How They Keep You POOR! (Watch This To Become A MILLIONAIRE In 2025) | Alex Hormozi

For people who are poor, it's because they actually don't see reality for what it is. Because the way they see reality, they see making money to be impossible or incredibly difficult, or it's only for a certain select people, not for them.

And it's just because they, I think.

You gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. I feel like a lot of society keeps people kind of trapped in this broke mindset. It's hard to kind of get ahead, right? Because of people investing in things when they don't have money, so they're in debt, and they kind of stay in debt. What is necessary for people to break the broke mindset that society has kind of trapped people in that keeps them poor?

So I think people have two sets of resources that they allocate. They've got time, they've got money. And so if you look at someone's bank statement and you look at their calendar, you know what their life is. And you can also predict where their life is going to be in X amount of years.

Right?

And so if someone wants to change what their life is going to look like, you have to reallocate where you're investing the resources that you have. And so from a time perspective, people who are poor, in my opinion, spend a lot of time not doing stuff. And that sounds terrible to say, but like at the base level, they're distracted. They're not doing the right stuff. They're not doing the right stuff.

Right.

Well, I would even say not doing anything.

Just distracting them.

Right.

Play video games. Netflix, et cetera, you know, all that stuff, right? So they've got, there's like the basis, like, they don't do anything. They're purely distracting themselves from their current state, which is hard because it's hard to confront reality. If you're like not happy, it's easier to distract yourself. Now the level above that is you've got people who are operating, they are working every day, but they're operating in low leverage opportunities. So they're doing things that do not give them a lot of return on their time. And so it's like I could work, it doesn't matter how many hours I work at McDonald's, it's very, very difficult to become wealthy there. It's just near impossible.

Right?

Versus like you could buy a building for $10 million and then sell it to somebody else for $11 million, just get the contract and make $1 million on the exchange. Super high leverage, right? From a time perspective, which is crazy for somebody who doesn't have money to even contemplate something like that. But the only way that that happened and that required no money is skill, right? And so like that's an example of like it didn't require money to make that money, that's skill. that's required to do that. And so first is the time, right? People are not doing stuff with the time that they have, or they're doing low leverage activities with the time they have, and then they're not trying to increase their output per unit time, which means investing in their skill set. So like one of the easiest ways to gain leverage on your time, and when I say leverage just for everybody, like leverage is the difference between inputs and outputs in a system. So, you know, Archimedes said, if you give me a lever long enough, I can move the world. And so the same degree, if you have enough skills, you can do anything.

Right?

And so skills give you leverage on your time. So you get more out of each unit of time. So if I'm a master cold caller, I will get more sales and calls booked for the same unit of time that somebody who sucks at it. Same time, more output.

Right?

But because they developed a skill at a masterful level.

100%.

Yeah.

And so when people are allocating their time, they're not by percentage, they're kind of like consuming their time rather than investing their time. So they're either doing nothing, or they're consuming the time rather than putting time into getting higher returns on their time, which is education, right? And so education you can have from like the conceptual learning, watching stuff like this, or, and/or the actual doing, right? And so, you know, you learn- Taking.

Action, 100%, failing, messing up, you know, feeling like an embarrassment in the actions, yeah.

The first thousand cold calls you make, the first thousand cold emails you do, the first thousand doors you knock on, the first thousand, you know, like you'll learn more from that than you'll learn from every single book you read up to that point on the concept. Like you'll learn.

Right?

And so people don't allocate nearly enough time to that in the beginning. And so I think one of the things that the formal education system did really well, that people poo-poo on it, is the idea of going into debt to gain education is something that fundamentally makes sense.

Yes. But it's got to be the right education that can make you money.

You got to get a return on it. Yes. That's the issue, right? You have to get a return on it. Because like the idea of borrowing from a future self that can make more money to pay for the thing that you're getting the skill for makes total sense. I think Elon was saying something about how Neuralink in the future, it's going to be such a competitive advantage that they could price it at whatever they want because once you have it, you'll be so much more able than anyone who doesn't have it that you could so easily pay off the price of the thing. That's how it should work conceptually, right? Crazy. So education is supposed to work. Yes. And so I like, this is the simplest example that I have. So a friend of mine has a 17-year-old daughter. She got a job at a bowling alley. and she makes minimum wage. And he said, why don't you become a phlebotomist? She was like, well, I don't want to spend the money. He's like, it's 500 bucks and it's a two-day certification. And then after you have that, you make 25 an hour. So she didn't have the money. Now she could save it to get the 500, right? Or she could take a loan for the 500 bucks from her dad and pay it back in a week.

Right. Right.

Because she has higher earning capacity. And so it was like she could. She could either save for eight weeks from her bowling alley to pay the $500 or she could take a loan for the $500, do the two days and then pay it off in a week. So at that one week, she now has seven more weeks of earning capacity. This is a micro example, right? Seven weeks of earning capacity at her new level and she'd be net positive on the next seven weeks of earnings. And so that's just a micro example of like what skill investing does. And so that, because I, A lot of us talk about like, you got to get educated, you got to learn stuff, and like you learn stuff by doing it. And a lot of times you pay for that education or access to people who can teach you those skills because a lot of people aren't going to give it to you for free. And that makes sense. It's okay. Like it took them time to learn the thing and they compressed that time to give it to you. So I mean, that's why I'm like.

If there's one thing that's my life's mission, it's education. And so I was telling my coaching students last night on a call that I have with them that I have multiple coaches that someone was asking about mentors. How do you find mentors? How often do you stay in touch with them? And I was like, listen, when I was broke, whatever it was, 15 years ago, just getting started in this space, I was lucky enough that I had a couple local mentors in Columbus, Ohio that kind of had pity on me. But they saw that I had this hunger, this desire. I was like, I'll do whatever you tell me to do. And then I came back two weeks later and I was like, I did it. Here's the results. Here's why I failed. And that's a fuel for mentors to be like, I gave you wisdom, you took action, you got results. I'll give you some more feedback. But if you just keep asking and you don't act, we talked about this with a mutual friend we have, it's frustrating for a mentor. They don't wanna give you that time.

No.

And I told them, I go, this is why I pay mentors. You know, there's a big guy in media that has a massive business that I messaged him. I'm an acquaintance with him. I said, Hey, I would love to pay you for some coaching. He said, I'll just do it for you for free for 30 minutes. Now, I want to pay him because I want to be able to do it more frequently. He said, I'll give it to you for 30 minutes because he likes me, we're friendly, but I know I can't call upon him for 30 minutes every week. So now I'll go back in six months and say, I took action on everything you said in that 30 minutes. Here's our results. Can we do another call? And that's kind of like what you can expect with a mentor, is that type of opportunity, unless you have a serious bond and they just want to give with their time. But investing in it, like you said, is so much more powerful and getting that speed of information, in my opinion.

