The Importance of Documenting Your Mistakes
(Alex Hormozi Video Transcript)
Other Title(s):
Your Failures Can Make You Rich (if you write them down)
Source:
Transcript:
Documenting your business mistakes may be the most important thing you do in your entire business career to make more money.
After I lost everything for the second time in my career, that experience was so painful that I was like, “I can’t keep doing this, I can’t keep repeating these same mistakes.” So I was like, “I have to find a way that I can learn from this.” And so, within the next three months, I started my podcast, and the intention behind that podcast was that I would learn to document the things that I was doing and what I was thinking about, and the problems that I was suffering from at that time.
I always thought the concept of having a Jeff Bezos vlog, where once a week he was like, “This is what we’re dealing with at Amazon,” all the way to his current state would have been so valuable. And I always had the belief that I would get to that level eventually. So, you know, delusional or not, I thought, “Why not start now?”
And so I started documenting my mistakes and my successes, and an interesting thing happened: from that point until now, I haven’t lost everything again.
We’ve built a $100 million-plus net worth, arguably a lot more than that, but just for the sake of this video, in that next seven or so years. I’ve been in business for 13, but I lost everything about the halfway point — twice. And so making sure that I learned the right lessons from my mistakes has been, I think, one of the largest contributing factors to me being able to move forward at such a fast rate.
Whether you document it through video or you document it through a podcast or you document it through written, I don’t think matters. I’ve actually done both. So I started with just a podcast, but the ideas for that podcast came from an email thread that I had to myself. Every year, I would start a new email thread called “Lessons and Failures…” and then the year, and it would be hundreds of emails long to myself. And it would just be little tidbits, little one-phrase, two-phrases of like, “Oh yeah, I had this interview with this girl; she did this thing I think that’s awesome.” And then six months later, when I find out that person’s stealing, I’m like, “Oh, that thing that I thought was good is actually not good.” So I’d have these kind of like continuous open-loop stories that I’d be telling about what I think will happen versus what actually would happen, and then it allowed me to have much more crystallized decision-making power in the future because I was like, “Wait a second, I’ve seen this one before, and I know how this one goes.”
And so that happened more and more times. So if you think about it as if entrepreneurship were a video game, you have levels. Have you ever picked up an old video game, and then beat it really quickly to the levels you remember, and then you get to the level you don’t know, and then it’s really slow again? And it’s, I think, entrepreneurship is a lot the same way. It’s because you were like, “Oh, I know where that pothole is. Oh, I know I can go get the extra ammo there. I know how to get this. I know what this director of sales should look like. I know what a director of marketing should look like. Oh, I’ve never run Facebook ads before,” — slow. And then you just die, die, die, die, and you respawn over, and then finally you get through. And then the next time you beat all six levels, and then you also beat the Facebook level, and then you’re like, “All right, well now we’re going to run YouTube ads,” and you’re like die, die, die. And so I see entrepreneurship a lot the same way.
But if there are so many things that are happening every day in business that if you don’t have a way to crystallize the knowledge to document what you’ve done, it’s like you don’t develop this repertoire, at least for me, not as easily, because the nuance of what I remember fades, right? I don’t remember what was the big breakthrough here? I’m like, “I just know that it worked, but I want to know why it worked.” So that when a new situation comes up, I can know how to increase the likelihood that it happens again.
And so, nowadays, I publicly do this stuff through shorts and longs and tweets, but fundamentally the thing that got me into doing it in the early days was the side benefit that people would watch it, but the primary benefit that future me would be able to reference back to this thing and know where I was at that time, what I was struggling with, what beliefs I had. And that was probably the one that was most interesting, it was like: “Hey, if there was a period of time where I was crushing it, how was I seeing the world, and is it different than now?”
So it’s almost like having a time machine. So it’s like, okay, if all of a sudden I get into a losing streak, I’m going to go back to when I was winning, and I’m going to watch some of the stuff that I was doing then so I can keep it top of mind like, “Oh, what’s different between these two things?” But if I don’t have that to reference, then I just have to go off memory, but my memory in the current state is being jaded by my current situation. And so I want to be able to have a source I can go back to, truth, and truth just being things that are documented.
