreneurship, especially when facing the choice between comfort and growth.

1. Success requires a focused commitment to a specific path, despite uncertainties.
2. Comfort can be an enemy of growth; stepping out of comfort zones is crucial.
3. Strategic decision-making should prioritize deep knowledge within a specific area over superficial breadth.
4. Entrepreneurial success often demands enduring short-term discomfort for long-term gains.
5. Mental resilience and adaptability are as important as business strategies in entrepreneurship.

1: Decision-Making in Entrepreneurship

Alex Hormozi discusses the importance of strategic decision-making when starting a business. He emphasizes the need to focus and commit to a path despite the inherent uncertainties of entrepreneurship.

• Alex Hormozi: "Pursuing multiple business paths at once almost guarantees failure in all."

2: Comfort vs. Growth

Hormozi explores the dichotomy between comfort and growth, urging entrepreneurs to challenge their comfort zones to achieve significant growth.

• Alex Hormozi: "Comfort is the enemy of achievement and growth."

3: Building Resilience

The discussion shifts to building resilience against the psychological challenges of entrepreneurship, including dealing with uncertainty and the fear of failure.

• Alex Hormozi: "You have to endure the hard things, those are what make the entrepreneurial journey worthwhile."

4: Strategic Choices

Entrepreneurs are advised on making strategic choices that align with long-term goals rather than short-term comforts, highlighting the importance of vision in guiding these decisions.

• Alex Hormozi: "You make a big bet on where you think the market is going to be, not where it is today."

1. Define Clear Goals: Set specific, actionable goals that align with your business vision.
2. Focus on One Thing: Avoid the temptation to spread yourself too thin. Focus on one business model or product.
3. Step Out of Comfort Zones: Regularly challenge yourself by stepping into new, uncomfortable roles and tasks.
4. Build Strategic Partnerships: Leverage partnerships that can help scale your business faster than you could alone.
5. Prioritize Learning: Invest in learning and understanding your industry deeply to make better strategic decisions.
6. Adapt to Feedback: Listen to the market and adapt your strategies based on consumer feedback.
7. Maintain Mental Resilience: Develop routines and practices that help you manage stress and uncertainty.
8. Embrace Failure as Learning: View failures as opportunities to learn and refine your approach.

(Disclaimer: This interview was recorded over a livestream. We apologize in advance for the quality of the audio.)

“And the thing that I keep coming back to that makes entrepreneurship difficult is that you have a known cost for an unknown payoff. “ Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) answers questions from his audience and shares vital strategies for entrepreneurial success, emphasizing perseverance, strategic planning, and adaptability. The discussion navigates the challenges of scaling a business, adapting to technological disruptions, and overcoming adversity in personal and professional realms. Key themes include commitment, flexibility, and learning from failures, providing insightful guidance for anyone on the entrepreneurial journey.

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

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Alex Hormozi
How you are acting in the present already proves the thing that you're claiming that you want. So you already won, dude. You're just going to keep doing the stuff. There's no magic bullet. You just keep going.

Because either you keep going or you die. And if you don't die, you succeeded. I would just say, stop. Just don't judge yourself on how you feel. Judge yourself by what you do, despite how you feel.

Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. The one question that I had that's been brewing in my mind since I'm pretty early in my career, in the sense of two years on, three years, is what's the one question that you wish you would have asked yourself earlier in your entrepreneurial career when faced with a little bit of uncertainty and direction? And I know that's probably a hefty question and give you context for myself, too. It's like 90% of my business is in person in terms of online.

That's the kind of the direction of whether or not I really want to go towards more specifically creating almost like a wadify version of kettlebells platform. So it's just basically just trying to figure out what the next step is going to be. Huh. Okay, so me asking myself a question is always going to be different than you asking something for you because we're different people, right? And we have different goals.

Alex Hormozi
And so everything usually ladders up to, like, what's the goal? What's the why? And so right now, do you have, like, a monetary goal? Do you have an impact goal? And believe me, I have no issues if you're like, I just want to make a certain amount of money.