Totally. The single highest return on investment thing I've ever done, and not to sound trite here, but I just like using scenarios. Like if I had taken all the money that I had spent on coaching, mentorships, courses, workshops, seminars, and put that in the S&P 500 when I, 10 years ago, the amount that I would have right now is inconsequential compared to what I currently have. It was because I invested in something different. So rather than investing in the S&P 500, I invested in the S&P 500. I took all of the excess cash that I had every single month and rather than saying, oh, I'm in a dollar cost average, long term, I wait 40 years, whatever, I was like, I just don't make enough money. I could be the millionaire next door who saves every penny, doesn't go to.

Starbucks for my entire life and have.

$2 million when I'm older, whatever. For the last 10 years of my life.

Right.

And literally enjoy nothing during that period of time. That doesn't sound like... It's not a trade I wanted to make. I had a belief that I know I I will work hard and if I'm given the right tools, I will be able to implement them. And so I took all my extra money and this is kind of, you know, a lot of people might not necessarily agree with me on this, but it worked for me. So I put all of every dollar I had even went into debt to get access to communities and mentors and coaching programs and masterminds. Masterminds, yes. And those were the biggest gifts of all. And it wasn't even just in this like the biggest gifts I got from those wasn't even the education, but it was the perspectives on reality. It was people disproving things that I thought to be true. So I was like, this is the way the world is. And they were like, that's false. And my whole paradigm shifted because I had distortions of reality. I thought reality was different than it was. And so right now for people who are poor, it's because they actually don't see reality for what it is. Because the way they see reality, they see making money to be impossible or incredibly difficult or it's only for certain select people, not for them. And it's just because they literally cannot see it. And so I'm trying to think of an example of when Like you can see something that, you know, easier examples like kids and parents, right? Like a kid thinks the world is a certain way and the parents like, you just haven't seen enough stuff yet. And so, you know, as you level up in the entrepreneur space, there's also just more levels of that where other people are like, this is the perspective you need to have. And you're like, no way that's possible. And so that's where those rooms gave me the highest ROI, the other skills, because there's so many people there that are trying to learn the same things. They already said, Hey, get this program, read this book. And so they helped sift through the mountain of information that's out there because I only have one resource, which is time at that time, right? And so it's like, okay, I'll spend it, but where do I spend it? And they were like, okay, if you want to learn real estate, these are the top three guys. You can join this Facebook group, get into this guy's community. He has a coaching program that helps you do wholesaling. This guy's a coach who does Airbnb. This guy, you're like, and so it's like, which one do I choose? The answer for everybody who's curious, is do them all. Because you're just like, you're not like people are like, which one should I do? I'm like, you're not gonna be poorer by learning more.

Right.

And it's not like you have a finite capacity to learn. The more you learn, the better you get at learning. And then the more lines and synergies you find between different skill sets and opportunities.

The more dangerous you become.

100%.

If you just learn cold calling, but you didn't also learn, you know, copywriting and email marketing or speaking on stage, It's the combination of multiple skills that make your earning power so much greater.

I'm literally getting goosebumps. Dude, I love it. It's the compound. And so I have this example where I break down Jay-Z. And so if you look at Jay-Z in the beginning, he probably had a natural proclivity for rhyming and beat or rhythm, whatever. So that was his first kind of skill. He probably practiced that a little bit 'cause he was into it. And then he started rapping. So that was his first level skill. And then he learned writing lyrics and it's like, okay, so that's another skill. Producing, right? Exactly.

Then he learned producing and then he.

Learned marketing and then he learned- Performing on stages or something. Yes, and then he learned how to sign other people to his- that's how to start a label and then he started to look. And so with each of these skills, it wasn't one plus one, it was like one plus one plus one equals 10, right? And so in a formal world, like the world that's not rap, if someone's good at math, they can learn accounting or bookkeeping first, right? It's like, okay, that's a level one skill. Then you learn accounting, okay, now you're making more. And then you learn how insurance works and you're like, oh, okay, now you can start to see this person evolve. And then you learn how tax and tax efficiencies work and you're like, oh. And then you learn how to package and sell businesses and negotiate those deals with private equity and things like that. All of a sudden, that's a CFO, that's somebody who's making multiple million dollars a year, but it's the same basic few skills that stack on top of each other and get disproportionate returns on all the prior skills with each new additional skill. And so the idea is not, People ask the wrong question when they're like, which course should I buy?

Which program should I do? It's yes. Do them all.

Yes.

Do them all.

Yes to all, yeah. Yeah, you want like, because each one of them you will learn things. And there's gonna be either different ways.

That someone's teaching, they'll have different communities, they'll have different beliefs, you'll learn from all of them. And this is something I think, I'll hear this sometimes where people say, well, I just invested in this program. I don't know if I have the time to invest in this next course or read this book or whatever it is. And you gotta think of like, I believe, you know, I'm doing five, six interviews a week where I'm constantly learning. You know, every time you come on, I learn something new. It's not like there are things that confirm what I already know, but I'm also learning new things. It's not like I've said after 10 years of doing this, I don't need to learn anymore. I don't have any more time to learn. It's so important for me to develop as a human being, and that's why I'm constantly learning. You know, people need to sit down and do interviews with people all day long. They can learn in different ways. But I don't think the investment ever ends in how much you can learn.

And it compounds.

Compounds.

That's the best part.

What would you say are the three main skills for someone to want to have the potential of being a six or seven figure earner?

Yeah.

That they need to start learning now. So 2023, they have that potential.

In my opinion, there's three main skills in business in general. You gotta learn how to sell, you gotta learn how to build, you gotta learn how to lead. So you got to learn how to get people to give you money for stuff, got to have the stuff to sell them, and then you got to have people that work on your side to help deliver on those other two. If you can do those three things, you're unstoppable. And if you do one of those three things, you can make as much, like you can still make a ton of money, but if you can do all three, you're unbeatable.

So build, like building a team, building.

So that would be on the lead side. The building is like the product and services that you have, so you have to figure out a way to deliver value to somebody.

To develop a product a program, a product, a service that you can package and sell.

And people are like, well, how do I do that? All you have to do, there's, this is the perspective thing we were saying earlier. It's like, I don't know where the opportunity is. And people who are entrepreneurs see opportunity everywhere. It's like, and my biggest red life is that I can't live multiple lives because there's so many things I want to do. But it's because all you have to do is look for problems. You look for things that people hate. You look for inefficiencies. You just look for things that are nuisances. Like, what are things that people do every day that they hate doing? Like, and a big one, a big misnomer I think is that people think they need to have a new thing. You can start a cleaning business, become a billionaire. You can start a lawn care business, become a billionaire. You can start a roofing business, become a billionaire. Like, there's clear problems. Like, all you have to do is just do what everyone else is doing.

Learn how to sell, learn how to deliver consistently, and learn how to lead. If you do those three things, you can do just as well as everyone else and just do it better. I was in the elevator this morning coming here, and I have this cat sitter that, used to watch my cats, right? And he mostly works in a different building that I used to live in. Now I'm in a new building. He was in the new building 'cause he had some other dogs. He's a dog walker, right? But I asked him to watch my cats one time.

And.