And so, I see this as a really huge problem for a lot of small business owners, or really just business owners in general; is that they make a mistake, but they learn the wrong lesson from it. Dr. Burgelman talked about this where he said, “It’s worse to be successful and not know why than to have failed and know why correctly.” This is me paraphrasing, but that struck me when I heard that for the first time. And I think the reason it struck me was that it took me years to figure out why Gym Launch was actually so successful in the beginning.
Now, obviously, for me, I was like, “I’m 27 years old, took home $17 million in income my first year,” — that’s not revenue, that was profit — “in my first 12 calendar months of the business. Like, I’m so great.” But we are so quick to attribute failure to an outside circumstance, but we don’t attribute success to an outside circumstance. And I had a number of things that were going well for me at that time. I had Facebook ads that were super cheap, which made the stuff that our gyms (customers) were using super cheap and super profitable. For me to acquire customers, gym owners, was also super cheap and super profitable. And so I had these things that were working, you know, I was like, “I’m just such a good marketer.” But it wasn’t that, right? I mean, because years later, when that arbitrage disappeared, it’s like, is the same thing happening?
So what happened is that Gym Launch had to evolve from an arbitrage business to one that won off of execution. And me basically realizing this was “Why is it not printing the way it was before?” It’s like, “Oh, it’s because the context has changed.” And so I became a much better entrepreneur despite the fact that the net income went down. And so learning from that is both humbling but also the only thing that you can do to get better.
And if we see ourselves as the asset that we’re ultimately building throughout our lives, which we eventually just cash in at the end and die anyways, then making sure that I’m getting the right lesson from the scar is arguably the most important thing that you can have to move faster.
Because when you watch that person play that video game again, when they know the game, it’s not like they’re moving super fast. They just don’t make the wrong turn. They go directly for the ammo, they avoid the pothole. They hit the dragon right at the sweet spot because they know where it is because they died 20 other times hitting the wrong part of the dragon that’s not the sweet spot. And so, it’s more efficient movement; they have less wasted moves. I see that the same way as entrepreneurship. The businesses that I have now are so much bigger than the ones that I had before, and they grow so much faster because I know how to go through the first early levels really quickly because of what I’ve documented before.
Here’s what it looks like when it’s wrong. So I’ll talk to, you know, a small business owner who will say, “Hey, you know, I hired a salesperson and then they didn’t work out.” And I’m like, “Cool, so what’d you learn from that?” This is always one of my favorite questions: “What’d you learn from that?” And so I asked this to myself, like, “What’d you learn from that?” And so with this particular individual, he said, “Well, no one can sell like I can sell.” I’ll be like, “Well, I think you might have learned the wrong lesson from the mistake.”
The only thing worse than having the mistake is learning the wrong lesson from the mistake because then you’re bound to repeat it again. And so a fool never learns from their mistakes. A dumb person learns from their mistakes eventually. A smart person learns one lesson from a mistake. A very smart person learns multiple lessons from a mistake. A wise man learns from the mistake of others. The wisest man learns from their successes too. And so the idea is if we think about that as a continuum of how we can move more efficiently through life and get more for every move, it’s making sure that we’re like that person playing the video game that when we go back through, we know what potholes to avoid.
Because imagine if you played the game and you’re like, “Oh, I killed this guy because I hit him in the sweet spot,” and you thought the sweet spot was here, but the real thing was that you had a certain arrow that you picked up earlier in the game. And when you play the game again, you don’t think it’s about the arrow; you think it’s about the spot. And so then you hit the spot again; it doesn’t work. It’s because you attributed the success to the wrong lesson. And so I actually see this happen a lot. I think it’s one of the most common mistakes that happens in entrepreneurship is that people just extrapolate their current view of the world over the mistake.