Like, I get that because any of the businesses that you just mentioned, so whether it's the brick and mortar business or you want to start doing training for those people online, or it's doing the wattify version, which is basically no service and just providing workouts and whatnot, all of those are potential businesses, but pursuing all of them at the same time will virtually guarantee that you don't succeed at any of them. And so the biggest issue when you're starting out is just picking the path and being willing to commit to it with the uncertainty that comes with it. Because, like, every entrepreneur on the path has uncertainty, like, and that's what makes entrepreneurship hard. It's literally the not knowing and the pain of suffering, consequences for ignorance, for things that you've learned now that you're like, if I had only known then what I know now. And that's every entrepreneur until the day they die.

And it's just wishing that it were different that causes a lot of the struggle. So which of these things, of the three that I just mentioned, like, which of those is the one that, like, lights you up the most? I mean, in person training, obviously. Like, we live in a small beach town community where everybody knows everybody. Cool family.

It's convenient. I want to say there's that comfort factor, that it almost in one scope is very beneficial because it is so comfortable in reality to do. Like, comfort is the enemy of achievement and growth. So it's like, I know, like, the comfortable side is the in person. Yeah.

And it's a community, and it's fun. It's family, friends. Whereas the uncomfortable, more challenging, but also very big picture wise would be the online. Sure. Going full tilt that side.

Now, I breached into the gap of, like, three day launches, four day launches, you know, small ticket, low ticket offers. But in terms of trying to scale. And make an impact, the world's really big. That's always really hard because I remember we had an event with gym owners, and somebody stood up. I said, what's your mission?

Alex Hormozi
They're like, I want to impact 1 million lives. I was like, did you have a brick and mortar location that has 200 members? If you really want to do that, then you'd approach it very differently or you'd have a time rise, and that's the rest of your life. It's one of the other. If you're like, I want to do that in three years, you wouldn't start with a brick and mortar location.

The thing is that what you said earlier is you feel comfortable, and it sounds like you want to grow. I just want to make sure that's correct before I keep going. Okay. So there was, like, an underlying assumption, at least that was unspoken, and I just want to draw attention to it, which was, you're like, the brick and mortar thing is comfortable. It's family.

It's friendly. It's fun. I'm assuming it's profitable. I'm assuming you're making some money doing that. The thing is just doing more of what you're currently doing and saying, like, how do I open a second location?

Or how do I open five locations over the next five years? Or whatever it is that would produce probably just as much of a challenge as going online would, except you already have two years of learnings on how to run that business where you have none in the online space. And so, like, you always just want to stack knowledge within a specific vertical so that you just go deeper and deeper on it, because that's where the compounding returns happen. Like, the richest people that I know have been in the same space for 40 years. They just know everything there is to know about the space.

And, like, that's how they've made their money. And so with what you're doing, you can either open a location that's not necessarily in a cheap beach down and test your mettle and see how good you are at actually scaling a team, you know, hiring somebody else, seeing if somebody else, if you can actually incentivize people, build a culture so that people want to work for you, that you can recreate the success. And that'll show you whether the success that you had was because of you or because of your ability as a businessman, right? Because, like, you can be a charismatic, razzle dazzle dancing bear in any brick and mortar business. And it will work.

It'll work. Surface with a smile always works, right? And it's just hard to scale because most people don't care as much as owners do. But if you can create the model that has the incentives and the training in place and the procedures that can consistently create that five out of five experience that allow a second location to have the same amount of success as your first location, then you have something that absolutely can scale and create lots of enterprise value over time. So I would say either scale that or basically dial down your in person to as little as humanly possible of your time and then go all in on the online thing.

But trying to do both will be very hard, because what will happen is you'll start to do some online stuff. You'll start to see subtraction. Your gym will start going down, but that's your main source of income. Then you'll hop back to the gym, the online will dip, and you'll go back and forth. And so that's why I'm so big on just committing to whatever thing is.