He literally, for 30 seconds in the elevator, I was like, Hey man, good to see you. And I go, Dude, how much you making now? 'Cause I see him hustling. I see him walking around with all these dogs. I'm like, and his prices went up over the last few years. Like when I first had him watch my cats, it was like 25 bucks, now it's like 40 bucks for a session. I'm like, I go, dude, what are you making? Like 5, 600 bucks a day? He goes, I go 1,000. I go 2,000. He goes, I go 3, yes, around 3K a day. I go, what? Walking dogs. And I go, he goes, now it's seven days a week. It's a grind. I've got three employees now who are like, walking dogs. But he's like the go-to guy in Beverly Hills. and he's like independent. He's not with some, you know, big dog walking company or something, but three grand a day walking dogs. I go, you can, there's a need, especially in this community where people are busy, but they love their dogs and they have money to spend on their dogs. And he is providing a service. It's incredible. Three grand a day, man. It's crazy. I love this. I'm the wrong business.

I need to be walking dogs, you know?

I love this example because it's perfect.

Because everyone can understand it. It's like, what's the problem that they're solving? It's like, People don't have time to work their dogs. Whenever you're looking at any problems, time is one of the easiest ones to solve is that people don't take the time to do something. It takes too long, you want to do it faster. Jason Fladlien said the easiest business model in the world is find what someone else is doing, do it half the time. It's just you can do it, and you can look at any business that exists and do that. And so it's like, what did he have to do? He had to learn how to sell, which means he had to get people to give him money for the dogs, which part of that's marketing, but I'm just wrapping that promotion, getting people to give you money.

He had to learn how to deliver, which is like, okay, what are the best routes to walk on?

How do I manage 17 leashes at the same time? you had to figure all that stuff out, right? And then you don't learn how to lead.

So he has two employees or three employees. Now he's got employees, but before he.

Was exhausted, but now he's figuring out how to build and lead. And what'll happen is he'll stop walking dogs and then he'll have-- He'll have a team. He'll be managing it, yeah.

Right, exactly. And so it's like, that's such a perfect microcosm of the three skills being put to use. It was taking him years to do it. It didn't happen overnight. He had to build his brand. He had to show that he could deliver the value of the product consistently and all these different things. He had to be communicating and-- yeah. be reliable, all these things. And he was like, I'm doing it seven days a week. So he has no life, right? So it's like an extreme, but it's possible. And so the three skills I heard you say is sell, build, and lead. You can never get enough training on how to lead yourself and how to lead others because there's so much of a world inside of each one of us that has to learn how to overcome insecurities, fears, traumas, triggers, that will make us poor leaders of ourselves and of others so that people respect and trust us. So leading skills is probably the hardest. And it's also the one that's almost.

A meta skill in that it actually can layer on top of the other two. So if you think about it, like as a hypothetical example, imagine I know how to recruit and lead people. And I don't know anything about marketing. I don't think about sales. I don't know anything about delivery. But I have a vision for what I want to accomplish a problem that I want to solve that's meaningful to me and I think will be meaningful to other people. I can compel people. I can persuade them and influence them to want to work and help me solve this huge problem together. And so you don't even, like real talk, you don't even have to know how to sell and how to market. You don't have to know how to build a product, build a service team, because if you can lead, you can get all those other people to do that.

And leading is also selling, in a sense.

If.

You'Re a leader, your energy is an enrolling energy. your way of being, how you show up, how you communicate is selling you in your vision. You don't need to know how to sell a product and get on stage and say, buy my stuff. But you need to be able to enroll people into a vision that they are in alignment with. And I think that is one of the hardest skills because people don't have the belief in themselves. A lot of people don't believe in themselves. They don't love themselves enough to be enrolling, in my opinion. and so they discount and that doubt, people can feel that energy and that doubt.

Yeah, you have to be certain, not confident. You know what I mean? I think part of it. And so it's easy to say what, like, what we just said about the whole leading thing. And, like, as much as everyone's like, well, I'll just jump straight to leading. I feel like there's some sort of, like, and this is me. I could be speaking a limiting belief.

Of my own over.

So, you know, disclaimer.

Right.

But it is my belief that there's.

A certain amount of, like, spiritual strength that you gain from having done stuff.

Right.

Developing skills.

Developing skills. Because you build confidence with these skills. Yeah, because you have evidence. Results. Yeah, and so people, you can enroll someone, you can subscribe someone to your vision. And because the next, the first question someone's gonna always ask is why should I listen to you? Or why should I follow you specifically?

Right?

And unless you have a solid answer that's not you being crazy, right? Being like, I have done these things. They give me evidence that I can move the goal post. further than what we have to done before because of what I have done behind me, right? Because the path I've already walked. And so I think like learning how to sell, learning how to build the first two skills, and then leading, you learn consistently along the way for the rest of your life.

What would you say are the most important habits someone can develop for themselves on a daily basis to support their opportunities for earning more?

Most of the most important lessons that I've learned in my life have come from doing. and mentors. And so on a day-to-day basis, it's reducing the time between when you wake up and when you begin working. A lot of people lollygag and delay and procrastinate and things like that. And if you just think about there's only a certain amount of time in the day, I want to increase my output per unit of time as much as possible. A lot of people have these superstitions that they have to do a certain thing or they must do X, Y, and Z. But all you have to do is talk to a single mom who has like five kids and still start businesses. They're not doing any of that stuff. They're waking up and they're working before their kids are up. And then once their kids go to bed, they work then too. And they're not doing all the lollygag stuff that you see trending all over social media. It's like they're working. And so the single greatest skill, in my opinion, is being able to find a place that you can shut out external stimuli and you can focus. Because for me, the single highest ROI habit that I have is that for me, between 5:00 a.m. and noon, I have nothing on my calendar. It is just work, no meetings, and then all my meetings happen after noon. This is for the entrepreneurs. Now, if you're in a job right now, then it's gotta be in the morning before you go to work and in the evening after you come back from work. But having that dedicated time, and if you're like, well, I'm not a morning person, fine, then just work late. That's okay. I've got billionaire buddies who are like, oh, I wake up at 10. But they work really late. That's their special time that no one bothers them. It tends to be at the bookends of the day, though, just from my experience, In the middle of the day, you get pestered and it's hard to get into that deep focus, that really, that deep learning that you get when you really pour yourself into something.

Yeah, and I think I saw Layla mention this in a video clip where she was like, I just wake up and I start working. She's not spending an hour morning routine or something like that. And I think you got to figure out who you are. It's like if you want to spend an hour or two in the morning and taking coffee and going for a walk and working out and kind of like preparing yourself great. I think for me, there is some importance to, at some point in the day, setting an intention either for the day or at night for the next day.

Agreed.

So if you want to get up and work right away at night, totally, what are the three most important things or what are the actions you're going to take that are going to get you closer to your vision that next day? So having some five, ten minutes to have an intention and then act on it, as opposed to just reacting to the world.

Yeah, 100%.

That's what I believe.