But fundamentally, the people who are better at business see business more clearly. They can recognize the mistake more easily, and they’re correct because they have a high predictive power. Meaning if they want this thing to happen again, they can predict that it will or what it would take to make the dragon die because they had the right thing, which is it’s actually not the spot or the arrow, it’s both. You’re like, “Ah,” right? And only somebody who’s lived through both of those experiences, well, the next time they came with the arrows that were right, they hit in a different spot; it didn’t work either. So you’re like, “Oh, it’s the combination of things.” And oftentimes it’s not one thing; it’s two or three things that have to happen at the same time for the outcome to occur.
And so when I started ALAN, my third company that I was CEO of at the same time — you can already tell me smiling because of the obvious mistake that I was making. ALAN was a hard business. I’d never been in software before; I’d never developed software before; I’d never had engineers before, product design, UX; I didn’t know any of this stuff. I was like, “I just know that this is,” I knew the problem, and I knew I had product-market fit because I knew exactly what needed to get built, and I knew I had a whole audience that I could sell to. But here’s all the lessons that I learned from that.
Hey, and if you’re in the early part of your business career, avoiding mistakes is one of the most important things you can do in order to move faster. Not to say that you’re not going to make them; you’re going to make a ton of them, but ideally you want to make ones that you can, that you can’t avoid rather than the mistakes you can avoid. And for people just getting started in business, I run something called the Skool Games on skool.com/games. And in there, I take calls; I help people build their first business on the platform, and you can start for free. All right, so if that’s at all interesting, you can go to skool.com/games.
One is software is hard. Second, that you don’t want to get into a features war with competitors. Like competitors in software can easily copy any features you have. And so you want to have other things about your business that gives you more of a moat that protects you from just a race to the bottom and a features war.
The main, probably the biggest lesson I learned from it was, yet again, another lashing from the woman in the red dress. The reason I’m so vehement about the woman in the red dress is that of all the mistakes that I’ve had to learn, she has been the sneakiest and the most devious of them, and the one that I’ve had to learn the same lesson over and over and over again. And I would say, to a certain degree, I’m ashamed of that; of how many times I’ve had to learn not to pursue the woman in the red dress. And it’s like, because every time, you know, now she’s black, now she’s Asian, now she’s white, and now she’s tall, now she’s short. Sometimes she’s wearing a short dress. Sometimes it’s not red; it’s maroon. Sometimes it’s, you know, faded mango for the color. But every time, I’m like, “No, no, no, this time’s different.” And you can probably tell, like, if you have that friend who dates the same girl over and over again, they’re like, “No, no, this girl’s different.” You’re like, “Dude, it’s the same thing.” It’s like super basic, work girl, you know, super tatted up, you know, dad issues, whatever. Right? It’s like “You run the same playbook, man. Like, this is obviously not working for you.” Obviously, I also have no issues with anybody who looks like that. I’m just saying this as an example.
And the main lesson that I learned from ALAN was that — it was the only argument that Leila and I have ever been in, and it was actually a business argument, which I find hilarious. And she just didn’t think that we had the bandwidth to bring on another company and do it. And I argued that she needed to think bigger and that, you know, we had to take big swings and all of that. And I ended up just steamrolling her, and it was a terrible decision for a number of reasons. But one of the biggest ones was that my operator wasn’t on board. Even if she wasn’t my wife, the person who’s going to be running this thing wasn’t on board with it and was telling me, shouting at me quite literally, that she was so spread thin with the current businesses that to take on something else would just make one of them suffer.
