Why Hard Work Beats Happiness Every Time | Ep 715

This episode challenges the conventional pursuit of happiness, advocating instead for a relentless focus on hard work and its undeniable benefits.

1. Happiness as a constant pursuit can be misleading and unfulfilling.
2. Being useful and improving oneself serves both individual growth and community well-being.
3. Mastery and confidence come from repetition and a deep understanding of the input-output equation of any skill.
4. Hard work often involves sacrificing immediate pleasure for long-term gains and is essential for achieving excellence.
5. The quality of output in any field is directly proportional to the amount of dedicated, focused effort.

1: The Flaws of Chasing Happiness

Hormozi discusses how focusing solely on happiness can lead to dissatisfaction. He suggests reorienting towards productivity and usefulness as more fulfilling objectives. Alex Hormozi: "I said fuck happiness because it led me to a loop of dissatisfaction."

2: Mastery Through Repetition

Exploration of how repetitive practice builds mastery and confidence, with personal examples from public speaking and writing. Alex Hormozi: "Confidence doesn’t come from shouting affirmations but from undeniable proof of your abilities."

3: The Realities of Hard Work

Hormozi reflects on the rigorous effort required to achieve mastery and the deceptive allure of shortcuts. Alex Hormozi: "People want a binary when it’s really a continuum."

4: Achieving Long-term Success

Discusses the long-term perspective on work and success, emphasizing the importance of depth in work over superficial achievements. Alex Hormozi: "I'm trying to write books to be bestsellers when I'm dead."

1. Redefine Goals: Focus on being useful rather than merely happy.
2. Practice Diligently: Identify key skills in your field and practice them extensively.
3. Seek Mastery: Approach tasks with the goal of mastery, not just completion.
4. Sacrifice Short-term Comforts: Be willing to forgo immediate pleasures for long-term achievements.
5. Regular Self-Reflection: Regularly assess your progress and adjust your efforts accordingly.

“Most people just don't know how to work that hard.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about the art of self-improvement and the importance of being useful, emphasizing on mastery through repetition and dedication to quality work. He provides a deep dive into the journey from seeking happiness to finding satisfaction in long-term goals, underscoring the role of hard work and the pursuit of usefulness for individual growth and success.

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
If you're doing work or you feel like you're not as good at something, you have to figure out what the input output equation is. You have to figure out, like, what's the thing that I have to do a lot of, because every skill's like this, is that there's a period where you have to do a lot of something, and if you don't know what it is, then you're not going to get better.

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 nice thing with being useful is that in order to be useful, you have to be useful to other people. No one can be useful on their own. You have to be useful to other people. So there's a service element, but there's also a self improvement element, which is to be useful to other people, you need to improve yourself. And so that's why I think being useful has been probably my day to day goal of what I need to do.

And that served me well. Not saying anyone should or should, they can do whatever they want, but for me, that's helped me. I mean, this is Tony Robbins quote. We said, if you stay in your head, you're dead. And because it rhymes, it's true.

But for real, though, when I was 19, the reason I said fuck happiness is like, I realized that I was in this cycle, this loop of trying to like everything you analyze, of, like, does this make me happy? Does this pizza make me happy? Does this class make me happy? I mean, I quit pre med because I thought biology didn't make me happy. Now I'm very glad that I did because I like business a lot more now.

But, like, that was the reason I did it. I studied really hard, I did well, but I was like, this doesn't make me happy. Like, of course, if fucking doesn't make you happy, you suck at it. You're learning something. You're going to suck for a very long time.

It's only when all these skills go together that you'll be good at something and you'll actually be useful to society. Of course, you learning the fucking chromosomes doesn't do anything, but it's because of what it shows, a school that you're willing to put up with so that you might be useful to society in the particular skillset. And so, yeah, I think being useful is a far better goal. And this is me just shouting out specifically to mention, try this on for a month. If you're happy, do whatever the fuck you.

Well, really just do whatever you want either way. But if what you're doing isn't working for you, I would try this on for size one. Say that you're going to stop trying to be happy. Just give up on it. Just stop thinking about it.

Like, I'm not. You know what? I'm actually okay with being unhappy. I'm fine with it. I'm still here.

Like, it doesn't mean anything. Okay? And so then you can take action despite your lack of happiness and think, okay, how can I be useful to other people? And I think if you do that, you'll actually start focusing on the tasks and on people outside of yourself, and you'll be amazed at how much better you feel overall. And what happened to me when I went into my fuck happiness thing is that I stopped thinking about happiness altogether.