But there was this one to consolidate what we were saying earlier because I like this matters a lot to me. Give it to me. Most skills can be learned decently with about 20 hours of focused effort. 20 hours, like the first 20 hours of you actually doing something you learn the most you're gonna learn about the thing. If you just consider by percentage of learning from like you know nothing to 20 hours in you already have a really good understanding of the thing. The problem is that most people will take years to start the first hour. And so that habit that you're referencing is that my speed, at least now as I've gotten better at this stuff, is that I try and detract the time from when I want to learn something or when I want to start doing something to starting it as soon as I can. Because I just want to start getting through those 20 hours as fast as I can. Yes. And so that's just been a very tangible, because it seems like this amorphous thing, but there was a study that was done. There was like, in the first 20 hours you can learn almost any skill, playing guitar, running an ad, doing a, like, you'll learn more in that first 20 hours than any other time. So it's like, then just get to that 20 hours and don't delay. Yes. And that's been one of the deepest lessons I've had because it took me four years to learn how to build a website and it took me one day to actually learn.

Crazy. Because you decided to act on the learning.

Four years to delay and procrastinate and say, I'm not a tech guy. I'm not a tech person. This isn't my kind of thing. I'm a gym guy. I'm a local business owner. I should pay somebody to do this. I'm above this kind of thing.

Like all these stories, right?

And then one day I sat down on a Sunday morning, I was like, I'm gonna learn this thing.

You Googled it and you took, yeah, you just learned it. Step by step by step. And you know what? I set the whole day aside.

It took me four hours. Crazy.

It's amazing. I bet you've heard this so many times that people are like, I want to launch a podcast. I want to start a YouTube. I want to launch a book. And they've been saying it for years and years and years when you can literally go on Amazon and upload a book in an hour. If you just learn the steps, it might feel daunting and over like, I don't know how to do this and how do I link my payments and create a book and put it up there. But you can create a one page book and launch it to at least say you did it and now you know the steps. So it's not as scary. I think so many people are to launch their thing because they don't understand how to do it and they think it's gonna take a lot more time than it actually is. You may not be good at it right away. Your website probably wasn't perfect, but you got the website up within four hours and then you can make it better over time.

And there's this, because that first hour is you paying down the fear of uncertainty. It's all these fears of like not being enough, what if I feel stupid? Because you have felt stupid when you try to figure something else out. But like if you remember how hard it was to learn how to tie your shoes when you were a kid, Right? Because it's like, I have to remember, then this one and the two bunny ears, you know, the whole thing, right? But like now you can do it in your sleep. And it's just the emotions we have about beginning work because of the judgments we're going to put on ourselves about how we're doing. But if we can remove the judgment of how we're going to do and say, I assume I'm going to suck. And all I'm doing is I'm going.

To start pulling the thread of this 20 hours. That's my only goal is to start sucking.

That's it.

I just want to start sucking rather than nothing.

Right.

You gotta love, you gotta love embarrassing yourself the way I feel like it. these skills that you're going to learn, they're going to bring you a lot of value long term. They're not easy to start with. They're not. And so you've got to be okay with accepting embarrassment of your own self. What's the, what's the belief that, why is it so hard for people that haven't made money? Let's talk about, like, the daunting number for a lot of people, which is seven figures, which is, it was hard for me to get over the hump mentally and psychologically of, like, how do I go from $5,000 a month to $10,000, then 10,000 to 20,000. And then how do you get a business? I'm talking about business owners. How do you get it to six figures and then to the seven figure mark as a business owner? Do we overcomplicate money in our minds if we've been taught stories as kids or been taught beliefs about it? And how do we get over the overcomplication of making seven figures as entrepreneurs?

I would, I agree with you that I think it gets over complicated and so we just have to boil it down to the first principles of the math. Like what math is required to make a million dollars, right? Like we can either sell, you know, a hundred, $10,000 things, we can sell a thousand, thousand dollar things we can sell. And by, when I say things, you don't have to price your product at $1,000. You're just lifetime value of a customer has to be $1,000, right? So just how much somebody's going to spend with you over the period of time that they buy from you in general. Right now if you sell those products, that might just be the lifetime value. But if you sell services like the dog guy, he probably has people who stay with him for years. And so he has to add up that total lifetime value as the number. And it's like, well, how many of those do I need to sell? And then you just divide it by, you know, to back into it. And so once you know the math, right? So the first is like, what is the math to get to the million? And you have to figure out how many units you're going to sell.

So let's just use something that's, let's.

Use $1,000 because it's an easy one. Okay. So a thousand sales of a thousand bucks. Exactly. So we have to do a thousand sales. Now, how are we going to break that down on an annual basis? Because a thousand sounds like a huge number. Well, it's about three a day, right? Like, okay, well, three a day is all of a sudden a lot more manageable. And we're like, okay, well, what creates a sale? So at some point, to get set, I'm going to take one step before for six figures for anybody who's not there. It's like you have to sell, and this is again for business owners, entrepreneurs, if you have a job, then awesome. But like, if you're trying to make money, it's, you have to sell something to someone. that's it. That's all you have to do to get to six figures to do that. So that's one avatar, one medium, one channel, right? One product, one channel. That's all that is. You add the fourth piece, which is consistency, right? That's what goes from six to seven. That's hard for people. And the consistency, yeah, 100% because then you can tackle all the emotional or whatever it is that why you're not being consistent. But from a math perspective, we just have to break down what are the primary actions that result in the output, right? And so if three sales means that I sell one out of three people who want to walk, or one out of two people who to come for the dog walking. Okay, well then I need six appointments a day. Okay, how do I get six appointments a day? It's like, well, I have six ways that I can get appointments, right? I can get appointments from referrals. I get appointments from affiliates.

So I make a deal with the.

