The Entrepreneurial Life Cycle That Will Make You Poor Or Rich (on DOAC Pt 2) | Ep 840

Welcome back to the game. This is part 2 of the guest spot on Diary of a CEO with Stephen Bartlett. This is a ton of fun. The second half, we talk about the entrepreneurial life cycle. It has 6 stages. You will be stuck in it forever until you break free. I was stuck in it for years and I will say this, it does rear its nasty head multiple times. I have to fight it actively. This, I mean, this year I was talking about it last night. It's one of those pervasive things that I don't think you solve. It's something that you manage. On top of that, we talk about experimentation. In the form of how you beat competitors and how to do that in a way that makes it harder for them to keep up with you. And so the last thing we talk about, we actually zoom all the way out and we talk about work-life balance, happiness, fulfillment. And I think it's one of the more clear moments I've had on a podcast in a while. I've got a lot of feedback from people from the last 20 minutes of this particular podcast. And it's, you know, 3-hour-plus podcast. And so the fact that people got there and then that was the part they were talking about, I think is good. But if you ever get criticized for how you work, how you approach life, you might enjoy it. So enjoy.

Well, I want to go through the 4 Rs, but I also— I think that what comes before the 4 Rs is knowing how to get customers in the first place, which is a tricky one. And actually, maybe even the thing that comes before that is being psychologically prepared for the toll and the roller coaster that business is. I found this, um, found this graph of yours.

Oh God. Yeah.

And I think for any founder starting a business, it's important for them to understand this cycle. I think you call it like the crash-burn cycle or something, because if you're not aware of this cycle, when you hit certain parts of it, you're probably going to think that there's something wrong with you.

Yeah.

And but there's a certain inevitability to this crash cycle. I'll put it on the screen for anyone to see.

Yeah. This is, this is the entrepreneur life cycle. Until you learn how to break free from it. And so there are 6 stages. You have stage 1, which is uninformed optimism. This is where you see your friend or you see something online and it looks like they're making money or it looks like there's some opportunity and you think, oh my God, that sounds amazing. And you have optimism because it looks great, but it's uninformed because you have no idea what it entails. So then you dive in. And you say, okay, I'm gonna pursue this thing, whatever is it, baking cupcakes, or I'm gonna do lawn mowing, or I'm gonna do crypto trading, whatever. Second step is you get into it and you're like, oh my God, I don't know, there's so many things involved in this and this is significantly more complicated than I expected. So then you become an informed pessimist. You now know that it's hard or significantly harder than you expected. The third stage is you have your crisis of meaning or the valley of despair. So you're continuing to do this stuff, it's continuing to not work, and you keep working and it keeps not working. And so this is the step, and this is the, this is the point of truth. And this is the cycle where the paths of the entrepreneur split. And the vast majority of people take this next step, which is they then say, you know what, there's that thing over there that my other friend's doing, maybe I should do that instead. And so then they hop back to uninformed optimism, and then they go boom to informed pessimism, and they just go around and around and around around, and they live the same 6 months, uh, for 20 straight years. Now, the other path of— from the valley of despair is sticking with it. And so then you become an informed optimist, because now you understand— you still understood all the bad stuff, but you also understand the good stuff and how to avoid the bad and maximize the good. And then once you're there, you do— you stick on that path long enough, and you end up achieving what you originally thought was really easy and fast. And so that cycle, this is more or less the Alex Hormozi life story, which is why I can so intimately describe each of the steps, is that I call that loop and that the person on the other side, the woman in the red dress, which is probably my favorite part of the Matrix movie, which is Neo, who's the main character, is in a program to teach him one thing. And so he's walking through the crowded streets of what looks like a New York City with Morpheus leading him. And he's droning on about something that he's supposed to learn. And he says, Neo, were you listening to me or were you looking at the woman in the red dress? And Neo was looking at the woman in the red dress as Morpheus is talking. And then he says, look again. And he looks back at the woman in the red dress and it's Agent Smith with a gun pointed at his head. And in that moment he's like, freeze. And he explains that You're either one of us or one of them. And they are the people who are sentinels sent to destroy us. And so what appears to be the woman in the red dress is actually an agent from the system meant to destroy the opportunity that you're in right now. And so I love the woman in the red dress so much because it's so real, because you're in this thing, you're in this relationship with your business, and you're like, you know, this girl seems great. And then you get to know her and you find out she snores when she sleeps. And all of a sudden it's like, You know, you know, you see, you see the sweatpants and no makeup in the morning and you realize that sometimes she's moody, whatever. But you get to, you start to get to know, you're like, I don't know if we're gonna get married, but like, you know, this is kind of where we're at. And then you see a woman in the red dress and you're like, you know what? I think that's the girl. And so you quit this relationship with your business and you get into that relationship, but then you realize that that girl has crabs. She has a crazy ex-boyfriend and you're like, oh my God, I didn't want to deal with any of this stuff. Right? And so my, CFO, so was one of the first people that you're like, oh my God, I hired that person, it changed everything. So my CFO and Jim Launch had taken 4 companies from 0 to $100 million. She had done over 40 M&A transactions. Her largest one was $5 billion, super experienced. She was at the very end of her career and she was like, I'll take you guys, I'll take this one last ride with you guys. And so, you know, mind you, Layla and I, I'm 26 or 27 at the time, Layla's 23, 24, and we're sitting across the table from a very experienced business person being like, please help us. And so one of the things that she taught me that I will never forget is she said, the grass is always greener on the other side. You just don't know that it's fertilized with shit. And she's Southern, so she had this deep Southern accent. She's like, there's always shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shit everywhere. And so she's like, I've been in enough businesses to know that all businesses have shit. And so you just have the shit you don't know about and the shit you do know about, and you're in this business. And so this is the shit you know. And that has been so profoundly impactful in my life because it was so hard for me to break the cycle. Really hard for me. I mean, I gave you my, my life story of the many businesses that I've been involved in. And so like the entrepreneurial ADD has been so real for me and I've made some of the biggest career mistakes by just pursuing and splitting my attention between multiple endeavors. And I can say truthfully that this 2024 was the first year, and this is now 2025, the first time in my life where I haven't experienced FOMO. So fear of missing out. And it was one of those things that I just always had. I would see somebody doing really well, I was like, oh man, I mean, I should be getting into that. Like, I shouldn't be doing this, I should be doing that. And it was one of those things, kind of like being happy where like you don't realize you're happy. You just look back and you're like, you know what? That was a really good year. You know, like you kind of like, you kind of see it in retrospect. What I realized was that now when I hear someone say like, oh my God, I crushed it with this thing, I think that's amazing for them. I'm sure there's tons of problems that I don't know about and that's amazing, but I'm gonna keep doing this thing 'cause this is the only thing I know how to do pretty well. And I'm just gonna keep compounding my information advantage against everybody else who thinks this is easy and wants to get into it. And so I think that that every, any massive company that you know of has existed for multiple decades. And in order for something to exist for multiple decades, the founder has to stay focused on that thing for the whole time. And I measure focus by the quantity and quality of things that you say no to. And I measure commitment, or I define commitment as the elimination of alternatives. And so if you think of marriage as the ultimate commitment, then it is the ultimate commitment because you've eliminated literally every alternative besides this person. And so I think that many business problems and many entrepreneurs would 5x, 10x their business if they simply gave themselves no way out. This is what I'm doing. And I'm, I mean, the term, you know, burning the boats, but I'm eliminating all alternatives and structuring my life such that I make it very difficult to pursue the alternatives. And I think by doing that, you can actually conquer this cycle and make it past the split where you go crash and burn and then restart the doom loop or make it to informed optimism and then eventually to the achievement that you want.

There's so much there. There's so much there, but it's such an important point. So where shall I start? So at that moment here, this crisis of meaning moment, what I see so much of is entrepreneurs not necessarily quitting the old thing, but just taking on something else. And entrepreneurs will come up to me in the gym and they'll say, hey Steve, just wanna let you know what I do and see if you can offer me any advice. And then they'll list 3 things. They'll say, I'm starting this crypto thing with my friend Dave. I've got this hair business where we're selling I'm working on e-com and I've got this other thing.

Yeah.

And they almost assume that the more things they're doing, the higher the probability that they'll be successful in something. My mum was that. My mum has started 30 businesses and I watched for my whole childhood how she would start a hairdressing salon and then the person down the street running an estate agents would come in and say, we're making loads of money as an estate agent. She'd start that, that business would suck. She'd hit this moment of crisis of meaning. She'd then start a furniture business. And again, and she, she, so she jumped between 20 to 30 businesses. Yeah. And it's kind of still happening now, but they last 6 months, they eventually go bust. She sort of like, you know, like the monkeys that swing to the next branch, swings to the next thing. And there's never been the escape velocity that comes from this informed optimism part. So yeah, this, it really rang true for me in every sense of the word, this idea of like a focus Going against all of your instincts and your emotions, but being pivotal to achievement.

I think entrepreneurship is far more a war of the heart than it is a war of the mind. Like we can understand what we should do, we just don't do it. And I think that's why we are so much better at giving advice than we are at following it. So most people, if they just followed their own advice, they'd be successful, right? And so, With this kind of valley of despair, I call it niche slapping. It's like, don't make me niche slap you. Which is like when you have 3 things going on, it's like, let me slap you into just picking one. Because the thing is, is that any of them can work, but none of them will work unless you pick only one. Because it's actually, in my opinion, an exercise in arrogance to assume that you doing 3 things is somehow going to beat somebody who's doing 1. And I can promise you the competitor who is going to beat you is only doing that 1 thing. And you think a third of your time is going to beat theirs? No, it's not gonna happen. I think it's arrogant. And so there's actually like an under— there's like an underpinning of ego underneath of this. And I say this as somebody who did this. So like when I had the Launch business, I also had my 6 gyms, I also had a chiropractor agency, and I also had a dental agency. And so I would introduce myself and like, oh, I own lots of companies, but I think one of the biggest misconceptions when you're an entrepreneur is not understanding the difference between being an owner and being the CEO. And so they might hear that you have a portfolio, they might hear that I have a portfolio and be like, okay, well they have a portfolio, so I must model that. That guy's tall, I should play basketball. Doesn't work that way, right? I should be, so if I wanna be rich, I should fly private. Doesn't work that way, right? It's conflating order. And so we must do these things in order to get the outcome. We have to concentrate on only one thing in order to get the outsized return. And that spreading of attention, especially when you're newer in the entrepreneurial career, it's like you already don't know so many things. How do you now wanna have 3 sets of unknowns that you wanna try and conquer at the same time? And the fallacy of thinking is that I'm gonna try all of them and see which one works, but none of them will work because you're waiting to see which one will work. Because you can force, in my opinion, you can force one thing to work, provided, like, I'm gonna just assume basics, like you're selling, you're not selling $5 bills for $4. Like, you know, the normal economics of a business. Like if a real estate business exists, there are other people making money. There are hair salon businesses where people are making money. There are lawn mowing businesses where people are making money. You can make money in all of them. You just can't make money in all of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. At the same, and it's when you walked in today and you sat down on the chair, I said like, what's going on with you professionally? I remember what you said. You said more of the same and better. Which clearly comes from your wisdom.