And so that’s exactly what happened, right? And so it had nothing to do, and like maybe if I had only done that, then we would have grown it, you know, and been a gazillion-dollar thing. There’s nothing wrong with the concept behind the business. And oftentimes for everybody, there’s often not something fundamentally wrong with the concept behind the business. Like you have some service or some problem that you solve for some specific customer; it’s just all the other stuff, right? And being able to recognize, “Oh, that is not what a sales director looks like.” But until you hire that person, have them, you know, spend six months wasting leads on them and then having them fail, and then hire another sales director, and again six months of not-growth because they’re not closing the way they need to, and then on the third, when you finally find it, you’re like, “Oh, this is what a sales director looks like. This is what a sales director does.” And then guess what happens, is that from that point going on in your life, you know how to beat that level. And so you quickly put the right sales director in, in your second company, your third company, or whatever it is, or a new division in the company, because you know what it looks like when it’s right.
And so I think making sure that it’s like, “Okay, I know how to kill the dragon,” because the sales director can’t just be charismatic. They also have to have systems things, and they have to do both of them, and they have to care about people, or whatever. And so it’s not usually one or two things; it’s usually a handful, and that’s what makes business complex.
Trying to remember all of these little details is so hard that it became so important for me to document those things. And you get the double benefit when you document that you make content about it, and so you can both build your personal brand if you’re into that and get the benefit of documenting the lessons, which is the real benefit as the entrepreneur. And I find it interesting because a lot of people, a lot of business owners who make content ask me, “How do I come up with content ideas?” And I always found that such a silly question because I always have so many things to talk about. And I think it’s because the easiest thing to talk about is “the news”. You just look at what’s going on and you make commentary on it, which is why a lot of channels or people over time just devolve into just news reporters with commentary. But I don’t think that’s the right way to do it.
I prefer to talk about my news because life is always happening. And so, I also have problems, so unless you have no problems in life, which I don’t think anybody watching this has no problems in life, you talk about the problems that you’re dealing with right now and how you’re approaching them. And you can also just do it in arrears. Like if you don’t feel like being vulnerable, fine. Because sometimes there are things in business that you can’t, you know, if you have an employee, say, “I’m dealing with Daniel, who’s behind the camera right now, and I’m like, ‘I got this problem with this videographer,’” you know what I mean? Then I probably can’t talk about it right now, right? But if I could talk about it three, like literally, if we solve something and then three months later I say, “Hey, Dan and I, we’re having this beef, but we figured this thing out; it’s totally cool,” right? And so we just talk about, you talk about a little bit in arrears, and that way you’re not risking anything, client relationships, whatever. But you just talk about your news rather than the news. You’ll always have a source of content, and it’ll allow you to document your business mistakes and successes so that you learn the right lessons.
And so let me tell you how powerful this is. So I had dinner years ago with an entrepreneur who had exited a company that was an e-commerce company, and he had made the majority of their sales on Amazon. This is the early days of Amazon, when you could pretty much just list a product, and it would just grow because there was reviews hacking and there’s all sorts of stuff. And so we had dinner with this entrepreneur, and I remember him saying this: he said, “Isn’t it crazy that you could never have a business as successful ever again? Like this could be the most successful business you ever have.” And it was because he attributed everything that he had in his life to the luck of things working out in tandem. And the reality was that for him, that was true. And for us, it was also true, but we had crystallized the knowledge because we had wanted to study what made us successful. And so since that point, he has not had a business that was more successful than that first one that he had. We have had every one since be more successful than the first one that we had. And the difference was, did you document the lessons, or are you just playing a video game that’s the same game, but you’re acting like a new character, like you’ve never played it before because you never wrote down what you were supposed to do when you got to the first boss or the first pothole?
And I think it’s just as important, like I said, to study your successes. And so like our supplement launch for Prestige Labs was probably the most successful launch in terms of like cleanliness, like no problems of anything we’ve ever done. And the difference between that launch and some of the other ones was that I had my operator on board, the team had been completely trained up, we had an alpha phase, we had a beta phase, we worked through all the kinks in the process, I let them set the date for when the launch was going to be, we were staffed up, we were trained, we had inventory, we had everything, we had all the little holes figured out. And the first month we did $1.7 million in recurring revenue. Recurring. Crazy for supplements. And so the crazy thing about that was I had learned from the mistakes that I’d done before. And so I was like, “How can I not make those?” And also, “This worked out well; how do I make sure that I repeat successful actions? How do I make sure that I check every one of these boxes the next time?” Because nothing feels like success, which is one of Leila’s favorite sayings. She’s like, “Well, we have to remember that it took us a year to do this, and so if we want to do another thing, we can’t think, ‘Oh, we just crushed that, we can crush another one.’” She’s like, “No, the point is that it took us a long time and a lot of work and a lot of buying and a lot of training, a lot of resources for an extended period of time to make this big thing work right the first time.”