Local grooming place for dogs or the local vet for dogs or the flyers up or the urgent care for dogs or pet co. Like whatever, I mean, like there's a million ways, right? Like I get one of those guys, I figure out how to deal with them and I say, I'll give you the first two months of what they pay me to you if you just send them to me. More money for them. And it probably helps their customers because it's a need that they can't solve, but they have the same avatar. Cool. So you got referrals, you got affiliates, you could just reach out to people you know, just one-on-one, like, Hey, I've got my thing. Do you need help with your dog? You could reach out to people you don't know, which you can do through post-it notes, cold calls, emails, door knocking, flyers. Yeah, all of those things are ways that you can reach out to people you don't know one-on-one. you can make content about how dog walking is amazing and ways to walk your dog better, ways to take care of a dog. And the whole point of that is to get people to feel comfortable with you specifically in your brand, that you will do a better job taking care of their dog than they will. They will. Exactly. You want people to feel guilty that they're not doing all this stuff for their dog. And then they would start, then you start getting you feel inbound. And then finally, you have ads. You have run paid ads to get new appointments booked. And so those are the six primary things you can do. to get customers, right? So it's like, okay, I need six appointments a day. I have those six different ways that I can get them. Which of them do I feel most comfortable with? Because you can win in all of them, right? It could be soliciting your customers for the referrals. It could be getting the affiliates of relationships set up. It could be the 101 DMs. It could be the ads. It could be the content. Any of those six would work, right? And so we just have to pick which one you want. And so then you just reverse engineer those actions. of, because even one step after, obviously this is something I do a lot. So if you reverse engineer the affiliate thing, right? So how do you get affiliates? It's like, well, I need to reach out to 100 people a day, so you'd still use one of the other methods, so cold outbound, warm outbound, content or ads, right? To get those affiliates and say, okay, well, if I reach out to 100 affiliates a day that are in my local region to see if they will partner with me and I can create some sort of relationship, If I do that every day, maybe I'll get two of those referral partners a week. And if each of those referral partners a week can get me 10 appointments, then for me to get my six appointments a day, it's 180 appointments per month, if I need 18 affiliates. So all I got to do is get 18 affiliates. But then if you're thinking right now, you're like, well, wait, but I would be able to get 18 affiliates in probably like a month or two. And the answer is you're right. But people just don't think through the math of how to do it because if we're being real, there's no reason you should cap your business at a million. And so to the same degree when we ask the question like, how do I make a million dollar business, you also think in increments that somebody who's trying to make a million dollars thinks in. Because I got asked on this TikTok, so they gave me this prompt, they said, Hey Alex, how would you make six figures a year? That was the question. And my immediate response was, I would sell something for 100 grand and then figure out what I would do for the rest of the year. And so it's like these people think about money differently. you know what I mean? And so if you think about how do I build this thing into like a hundred million, like, and you have to think of a number that's as high as you can fathom, right? If you can't fathom 100 million, then don't think that. But like, as high as you can mathematically fathom. So it might be $10 million. Okay. Think like, how many dogs would I need to walk? And you just reverse the math into what you need, right? And then people need to hire and how many. Exactly. And then you start. And then you start with the inputs because in the beginning, the only inputs you have is going to content, it's gonna be running the ads, it's gonna be doing the warm, it's gonna be doing the reach outs. That's it. Those are the inputs. And then everything else is gonna stem from that. And then what will happen is if you have that advertising machine on the front end to bring people in, the bottleneck becomes your leading rather than the selling in the product. You're leading, yes. And so then the focus then becomes, how do I use that same, if you really wanna get deep on those, how do I use that same skill set of advertising and then shift it to my internal? Because I still have to do warm reach outs, I still have to run ads, I still have to make content, I still can have affiliates or get referrals from my employees. to get more team. And so every business has two funnels. You have the front end funnel that gets your customers and the back end funnel that gets your team. And so as you crank this guy, you need to crank this one. And then that's how you can scale these things to the moon without stopping. Right.

Is it harder to get leads and sales or harder to build a powerful team with the right culture?

I think they're both hard and both easy for different people. You know what I mean? Like Layla naturally is very good at the back end funnel. I mean, she's so good at building culture. But she has this thing that she's kind of spoken over me from a belief standpoint, which is if you are a really good marketer, a really good salesman, a lot of them are like, oh, I'm not a good leader, I'm not a good operator, not a good whatever. And she's like, if you can sell all those people and influence all those people, you can use that same skill set and just face internally to your team. It was a nice belief shift for me or belief breaker for me. I was like, she's totally right. And so to the point that you.

Were making earlier, like leading is selling and influencing, a lot of it really comes down to being able to move.

People and being able to clearly communicate.

What you why do you think it's so hard for people to overcome their limiting beliefs around money in general?

A lot of people were told things about the world that were not true and they take them as fact. And so they're making their decision calculus off of something that is not true. And so they're making conclusions off of false data. And that, so that's why they can't see it because what they're basing their assumptions on is false. Right.

They've been believing it for so long.

Yeah.

So how do they change that belief when it's been baked in their psyche for decades.

Yeah, I think that the way that the biggest beliefs have been broken for me have been one of two ways. Reality proves me wrong or someone tells me a story and gives me evidence from their lives. Like, I remember when I, we went to a mastermind and we were just starting out. I was not making a ton of money. And the guy, a guy got up there and he gave his little spiel and he was like, yeah, you know, we're making three or four hundred thousand dollars a month. I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm not really sure I like the.

Business, blah, blah, blah.

And the guy did not seem smart. You were like, how is he doing this?

It's funny you say that because my.

Actual first thought was if he can do it, I can do it. And so that was like he, through evidence, he reshaped my reality. It was one of the most momentous thing. I remember Laila and I both had the same takeaway because she was next to me when we both saw this guy do this. We walked out and we're like, dude, if he can, we both immediately had the same conclusion, like if he can do it, we can do it. And so I think that that's like how do you, you either have reality prove you wrong or someone else is that reality for you where they tell their story about, hey, I used to feel the same way, I used to think this thing, and then I will share my story so you don't have to have the scar. Yes. So you don't have to give up five years of your life to learn this lesson. I'll just give you the story so.

You don't have to have the scar. There's certain things I think we need to learn on our own and fail and make mistakes on our own, but there's a lot of things we can learn from other people. Being the youngest of four kids, I watched my older siblings fail and succeed in their own ways as a model and say, okay, I don't want to make this same mistake. I made other stupid mistakes, but I didn't make certain mistakes that they had made and. And able to accelerate that time from the pain that I was gonna feel by making the same mistakes. Yeah, I think you're gonna make mistakes no matter what, but I think that's seeing other people and learning. This is why it's so important to have coaches, mentors, people that can. can break the beliefs in you and tell you what you need to do.

If you think about human, like the human race, does this zoom out? I think it's a really interesting concept. I was talking to Caleb about Gary, and I'm a competitive person. Yes. I like, you know, thinking like, oh, by the time I'm that age, I'm going to be further. You know what I mean? Like, and it's it's it's lovingly, right? And he said this thing back to me that, like, it hit me, right?

And he was like, dude, Gary didn't have Gary. Right, he just had to do it on his own.

Right, and all of these, and so the thing is, is like a lot of us and myself included, I get caught up in there like, man, these kids have it so easy, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? YouTube wasn't even around when I, you know, like all that stuff, right? But the thing is, if you ask most entrepreneurs what they want to do with their lives, they say they want to make an impact on the world, they want to make the world a better place. But like making the world a better place, what that looks like is it being easier for the next generation. And so rather than lamenting the fact that the guys who are younger have it easier, that was the point. Yes. That was the, like, mission accomplished. And so it re, it reframed how I thought about being the greatest of all time, because I think a lot of people have that goal to be the greatest. I mean, a lot of people have that goal. But the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I can't have that goal, because if I did my job, then I have to have made people who are after me get there faster than I got there. And so the mark of the success is that I'm not the greatest of all time. but that other people who come after me are even better. And so it really shifted my relationship with how I saw future generations or past generations, guys who are older than me who are killing it. And I used to think, oh, I'm gonna beat them. And if I look at how much I'm worth at this age versus them, just doing the math, I should be further along than them by the time I'm their age. And it was this kind of different competition rather than this gratitude for like, well, of course I'm gonna be bigger than they are at their age.

I had them to help me.