My infinite wisdom, right? Well, it's just from suffering the woes of this. Like the biggest entrepreneurial mistakes I've made in my career have all come from splitting my attention. Every one of them, like every single one of them. Like I talked about how I had the e-commerce business that I bolted onto my licensing company. I should not have done that. As soon as I did that, my revenue started slowing down in its growth.

Why did you?

Because I was ADD. Like, I just, I was like, oh my, I don't want to leave money on the table. And I want to be so violent about this. You are always going to leave money on the table. That is the result of focus. But you're leaving a small amount of money on the table to pursue the much larger money that's on another table of just sticking with the thing that you're on right now. Because, compounding, if I were to show a chart here, it's like if you're at year 3 of your thing and you want to think about moving to year 0 of a new thing, you have to compare, maybe year 0 of a new thing grows faster, but it has to grow faster than year 3 to 4 of the thing that you're on right now. And I think that's the, people will compare year 0 to year 0, but not year 4 to year 0. And the thing is, is you actually, we have a linear life. And so we, That is, it's an unfair but true comparison of the opportunity cost. And every exceptionally successful entrepreneur that I know has just stuck with one thing for such an inordinate amount of time. And I think there's a quote by, I wanna say Shane Parrish, but he said, "Success is doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without believing that you're smarter than you are." Yeah. And it's just like, We know what we need to do, and so we don't need to make our lives more complex. Complexity will come with scale, I promise. And so just simply trying to do more of what you're already doing well is already hard enough. Don't add anything else. And so like, if you need to write some sort of commitment of like, I'm just going to stick with this, then do that. But the, What happens is, when we were talking about the levels earlier, about like beating the bosses, so what happens is you know how to beat boss 1 through 3 of the game. And so then you just say, okay, well, I'm just gonna start the game over and beat boss. I mean, this time it's gonna be different. But then you just get to level 3 again and then you're stuck again. And so people just keep getting up to level 3 and new endeavors over and over again because they never learned how to get past that boss. And so you just have to control you confront the uncertainty of knowing that you don't know how to do it, but that you will figure it out if you keep doing enough repetitions. And that's where you talk to as many people as you can. You see what they said, you consolidate it all, and you say, I think this is the highest likely path. It might not work, but I do believe fundamentally that if we cut people's hair well and we do it for a long period of time, we will have a thriving business. And if we have a really good model from that thing, we might be able to open up another location. And if we keep our costs down, we might be able to have an actual model that we could Either invest your own capital or bring somebody else and take it national. Like all of these, like I have yet to find a business that can't get to $100 million a year that has a permutation of it that exists. You're a dry cleaner, fine. Well, cool. We'll build the model and either we can license the model, we can franchise the model out, we can get outside investors, we can scale it nationally, we can do it. But the crazy goals are only crazy because people have crazy timelines. They're actually very sane goals if you extend the timeline out. If you have a true 10-year goal or a true 20-year goal, almost anything's accomplishable. I mean, almost every multi-billion dollar company is about, you know, they get, it's usually between like year 6 and 10 when companies get to kind of like those big numbers. And most people who are listening to this are 5 years into entrepreneurship, but you're 6 months into the thing that you've been working on right now. And you keep restarting the clock for getting to year 10 every time you start over. And I think that's the part that it took me a very long time to figure out. And I think it takes a lot of entrepreneurs, like everyone messes around with a lot of stuff in the beginning 'cause you just don't know what you're doing. And so in my experience, it takes about 5 years for most entrepreneurs that I know to just like find something that works.

Yeah.

Like, it takes about 5 years to figure out which way is north.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah.

And then it takes like another 5 years. And a lot of people, that's it. Like they restart, they go off, crash and burn. And it takes another 5 years to build something that can, can create generational wealth. So it's about a 10-year slug. And here's the really hard truth about it. If you have a job right now, for almost all of that 5 years, you quit your job because you don't wanna work as hard as you are and you wanna make more money. And as soon as you quit, you will realize that you are now gonna work way harder than you were and you're going to make less money. For an extended period of time, the one benefit is that you get to claim all responsibility for how little you make and how much you work because you're like, my boss is an idiot and it's me. But it's the truth. And I think that in some ways having that optimistic ignorance is actually one of the really redeeming traits of entrepreneurs. And one of the really hard parts is that the biggest jump you have to make gets so immediately reinforced from the freedom you have from being able to, you know, chart your own path. But that big success of quitting one thing and starting another, you need to immediately forget. And I think that fundamentally that is why so many entrepreneurs keep doing it, is because the first time you do it, it's the biggest rush ever. You quit your job, You do the business and you get some, some first traction. And that, that first dollar that you make when the new business, it's like the best dollar ever, right? But it's such a strong reinforcer that what does it reinforce? It reinforces stopping what you're doing and starting something else. And so I think one of the fundamental errors of entrepreneurship is that sometimes the jumping ship to start this thing is the lesson that you need to immediately unlearn because after that, You have to just stick with it for a very long period of time.

There's also something in that entrepreneurs don't go into starting a company with the belief that their hypothesis is wrong. So in year 1 or 7 months in when they realise that their initial hypothesis was wrong, they think that means abandon ship because my hypothesis was wrong. Whereas successful entrepreneurs that I've met, especially second-time founders, realise that their hypothesis is almost certainly wrong from the jump and that the process of starting is to correct and to find a new hypothesis. I think about like Mark Zuckerberg in his room with like Face Swap or whatever it was, rating people's attractiveness. And now Meta is this like virtual reality AI company.

Yeah.

But understanding that your hypothesis is wrong from the jump, yeah, and that, you know, this is a process of finding a new hypothesis, I think will give you a little bit more patience as well through these cycles of the crisis of meaning and so on.

So two things. So one is I had this tweet that went like super viral, but it was like, first-time founder, hey, I need you to sign an NDA before I tell you my business idea. I know you've gotten it. I know you have. Third-time founder, here's everything I have. Here's all the documents, here's all the projections. It's probably all wrong and this probably won't work, but I have a couple smart people and I think we'll be able to figure it out. It'll probably cost longer and take longer, cost more and take longer than we think, But we think it's worth a shot. And then things went wrong. Because everyone who's been on both sides of that understand, like the entrepreneurs got it because they're like, oh my God, I was that guy. And all the investors get it because they're like, oh my God, I deal with this guy all the time. But actually what you just said with the many, many iterations that from your original idea until what actually happens is yet again one of those demonstrations of the difference between a beginner an expert. A beginner has binary thinking, so they think this worked or didn't work, and if it didn't work, then I need a new idea, rather than having the nuanced thinking of a master or an expert or advanced person who says, what about this? If I click into it, I break it into its component parts. What about this didn't work? Okay, it's not that meta ads don't work or advertising doesn't work. It's that we didn't nail the hook in our ad, or that we didn't make our, our offer clear enough on the landing page, or it was not congruent with the advertisement, or, you know, it was— the offer itself wasn't very compelling, or it didn't have— it didn't like— it was just this. Everyone's coming in and saying, yeah, I kind of want that, but this is actually my issue. We're not solving the core problem. So it's, it's always in the, in the details. It's always in the sifting through the many small things that you find the kernel that ends up fixing the business. I mean, I know that Facebook was trying to fix their virality issue. and they were locked in a room for days trying to figure out how they could get more users to retain on the platform, right? People would sign up, but then they wouldn't do anything, and then they would, they drop out. And so finally, Zuck just said, okay, we have some belief that if people have more friends, that they will engage. And so they didn't, and here's the thing, like with the uncertainty, they couldn't prove it. He just was like, I feel like that's better than them not having friends. And so he said, all right, the new goal is 10 friends in 14 days. That's the goal. So we have to create the experience so that we can get it to introduce them to 10 people or connect them with 10 people that they already know on the platform within 14 days. And as soon as that happened, then obviously Facebook took off or continued to grow. And so he wasn't like, oh, Facebook doesn't work anymore, or social networks aren't gonna be a thing. It's, it's usually way smaller and way the adjustment you need to make is much more nuanced than what you originally expect. If the foundational principle of like cutting hair, mowing lawns, whatever, it's like this problem exists and I can charge a certain amount and make a profit on it, then there's nothing wrong with the business. It's just what is the constraint that's holding us back? And then usually zooming into the constraint and realizing there's 20 things that are contributing to the outcome, not one. And that's where expertise and that, and you develop that expertise by trying and failing. Yeah. And that's just the name of the game. And so I think you have to have an incredibly high tolerance for failure without internalizing it and feeling like you yourself are a failure as a result of failure.

Well, this is it. When I started my first business at 18 years old called Wallpark, social network, whatever, I thought the game was to be right. Yeah. I came to learn from businesses that came after that actually the game of entrepreneurship is to be successful. And they're two very different things.

To win.

Because when you want to be right, you not only want to be CEO and you want your hypothesis that you put in that first pitch deck to come true. And even when customers are telling you that you were wrong, you try and force the fucking hypothesis. You don't know. Yeah. But when your game is to be successful, there's a couple of really interesting things that I observe happen. One of them is you— I watch founders say, actually, maybe I'm not the best person to be CEO.

Yeah.