Cause any of them would work, but you have to be all in on it. And I know I run out of time, but I guess on that point too, it's like the one pillar that I guess I failed to mention was the Freedman flexibility. This being a seasonal town where I'm at, like, being able to essentially create a life where it allows me to own and be at the brick and mortar for, say, four months out of the year and then from there, being able to live elsewhere, and then from there, because at the end of the day have much responsibility here. Aside from the gist, just the gym. I don't have anything else, really.

That's fine in two home. But that's where I guess my point of store has been for a long. Let me just give you step one here. I own a ton of brick and mortar locations, as is. Like right now, I've got 70 stores that I own between different companies that are brick and mortar locations.

Alex Hormozi
I'm not in any of them. And so, like, the idea that you need to go online in order to not be in person is a fallacy. That's not true. Like, you can own your gym because, like, if you were to open a second location, you wouldn't be there either. And so the easiest way to test this 1.0 test is like, if you can step out and just not go to the gym for a year, then maybe you can do the other thing.

And if you haven't gone to the gym for a year, then maybe you'll do a second gym. And so I think no matter what path you do, this is probably a perfect end for this, which is you either are going to do the online thing after you figure out how to outsource the gym or delegate it and hire people who are awesome, or you decide you're going to do a second location. Either way, you're going to have to start with outsourcing the first gem. Appreciate you, AJ. Hey, appreciate you both.

What's up? How do you say your name? Hirad. Hirad, how's it going? Yeah, pretty good.

Hirad
How are you doing? Good, man. Good. So first of all, really appreciate the chance that you gave me. This means a lot to me.

So let's say I. I want to start a business and I can have a very grand vision of the business. Like Apple or micro, they had this vision of, like, changing the whole world. Okay. But I also can have a vision of just making enough money for me to survive and just work on my thing.

Alex Hormozi
Yeah. Let's for now, assume that I've chosen the grand vision one. Okay, so the real question here is, how do we keep working on this business for years when we're worried that it might get outdated because of a new AI or technology? Or in other words, what do we do when we think our project might not be useful in the long run? I mean, what you're talking about is strategy.

These are strategic decisions that we have to make. You make a big bet on where you think the market is going to be, not where it is today. If you're going to go after something that's that big. If you look at the companies that you just referenced, you look at Bezos with Amazon, you look at Zuckerberg, you look at Microsoft, every one of those guys started well off and well capitalized. So Bezos was an investment banker from Wall Street.

Bill Gates parents were really well off and he was well off and whatnot. Zuckerberg went to Harvard, same deal. If you want to really go after that, you would have to try and recreate the conditions. And I think that right now the likelihood that that happens given your current situation is low. And im not saying that to dissuade you.

Im saying because I want to be realistic with you, which is that you need to get your own head above water. Because right now, if you don't have the ability to make money on your own from a entrepreneurial perspective, you need to get your head above water. Because the only way that you can stick with something for the required amount of time in order for it to become world changing, we're not talking even a decade. Those companies, Facebook's 20 something years old. Just context.

The only way to get there is be able to breathe while you're going. And so I think that from a one on one perspective, starting a simple business, that you can generate income on that, you know, you can learn the basics of business before trying to take on the biggest competitors in the most well capitalized arena. Absolutely on your own. Not to say that that's impossible. It's just incredibly improbable given the circumstances that you just laid out.

It would be really romantic for me to be like, dude, go chase your dreams. Go do that. But like, I also would rather have you in a year making money on your own so that you can breathe. Because you might find out that if you actually start making money on your own, you might just like that. Because right now it's just the idea of the status of the dream of that.

Like, it's an amorphous idea, but the amount of pain and suffering that you have to be able to put up with and not make money through that whole period of time, really tough. Okay, but wouldn't that cause another issue where because you decide to choose to solve a problem that is small, like smaller than the grand, then you won't be able to scale much? That's not necessarily true. And also, every one of those companies starts small. Like, Facebook wasn't like, we want to be the social media platform for the whole world.