They didn't have them to help them. And so I'll age up and we'll be multibillionaire, whatever it is, right? And then there's gonna be a young whippersnapper who had me to help him out. Because I'm seeing, you know, we have guys who apply for acquisition.com who are in their 20s to 100 million a year, right? And I'm like, and that wasn't possible 50 years ago. It just wasn't. Nice. And so we think about like the human race in general on a macro perspective, right? you have, like, rather than seeing the people who are older than you as the old dogs that you have to kick off, right? And by all means, play hard in the paint, don't get me wrong. And the people, the young whippersnappers behind you, as you know, resenting them for the fact that they got it easier, it just flipped the script for me in terms of like, I'm so grateful for these guys who came before me because they didn't have them. And then if these guys do eventually beat me, right, or they're further along than I was at their age rather than Lamenting them to protect my ego because what it really says is you're better than I am. Because if they're making more money at a younger age than me, that means they're better at business in some way than I was at that age. That's just the fact of business. They're better than me at that age. And to protect my ego, I want to say they have it easier.

But rather than-- what does that do for you if you protect your ego as opposed to help others accelerate faster than you?

I think it just reframes it. And so it takes the ego away from, I need to crush these guys, or I need to poke at why it's easier for them, and instead say, it being easier for them is my purpose. How can I say that my mission is to document and show the best practices of building world-class companies, and then not be pumped for someone to use the best practices of building world-class companies 10 years before I learn them to accelerate way past?

Mm-.

And so anyways, that was a frame of reference that completely shifted the narrative for me in terms of competition. I still am pushing as hard as I possibly can to transform my potential into reality. But it feels different. It feels lighter. That's cool. And I like it. So anyways, I just wanna share, 'cause it was a cool breakthrough that I had recently.

Yeah, you do look a little lighter. Yeah, mentally, emotionally, physically, you lost a little weight too. It's funny, I just had Steve Young on. who was a Hall of Fame quarterback in the NFL, won multiple Super Bowls. He was just on a couple days ago, and he said, back in the late '80s, and I guess it was the '90s, Bill Walsh, the coach, who was like, he said, three generations ahead of every other head coach at that time, he had a camera guy with him all the time documenting his processes. And he would package it into these, I guess, VHS tapes, and put it in a box, and he would give it to all his assistant coaches. and say, I want you to learn these skills. His offense was the West Coast offense. So it was far ahead of its time where most people just running the ball down, you know, down the middle. And so he gave away everything for free. And he said, I want you guys to learn this and then come and challenge me, you know, use my information and come. And people, he said, years later, some coaches would leave to become head coaches and they would compete. in big games together, sometimes we lose against these other coaches that he coached. And he loved it. And he is still revered as a leader in the space because he was ahead of the time, because he documented it and gave away the skills to his other coaches. And I think that's really cool. I mean, you're not gonna be able to do this forever, so you might as well leave some legacy behind in that respect as well.

It puts the game above the player. Yes. Rather than putting the player above the game. And so, like, I think right now, if Elon, had a choice of having somebody else accomplish all the things that he is setting out to accomplish and it not be him. My hope, my belief from everything that I have seen and witnessed of Elon is I think that he would be stoked. And because it's mission first rather than like ego first. And so like Steve Young put the game of football and it consistently being elevated to be played at a higher level as more important than him because in three generations, no one will remember him. Exactly.

Right.

But the game, will always have his fingerprint, right? And so like he can live along in that way. Exactly. And to the same degree in the business game, it's like we honor the game by playing to our absolute hardest and by doing our best and passing it on to the next generation.

So anyways, I love that stuff. That stuff gets me amped. What is the vision for you now? Because when did we first have you on? I can't remember. It was a few months back.

Yeah.

And we've hung out for dinner a couple times and I've seen you a few times. But there's been like a transition in you in like three to four months. You know, there's been like an evolution already. I'm hearing you say you're having realizations recently and before it seemed harder, right? And now it seems like there's something that's unlocked inside of you. So I'm curious, what is the business vision that you have? What's the number you want to reach?

Yeah.

And personally for the business, all these things.

Yeah.

I know you've talked about being a billionaire. It's just going to take a matter of time. When do you think being a billionaire will happen for you?

I'd like to do five to seven for a billion. I like to hit 10 and 10. That's what I would like to do. I think that we can do that math-wise based on kind of the inflow of deals that we have, the returns that we're getting in general. I think we can do that. But the thing that really drives me though is acquisition.com is the wealth machine that is behind Alex and Layla's media. Right? And so I wouldn't be a very good business educator unless I had proof or evidence that I actually was good at business. And so we obviously could just sit on the laurels of the three X that we had last year, three exits we had last year. But to me, that's not like as crazy as this will sound, it's not super impressive, you know what I mean? At least for where I want to go. And so I want to have a billionaire or multi-billion dollar thing because I think it would be so cool. How cool would it be if Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett and Elon Musk and all those guys had documented everything that they learned throughout that path. All we get is these snippets, shareholder letters every once in a while, and it's just like they're so little and they're going to die and we're going to lose it. We're going to lose all those lessons. And so part of it that excites me is just calling my shot because I think that always just like enlivens a little bit of the competition. But I do believe from a mathematical standpoint, we will get there. So it's not to me, it doesn't feel like a super big. I'm not really pointing that part of the fence, but seeing the hordes, the scores of businesses that are using the stuff in the books, in the courses, and YouTube and podcasts, and TikTok and Instagram and LinkedIn, and use those in the message they get every day of like, dude, you helped me go from a million to five million a year. You helped me go from, you know, quit my job and then start my dog walking business, and now I'm doing, you know, six figures a month. And like those stories, I know that I will probably never meet most of them. I will probably never work with the vast majority of them, but the fact that it's happening, just amps me up. Like it just gets me so lit. That's cool. And so the media has been really cool and new for me, but I like it and so I'm learning it and so it's just a new thing that I get to learn and so I'm really loving that.

Yes.

And then seeing the vision of where we're going in terms of what we're building on the Acquisitions.com side and the companies that we're scaling there and the impact that they're having because many of them are also education businesses, not all of them, but like probably about half. Seeing that on both sides, like us directly influencing through media and then the actual wealth machine on both sides, like I just see them both expanding. That's cool. And so I don't, I had, we were talking before this, but it was like I saw a limit with gym launch, Prestige Labs, like at least my vision was limited and that could have been me being younger or whatever it is. But like, I don't feel like my vision is obstructed in terms of where this can go. And so that is what amps me up. A buddy of mine sold his company for a couple billion. and he's been in a little bit of like a rut since then.

Yeah.

It's interesting after people sell for a lot of money, why do you feel like they go into a depression or a funk after they sell a billion dollar company?

They lose the vision. Right? Like the vision, like I think the vision is another word for hope.

Right?

It's hope for a better future. That's what we're marching towards.

Right?

And you basically give that away to someone. Right? And I can sell it. For money. Yeah. In exchange for money.

Right.

And then the hope ended up fueling you more than the money ever does. But different conversation. But he said this one thing to me and it really resonated. He's like, I'm just looking for my next big bone to gnaw on. And that visual for whatever reason stuck to me. And so I'm like, I just need a big bone to gnaw on, knowing that I'll never chew through the entire bone, but being pumped every day to just get a little bit further down the nub.