Even though I founded this thing, maybe I should be chief brand officer. When I think about some of the top companies in the UK, represent, just valued at $100 million. Gymshark, Ben's business, valued at $1.5 billion. Julian's business, probably valued at a billion. I'm involved in some of these businesses in different ways, but, um, the thing they all have in common is at some early point, the founder put their ego secondary to the success of the business. They said, actually, I'm not the best CEO, I should be head of brand or marketing or product, right? Product or whatever it is. And that's that mindset shift from being, I need to be right and I need to be at the helm of being right, versus this thing needs to be successful.

And this goes back to the who, which is if you, if you at some point, if you want to have a really ridiculously successful company, it will require more lifetimes of expertise than you can live. And so then it becomes a recruiting game like very quickly. Almost all business becomes recruiting, which is how do I— I mean, if you listen to Zuck talk about it, you listen to Elon talk about it, you listen to Steve Jobs talk about it. Steve would talk about how the best players that he had in the company, he would I would set aside like a year to 18 months to bring them in.

Amen.

And he said, every time I, you know, I knew who I wanted. And then I would, he's like, you know, I would take some calls with other people and I would just be like, but they're not John. They're not John. And so he would just keep working on them and working on them and working on them until eventually they're like, you know what, fine. They like give up. And they're like, if this guy's this persistent, like, He probably will be a successful entrepreneur and he will take us there. And I think that like, people are the highest leverage thing that you can bring into the company outside of, you know, crazy technology.

One of my favorite videos of all time is where Steve Jobs, who you just mentioned, talks about hiring truly exceptional people. And he says words to the effect, I'll play it on screen. He says, people think the success of Apple is a consequence of me and my talent and my skills. But what I've actually done is I've built my career, quote, on hiring truly exceptional people doing the extremely hard work of finding them and hiring them. And this crazy thing happens when you do that, is it propagates. I.e., A players then want to work with A players. They also hire A players, and it spreads. I think it was this video.

I've built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players. And I found something I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go to through the incredible work to find, you know, 5 of these A players, they really like working with each other because they've never had a chance to do that before. And they don't want to work with B and C players. And so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players and it propagates.

The thing is, is that it's just like money won't make you happy. It's one of those things that like every founder like has to figure out for themselves. But the thing is, is, and I've had obviously a bunch of conversations around this, but like what you think is an A-player today is not what you will think an A-player is in 5 years. And so I think one of the hardest mental hacks around this is trying to project yourself into the future into the size business that you want to have and say, who would be an A-player at that size and scale? And then coming back to the present and saying, how do I get them to work for me today?

Amen.

And it's, it's really— and so as a mental process for anybody who does have a business right now and has some employees, if you like, everybody right now, you probably have some version of your A-player because every business has at least one, hopefully, right? Besides you. Imagine your business had 5 of those people. Like, picture in your head, you've got that one person, now you have 5 of them. How much more would you make? Would you, would you double? Would you, would you 5x? Would you 10x? Would you 50x? And sometimes you realize you're like, no, I think I would actually 10x. And so if that were the case, one, not only would you 10x the company, number 2, the value of the company would more than 10x because it would no longer be— it would be significantly less reliant on you and it'd be more reliant on the team that you've built. Number 3, it would happen faster because you would have more barrels that were firing concurrently, moving things forward. And those, those pieces, when put together, you have to then ask yourself from an opportunity cost perspective, what other activity could I be doing that would have the possibility of 10x-ing my company, doing it faster, and increasing the enterprise value multiple? That's not that. And if you can't find one, then it means you're working on the wrong stuff. And I think that is one of those great litmus tests of like, if I can find something and I'll give you a really simple one that's not, not human, the talent-based here, something as simple as calling your leads. So there's tons of research that suggests that you can 4 or 5x your conversion of leads by calling them within 60 seconds of them opting in for any product you have. If you have all of these priorities that you have across the company, does any of them have the high likelihood of 4 or 5x-ing your business immediately with very low cost of doing so? Less so than just calling the leads within 60 seconds. If the answer is no, then by God, why are you not calling all your leads within 60 seconds? The follow-up question would be like, well, I don't have enough people to call our leads within 60 seconds. So then we'd say, okay, what does 4x the revenue of your company worth. Okay, what does it cost to hire one person whose only job is to just call the leads? Now, I recently talked to a restoration company, so they did water damage for homes when they got hit by storms. And he told me, he said he was converting 55% of his leads, not calls, leads. And I was like, how on earth are you doing this? And I was like, well, how many leads a day do you get? And he said, 2 or 3. I was like, okay, so what's the process? He's like, oh, it's really simple. My aunt, I pay her $60,000 a year and she has only one job. She has no responsibility in the company besides the moment a lead comes in. You stop having sex with your husband, you stop, you stop, you stop cooking, you stop loving your child, and you immediately call the lead. That's the only responsibility. She just has to make 3 calls a day at the moment the leads come in and he pays her $60,000 and that brings in millions of dollars of revenue. And so You, you're not gonna pay for it out of the dollars you have now. You're gonna pay for it out of the dollars that you're going to make that you're not making yet because you haven't done it yet. And so pin in that. Back to the people. I think the hardest time, I, we call this the swamp at acquisition.com, but it's usually between like $1 and $3 million is the swamp. And I think there's a numbers reason for why it's such a painful period for entrepreneurs. Let's say $1 million for simple math. If you have a million-dollar business, let's say that you have 20% margins. So that means you're making $200,000 a year in profit. For you to get an A-player, it's probably going to cost you 100% of your profit to get that A-player. And so you'll have what appears to be an impossible choice. You'll have, do I sacrifice basically 100% of my profit to bring this person in? Or do I work another 6 hours a day to do the job that this person is doing? Both paths work. Both are painful and risky because the overworking yourself thing, you can get yourself through that hump and then now you're at maybe $3 or $4 million and that 20% is $800,000. You can, you can spend $200,000. You still have cash flow. You can still live. The downside for the picking the person path is that what if you pick wrong? And this, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, is why entrepreneurs get outsized returns, is because we take on outside risk. And so this is the job, is that we have to be willing to make impossible choices. And the vast majority of choices for entrepreneurs in the business are impossible choices between two relatively bad scenarios. Because the rest of the choices aren't, don't even feel like choices because they're obvious. Of course we should call our leads faster. Of course we should follow up more. Of course we should try and onboard faster. Okay, all of these things are the obvious ones. But when you have— man, I'm trying to think of the ones I'm not— I'm not sure. Almost all the decisions that you get stuck with, and Elon says this really beautifully, he says running a business is like staring out to the abyss and chewing glass. He said because The staring off the abyss component of it is just the fact that this may never work and you're almost facing existential risk at all times to the business. And the eating glass component is that you will, by nature of your role, get funneled the worst problems in the business and the problems that no one else can solve. So it's one, problems that people can't solve, two, the worst ones, or that they don't wanna solve and they suck. And so you basically become a filter for the worst things. And that's why it feels like a fire every single day in the business because you're the only one who can make the tough call because no one else wants to choose between these two impossible choices. And you're like, why is it so hard? And the thing is, is that it literally never stops being hard. It's that the currency that you pay for in the hardness changes. And so, you know, a lot of people have this envisionment of like the Rocky cutscene of like, it must be hard for business. But I don't think that's where the hardship comes. I think the hardship is that at every level of business, there's new sacrifices that you didn't know you were going to have to make. Because if it was just, oh, I have to work long hours, there's tons of people people work long hours in their business and don't grow. And it's usually because they're unwilling to have a hard conversation. It's a different currency, right? They have to take on risk. It's a different currency. They have to make some sort of bet, right, that they otherwise wouldn't have had to make. They have some sort of legal issue that they encounter. They have an employee who tries to sue them for some sort of mal whatever, right? All of a sudden you're like, wait, all of these things are happening and they happen on a regular basis. And at each level you unlock new levels of glass that you get to chew through. And so this is why, like, most entrepreneurs, in my opinion, don't actually quit. They fizzle. So it's not a big bang. Usually it's they just, they stop seeking. So either they get content at the level that they're at and they just don't strive for more. And sometimes they say it just wasn't worth the trade. And I respect that. If you're like, you know what, I'm at $1 million a year and I don't want any more, fine, you won. Congratulations. Like, you won at life. But most of the times they don't really quit. They just stop trying. And then they just either coast and or it just fizzles into nothingness. And that's just my experience of having, and I'm sure you've seen this, having gone through like cycles of entrepreneur, it's like seasons. It's like, oh yeah, I came in through even like in the media and influencer space, whatever. It's like there's a bunch of guys that 10 years ago, it's a different landscape now than it was 10 years ago. Some people adapted, some of them were like, ah, I don't like the, they weren't willing to chew the new glass, which is how do I learn TikTok? How do I learn? But man, blogs were so good. It's like, yeah, and they're not anymore. I talked to an entrepreneur, really massive, many hundreds of millions a year in sales. And he was like, dude, we were killing it on infomercials. So TV. And he's like, we just, you know, we, we just, we really just have to crack YouTube. And I'm thinking to myself like, dude, it's 2024. Like, what? Like, you needed to crack YouTube 10 years ago. And he had the resources to do it, but it was just a different kind of hard. And so most of the hard is one, a level of uncertainty that goes into it, and almost certain immediate failure, because the first thing you're going to do will probably not work. And again, it's the iterations of when you get into the new domain, you have to transfer your generalized knowledge, which is that as an entrepreneur, I will know that this doesn't work probably because I only know 4 things about it and I need to know like 400. And so I will get my first shot and I need to get directionally correct. And then just keep doing more of that. And so I gave the consulting way of learning kind of like a new space. But if you want to learn a new skill, the fastest way that I do it that's outside of courses or anything is tremendous volume of activity. So whether that's like, I want to take a lot of sales calls, I want to do a lot of outreach, I want to make a lot of content, I want to do a lot of customer success calls, whatever it is, you do 100 of those and then you see what are the top 10% of these? Okay, what did these top 10% have different than the other 90? And then I say, okay, well, these ones had these 3 things that were different. Let's try and do those 3 things on the next 100. And then because of the variety of life, there's going to be some new variables that exist that you look at the top 10% of the next 100 and you're like, okay, we did those 3, but there's also 2 more things that happened in this 10 versus the other 90. Now let's do all 5 of those things. And over time, this is how you develop a checklist for making banger content and banger videos. And I'm sure like there's this clip, David Perel talks about Chris Rock's creative process and he says, how is it that you see Chris Rock at Madison Square Garden and it's just like 60 minutes of just fire? You're like, how is this guy so funny? And it's because what you don't see is the many small clubs and the first club that he goes to and does a whole hour-long set and has like 3 moments that people laugh a lot about. And he's got like 5 minutes that are good and the other 55 minutes basically suck. And so the next time he goes to a club, he takes those 5 minutes, puts them at the front, and then he tries all new material for the next 55 minutes and he gets another 5 minutes and he continues to repeat this process and put the new stuff at the front until eventually he has 60 minutes of uninterrupted laughing. And then people are like, oh my God, he's so talented. I can't believe that he can just stand up there and talk into a microphone and make everyone laugh. Cross age boundaries, cross cultural boundaries, cross, you know, all of the boundaries that you might imagine. How can he be so funny to everyone? That's how. How can that guy be so good at writing? Well, he looked at the stuff that he wrote, he found the best stuff, made it into the few things that he always does, and then kept writing. And that fundamentally is the process of learning anything. And it's usually not one thing. It's many small things that when added together in aggregate create the outsized returns. Sorry, that was a little pulpit there. I just get violent about skill acquisition. That's what it takes.