And so when we do something else, we have to understand that’s the price that we have to be willing to pay. And having that context, you think, “Wow, okay, I know to beat the next level it’s going to take me two hours, but mom wants to go to the grocery store, so I probably shouldn’t start that level right now because I’m not going to be able to finish it.” And so having the context of what kind of resources am I going to have to put towards this gives you a more realistic view of how many things you can actually take on and do well. And I think — big picture — that has probably been one of my biggest meta lessons, that once I learn how long it takes me to do something well, I learned how few things I can actually do, which means that I have to say no to just about everything.
Steve Jobs was famous for asking his executive team this: he said, “What have you said no to lately?” Because he didn’t want people to just say they’re focused. The focus is everything you turn away from. He said it’s not just turning away from bad ideas; it has to be an idea that you, in your bones, desperately want to do and still choose not to because you said you were going to stay focused on the one thing that mattered most. And that has probably been one of the hardest lessons. It’s the inverse of the woman in the red dress for me because there’s just so many things in the business world that I want to do, I want to try. But knowing how much work it takes to make one thing work very well, and it’s just taken me a very long time to learn this, is that you just can’t do many. You have to learn how to say no.
And once you do start the game with all the lessons, you zoom past all the levels and you get to the hard part, which I call the virgin territory. Right, now it’s how do I hire a CFO, how do I do a business transaction, how do I take on debt in a way that’s responsible, how do I scale to a new acquisition channel, how do I go from five salespeople to 50 salespeople, like what is that process, what does a career path look like for a salesperson, what does a career path look like for customer success, like is this customer support or customer success, like where do I find a good IT director who can actually integrate all of our systems together.
But what’s interesting, I’ve always thought about this, is that we were able to grow so quickly in Gym Launch. Sure, we had the arbitrage of the Facebook stuff that was happening, but I also came into it having run six locations with 30 plus employees and, you know, eight sales guys. And so I was used to 30, 50, sometimes 100 sales a day on my team. And so as soon as we started Gym Launch, I immediately went up to what my level of incompetence was or my level of max competence, right? Equal opposite. I knew what it was like to spend $1,000 a day, I knew what it was like to spend $3,000 a day, I knew what it was like to have eight sales guys taking calls all day long. And so I could quickly scale to that, which is why we went from basically nothing to 26 million that next year because I was used to that level of activity, we just added more zeros on the price tag, but everything else was the same.
And one of the greatest parts about documenting things publicly is that you now become accountable to the lessons you claim you learned. And so I think that if you think about the benefits of documenting business mistakes and business successes publicly, there’s three things.
One is you make it for you, and so it will help you learn the lesson better, and telling the story makes it stick. If you just try and remember a lesson, it doesn’t apply. Elon Musk had this clip that I sent to the whole team, where he talks about how education is all wrong. They have a course on a wrench and they have a course on a screwdriver. He said they shouldn’t teach that way because you don’t have context, your brain can’t remember it. But if you said, “Hey, let’s take apart this engine,” now everyone looks at the engine and says, “Oh, I guess we’ll probably need a wrench.” But now the wrench has contextualized the problem that it helps solve. And so when we tell the stories, it helps contextualize the problem that we’re solving at the time so that when a problem similar to that, when a girl with a red dress comes up and she’s got short hair, you’re like, “Okay, I have one of you guys before; it had long hair, and the dress was, you know, shorter, but I think you’re related.” And so you have the first benefit, which is that you crystallize the lesson.