What happens if we don't have a vision for our lives?

I think you have less direction. and so you make less progress because you're not actually, you can't make progress unless you have direction because otherwise you're just moving. So like you can only have direct like a vector, right? You know, movement in a direction if you know where you're trying to go. And so it's like the first thing we have to do is figure out where we're trying to walk and then.

We can start walking there.

Yes. You said you want to be a billionaire in five to seven years, so you kind of see the math playing out that way.

Yeah.

Let's say you were forced to do it in half the time.

Yeah.

Three years you were forced to be a billionaire.

Yeah.

Or some catastrophic event would happen. Yeah. What would it take from you to reach the billion dollar goal in half the time? What would you need to do differently and how would you need to think and act differently?

I would probably onboard more operators faster. That being said, the current plan gets us there in like three years. I say five to seven publicly because I want to give myself a little buffer. I tend to be that way because I am probably a little bit different approach with goals, like I want to hit every goal. Like I don't like missing goals. And so for me, I don't like teaching myself or teaching other people that if I say something's going to happen, it doesn't happen. Because some people are like, shoot for the moon, think really, like I think you absolutely should think really big, but then like, okay, how do I make a goal that like, and then, and then once I have that goal, do the activities that make it unreasonable not to hit it. Like if I hadn't hit this goal to your point, what level of activity would I have to do that it would be unreasonable, it would be unacceptable based on how I see reality that I would not achieve it. If you're like, I want to learn sales, I would say it's unreasonable that if you get on 10,000 sales calls, you will not be good at sales. Be unreasonable. Okay, how long will it take me to get on 10,000 sales calls?

Right?

A lot of time. Yeah, a couple of years. Right? A couple of years, you could do it. Okay. So then I can, that's a goal, you know what I mean? And I can set that, and if I do the activities, it would be unreasonable that I'm not now, realistically, you probably get there in half the time.

Right?

Because you're probably pretty good at sales even after your first 2,000, 3,000 calls, right? You're probably pretty good. And so with this, we would, I mean, what we're doing now is the only thing I could probably do is take on bigger companies. That would be the shortest path. But I feel confidently, like in terms of how much we're stretching, I feel good about it. Like it would take, I would feel like I'd be taking on more risk to hit that, if that makes sense.

If you had to do it, and half the time with less risk, what.

Would you need to do?

That's a good question.

What would need to happen? What would need to shift inside of you?

Yeah, I would need more people faster. I mean, it would just be-- How.

Many people would you need?

I would spend more aggressively on talent acquisition. So I would basically go into, from the debt perspective, right? So rather than think of the businesses, or the portfolio companies as cash flowing towards me, I would probably take all of the excess that is there and.

Plow it into talent earlier.

So right now I live on a certain amount of cash flow, et cetera, just from the portfolio companies. And I probably have gotten accustomed to that, and so I don't like cutting below that. So if I had to, then I.

Would say all of that money rather.

Than going to Alex is going to go into more talent, bigger, faster. Yeah, exactly. And then they would amplify, and then.

They would be able to, we would increase our rate. You would have less money in the short term over the couple of years, but then you would have way more money in the long term.

Totally. So it's a comfort level.

Yeah, it is.

It is. No, it as we're talking about.

You knowing that you like to have a certain amount of cash flow every month. But you've got a bunch of cash.

In the bank too. I know.

It's totally, it's 100% illogical. If you had to do it though.

Let'S say you had to do it.

In two and a half years. Let's say we had to do it tomorrow. If you had to do it two and a half years, because you need time too. Yeah, yeah. You know, five to seven, you gotta do it in two and a half. And you had to stretch and get extremely uncomfortable where you're not going broke, obviously you got money.

Yeah.

How many people would you need to hire?

Yeah.

And how much less cash flow would you need to have? I mean, I would eliminate my cash flow.

All your cash. Yeah, I mean, if I was really going, I mean, I was going ham on it, I would just, I would have no cash flow to me.

I mean, I don't need.

You have money, though. Yeah, I have money.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I would eliminate all the cash flow to me and it would, a hundred percent of the money would go into the team. The only thing that would go faster than that is that I drain my own net worth to further Fund. Yeah, exactly. I would be incurring financial debt to more quickly build the enterprise value of the asset. So I'd be transferring money into the asset fast. It's like you incur different types of debt. If you incur no debt when you start a business, you do always incur debt. You incur management debt. You incur technical debt. Time debt. 100%. And so people, all businesses start with debt. It just depends on what type of debt you're dealing with. if you don't have money, then that's fine. You just incur other debt. Even when we think about how we're building the Holdco right now at acquisition.com, I am building more fixed cost in the infrastructure right now because of what I want it to be in a year, two years. If I wanted to run it, we already do reinvest, obviously, a big percentage, but I would just reinvest more and be okay with it. I've just grown accustomed to this. It was funny because a buddy of.

Mine I had dinner with last night.

Told us company for $250 million. and we were talking about how cashflow is a very regular reinforcer from a behavioral standpoint. Like you get this feedback directly every month of how you're doing, right? And so you, as entrepreneurs, or at least for me, I've been always a high cashflow entrepreneur. Like I've never been like a reinvest every dollar into the business. I like making money from my businesses. But that has become a trait that I have learned to look at as my barometer every month. Like how am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing? And so it would have to, so to the question what would have to change in me, I would have to change how I measure success and then I'd have to reinforce the behavior in a different way. I'd have to measure it differently.

Right.

And so is the cash flow coming from all the businesses you guys are in partnership with, you get a percentage of cash flow, they get a percentage of the business as well.

Yeah.

And so you have a certain amount of cash flow every month that's coming in from all these businesses, right?

Yeah.

But you also have a ton of money in the bank.

Yeah.

So one of them you could take some money out somewhere. You can still keep the cash flow coming and take the money from the the same.

I'm so security driven. It's funny because I was having this conversation with this guy, and so the guy sold his company for 250 million dollars. For the last 10 years, he's lived on 70, 000 a year. 70, 000 a year. And so he was staying at the Marriott, and I was staying at a nicer hotel.

And I was like, dude, you got money now.

Yeah, you got money now.

And he's like, I know. He's like, but I just. Isn't that funny? For years, I would sit middle seat, you know, back of the airplane, cheapest flights. for years, even when I had seven figures and a year coming in. But because I was so used to, I was like, I don't wanna lose my mind. I was like, I wanna make sure that I can live like this. I was still sleeping on friends' couches. When I traveled to events, it was like any way to save money. And it's not until the last couple of years was like, okay, my back hurts. I need to have some leg room, right? I'm a big guy. But for years, it was just like, how do I save and use that money to reinvest in going to the event, buying the ticket to the conference, or investing in coaching that will accelerate the revenue long term.

Yeah, it's so funny you say that because I think, and this is just off the cuff here, but many of the people that I know who have tremendous amounts of money have huge fears around being poor. And so it's just an interesting thought. Like a lot of people who don't have money see people who have money as, thinking differently and they might in that they are more uncomfortable being poor than you are. Like it is more painful for them than it is for you. It might be, I'm just being really real. It might be why some of them.