He wanted to map colleges so they start with a niche and then they expand outwards. And so you'd want to much more narrowly define your problem before you go attack it. Because what you're going to try and do is build something that's going to be everything for everyone and it's going to be nothing for nobody. Strategy is prioritization. It's allocating limited resources against unlimited options.

And so you have unlimited options, but you have very limited resources. And so in order to be successful, you have to narrow the problem that you're trying to solve. So you can allocate the small amount of resources you have to adequately solve that problem completely. And then from adequately solving that problem completely, like Amazon started with books and Facebook started with colleges, you've solved and then you can go adjacent. Right.

So right now, it just sounds exciting to say this, but like, it's not reality. Like, you have to pick one problem that you're going to get really good at solving and that's it. And then you can have an idea that in the future, but real, real, so many things are going to change between now and then. And there's so much luck that has to concur because if you think about this, zooming all the way out, the biggest companies in the world have super well capitalized people who are the best in the world, made a good call and had luck. Because if you're number one, you have all the things, plus luck.

Like if you're number one at like in the whole world, it's all of it, plus luck. The market moves in a direction that you never know. And so I would rather you just stick to a problem that you know you can absolutely solve given the resources you have, learn the skills, make income, and then from there you can go solve an adjacent problem. Or you might decide, you know what, I like this and I'm gonna keep going with it. I see.

Hirad
Thank you very much. You bet. That was really awesome. You bet. You're right.

Alex Hormozi
Good luck, Ben. You too. Thank you. All right, so this is our first tweet break. Interruption or not interruption, just tweet central.

You're going to lose sleep. You'll doubt whether it'll work. Youll stress to make ends meet. You wont finish your to do list. Youll wonder if youve made the right call and have no way to know.

For years this is what hard feels like, and thats okay. When I was tweeting that, I was thinking to myself about, I think it was just stuff that I was going through at the moment. So if you guys dont know, my tweets actually just, theyre not ghostwritten, theyre just me. And they come throughout the day. Like, right before I got here, Jason grabbed my phone.

I was like, wait, I got a tweet that something just came in my head. And I think I was just trying because a lot of people say entrepreneurship is hard, but I was like, it's such a vague term. I was like, what? What about it makes it difficult? And the thing that I keep coming back to that makes entrepreneurship difficult is that you have a known cost for an unknown payoff.

You know, every day that you're continuing to pay these bills, both in time, energy, money, all of it. Every day you're paying this bill, right? But you don't get the paycheck back. You don't get the reward back. And sometimes it's a week, sometimes it's a month, sometimes it's a year, and sometimes, more realistically, it's years, plural, before you get the paycheck back.

And the paycheck isn't always money. Sometimes it's just knowing that the thing you said was going to happen happens. Or that maybe your wife looks at you a different way, or maybe it's your family that looks at you a different way. You want status within your community, whatever it is, whatever that thing is, that paycheck that you're working for, figuratively. And it just comes down to this absolute, soul crushing uncertainty with the idea that no one can actually tell you.

And you have this unquenched desire to be able to predict the future while at the same time knowing that you can't. And you have this desire because every day you learn something, and then you look back a year ago and you're like, why the hell did I not know this? Like, I'm such an idiot. It feels like I'm starting all over again today because of what I just recently learned. All the work that I did up at this point is useless, but that's the wrong way to see it, because, like, you are the work that you've been working on this entire time, and the fact that you can see what you were doing before was not nearly as fruitful as it could have been is the progress that you are making.

And so, like, trying to consistently reframe that for myself has been really powerful in getting through harder times.

Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram, or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth. And so I don't run ads, I don't do sponsorships, I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. So if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me and you'll throw some good karma out there for another entrepreneur.

Oh my gosh. Hi. You're amazing. Hello. What's up?

So I run a writing company. I write for celebrities and CEO's because I took your advice and I started writing for people that have more money. Solve rich people problems, they pay better. Yes. But I also publish my own book.