The second is that you’re accountable to that lesson because there’s people who are watching it who are like, “Hey, I thought you said that you didn’t want to do a lot of these things. You can’t be CEO of multiple things, right?” Right. And so it holds you accountable to that. And then the third benefit is that you actually make money from it because people will identify with your values and your beliefs and say, “Hey, I’d like to do business with you.” If you see that as gravy, then you won’t lose because you never did it for them to begin with.
So instead of giving a non-answer to like, “What’s the one thing that you think you attribute a lot of your success to?” I actually do have some answers.
One is the time-blocking thing that I made a video about the other day, which is like my productivity system or something, some YouTube headline. But basically the maker-manager time, understanding the difference between those things. But the second is that, okay, if I can maximize my maker-manager time, then I maximize the raw unit. But now I want to get the most for that time. And I think this, what I’m talking about today with crystallizing those lessons, has been probably the second most valuable thing that I’ve done in my career. So it’s, I need to make time so I can do the work that matters most, and then I need to document the mistakes that I made so that when I do that work that matters most, I’m actually working on the work that matters most.
And so using the video game analogy, it’s like if ALAN were a video game and I’m trying to win at that game, then I’ve got a co-op player, my wife and business partner, who doesn’t want to play the game, it becomes very hard to win when you’re doing co-op and one player doesn’t want to play or wants to win at a different game, right? And so there are a lot of lessons, not just that one, that I learned from ALAN as a company. And I’ve learned lessons from every company I’ve had, but not being able to look back because it was so long ago would increase the likelihood that I am forced to replay that level again because I wouldn’t remember why I failed.
So if you had to apply the woman in the red dress to a video game scenario, it would really be like trying to play two video games at the same time and win at both. Like, just think about how crazy it is. There’s two ways you can think about it. One is that you literally try and play both games at the same time, which obviously no one’s going to win. What’s crazy is that entrepreneurs do this all the time. The second scenario might be a little bit more realistic is that you’re alternating between games. It’s like one day you play this game, one day you play that game, one day you play this game. But you’ll notice that when you do that, you’re kind of rusty. You kind of got to get yourself back up to speed, you got to learn the keys, you’re just rusty, right? You got to get read up or sped up. Now do that with three games and you’re playing one game, you know, A, B, C, A, B, C. Well, imagine the guy who’s just playing on A. That guy’s your competitor. He’s going to not be three times better than you. He’s probably going to be like six or nine times better than you because not only is he spending three more, 3x the time on the actual game as you, but he also doesn’t have the cost of change and the cost of getting caught up to speed every single time. And so he might be six or nine times ahead. And you’re like, “How is this guy beating me?” It’s like, “Because he’s not doing anything else.”
And so I like to think, “How would I play this game if I had to win? Like there was no option for failing.” Well, I definitely wouldn’t have any, I wouldn’t be playing any other games. I definitely would orient my entire life around the video game. I would definitely make sure that like food was brought to me, you know, drinks were brought to me. I’m, you know, sleeping optimally. I’ve got everything that I need, my lighting, all that stuff would be optimized so that I could just play this game. And the people who make the most money in business call it the game. The reason the show is called “The Game” is because I think everyone is in the game. It’s just that a lot of people don’t know it.
As soon as you realize that you are playing a video game with money in business, then all the same rules apply. And you want to have your Prima officially official strategy guide next to you of all the lessons that you’ve learned along the way. It’s just that this game has way more than 10 keys on a keyboard and way more players because everyone in the world is playing, and there are no rules besides not going to jail. And so you have a true open world game with real stakes and players that have been playing for 60 years who are competing against you. And so I just want to do everything in my power to make sure that I increase the likelihood that I can win.