And then, like, years later, I was like, you know what? Cause I was so used to, because, like, I wanted to label myself that way and be okay with it, people would ask me like, hey, xyz. And I'd be like, oh, I'm not a happy person. I would just, like, say that up front. That way I didn't have to.

And I remember catching myself probably like five years later, and I was like, huh? I say that. I was like, but I actually really do like my life a lot. So I stopped saying I'm not a happy person because I actually kind of do like my life, but I feel like I only got to liking my life by being willing to not like what I was doing for a long period of time. I think people just only think of the things that, quote, feel good, but there's tons of things that feel good that are not bad for you.

Like, sex feels good, it's not bad for you. It's just we immediately jump to, like, cigarettes, booze, you know, whatever, but it's really anything in excess is bad for you. Even cigarettes. Like, if you have one cigarette, a week doesn't do anything for you. Probably you smoke more than that just walking outside, you know what I mean?

For a week in terms of just, you know, CO2 from cars, so it's always in the dose. People want a binary when it's really a continuum. And so I think, I think learning to work is the most useful thing that you can do. I mean, I think for me, I love finding input output equations that equal success of some kind. If you're giving public speaking, I'm going to give this example, because it's perfect.

Caleb, who's on my team, had said years ago when we met, I don't really like public speaking. I don't like presenting. I don't like that stuff. I'm like, cool. I think he said some to the degree of I don't like it or I'm bad at it, whatever.

He did a presentation for the team, and it was good. He had a bunch of things that he wanted to do better on the next one. Now, between those time periods, I had done the book launch, and so he had seen me prepare for my presentation. And so I did it 100 times over 30 days. I did it three times a day before I gave the book launch.

And, you know, when there was 500,000 people or whatever that were at the launch, when we had 500,000 people registered for the launch and I was about to step on stage, the team that was doing it all said, we do this every day, and I've never seen anyone so, like, relaxed and it wasn't a front. It was because I had done it so many times and so fast forward. Caleb had another presentation he had to give, and this time he prepared three times as long. So he did. Instead of 10 hours of prep, he did 30 hours of prep.

And instead of having 80 slides, he had 330 slides. And the presentation went way better. And he noted that he wasnt nervous at all going into the second presentation compared to the first presentation. He messaged me afterwards and said it wasnt that I was bad at speaking. I was just lazy.

I think that a lot of people mistakenly think theyre bad at things. They havent even learned how to try. I do think learning how to try is also domain specific. Caleb is an exceptional video editor and media strategist and great with building the team and those skills, but those had been skills that he knew how to work hard at. But this was a completely different skill.

And so it's like writing. Like, I have a lot of entrepreneur friends who are writing books now. Now they don't know that I come from background of writing. I got a full writing scholarship to Tufts University, which is a good school. I got a personal letter from their writing seller.

Like, we love all your stuff. We want you to be here. I ended up going to Vanderbilt, but, like, I was the vice editor of the newspaper. I was the editor in chief of literary magazine when I was in high school. Like, I like writing and so I know what hard work looks like in writing, which is just editing and editing and editing and editing, which is basically like doing the speech again and doing the speech again and doing the speech again.

And it's the same as ping pong, which is 500 backhands, 504 hands. It's just repetition. Right. And so right now, if you're doing work or you feel like you're not as good at something, you have to figure out what the input output equation is. You have to figure out like what's the thing that I have to do a lot of?

Because every skill's like this, is that there's a period where you have to do a lot of something and if you don't know what it is, then you're not going to get better. Sales is like, I have to do 100 calls a day. I have to do ten conversations a day. Whatever it is, you do that every single day. And you do that for a year, you get pretty fucking good.

And so you have to learn what that input output equation is so that you can push as much it's me, once I know it, then I just jam as much input as I possibly can into that thing. And then that's where the whole, the whole quote that went viral was. Confidence doesn't come from shouting affirmations in the mirror. By having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are, outwork your self doubt, and so you become confident by giving yourself the stack of evidence. The hundred times I went over the presentation, I felt confident going into that because I had a stack of proof that I'd already done it perfectly the last 20 times in a row that I'd done it.

So why would 21 be different? And if youve had 1000 sales calls on your thousand first, if people were watching, theyre like, man, you sound so confident. Youre like, its just how it is. Its not like im confident. I just know whats going to happen next.