Alex Hormozi
Cool. And I traditionally publish with publishers. Okay. And I have done it really well. But in the future going forward, I want to publish my own book, self publish my own, love it, because that's just necessary.

Great. Yeah. But I have analysis paralysis because there's so many options to execute a strategy. Sometimes I don't know which option to pick to just execute the strategy for my next book. And my first goal is just to sell 1000 ebook copies.

Nothing even grand. Yeah. Okay. And then when I settle on a strategy, I get scared because I don't know if it's going to work. Oh, I don't want, oh, I'm just going to use like click funnels and da da da and I'm like, oh, but I don't know if it's going to work.

And then I'm back into the same place. Yeah, hard times place. And then I do nothing. Yeah, understood. So two questions real quick.

Alex Hormozi
So when you say you have so many different strategy you could pick from, you're talking about different topics for the book. Is that what you're saying? No. So I know the book topic, but different options to execute a plan. So I can use quick click funnels to execute a plan.

Have you written the book yet? No, but the book will be. That's the easy part. Okay. I'm a writer so that's okay.

Okay. Okay. Because I was like, I'm like, the book's the hard part. Selling is the easy part.

Yeah. No, understood. You're asking the universe for a guarantee that it will never give you and you're waiting for a response in order to move forward from a universe that stays silent. Yeah. Right.

And so you're just talking to dead people and waiting for a response. So like the thing is the person you should be talking to is the marketplace, because they will always respond. Like, when you knock, they will open the door and they will tell you, fuck off. Or they open the door and they'll tell you they'll let you in. But either way, they'll open the door.

Let's play this out the other way. What are you afraid of? Because you seem very upbeat. And you see, obviously you've written stuff before, and so I'm not worried about your writing skill, given what you've said so far. So what are you afraid of?

Okay, so let's play it out. So let's say you have your book and you pick path one. It doesn't even matter what it is. Pick path one. Okay, so what happens?

So you put it on Amazon. You're like, I'm just going to put it on Amazon and see what happens. All right. That's the easy path. Okay.

Then what? Yeah, I'm scared that I won't reach my number. And then what happens? I mean, I'll survive, but then I still won't know how to do it. And I'm also scared because I have self published a couple books in the past that didn't reach my goal.

Okay. And I know that feels like I don't want to feel like that again. So let me do this then. Let's reframe this, because I have a lot of experience with setting goals. All right?

So I feel pretty confident. Talk about the topic, especially big goals. Make the big goals that you set, things that you could absolutely control. Like, you cannot control how many people buy your book, but you can control the amount of actions that you're willing to take that make it unreasonable that you don't sell 1000 copies. And so then you can judge how successful you were by how much you adhered to, the actions that you committed to.

And so if I were to say you have to sell 10,000 books, not a thousand books, 10,000 books. You have to, or you lose your life in twelve months. You just die. That's it. You die.

What would you do? Do every door. Okay. Okay. Like you're thinking about it, right?

Like you have the leads book right there, all that. There's eight different ways to advertise. And so you know that the more people find out about your stuff, the more people buy it. And you know there's only four things you can do, right? You can talk to people one on one.

You can make content. You can run ads, right? Or you can get other affiliates, you can get referrals, once they read your book, or you can get agencies, we can get employees to help you out. That's what you got. Yeah.

Okay. And so if you know that you have to take those actions, let's play this out a year. Let's say that you did absolutely everything on the plan, like your plan of advertising, of letting people know about it for a year, and you did everything, and you sold 999 books. Would you consider it a failure? No, that would be a win.

Okay. Now, if you sold 90 books, what's crazy is that it's just a number. It's just made up. It's completely made up. But I just want to reframe this because, honestly, the thing that you're talking about is something that so many people deal with, and it's because you want to control things.

You want to control the outcome. And you're saying, I'm only willing to pay this price if there's this outcome, but you're seeing the outcome as the outcome rather than the skills that you develop along the way as the outcome. Because I can promise you this, this will not be the last book you write. Right. And so if you get to 100 sales instead of a thousand, then what's going to happen, realistically is that you will figure out the one thing or two things that actually work to sell books.