So if you aren’t documenting your successes, start. If you aren’t documenting your failures, start. You can also not, it doesn’t really matter. When I didn’t do it, I made a lot less money. When I started doing it, I started making a lot more money. And so I would say, do it whatever way you can. If it’s just Twitter and tweeting it, or if it’s an email chain to yourself, or it’s audio messages to yourself or just when you’re driving, whatever version of that it is, as long as you make you the main audience, then you won’t worry about the reviews, you won’t worry about the performance, you’ll just get better at it. And I think that, honestly, having done 700 and something solo podcasts up to this point, I’ve gotten better at talking just because I was forced to. If you listen to my early podcasts compared to now, I’m more articulate. How did that happen? Because I did it a load of times. And so the same thing will happen to you and you’ll actually get practice on making content, on presenting to your staff, on presenting to your team, on presenting to customers by doing it more.
Audience Q&A
“Do you See Leila as you guide?”
So a question from the audience is, “Do you see Leila as your guide?” So I think there’s guide with a capital G and then guide with a little g. So guide with a capital G would be the assumption that like Leila is my guide in life, and the answer would be no. I would say that we’re partners, we do these things together. But within the context of the story, in that instance, yeah, she came in with the insight and that’s what changed the character, got me over the obstacle, and got me to the next thing. And I think we both played that role for one another throughout our careers. And having somebody like that, the hard part is just finding somebody who actually wants you to win. It’s so rare. Everybody has their own agenda, and it’s how you can help them win. And so, I mean, that’s why I think at least, you know, husbands and wives have the most aligned incentives. And so it helps that when they’re selfish for themselves, you can believe, like sometimes they’re wrong, but at least their intention’s correct.
And I think what’s really cool about documenting your mistakes and the lessons from them is that we give such great advice to other people, and yet we don’t follow it for ourselves. And so when you actually write down the advice that you want to give to yourself, it kind of stares back at you, and you’re like, “Man.” And one of the most powerful frames that I’ve had in my life in terms of like navigating difficult situations is if I were coaching myself, if I were mentoring myself, if I were my own guide, what would I tell me? Because the beautiful thing is that you always have complete context with the situation because you’re in it. So you don’t need to tell somebody to try and get them up to speed; you are up to speed. But most people, if I said, “Hey, how do I lose weight?” They’d be like, “Hey, stop eating and move more,” right? But then when it’s you, you’re like, “Well, I have all these other things, I have all these emotional charges around all this crap,” right? But if we listen to our own advice most of the time, we don’t lack information; we lack execution.
“Is talking to your future self just as valuable as learning from your past?”
So the question is, do I get just as much value from my Solomon sessions, basically when I talk to my future self, which sounds really sketchy, but basically I just have a chat message thread with what I imagine to be my 80-year-old version of myself, who’s already accomplished everything that I want to accomplish, has all the lessons learned, and can reflect back on my present situation versus what I’ve learned from my past self? And I think that I’ve learned lessons from both. I think time travel is one of the most useful frames for crystallizing lessons and getting insight into situations where you’re like, “I just don’t know what to do,” because it’s like your present state and your present condition with present influences and things that are going on in your head that are top of mind doesn’t know. But future you definitely will ask a different question about the scenario that oftentimes just erases the importance of it entirely.
“What ‘Big Boss’ are you dealing with?”
So the question was, “Right now, what big boss are you dealing with?” I think that the boss that I am dealing with right now is actually just being patient. And so we have all of the skills we brought from all of the other businesses we’ve owned and run, and we’re applying it to our current business with Acquisition.com. And I think it’s much more of a character trait test for me because the model is working above projections when I started it in 2021. And so it’s doing everything that I hoped it would do and better, which Leila brings up all the time. And I have a huge desire to fuck with shit; like I have a huge — I’m a tinkerer, I like tinkering with things, but most of the time you don’t need to tinker when it is working.
And so I think a lot of times in business, depending on what it is, a lot of things are good enough, like if it’s not the constraint of the business, then it’s just a cost that you force the business to incur by changing anything. Like the cost of change is guaranteed; the upside from change isn’t. And so if you have something that’s working well, then whenever you change it, everything sets back because everyone has to get retrained on a new process, a new anything before it gets back to even neutral, let alone whether it improves or not. And so I think the big boss that I’m facing right now is just a skill thing that I’m learning, which is just letting things grow without getting in the way.