So interesting. But so interesting interesting to see your journey through that and how, and how you, you ended up at Skill Acquisition. Because I was— as you went through, there was 3 things that I was thinking about, and I managed to write them down. The first, at the top of it, was you detailed 3 reasons why hiring the exceptional person when you're faced with that paradox of what do I do with my profits makes so much sense. One of the big things I hear from founders that they don't appreciate is to go for a long period of time you have to have some kind of emotional regulation. Oh yeah. And as you were talking about the, the different levels of business, and at every level you have more problems, what I often see is a young founder hasn't hired those levels in between to deal with all those different types of problems, and they are like burning out and thinking of quitting. I had someone in my office last week, and she's en route to build about a $50 million business this year. And the first question I said to her was, what's your executive team? And she just like rolls her eyes and she's like, I don't have an executive team. She'd done a post on social media basically in tears saying that she was going to quit. She's got a $30 to $50 million business. It's growing like wildfire, but she's about to almost quit it because she's dealing with every single problem. And often founders say to me they think because they're experiencing so much hardship in that like $1 to $3 million phase that forever it's going to be just huge pain. And I talked to them about this thing I call Yeah. The promised land.

Dude, I love this. Yeah.

Because in the first 2, 3 years of my business, I thought that forever I'm going to have to deal with every fucking problem. Jenny in the office is pissed off at Dave, and on Saturday night when they were drunk, they did something which they shouldn't have. And I realised the problem was I hadn't solved for hiring these levels, so everything was coming to me. And the emotional toll on my nervous system of dealing with every problem was not sustainable.

Right.

And then I accidentally hired someone good.

Yeah.

Katie, who I mentioned. And then she dealt with all of that. Yeah, she dealt with all of that. Yeah. Think again as a founder, right? So I want to just give a moment to that and your thoughts on that.

I want to do my best shot at operationalizing what you just said for somebody who's listening.

When we have—

when we encounter this issue, we have a specific process that we go through. And so we tell the founder, I want you to make a Google Sheet, really simple, and I want you to have the time slots from 5 AM to midnight, however long you work, in 15-minute increments. And I want you to set a timer, easy timer, kitchen timer, like for cooking, for every 15 minutes. And every 15 minutes I want you to, when it dings, I want you to write down what you did. One or two, one or two words. Doesn't, doesn't, doesn't take a lot. Now, as soon as I say that, people are like, oh my God, I don't have time for this. I will promise you it will be the most productive week of your life because you will be aware of how you're spending your time. Every time I do this, I immediately think I should do this all the time and I don't. So just do it. Just do it for the one week. Okay? And so what happens is you'll do it for a whole week. And then what the second step of this is, you'll look at that and you'll say, okay, wow, I didn't know that 40% of my time is dealing with this thing. And I can hire a role to handle 40% of my time for this amount of money. If I had 40% of my time back, I could double this business and that would be worth significantly more than what I'd pay this person. And then you look at the next 13, you know, 15% of your time and you're like, okay, Is this something that I can give to somebody else? Like, can I, can I push this down? Can I create some process around this that can correct it? Or do I need to keep eating it for a little bit until it's enough that it's a full-time role? And so fundamentally, I see the entrepreneur as the, the many-headed fractionalist that you continue to pull things onto your plate until you have enough that you can ship it out to somebody else full-time. And being aware of, again, the one resource we have, which is time, how we're allocating it so we get the highest return. And so if you look at the stack of time as an entrepreneur, we are always getting paid for our time. Kind of the premise of the whole talk here is that we trade our time for dollars. And so we always— the whole process of entrepreneurship is continuing to trade up what you're trading your time for. And that's it. Like at the most foundational level, that is all we're doing. And so to take this as a hypothetical, Your business doesn't need you right now. You spend whatever hours you do working and you do these things. Imagine a world where you could hire somebody who could spend the same amount of time doing all of that stuff. Now you own the business and whatever you have to pay them, you take out of the profit and everything else is now distributions that you own as an owner. That's it. Now, the entrepreneur who's mission-driven then stacks their plate with even more things that they need to do and then just continues that process over and over again. Now, this is the part where the pushback comes, which is no one can do what I can do. And I want to say you're right. And if I wanted to— let's say you're a unicorn so we can imagine this mythical unicorn. We've got this white horse, got the horn, tail, everything, and the little pixie, pixie flies for the magic that's around it. Okay. You probably won't find a unicorn, but you can find a white horse. And you can find a rhinoceros to get the horn, and you can find some fireflies to give you the twinkles. And so you may not hire one person who has all of these things, but you can hire three, and then those three together can potentially do everything that you're doing better because it's all they're doing with all of their time. And breaking it up into basically understanding that you're not going to find that unicorn, but you just break it into pieces, and then you And you partition it out to people who can just do those parts, makes it a lot more manageable from an emotional level to think like, I'm never gonna find this. Of course you're not. And that's okay because we can find, we can solve for parts of our calendar. And fundamentally when you buy back the time, you can then do what you're like, basically take the next step in the business.

The other really interesting thing is you were talking about your friend who was doing blogs and missed YouTube.

Yeah.

Was the idea that our success traps being old innovator's dilemma. Yeah. That success traps us in the past. So your friend probably missed YouTube because he didn't want to reallocate headcount to something that was working and paying the bills. And this, I guess, ties into your point about failure being so unbelievably important because what me and you both do right now is gonna get old. Yeah. Like, you know what I mean? And we've probably both watched the people that came before us fade into irrelevance.

Look at these dinosaurs. Yeah, right.

And we're part of some kind of new school of content creation, but we're gonna become part of the old school if we don't Yeah. What's in that gap?

Adapt. And I think that it's important, so, you know, Google has their, you know, I think Sergey like solved this mathematically, but I think they called it 70-20-10. So 70% of resources get allocated to the core business, do more of what we're currently doing. 20% goes to adjacent businesses. So things that are high likelihood of success that are, you know, one step removed from the existing core business. And then 10% goes to moonshots, totally like off the path. Like, let's just see, maybe we'll get 100x return. We probably will lose on most of these. And he proved it with math. He's smarter than I am. But fundamentally, that is the concept of more, better, new. And so that's one of the chapters in the Leeds book, which is, okay, now that you have the core 4, right, these are the 4 things that you can do. You can post content, you can run ads, you can do outreach to strangers, you can do outreach to people you know. Those are the 4 things any person can do to advertise. The first thing you do is you do more. And for most small businesses, they're, they're doing so little and think they're doing so much. And it's a huge gap in, in understanding. And so I'll, I'll tell this story. That's, that's probably the easiest way to explain it, which is when I had my first gym, I called up a mentor. He had 20 locations. I said, how do you advertise? He said, I use flyers. I said, okay. So I put 300 flyers out. It didn't work. I called him back. I was upset. I said, WTF? He said, slow down. What was your test size? And I said, what do you mean? He's like, well, your test size. So like, I mean, the 300 wasn't the only amount that you put out. And I was like, well, yeah. He's like, well, our test size is 5,000 flyers. And then once we have a winner, then we do 5,000 every day. In terms of flyers that they put on cars to get people in. And so over a 30-day period, he would be putting out 150,000 flyers. And over a 30-day period, I put out 300. And so he was in a very real way doing whatever the math is there, but like 300 times or whatever, I don't know, a lot more, 500 times the math, sorry, 500 times the flyers that I was. And of course he was getting a better result. And so one of the fundamental misconceptions of small businesses is that they mistake vol— they mistake low volume for volatility. Meaning if you, if you're not sure where your sales come from and you get one sale here and then, you know, two weeks later you get another sale and it feels sporadic, it feels volatile. Well, there is a certain amount of advertising activity that is occurring over that period of time. And we know that a month passes and you get 1 to 2 sales. And so the companies that are in your space that are doing 1 to 2 sales a day, take what you're doing in a month and they do that every day. And I know that you can get this and I want to put this in context here. I hear, I would like to build a personal brand and I say, cool. And then I ask, how much content are you putting out? And they say, you know, I put out, you know, 1 or 2 pieces a week. And I think that's amazing. For context, for anyone who's listening to this, we put out 450 pieces a week. And so the brand that we have is way larger because we do so much more than you do. And that's—