And then I'll say, do 100 times more of that. And you can either choose to do that on this book or you can choose to do it on the next book. But the idea of, like, I'm setting this thousand because you could have said a million books, it doesn't really matter. You're just setting it. You're making up a number and saying, this, I feel is reasonable for me.

But instead of making the number reasonable, make the actions that would lead to that, the reasonable thing. Like what? Can you commit to 4 hours a day of promotion? Yeah. Okay.

Then make that the commitment. And I will. I'll promise you that if you do that every day, one at the end of the year, you will feel accomplished because you actually did what you said you were going to do. And I will tell you that the marketplace will also always recognize someone who puts 4 hours of work every single day into one thing. Yeah.

And that you can control. Don't do my best. It was required. That's right. That's right.

Because your best might not be good enough yet. That's true. Man, that was amazing. That's what I needed. Thank you.

Good. Just promise me that you'll actually just commit to doing the work if you do that. You do like, I have to get sell 10,000 books. What I actually do to do that? Yeah.

Find somebody who has an audience that is relative to the topics that you're talking about, and reach out to that. Now, it's okay if I got one person, they sold 20 books. Okay. How do I reach out to 1000 people? Do all have my audience.

If you do that, you'll probably sell more than 1000 books, but you just got to do it 4 hours every day. Okay. Thank you. I love you. You're the best.

You're me. I love you back. Good luck with the book. I know how much work goes into that. Hey, Alec, how are you doing?

Good, man. Nice hat. Thank you. I like it quite a lot. You look svelte.

Alec
Oh, my God. It's the best hat for the gym. Good. So what's up, man? Awesome, man.

So I have two topics that I kind of want to, you know, treat with you. And, you know, you titled this advice for hard days, and it's been tough lately. So I'm just gonna catch you up on a little. A couple of things that are happening. So, about three months ago, my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer.

Two months ago, my girlfriend, the girl that I thought I was gonna marry, kind of left. Yep. Then two weeks ago, I traveled to London to speak at Europe's biggest business event. On the first day of my arrival, my granddad passed away. I'm sorry.

So I had to basically speak in front of thousands of people. Yeah. Kick my smile and then travel back and bury him. Did you? And so yesterday, I did.

Alex Hormozi
Okay. I did all of it. And so the question is. Well, yesterday, everything just kind of hit me, because now I'm back in the office taking the calls, and I'm trying to deal with everything. But the question is, how do I maintain my composure and kind of stay strong?

Yeah. Because it's. It's a tough period. Totally. Well, first off, I'm sorry that you're going through that.

That being said, honestly, you've got a lot of good stuff going for you. So this is a. I feel like almost a relatively easier one for me to take, given what you just said. Like, you just asked a question. How do I do something I've already done before, which is you got in front of thousands of people and gave a presentation and had a smile, and you crushed it, despite the fact that you had other circumstances.

Right. Yeah. And so you ask the question, how do I do something that I already done? You've already done it. What?

You're saying is, how do I keep living? And you keep living by keeping living. It's the same thing with breakups, right? It's like, I've heard this quote, and I heard it from Layla. I think the first time, the amount of time it takes you get over someone, do you know how long it is?

There's a math equation for it. It's exactly as long as you decide it takes. And what I'm going to say is going to sound really dark right now, so I want you to take this the right way. Take it the way I mean it, all right? Which is that you just had.

You had three deaths, right? You had death of a life that you thought you were going to have with a girlfriend, and then you had the death of two different grandparents, right? You had three deaths. But, well, on the positive side, my grandmother is still battling. Oh, okay.

She's still battling. Wait, we're plus one. All right, so only two deaths now, right? But sure, we can even play it out, all right, on a long enough time horizon, she will eventually pass away, right? It's going to happen.