And so I prefer to think about it as like do it so many times you get bored of doing it. And like thats when youll look confident to everyone on the outside because youll have no emotional affect to the outcome, because youll have recognized the patterns so many times that theres nothing thats going to surprise you. And I think that most people just don't know how to work that hard. There is no way that anyone will know how hard I've worked on the books. Just imagine that there's a reason that they're all time bestsellers for each of the categories they're in, and still they're like, it's because you're following it's like, no, I know that.

Look at every other fucking person who has a following, and their books don't fucking sell, even though they have a big following. They launch it, and then they stop selling. Why? Because the book sucked. They had a ghostwriter.

They voiced it in whatever they make their, whatever, $5 million or whatever it is, they think the book is finished when it has reached the number of pages. That creates a book. Like, I can write a book in two weeks if I was just trying to write a certain number of pages. But I've usually written five times the amount of pages as what actually comes out in the final draft. And I've rewritten end to end the whole thing, not once or twice, but, like, ten times end to end.

But you know what happens when you do that? You get really fucking good at knowing what is important, what isn't. And you also give yourself way more outside life exposures that trigger new thoughts over that period of time that remind you of things that can make it better. And so it's kind of like when you paint, it's like, it's like putting coats of paint and letting it dry. And so I kind of see editing drafts as, like, another coat of paint.

And then you think you're like, you know what? I went to a new area today, and I saw this new yellow. I wonder if I could throw that in. If you had immediately shipped it, you wouldn't have had the opportunity to see the yellow thing, because time didn't transpire during the creation of the thing. And so I think there's a reason that books that take ten years to write look and read like they took ten years to write.

There's just a depth to the quality. I find happiness in figuring out what my input output equation is and doing it as much as humanly possible. You want to make it easy as possible to work as hard as you can. And so everything that is not that input output equation is interference.

Real quick wise. You guys already know that I don't run any ads on this, and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the word so we can help more entrepreneurs make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers. And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I asked you to do is you can just leave review.

It'll take 10 seconds or one type of thumb. It would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world with someone else. And so, like relationships, I mean, I said this before, but everything that you are not willing to sacrifice to be the best, the person who's best in the world is willing to and already has sacrificed. And so I'm not saying good or bad, do whatever you want, but if you want to be number one, and a lot of people say, I want to be the best, it's like, nate, no, you want to be better.

And you can be really good. You can be really good and not sacrifice plenty of things. But if you want to be the best, then you just have to assume that the best person in the world has the genetic predisposition, has all the environmental cues aligned with their ultimate goal, and is willing to give up everything that is not achieving that goal. And if you're not in that boat, then you're not going to be the best. People just like saying because it makes it feel good, but it's false.

And so in terms of aligning the environment, if you know, theme podado for me, it's writing. Right now is the season that I'm in, because writing kind of is the, is the pillar of everything else we do, content wise, internal communications, the books. Everything comes from me taking time to write because I organize my thoughts better that way, not because I've become skilled at writing. So it's the best way, it's the most distinct way that I can communicate. And so there's a reason that the first 6 hours of my day, when I'm freshest, most well rested, I have no meetings, and I have only one thing that I do, which is write.

There's nothing else. And so if you know what the input out equation is, find the time, the four to 6 hours a day, every day that you can do that and then allow nothing to interfere with it. And that's it. Like, nothing interferes with it. And if you do that for five years, you'll be really fucking good, and you'll be useful and you'll feel good about it.

Because the thing is, at a certain point, the work itself becomes reinforcing. Like when editors edit and then they make a change and then the story goes or the video goes the way they want it to, it's like, boom, that was reinforcing. And if I, like, work really hard on a paragraph and I can just shrink it to one sentence, I'm like, fuck yeah. And that might take that literally, might take 2 hours to just keep beating it down until I get it to like the one most succinct thing, but that's satisfying. And so in the beginning, you suck and you do the reps so that you can learn the skills, so that eventually you do the work itself, because the work itself is rewarding.

But that takes time to get to. In the beginning, you start the journey because you have this big ultimate payoff you want to have, but that's way too far out to actually wait. Like, you have to be an exceptional person who'd been reinforced in the past for waiting for a very long period of time. That's why I say the athletes thing is kind of interesting because they've had to wait a long period of time, and so they have to practice for a long period before they get the thing. But typically they get enough reinforcers early on that the act itself becomes reinforcing.

And thats what mastery is. You transition from having some sort of external motivator to external. I believe all motivators are external, but from the work itself being intrinsically rewarding versus having a carrot of some kind thats been artificially put there, like status or an award or number one or a ranking. And masters enjoy the work more than novices do. So its actually easier for masters.