it's—

people can't fathom the idea that someone works 2 times, 5 times, 10 times, 1,000 times more output than they are doing. But it is usually the reality of why they are getting 1,000 times more than you're getting. And fundamentally, this is the concept of leverage, which is, you know, the that you get more for what you put in. In the beginning, you're the one doing the flyers. Then you get leverage because then you make enough from those flyers that you can look at your time study and be like, okay, I can pay 2 guys to do these flyers and I can get 8 hours back. That would be amazing. But now you've got 2 guys doing flyers, which is still double what you were doing. Now you have double the revenue that's coming in. You're like, okay, should I hire more guys? That's more. Or should I do something better? Should I change my flyer up? Should I change the offer on the flyer? That would be better. Or should I start Facebook ads? Well, the new, which would be Facebook ads, is the 10% thing. Now, when you're looking at allocation of resources, let's say we're now fast-forwarding a little bit into a company that has, you know, profit that they can do stuff with. Part of the reinvestment is insurance for the future. And so every business has 3 strategic buckets that it has to allocate its resources into. Number 1 is how do we get more customers? Like if we get more customers, the company grows, period. Number 2, how do we increase lifetime gross profit per customer? So if we got the same amount of customers but we made all the customers worth more, we would also grow. Bucket 3 is how do we decrease risk, a.k.a., how do we increase the likelihood that the first 2 things don't stop happening? And so those are the 3 buckets. And so when we're— when you look at that 70-20-10. Hey guys, real quick, this podcast only grows from word of mouth. Quite literally, there's no other way to grow a podcast than word of mouth. If there's some element of this that you think somebody else should hear, or would be relevant to them, it would mean the world to me if you shared this via text, via Instagram, via DM, via whatever way you like to share stuff with people you love. Thank you. The 70 for the most part is usually going to be directed towards get more customers, make them worth more, and the better also ladders up to that. The risk factor is usually going to be the new thing that you're going to do to ensure your future is going to be there by the time you get there. And so if you notice, if we noticed, for example, that like YouTube becomes like legacy television and, you know, viewership starts dropping and it becomes this new VR, whatever, right? At some point we're gonna have to look and be like, we need to take 10%, 20% of our profit every year and start building out this new team. We're gonna continue to do what we're currently doing. And here's the mistake that you need to avoid. Don't take the stars that are making the one thing work and then push them on the other thing. You have to find the people who can build this other, otherwise you're gonna sacrifice the core. Because all of a sudden it's like, oh God, well, now we're totally screwed because now we're not getting customers from our existing thing and we haven't figured out the new thing yet. Yeah, right. And so this is fundamentally where I see the CEO role is like you want to eventually become the flex player, which is that you can parachute in to a specific division or department that's solving a complex issue. And then you have the benefit that you have as CEO or founder is that you have decision-making power and you have the ability to allocate resources and immediately say yes to things. And that's why— and to be fair, it's unfair to your team to say, why can't— why can't they do things as fast as me? Well, because you can write the checks and because you can say yes, you don't need to check with the committee, you don't need to run it up the flagpole. It's just you saying, do this, do that, don't worry about that. I'm telling you, you can stay late for this meeting. This is more important. And so strategy is just a fancy word that people say when they mean prioritization. That's all it means. We have, we have unlimited opportunities that we can allocate things towards, but we have limited resources. And so how do we prioritize those unlimited opportunities against those limited resources? That is fundamentally what strategy is. And that's another way of just saying we prioritize.

On the, on the car example you're talking about with the flyers. Yeah. What I was thinking is so many businesses try and win on the game of creativity. So we'll create something more creative and appealing as an advert. And I see this in my portfolio because they'll send me something and they'll go, Steve, one particular business I'm thinking about, a major national supermarket has given us a display slot in, in 400 supermarkets. 'Which display should we use?' And they'll say to me, 'This one or this one?' Right. And I remember replying to them and saying, 'I don't know.' Yeah. 'And you don't know.' Yeah. 'But here's the system to find out. We're going to create 100 displays.' Yeah. 'And we're going to run them as ads on Facebook, or we're going to create some kind of environment where we're not going to try and win on being the best creative guessers. We're going to win on our rate of experimentation.' Yeah. 'We're going to conduct more experiments.' Yeah. And I think this is a real shift in so many regards, because especially if we've gone through university and we've been trained as a copywriter. Yeah, we have the old problem of wanting to be right, not successful.

Yeah.

And, and being able to, as a creative, even as a podcaster, say, I don't know what the right answer is, but I'm going to create a system where our rate of experimentation is going to be so much higher than our competitors that we're going to stumble across the right answer more than they do, is a shift in thinking.

So there are two types of questions that you shouldn't ask: questions that, that can be solved with a spreadsheet and questions that can be solved with testing. And so fundamentally, the outside advice that you get on something that can be solved with math, just solve with math. And I get— I would say like 30% of the questions that I get are like, should I, should I sell this one or this one? And I'm like, okay, well, what's lifetime value of this product and what's lifetime value of that product? Okay, what's cost to acquire for this customer? What's cost to acquire for that customer? Okay, this is a math problem. You have a way higher LTV to CAC ratio here. Allocate resources here. But that's a math problem. Anyone can just do that math. For the testing one. I love this. So like the Leads book, I didn't know what to name it. So it's about advertising. So I ran story tests for like a week or two just saying $100 million promotions, $100 million advertising, and then advertising one is like $100 million advertising, $100 billion marketing. Okay. And then advertising wins. I'm like, okay, $100 million advertising, $100 million leads. Leads wins. Adam Hernandez leads versus two other things. Leads keeps winning. Okay, that's the title. And then I did the same thing for the COVID and I did the same thing for the subheadline. And so I tested every component of it to get the thing that people seem to want, which is like the book is advertising, but ironically people want leads. So it's kind of like, do I want to have a book on drills or do I want to have a book on holes? Right? People want the hole in the wall, not the drill. That's just the vehicle. And so the book is just the vehicle to getting leads. Amen. But as a quick hack, for anybody who has a brick-and-mortar business. This is just a, just a quick hack for anybody. If you're like, what market should I expand into? Here's 5 markets we're looking at. Take $1,000, run your best promotion that you ran in your current market in all 5 of those markets. See what your lead cost is in all 5 markets. The one that has the lowest lead cost, then open in that market. Don't spend $250,000, you know, doing all these studies and then, and then building out this location only to find out that the lead cost in that area sucks. Just test it first. It's the best $5,000 or $10,000 that you're ever gonna spend to just ensure this is a risk bucket, ensure that when you're there, it's gonna work.

I mean, amen. It's our whole philosophy. So it's so wonderful to hear that. And I didn't realize that you'd done that with the book.

Oh yeah, I have it in the chapter where I'm like, you have to wrap everything and I show all the tests that I ran to, and like you can see all the percentages of people saying this And this is the— that's the book title.

When people look at you, Alex, they— you're a guy that knows a lot about a lot. And one of the questions that I often get as well is, um, I need a mentor. People, kids will come up to you and say— I'm sure they say it to you all the time— will you be my mentor?

Yeah.

Do mentors matter?

So to— I'll explain what I'm thinking through. So to answer that question, I think it asks what is, what is required to win? And is a mentor required? No. But there are certain behaviors and actions that will increase the likelihood of success. If you can do those actions faster, then you will have a higher likelihood of winning and higher, higher likelihood of winning faster. All of humanity has been built on us standing on our forefathers' shoulders and taking what they learned. We don't have to figure out how light bulbs work. I have no idea how the internet works, but I know that it works and there's somebody who can figure it out. And so we just start where they kind of lay off the baton and then we pick it up from there and we run the next however many, and then we die and we hand it to the next guy. And I think you don't need mentors, but you need to learn from people ahead of you. And so I think in models, not mentors, what can I model about their behavior so that it can change my behavior to increase the likelihood that I win faster? And so everything that I do, and I feel like pretty— it's a pretty strong statement— everything that I do ladders up or down to behavior. And so you've probably noticed it when I talk about training and employees, when I talk about advertising, I just want to increase the likelihood that a stranger takes a desired action. That's all I'm trying to do. And when we get into behavior change, it removes a lot of the surface-level fluff that I think confuses the vast majority of people. And so I'm always afraid to go on podcasts where somebody is like really heavy in like manifestation and like energy and frequencies and like whatever the hell. And they'll say things like, I manifested this meeting and I'll be like, like, you didn't. You're, uh, you have content that did well because you produce content on a regular basis. And then your EA reached out to my EA. That reach out is what initiated this, not whatever vibes you were setting out into the universe. Now, some people might say, yeah, it was also the vibes, but I would bet that if they made the content and did the reach out, I would still do it, which means that those are the core things. Because if we've removed those, if we just did the manifestation and didn't make the content, the reach out, I would not be here. And so One of these works, one of these doesn't. And so that is what has allowed me to try and extract the essence from the mentors or heroes ahead of me. I consume a tremendous amount of Elon, Bezos, Zuck, anything that I can find that they put out or that they're interviewed on. I try and consume it. And the whole goal is I want to think about their decision-making process as it relates to what they did. And try and apply that to my context in terms of behavior. And so that has been just like the big, big zoom out for, do I need a mentor? No, but you need to learn stuff. And so whatever way is the fastest way for you to learn things, do that. And so I'll tell this story 'cause I think it's like, do you need one? No, no one needs one. You can literally just do all of these things through trial and error on your own and you will figure it out. Time is obviously the one thing that is the big question mark. And I think part of that is a question of how valuable is your time to you? Not in a micro example, but could— would I pay in time or money to move forward 5 years and not make 5 years of mistakes? So when I started my first gym, I didn't actually start the gym because I quit my job and I drove across the country and I showed up at a guy's house that I Googled on the internet who said he was good at running gyms. His name was Seven Figure Sam. All right. So he was a gym guru. And so I showed up at his actual gym unannounced, and I was like, hey, I'm here to be mentored and learn. And he was like, I'm working. I really don't know who you are. And like, maybe we'll talk tomorrow or something. And I was like, okay. And he's like, where are you staying? And I said, I don't know. I haven't decided yet. He's like, what do you mean? I was like, that's my car. I just drove here and all my stuff's in there. And he's like, you have nowhere to live? I was like, figured I'd just figure it out when I got here. And so he offered me to stay at his house that night, which is unbelievably generous. And maybe my salesmanship got him, you know, who knows? But within a few weeks, he had a meetup of all the gyms that were kind of like following his little system for how he ran his personal training studio and boot camp. And I got to go as a 22-year-old, and I paid to have access to this community of gym owners. And they were all going around talking about what was going good and what was going wrong. in the business. And when it got to me, I was like, well, okay, so I wanna open a location and this is kind of what I was thinking about my model and this is what I was thinking about price points. And they were like, wrong, wrong. Here's why that's not gonna work. Here's how that's not gonna work. And I was like, oh, uh, okay, well this is where I was gonna buy equipment. They're like, don't buy there. That's retail. You can get it from secondhand over here and it's literally a 10th of the price. And I was like, oh, fuck, that's awesome. Okay, great. I was like, well, I was thinking about getting this type of thing. They're like, no girls will eat shit on that and they'll fall. Like I've had 2 girls do it. Dude, don't worry about it. Like, you're not going to use it, but you can get sandbags. You can use them all the time and they're super cheap. And if you have to replace them, you can, but you can use them for like hundreds of exercises. And I was like, great, I'll do that. And then I was like, okay, so I was thinking about this kind of square footage for my, for my facility. They're like, dude, you don't need all that. You can cut that in half. And I was like, okay, well, cut that in half. And I was like, I'm willing to pay $2 a foot. And they were like, no, never go over $1.50. And I was like, okay, never go over $1.50. And so like in a matter of a day, I got to take, like, all of the knowledge of all of these guys, of the mistakes that they'd all made with their gyms. And I started my first gym just on their backs. And so how much was that worth to me? Years. And so for me, I have always been willing to pay in whatever currency was required to get knowledge that I don't know.