Closing Remarks
And if you guys want to know something very trippy about this, I didn’t start having compounding growth in my wealth until after I started documenting my mistakes. And so until I lost everything the second time, I did not document my mistakes; I didn’t document anything. After that point, 90 days after I lost everything, 90 days, three months, is when I made my first podcast. And from that point going forward, I’ve spent more time thinking about why did this work rather than really anything else. Because if I know why it worked, then I can do it again. And so then I get to like conquer that level, and I just know that I can always skip past it if I know the right “why”.
And speaking of lessons and failures, I just made a video of 13 years of business lessons that I’ve learned in 90 minutes. Go check it out. Enjoy.
From Video Description (from Alex):
Want to SCALE your business? Go here: https://acquisition.com
Want to START a business? Go here: https://skool.com/games
If you’re new to my channel, my name is Alex Hormozi. I’m the founder and managing partner of Acquisition.com. It’s a family office, which is just a formal way of saying we invest our own money into companies. Our 10 portfolio companies bring in over $200,000,000+ per year. Our ownership stake varies between 20% and 100% of them. Given this is a YT channel, and anyone can claim anything, I’ll give you some stuff you can google to verify below.
How I got here…
21: Graduated Vanderbilt in 3 years Magna Cum Laude, and took a fancy consulting job.
23 yrs old: Left my fancy consulting job to start a business (a gym).
24 yrs old: Opened 5 gym locations.
26 yrs old: Closed down 6th gym. Lost everything.
26 yrs old: Got back to launching gyms (launched 33). Then, lost everything for a 2nd time.
26 yrs old: In desperation, started licensing model as a hail mary. It worked.
27 yrs old: “Gym Launch” does $3M profit the next 6 months. Then $17M profit next 12 months.
28 yrs old: Started Prestige Labs. $20M the first year.
29 yrs old: Launched ALAN, a software company for agencies to work leads for customers. Scaled to $1.7mmo within 6 months.
31 yrs old: Sold 75% of UseAlan to a strategic buyer in an all stock deal.
31 yrs old: Sold 66% of Gym Launch & Prestige Labs at $46.2M valuation in all-cash deal to American Pacific Group. (you can google it)
31 yrs old: Started our family office Acquisition.com. We invest and scale companies using the $42M in distributions we had taken + the cash from the $46.2M exit.
32 yrs old: Started making free content showing how we grow companies to make real business education accessible to everyone (and) to attract business owners to invest or scale their businesses.
34 yrs old: I became co-owner of https://Skool.com to help the many people who want to start a business online do so.
Today: Our portfolio now does $200M/yr between 10 companies. The largest doing $100M/yr the smallest doing $5M per year. Our ownership varies between 20% and 100% ownership of the companies. Many of them we invested in early and helped grow (which is how we make our money — not youtube videos).
To all the gladiators in the arena, we’re all in the middle of writing our own stories. The worse the monsters, the more epic the story.
You either get an epic outcome or an epic story. Both mean you win.
Keep crushing. May your desires be greater than your obstacles.
Never quit,
Alex
*FULL DISCLOSURE*
I make content to make money — just — on a longer time horizon than most. I want to build trust with business owners so we can find the best ones and help them scale. And if they’re awesome, write them a check and go all the way as partners.
Find Alex Hormozi on:
Books & free courses: https://www.acquisition.com/books
Podcast: Find his podcast “The Game” on your chosen platform
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hormozi
X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/AlexHormozi
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ahormozi/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhormozi/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ahormozi
P.S.
“If you introduce something valuable to someone, they associate that value with you.” — Alex Hormozi
If you found this valuable, think of just one person who you believe would also find it interesting/valuable and share it with them. They will then associate that value with you, in the form of goodwill.
No affiliation with Alex Hormozi