I would say the hard thing that I have now is that my level of quality, the standard that I have, is only mine. Like, I know that I could probably put out the first draft and it would probably be a bestseller. Its just that I would know that it could have been better and that would eat me alive. So its actually the hard part for me now is that I maintain my standard as the number one standard that I optimize for. And if the world so chooses to also like it, great.

But it also divorces me somewhat from the outcome, because if it were just about getting the best selling book, then I would publish it on the first shot, because at this point, I do have enough skill that probably would be a bestseller on its own. But I also think theres a difference between being a bestseller for a season and being bestseller for 100 years. And so im trying to write these books to be bestsellers when im dead, so theyre still useful when theres nothing else I can do to it to make it better. Same thing for the presentation. Theres nothing else I can do to make this better.

I can't practice it more because even at a certain point when you, if you get past a certain point of practicing, you start knowing it almost too well that you start cutting corn because you're like, it gets too natural. Like, I actually, I borderline over prepared for the GMATs. I like peaked. I like, because I took tests every week and my math score, sorry, my english score peaked before my math score did. So my math score peaked at the test.

But my english score, I had done it so many times, we were like, shooting. You recognize so many patterns that you're like, man, which pattern is this one? Because I'm so good at all of it. I have to remember, you peak, there is a point where it's not even diminishing returns. You actually start getting worse, at least in my opinion, at least in my experience.

If you regress something down to its simpler form, and then I just cut the sentence at half. I lose material. I lose stuff that needs to be there. And so you get it as simple as possible, but no simpler. A really fun thought exercise for somebody who just like, all of this is like, wow, that's so much work.

I'm not really prepared for that. Well, I'll walk you through what it looks like in a micro example. So if a video editor comes to me and says, hey, do you like this clip? And I say, yeah, I do like the clip. If you had another 2 hours to work on it, what would you do?

And they're like, well, if I had another 2 hours, I'd do this, this and this. I'm like, okay, go do that. Come back. They come back and I'm like, do you think it's better? And they say, yeah.

And they show it to me. I'm like, it is better. Okay, now, if you had another 2 hours, what would you do? Like, well, I do this, this, and this. Like, okay, cool.

They go, they come back, same conversation. Like, okay, if you had a week, what would you do? Well, then they're like, well, shoot. I probably scrap this whole style overall, and I actually make a totally new framework for how I'd approach the video, and I'd want to come at it from this angle altogether. It would just take a lot more work, but I think it would still make a better outcome.

It's like, okay, so that idea, just do it on five years. And so everybody just wants to get it done rather than get it right. And getting it right is where all the money is. At a certain point, you start to develop mastery even around pursuing goals. Like, this is book three from the $100 million series.

Every month I get thousands of reviews and DM's and people who say their lives change from the first two books. The hard part was book one when I have none of that for a year and a half. But once that one's out, leads, I'm like, well, I'm getting reinforcement every day from my writing, and so I write, and so now I've two books worth of that, and once the third book's out, there'll be three books worth of that. So maintaining that it gets easier and easier just because I have regular enforcement for writing, not necessarily this book, but writing in general, and so then means I can generalize past good experiences onto how I act and work. Now, you become an expert at pursuing goals because you have pursued goals in the past.

I just use writing as an example, but I've pursued goals in the past, and sticking it out has had big payoffs. And so when I feel like I'm sticking it out again, I'm reminded of the past times I've stuck it out and it's been worth it. The hard part is for the people who haven't stuck anything out because they've never seen it work. And so the first one's always the hard one. It's like you just have to have faith on some level.

You just have to fucking believe that it'll work out. And the thing that carries you over the bridge in the short term is that you are getting better. And if you can just focus on that, then even if the crowd doesn't cheer when you give your presentation or you don't sell books or whatever it is, you'll know. And so it's funny, because I look back at the presentation that I gave five years ago, and I really am embarrassed. But I'm not embarrassed at the effort I put in then, because the effort I put in then, I really did think it was really good.

I just didn't know what good could be because I also gave myself 20 hours rather than 200 hours. And so if I only had 20 hours, maybe that is the best I can do, and maybe today that's still the best I could do. I just give myself way more time. But the problem with giving yourself way more time, once you see how much good good can be, is that you realize how few projects you can do. That's why the biggest guys and biggest business titans in the world talk so much about focus, because it's not that focus is the thing.

It's just that it takes so much fucking time to do something right that you can't do more than one thing.