Can you get that now for free?

Yes, it didn't exist then. YouTube wasn't even a thing. Instagram had just come out. Like, for context, for everybody who's listening to this, I think about this equation a lot, and I actually had some video of somebody shitting on me for this, but I'm going to say it anyways because there's the 20% that are going to say it. That's right. I'm not going to dilute myself. So I saw a salesman say this at a conference, and he wrote $1 million on a whiteboard and he called up a lady in the, in the audience and he said, how much do you make? How much do you make? And she said $50,000 a year. So $50,000 underneath the million and he subtracted it and said $950,000. He said it costs you $950,000 every single year. You don't know how to make $1 million a year. And so the question is, what is the value of that skill? And the answer is the difference. And so the, the, the troll who, who, who responded to this originally was like, well, you can keep going. What about $100 million a year I was like, yes, yes. If you had the skill of making $1 billion a year, then the difference between $50,000 and $1 billion is the delta of the value of that skill. And it's really not one skill. It's many skills that ladder up to, when combined together, to create that kind of value. But I remember that being like seared into my memory, which is like, whatever I want to have, the delta between where I'm at and where that thing is, is what basically what I've, what I'm willing to sacrifice in order to learn what I need to learn to get there. And I think that if people appraised that delta not by the money in their wallet or the time that they currently have, but how much they would be making or how much time they would have and how much that's worth to them, then I think far more people would be willing to invest in their education. And it's such a taboo word because people hate the word education. It's like, oh, it's like work. But like, you want to be an entrepreneur, like You gotta learn. There's so much stuff to learn.

Parrots versus practitioners. This is an idea that I've thought about a lot over the years because I look at someone like you and I can tell based on everything you say today that you are a practitioner. In this analogy, what I call a parrot is someone who hears what Alex said and then starts saying it. But your lessons and wisdom have come from going through that shit and being able to distill the essence like Richard Feynman and then share it. Um, there is a group of people that just spend their whole life reading books. Yeah, posting about it, etc. They never take the jump. Parrots versus practitioners. Is the best way to learn being a practitioner?

This is widely known in the education space but not as much in the, the content world, but there are two types of education. There is procedural and there is declarative. So declarative knowledge is knowing about something. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something. So a simple example would be, okay, I understand how private equity works, right? Like that you can, you could talk about it, you can explain how, okay, they take some debt and then they have this arbitrage and they get this enterprise value multiple, whatever. But you've never done a deal. And until you've done a deal, you will not have procedural knowledge of knowing how to actually do a deal. And so you can read 100 books on sales, but you will learn more about actually selling from your first 100 sales calls.

And business is the same. Yes.

And so the idea, in my opinion, for most people is that if you want to rapidly learn, you want to rapidly do those 100 repetitions as fast as you can so that you can suck 100 times in a row and find the 10 that did— that sucked the least and then say, how do I suck least on the next 100? And you keep doing that so many times until eventually you suck so little that you're actually good.

Hard work.

Yes. And I think, you know, this is actually really interesting because it ladders up to— because there's two types of creators. You've got entertainers and you have educators. At least that's how I separate it. The point of entertainment is to maintain the attention of the audience. That is it. So the point of an entertainer is to literally just keep people watching. The point of an educator is to change someone's behavior. And so if you, if you want content to do well in either of these buckets, fundamentally, at least in the education space, you are selling time. So education, is I spent all this time doing this thing to learn these 4 things that I can give to you so that you don't have to spend this time learning it. And so education is actually, if said differently, what you do is you buy time. So when you buy, it's the only thing, it's the only way to actually buy time today. So if you want to basically time warp into your future, you have to buy education so that you can buy all of the life experiences from all these people and then not pay for it in your life. You pay for it with worth less time by consuming what they have, or some money, or some combination of those things. And fundamentally, we usually pay with the currency that we value least. And so interestingly, a rich person values their time more than their money, and so they're willing to pay with money to get time back. A poor person will also pay for their time and drive around to 10 different gas stations to find the one thing that's 10 cents cheaper, or drive to 10 different grocery stores to use whatever, whatever coupons. They're valuing their their time over their money in that instance. And so back to the, the educator. If you want to be certain or have confidence in any endeavor, you have to do so much volume of activity that it would be unreasonable that you would suck. And if you were to write out the equation of like, okay, how many public speeches would I need to give for it to be unreasonable that I would suck? Is it 10? Is it 100? Is it 1,000? Write the number that you're like, there's no way that I would suck after this many. And then all of your effort gets really narrowed. Commitment, elimination of alternatives, focus, turn down quality and quantity of other things to just doing that. And then, and the key part of this is not just to do the 1,000, but after every 10 or every 20, looking at the top 10 or 20% and saying, what did I do well there? And that, 'cause you have to have the feedback loop. Otherwise it's not just doing 100 reachouts. You have to do 100 reachouts and then look at what what worked and then do more of what worked. And so for the, the parrot versus the practitioner component of this, even if you're starting out, you can have confidence in what you're doing because you derived the solution and you can actually answer why you do something. So if you cannot explain why you believe what you believe, it's not your belief, it's someone else's. And so most people, I would say, parrot the vast majority of the things that they say because, and to be fair, that's how humans learn. You're 5 years old, you say, "What's that?" They say, "Bull," and you say, "Bull." You parrot it back and there we go, right? But when it comes to skills, you can describe what other people have said before, but if something goes wrong or what about this condition, you won't know what to do. But if you derived it from the ground up, and there's a great portion of this in the Y Combinator community that you, or the Silicon Valley community that you probably heard is maybe like, 3 or 4 months ago, it was like founder mode. Did that get to the UK?

Okay. It was from Brian Chesky. I actually messaged him about it after.

Oh yeah, it was awesome, right? And so basically the tenet is that the founder always has special powers in the company because you know what built it. And so that is basically at its core, the practitioner versus parrot. The people who came later are parroting why you do what you do, but you know what conditions you were in when you made this rule and also you know how to break it. It and when to bend those rules. And so if you build something when you built it from those repetitions to distill out the few truths that exist, you'll know why those are the truths. Like, I'll give you a really simple example. So if we, you know, we've tried to learn YouTube and we've gotten better over time, but in the beginning I did this massive review and I figured out that the videos that we had that had 3 things at the beginning—proof, promise, plan—was the videos that did the best. And so then all of a sudden we said, Okay, all videos have to have proof, promise, plan right at the beginning, the first 30 seconds. Great. So we started doing that for a while and then we looked at the outliers among those and we were like, oh well, we also in some of the ones that did really well also had some sort of visual picture of, of this plan. All right. So it became proof, promise, plan, picture. Then we kept looking and we found out over more repetitions that if we also include some sort of pain or problem that's being solved, that also helps. So proof, promise, plan, picture, pain. And so you're like, wait, if you keep adding to this thing, it's gonna get really long. No, sometimes you can check multiple boxes with one thing. And this becomes the elegance of creation. Like, how can I, how can I check off 3 of these boxes with one sentence, right? And so that is, by the way, for if you're like thinking about this, you're like, do they really think about this when they're making videos? Yes. And that is the difference between a 10,000-view video and a million-view video. And it's, it's understanding that level of nuance across the entire thing. That creates expertise. And also when you're like, oh, this video flopped, when you're a beginner, you're like, these videos in general don't work or content doesn't work rather than saying this video didn't work. And here's why, because we did 3 of the 5. And so it's just like all of the, I mean, the devil is in the details and you only, you only, you meet the devil himself by doing the unreasonable amount of work. And then it becomes, it goes from uninformed, uh, lack of knowledge to informed optimism because first you're like, "I can make videos and get rich." Then you realize that it's really hard to make videos that people watch. And then finally you start to develop a framework of, "This is how I make videos that people watch.

And when they don't watch it, it's because I didn't follow it." It's so timely because it weaves into something you said earlier, because my girlfriend came to the recording yesterday and as I went into the green room and I sat down, she went, "Babe, look, I found this new app." And I said, "What is it?" She goes, "It's an app that summarizes books." Yeah. And she, it's called like Head Something. Yeah. And she showed me it and I go, I was like, look at my book. Yeah. 'Cause I know the laws, I know the chapters, I know all of the principles that lead up to the point. So show me my book. And law 2 of, my book's called "33 Laws." So it's these 33 laws. I got it, yeah. And law 2 is about the Richard Feynman technique you talked about. And I explained why that process of learning something, simplifying it to its essence for a 10-year-old, teaching it to someone else, if they understand it, move on, if they don't, go back to the top and learn again. And it summarized law 2 of my book to, um, like, writing is the best way to learn. Yeah. And I said, babe, if you— I said, if you just read that, that summary, the top of the pyramid, yeah, and you don't have this story and all these agreeable foundations, which I then explained to her, would you be able to then translate that and truly understand the nature of the problem so that you could apply it to lots of different settings and so on? And then I told her what that, that second law of my book actually meant, and she deleted the app. Yeah. Because there's no point knowing The conclusion. The aphorism. Yeah, like the punchline when you don't know the story. And without the story, you can't, I guess, get to the first principles of the thing.

So this is really interesting because with that Feynman example, it proves that the distillation of knowledge is not bidirectional. So you, Richard Feynman, can break it down to a child, but a child cannot then rederive what Feynman has done. Interesting, yeah. And so it's, It's convenient for the transmission of communication and for teaching someone who's, let's say, coming new to an organization. Here's the— here are the things, and these give you the decision-making frameworks around which— and it can give you directional guidance. But that is the whole founder mode. That is basically a different way of getting to the founder mode idea. That person derived this thing. Yeah. And so when a problem arises, we can rederive the next solution. Rather than trying to apply the aphorism to a new setting.