And the thing is, is that you are already standing it. Like you're asking, how do I stand it? But you are standing here already. You talking to me today is evidence of the success that you're asking for. You're already won, dude.

You're showing up and you're working every day. You're coming here to ask questions, actually still trying to grow yourself. The stuff that you go through become the stories that you will someday tell. And no one likes epic heroes without epic monsters. And so you have to go through the rocky cutscene to have those periods of time where you doubt yourself, where everyone else doubts yourself, where the walls are crumbling around you.

Because have you ever read shoe dog Phil knight story about Nike? Even if you haven't, the entire story is just him getting kicked in the nuts for 30 years. That's the whole story. And then he's like, oh, yeah, and then I built Nike, right? And now if he had just said, yeah, I started this company, and everyone loved it, and all my suppliers were on time, and I just scaled straight.

And as the money came in, I just bought more inventory, and then we just went public, no one would care because it's not relatable. And the thing is, is that when you die, the only thing that will remain is the story that people will tell of you. And so wouldn't you want that to be an epic story? Yeah. And so the things that you're going through are required for the person you want to be and for the goals that you have and how you are acting in the present already proves the thing that you're claiming that you want.

So you already won, dude. And you're going to just stand it by tomorrow, you're going to wake up and you go to work, and the next day you're going to wake up and go to work, and then you're going to text and it's going to say that your grandmother's cancer is getting worse. And what are you going to do? You're going to get back to work. You're just going to keep doing the stuff.

There's no magic bullet. You just keep going, because either you keep going or you die. And if you don't die, you succeeded. I would just say, stop. Just don't judge yourself on how you feel.

Judge yourself by what you do, despite how you feel. So you can feel shitty, you can wake up and have a terrible day and still show up with a smile in front of the thousand people. And so if you can do it with a thousand people, you can do it with one. And that first one is the person that looks at you in the mirror in the morning. You can do it for them.

You can do it for you. Got it. That was kind of like the life part. And now when it comes to business, I just have a real quick question. Okay, sure.

Alec
So I built an Instagram audience to over 100,000. I speak about sales and marketing. Awesome. I've been doing it for the past two years. I've been posting kind of like every day.

I know the content game, but the one thing that I'm struggling to balance is, you know how you say, give, give until they ask, and, you know, I love it, but sometimes it takes a while until they ask. Cash flow still needs to go. Yeah, I understand. Service based. So how do I balance it out without hiring my audience?

Because I also, my community is known for. For really being in the comments, chatting with me, being there for me. So how do I do it? So if you want to have a one step away from, like, just giving forever, right, is that you give in public, sell in private, which is when people respond to your stories. Right?

Alex Hormozi
When people dm you, when people ask questions, you can still define a scope and say, hey, like, at a certain point I have, like, I have given you all this value. Use all the free stuff. If you want more than that, I'd be happy to hop on a call and see if I can help you more. Right. So it's not like, everyone buy this thing right now.

Right? You're not, like, getting super aggressive about it. You still publicly just keep pumping all the goodwill and the value that you are, and that'll grow your audience and increase goodwill and all of those things. That's what you want. You're gonna keep doing that.

It's just that you could still have a call to action that's just in the comment section or put a story up that says, hey, by the way, if you need help with that thing, I'm happy to help. Like, those are very light touch things because I understand you gotta pay bills. I understand that. And so you can put those things out without necessarily damaging the goodwill that I think you're. That you're obviously building.

Alec
Yeah, that was kind of like the one thing that. That I had in mind. Yeah. And just make an amazing offer. But that's well good.

Irresistible. Yep. So good they feel stupid saying, now I got it. A hundred million offers. That's right.

Alex Hormozi
All right, well, dude, I. I appreciate you, man. You're fantastic. You are too, man, to hang in there. You'll be fine.

You'll get through it. And then it'll be a story that you'll someday tell. Yeah. And thank you for everything that you do, not just for me, but for everyone else, because I think you're marking a new path, and that's kind of cool. I appreciate you, bro.

Thank you.