And another point for founders who are getting their work copied. Yeah. Because this— everything you've just said actually should give a founder who's having their work copied, their t-shirt designs, their content copied, huge amount of peace. Because if I need to know steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 up the staircase to success to be able to predict step 6, then if someone's just copying your step 5, you should be at total peace because they don't know. Yeah, the foundations that would lead to the next step. And that's what we see as podcasters. Podcasters copy you, they'll copy your thumbnail, your title, your whatever.

Dude, I mean, I'm sure you see it everywhere.

Yeah, yeah. But the piece that I have is, honestly, I say to the team all the time, if that's the thing that makes us special, we're fucked anyway. Yeah, yeah. Like, if it's the thumbnail or the this or the how we do this, if it's the trailer that made us special, we're fucked anyway. Yeah. But also, there's a set of principles. We call it the iceberg. The 99% of what we do, you can't see. It's the culture, as you said.

It's like, so I have so much on this. So one is right when I sat down, you were telling me about the episode that we ran that was like akin to a Shark Tank, but new version that we had on our channel. And as you saw me like kind of like groan and be like, it was 56 minutes on video, but it was so much work to produce that one thing. But no one sees all the work behind it. That's the 99%. So that's thing one. The next thing is think about the— if you're a founder who's plagued with competition and being upset about it, I was one too, and I want to tell you how I got over it. So number one is think about the alternative, which is that no one copies you because no one cares about what you're doing. Well, then it would be a requisite for success that people copy you. So as long as you are successful, this is just a part of business. The second piece is by definition, if someone copies you, they are second, period. And so if you want to lead, you can't look at anyone else. You have to consistently be deriving the next step, the step 6 that's unseen from your first 5 steps to innovate rather than I'm just going to parrot the next thing. And as soon as you find yourself copying, you have admitted defeat. You've admitted that you are no longer the leader and that you are just following in someone else's footsteps and you're giving them the baton and saying, You be the champion. I'm happy with second, third, fifth place. And in a winner-take-all world like attention is, all the fruits go to the first place anyways. Amen. Amen.

I have nothing more to add. That's perfect. The last thing I want to talk to you about is it's really like a three-part thing. It's hard work, love, and happiness. Okay. And I put them together intentionally. One could say work-life balance. Yeah. Love, happiness. I think these things are kind of fundamentally intertwined. But how do you think about it? You're someone that's known as being very obsessive, very into your work, to say the least. You have a wonderful partner who seems to be aligned. I know. Oh, super.

Okay, good. She's hardcore.

So let's go through it. Work-life balance/hard work, love and happiness. Okay. If we start with work-life balance, it was that shit question.

Beliefs on it? Yeah. So I will answer with how I derived my kind of life thesis, which was after we, so when we went to, so we had taken about $40 million in distributions from Jim Launch personally throughout the, you know, years that we ran the company. And then in the year of the sale, for those of you who've never sold a company before, you typically don't want to change a lot of things. You kind of want the company to just be like, be stable, keep working, everything's fine. And so, one of— it's one of the most harrowing experiences to go through because you can't really change anything. And if you're the founder, you're always trying to innovate. So you can't do what you're normally doing. And you also can't start the next. So you can't change current and you can't start new because if the deal doesn't go through, then you don't want to start two businesses. Remember, because we're, you know, cardinal rule number one, we're not chasing, chasing women in the red dress. And so you basically have to sit idly by and just like let things operate. And so in that year, it was one of the most miserable years of my life because I basically had nothing to do. And when I looked back on my life, this sounds like, you know, I looked back on my life as though it's been so long. I looked at the days that I enjoyed the most. And on those days, I had worked out and I had produced something and I had done both of those with people I liked. And almost all of those days I'd worked many, many hours. And when I realized that the idea of working hard so that I can insert blank, the so that actually makes it still destination driven. So that was when I derived what I called hard work is the goal. It's just to work hard. That is my goal. And then die? Mm-hmm. On things worth doing. And I— those are the days that I love. And I get a tremendous amount of pushback for saying this. And it bothers a lot of people. And to them I say, live your life whatever way you want. This is, again, my life is not a sermon. It's a documentary. This is just how I do it. You can do whatever you want. And for the people who are dissatisfied, try it. And if not, no worries. I really enjoy working. Like, the best days are like when I write those books, it's the happiest I am. And it's not happy in the moment because it's really hard. But the amount of challenge is about proportional to my level of skill. And every book I think is better than the last. And the third book that's coming out is gonna be fucking awesome. I'm very excited about it, but there's nothing that I enjoy more. But in the moment I'm like, how do I break this down? And I'm just rubbing my forehead and I'm like, and then I create 2, 3 different frameworks. I'm like, nope, that doesn't work here and that doesn't work here, which means some kid in Afghanistan is gonna get stuck on this step because it doesn't work. I have to figure out how to get it so that it works everywhere. And I keep driving it. But the moment it's like, it clicks, I'm like, that's it, fight me. Like, that's the framework. That is what I, what I strive for. And for me, the love, the happiness, and work have all, because of the nature of my life, been one. Now, some people have lived their lives where their love life and their happiness and their work are all separate. For me, it has just been life, and I like it that way. And for the people who are upset by that, I'm not upset about how you live your life. I just choose to live it this way. And if in the future I change my mind, I'll change my life. If I get to a point where I'm like, this is no longer a priority for me, something else is, then I will. But when I look at the centenarians and I look at the people who— I look at Warren Buffett as somebody and Charlie Munger as two of my heroes. Charlie worked until the day he died. And to be clear, I don't work on a 7-day calendar. I don't work a certain hour. I work as much as I can until I feel like my rate of output drops precipitously because of fatigue, and then I sleep. And then if I feel like on a longer time horizon of like, I've worked 9 days, I've worked 20 days, I've worked 30 days in a row, and I'm like, all right, I feel like I don't have any gas today, then I'll take the whole day off. And whether that's a Tuesday or a Sunday or a Saturday, I take the day off, and that just is what it is. And I've just— I have learned to work that way, and I'm okay with it.

The goal clearly for you then is the hard work itself and not a certain place you're trying to get to necessarily.

'Cause that always moves. Yeah. And so Jesse Itzler has this, and maybe I'll be able to steal it from him someday, but he told, I saw him show a picture of his kid finishing a race and putting a zero up. And what that signified was nothing left in the tank, that he'd spent everything he had on the field. And I would, And it's like, I have this visual of the 300 movie where the queen says to the king, as he goes off to battle, she says, "Come back with your shield or on it." And I kind of see like my work that way. Like, I can't imagine a better way to go out than like doing the thing I love. And it bothers a lot of people that I love something different than they love. And it's like, it really bothers me that it bothers them, to be honest. Because I make no projections. Like, do whatever you want. And I feel like if I ever had a, like, one thing that people took from me, it was like absolute freedom. And because of that absolute freedom, we are 100% responsible for our own lives. And so where we place the finger of blame is also where power flows. So if you blame your parents for your life, your parents have power over your life. If you blame your, boss for your bad life, your boss has power of your life. If you blame you for your bad life, at least you can change you and you can do something about it. And so I think absolute responsibility has been my core tenet. And if you have a life where you're like, I don't want to care about work that much and I just want to spend all my time with my family, I'm like, congratulations, you fucking won. That's amazing. Just don't assume that everyone's you and that winning for me is the same as winning for you. And, and it, and I think the, the times that I talk about this, I, I know that my, my message won't resonate with everyone, and that's okay. But it's for the few people who were like me and felt like everyone told them there was something wrong with them. And I still get people to tell me there's something wrong with me. And if wrong means not normal, then yeah, you bet. But it's more so that like, you are different and that's okay. And I think that if you're, if you're okay with that, then it unleashes this whole new realm of possibility of being able to do what you want. And kind of like I had the, you know, you do 100 of these and you look at the top 10%, do 100 of these, look at the top 10%. That was my way of trying to operationalize happiness because it was this ephemeral thing that when I was 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, I struggled a ton with. I was very depressed. I looked at, you know, religion. I looked at a lot of different things. And this is common for people at that age. And I came up with a mantra for me at that time, which was fuck happiness. Now, people then hear this, and I'm sure this will get taken out of context, but that was basically like this release moment for me where by continually chasing happiness, it always existed outside of me. And so it was always this carrot that was in front of me that I could never really get to. And so by saying fuck happiness, I was like, it's unattainable. I'm just gonna work and I'm just gonna do the stuff I wanna do. And when I started doing the stuff that I wanted to do, I looked up years later and I was like, I actually kind of like my life. And I was like, is this what happiness is? And I was like, I don't know. But I think one of the major plights of humanity myself included, is the expectation that life should be different than it is. And so we, we, we create this idea that whatever we have right now is not what it should be. And I think should is the, is the root of all pain, is that all the things that we think should happen but aren't is our, is basically the measurement of our pain. And so I've tried to eradicate should from my life. Should for other people, she should do this, they should do that. And just lean into is. It just is this way. I work, period. Not I should work more, I should work less, or I should work differently, or I should see my mom more, I should call my dad more. I do this. And if something changes, I will change. And so unconditional shoulds. Now, if there is a condition of like, if you want to make more money, then this is a higher likelihood, you might want to consider doing this. Those are things that I don't consider in that category. But just the generalized shoulds of he shouldn't do that. He should, he should build a family. He should have kids. He should have gotten married earlier. He should have gotten married later. He should have married someone different. He shouldn't have the life that he has. He shouldn't work this way. According to what? And so for me, that is my, my theory on life, on, on, on happiness, work, and love has been very unified because I love my work so much. That I got out of a relationship, and when I, you know, started dating Layla, I said, I am not willing to change this. And so you have to be willing to deal with me working this way, or this won't work, because my relationship with my work is the most satisfying relationship I have. Now, people will hear that and be like, well, that's because he's never experienced true love, or whatever or whatever narrative they'll say. But it's like, you haven't lived my life and I haven't lived yours and I don't project anything onto you. But I like, I love what I do. And I like, I get attacked for liking what I do so much. And I like working a lot. And it's because they have negative associations with the word. And that's their own history of their experience with the word. But I see my goals and my relationship with my goals as one of the most sacred things that I have because I see them as a relationship with myself. And so those proxy, when someone comes in and says, hey, you know, sweetie, you've been working too much. According to what? Why should I stop? Right? Now let's do this other thing. And people will probably see this as a— they'll put whatever labels they want on it. But like I just said, this is what I would like to do with my life. And if you can incorporate yourself into that, that would be amazing. And so my second date with Layla, after we talked about business for 4 hours on our first date was I said, I'm going to be working all day. It'd be cool if you worked with me. And she just worked next to me. She had her own thing, but she just worked beside me. And I was like, this is nice. And over time, eventually was like, hey, maybe you want to work on my thing with me? And she was like, yeah, that sounds good. It was a little bit more than that. But like, fundamentally, I got her to switch, switch to working on it with me. And at that point, what we got to talk about was what we were creating together. And to me, that's been, you know, the journey of my life. And it's been, it's been amazing. And I'm not saying it works for everyone. I'm saying it probably doesn't work for most people, but it has worked really well for me. And it would make sense for me that my path would be different than most people's because I don't behave like most people. And so I would have to have a different formula for how I drive, you know, meaning or joy from my own life. And since I don't believe in inherent meaning, just the meaning that we choose to ascribe to things, then it's up to me to create that meaning within the work that I do. And so the reason acquisition.com was all based on, and it was during that year where I just basically had nothing to do, where I was like, what do I wanna do with my life? Because I don't need to work anymore. And that was, you know, we'd taken 40Up before the sale and then we obviously got the sale. So like, I don't need to work, I like to work. And I try to spend, I look at, you know, I had this boss that told me this, and was one of the catalysts for looking at life this way. She said, I had just had like a good weekend or something and I came in like chipper. And she said, well, you must have had a good weekend. And I was like, yeah, it was good. And she said this, it was like an offhanded comment. And she said, I'm pretty sure the key to happiness is living as many days in a row like that as you can. And it was actually like really operational. Like I was like, I can use this. Like what are the good days? How do I live as many of those days in a row as I can? And so I've, you know, I've been attacked for like saying that I don't really enjoy going on trips on vacation very much. And it's because like, I just want to get back to doing the thing that I really enjoy doing. And I remember we, Layla and I went to Mexico this year for a week and it's always during the week of Christmas 'cause no one works and it drives me nuts. And I've just like, I've just given up trying to get, you know, get everyone to work. 'Cause even if my team will work, 'cause my team will because they're crazy too, other teams won't and vendors won't and it's just pain. Anyway, and so while we were there, all I came out with was like, This is for other people and not me, comma, and that's okay.

Earlier on when we were talking about— sorry for the long rant. No, it was beautiful because it— so a couple of takeaways from it. But earlier on we were talking about being a great content creator is a byproduct of having the courage to be yourself. And from that, what everything you just said, my soliloquy. Yeah. I also gleaned something similar, which is being happy requires the same thing, which is the courage to be yourself. And in both— in the previous analogy, you said everybody is unique. Yeah. And that is their value as it relates to showing up in marketing or with whatever product they have. But also, when I think about Alex's story, your story, and all you went through with your father and the early experiences in that consultancy firm, the gym, the fur place you worked— logically, from first principles, the thing that's going to make you happy because you are completely unique, is going to be completely different from everybody else, right? Like, to varying degrees depending on how you're sort of defining your early experiences are. But I actually think we talked about the courage of being yourself. There's also the courage of being happy. And with the courage of being happy, you have to withstand public pressure. The shoulds you said from your parents, whatever, from social media, especially as you become a bigger creator. To actually just listen to how you feel every day.

Can I throw something out that I think might, like, so this blew my mind. So I was in around that same period of time, 'cause I talked to everybody I could to try and get context on this. And so I called a friend of mine up, or not friend, I would say acquaintance that I got connected with who'd sold his company for hundreds of millions of dollars, really bright guy. And one of the questions I asked him, I said, so how do you drive meaning What do you want from your life? And he said an answer that really, really shook me, which doesn't happen that much given my worldview. He said, why do you think that life needs to be meaningful? And it was just this really interesting question, which is basically that I had an unspoken demand of the universe. Life should be meaningful. I should be happy. And so it's the shoulds that we don't even know that we think and say that are the ones that chain us the most. Like hardcore. And so my favorite quote of all time, which is probably at the front of a few of the books that I have and will probably be the one that'll be on my tombstone, is a permutation of an Orson Scott Card quote, which is, "We question all of our beliefs except for those that we truly believe and those we never think to question." And so I would say that a lot of my entrepreneurial career, even just human journey, has been what are the beliefs that I so, so inherently believe that I don't even see them? I don't even think about the should. And so when he said that to me, I was like, whoa, I have had this inherent demand of the universe that my life be meaningful. And now people would hear this and be like, they have their shoulds and they're gonna say, well, it should be meaningful. And I'm like, why? According to what? And if we look at history, history pretty much sweeps everyone under the bed, like within 100 years and within 1,000 years, basically everyone. And the people that we remember, we remember some of their works. And we go 100,000 years in the future or 10,000 years in the future, probably unlikely that we will be remembered in general. And that is solving for the idea that we need to be remembered again. We have to. Why? And so my solving has been for degrees of freedom and responsibility. So what are the things that I can control? And I will do the very best of my ability to try and do the things within my control to ideally make other people's lives better and my own in the process. Now, that is a choice rather than a I demand that of the universe. And this gets really abstract and heady really fast. And so I will try and, you know, bring us back down to earth. But by demanding that life be meaningful, by demanding that I be happy, when I understood that I was demanding these things and pursuing them, that they were outside of me by saying, I need to do this, that I created inherent space that I could never gap, I could never close. And so by trying to forget or eliminate the demand is where it was the first time that I experienced those things. And so I try to keep them out of my head to the greatest degree possible so that I can be inside of them. I'm, that sounds weird, rather than in pursuit. And so the times where I derive the most joy from my life, if I'm optimizing for that, which is, I wouldn't necessarily say that I am optimizing for joy. I think Williamson was like, you definitely optimize for purpose or meaning or something like that. And I kind of reject a lot of it, mostly because I do what I have been rewarded for doing in the past. And so because I have a behaviorist view of the world, which is that everything boils down to behaviors, um, why do I do these things? I do these things because when I have done them in the past, I have enjoyed the result. And so I continue to do things that I've enjoyed the result of. And if other people have done things that they enjoy the result of, then I encourage you to keep doing them. And I also encourage you to not project that other people need to also do those things and that they will experience the same result as you, because they might not.

Alex, thank you. Oh, that was such a beautiful way to end. And, um, I, I've— it's so interesting because if, if people attack you for that, I just wanted to give my own perspective. Is when I hear you say these things about not, not enjoying holidays and, yeah, um, things about your relationship with Layla and how, how that happens, for me, I feel even if I don't agree with 100%, I probably get to 95%, to be honest with you. The fact that you're telling me that you're different makes my difference, whatever it might be, feel acceptable. Do you know what I'm saying?

I 100% know what you're saying.

Because, because when I heard you say these things and I go, oh my God, Alex feels like he's different from the normal too. We might not be— me and Alex aren't the same, but we both feel inherently like we're not playing by the rules and therefore in some way getting life wrong. Based on this like public narrative of the way we should live our lives. I thought, amazing. I remember watching the video where you talked about not liking going on holidays and being like absolutely obsessed, and me thinking, oh my God, I'm so fucking glad he said that, because deep in my heart somewhere I felt a guilt. Yeah. Oh, I, you know, yes, I guilted. And I'm like, where did the guilt come from, right? I'm doing it, something that I love every single day, but I feel guilty. Well, I feel guilty because of other people's shoulds, right? So please, Alex, Despite the, um, despite any critics that might be out there, please continue to have the courage to be yourself because you have no idea how it's making a group of weirdos that feel like they don't fit in feel heard and understood for their variance. Well, that is my—

yeah, I mean, it's— I make it for them.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast, as you know, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. Oh God. I'm laughing 'cause it's so ironic.

Okay.

What is the meaning of life? Oh.

Well, the short answer is obviously 42. But, um, I actually do think it's learning. Because if we think about what learning is, it's that you're exposed to new conditions that over time change your behavior. And so you are different now than you were 10 years ago because you've learned more things. And so if we think about the meaning of life as what is the output of life— so I actually do really like this. So people talk— I can relate this to business, of course. I can relate what's the meaning of life to business. But what is the meaning of a business? The purpose of the business is whatever the output of that business is. That's the meaning. It's what the output of that business is. And so if the mission, like with Elon, is like to get to Mars, then the output of the mission is that people get to Mars. And so that's the meaning of that business. And so the meaning of life in general for me, I think for all humans, is that the output of experience is learning. And so we will learn regardless whether we want to or not. We learn. Learning happens whether you want, whether you like it or not, you will learn. And I think that that's where I would just leave it. And the question is, are you learning the things that you want?

Amen. I highly recommend people go and check out the new format you launched on your YouTube channel. It's titled Building a $1 Million Business for a Stranger in 56 Minutes. It's kind of like a new take on Shark Tank, but it's more actionable, more practical. It's what you referenced earlier, and I know it took you many, many, many, many hours to perfect it, but it's a really interesting format that I think YouTube is seeking because it's so actionable and practical. And I highly recommend— I'll link that below— but I would also highly recommend people go and check out these books. I mean, they've been— to say they've been smash hits is a massive understatement. Um, thank you. I mean, I just see it everywhere. I feel like it's a prerequisite of any entrepreneur's toolkit when they're starting and they're trying to figure out frameworks for scaling a business, making sales, generating leads. And I know there's another one on the way which you won't tell me about, but I know it's coming this year, which is volume 3 of this, this format. And I'm exceptionally excited to see it. And for any entrepreneurs out there that are looking to get in business with you, I highly recommend they go check out acquisition.com because there's so much there regardless of where you are in the whether you're starting out, whether you're scaling up, whether you're looking for advice, acquisition.com is the place to be. Thank you, Alex, for your generosity. I appreciate it. And thank you for all that you do. Thank you for being weird and different, because like, that's again, that's the value. That's all the value in the world. Um, we don't need more of the same. We need people that have the courage to be themselves and the courage to be happy. Um, and that's exactly who you are, and I really, really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.