Are stingy too with their money. Of course, 100%. I'm not gonna spend this $5. I'm gonna keep it.

You know, they're very stingy with all of it. Two nights ago, we were out to dinner with a guy who just got valued at a billion, right? And it's all cash flow. It's not one of these software things. Like it's off, like he's getting, yeah, he's making real money. crazy money. And he's like, I'm not going to that gym. He's like, for equal, I said, I'm not paying $200 a month for a gym membership. It's a different perspective. Now, I'm not saying I'm that way. You know what I mean? Like, I'm okay spending on gym membership. That's fine for me. But like, everyone has their own things and like, there are these behaviors. Like, he got the other guy who had the 250, he got to that point because he lived, he squeezed everything out of his business, which made the business so valuable, and then he was able to sell it. But the billion dollar guy was saying, he's like, you, know what? They don't tell you about when you sell your business because he's sitting next to the guy with the 250, right? And he's like, the moment you sell your business, he's like, you, have no cash flow. And so he felt that too. He's like, what are you going to do?

He's like, you,'re going to take the.

Money, then what are you going to do? You're going to try and buy more cash flow because you got to replace the cash flow you had with the business.

You got to get real estate assets. You got to do something.

He's like, why bother? He's like, I'll just keep it. And so he doesn't have any intentions of selling. And so it was an interesting lesson for me too because we obviously got rid of our cash flow asset when we sold all three. last year.

You got a lot more money, but you don't have the money cash coming in.

Right, because then it looks like this finite asset.

The business goes on forever in your.

Mind at least, right?

And so it gives you this illusion.

Of control, this illusion of security. And me personally, most people wouldn't believe this when I hear it, but I'm very risk averse. And so I probably need, what's the core changes that I need to have? I probably need to be a little bit more of a risk taker than I am. I tend to always take the lowest risk path when I can't even the idea of like when I quit entrepreneurship or sorry, when I quit my job to start entrepreneurship, it was because I knew that the path that I was on was guaranteed not to get to me where I want. So I had a zero outcome. And that so this one, even though it was lower, like I had a low chance of success, the other one at 100% failure guarantee. And so that so it felt like the lower risk option for my long term goals to quit my job and become an entrepreneur for that reason. And so, you know, people are like, I'm really risk averse. I'm like, so am I. Like, I hoard money.

Like, I do. You must spend any of the money from the exit.

So it's like a city in the bank.

Nothing. We started working the next day.

We didn't even take it.

We didn't take a day off. Yeah, we literally sold wire hit, and we started working on acquisition.com the next day. Let's say you had to put your. Start putting that cash flow every month into other things, team. resources, whatever it is. And that wasn't coming in. And, you know, let's call it 100 grand a month was coming in with cash flow. I don't know how much it is, but say that is going into hiring team and other things to support you getting to the billion in two and a half years. What would need to shift in inside of you after three months of feeling no cash flow come in to stack your bank account in order for you to be okay with it? to get to that billion quicker?

I would just have to be more secure, just realistically. Like I use, what does that mean?

Is that an internal?

I use cash flow from businesses as evidence to the fact that I'm not a failure. And so I use, I've always, like it has been easier for me to change my conditions than to change who I am. And so I have used my material success and accolades to quiet the voices of not being good enough. And so for that, like me having that, If I had that little voice that peeps up, it's like, hey, look at that. I'm like, okay, no, no, I'm okay. I'm not that bad. This money thing just came in. Yeah, no, I'm not that bad. Right, and so I'd really have to re-engineer the conversation I have with myself around how I value myself. Because then people are like, well, if everything disappeared, how would you feel about yourself? I like to think that I would be uncomfortable and that I would change my views, but I haven't needed to do that yet, and so my effort goes elsewhere.

But that's what probably would have to happen in order for me to make make that change. Is it a, what is the thing that is you're afraid of inside of yourself? Is it a self-worth thing? Is it a self-love thing? Is it a belief that you're not good enough?

Yeah, definitely be a good enough thing for sure. Yeah, it's just like maybe, maybe, maybe I'm, maybe I'm not as good as I think I am. Maybe everything that I've been putting on media, maybe my book, maybe all these things are actually not true and I don't know what I'm talking about, right? Because clearly I don't know what I'm talking about because I'm not making any money. Like, so these things have been, that's why acquisition.com is the other half, like the actual businesses of acquisition.com compared to the media of acquisition.com, it is the other half because it's the evidence of the fact that the things that I say are true.

Because those are getting results.

100%. And they're growing.

Right.

And so that way I feel bulletproof when I make the content, when I make the book, when I write the stuff, like, you know, there's a zillion people who are like, you suck, none of this is true, whatever. And for me, it rolls off my back because I have evidence.

And I'm like, no, no, it is true.

And here's how. But if I didn't have that, I would probably have to... It's because I don't know what the right call is there. Because if I didn't have the evidence, it would be hard for me to say, you,'re wrong. Because I don't have any proof that they're wrong.

But you have evidence now. Right, and so I have this evidence.

So how do you change the belief inside that you're good enough with the years of evidence now? the question is like, have I built a billion dollar thing yet? You know what I mean?

It'll be 10 billion.

Yeah, of course. No, but like it's a fun convo and it's great because this was wonderful, Louis, because I get to see my own limiting beliefs. And just for everyone who's listening, everyone deals with this. You know what I mean? At every level you're dealing with this, feeling of inadequacy, feeling not good enough, feeling like you're not smart, feeling like you don't work hard, whatever it is. I have that stuff all the time because you think that the external circumstance is going to solve that. And I would say that it does to a degree. It becomes a crutch. But then you have this crutch and then you just tie yourself worth to the accolade of the thing rather than still yourself. And maybe I need to do more work on that, who knows.

If you could overcome one thing or eliminate one thing internally to become a better leader to yourself, to quiet the noise or help you Take a risk in a different way. Not talking about lose all your money, but take the risk to help you accelerate this. And you don't have to by any way, but I just believe that it's possible for you to do that. I believe you can be a billionaire in two and a half years.

I appreciate that.

If you shift whatever inside of you is holding you back to get to that space, what would be that one thing to eliminate or overcome internally to make it happen?

It's need for external validation.

100%.

The need for external validation.

Why do you need external validation?

Why do you need external validation?

I mean, I think part of it's so ingrained in us, if you think about us as kids, right? Like how do you orient yourself with the world? You get reinforced or punished at all phases, directly, indirectly, but you get reinforced or punished and the things you get reinforced, you do more of the things you get punished to do less of, right? Like that's just how we learn behavior, how we learn to function in society, right? Touch that thing, ah, it hurts. It's, we got punished. Okay, you know, your parent tells you to sit down and be quiet and eat, and you learn to sit down and shut up and eat. And then we wonder why adults don't move because we're told to sit when we're running around, right?

We learn- Or at school, sit down and be quiet.

100%, and we wonder why we eat so much when the reward for everything we did when we were a kid was food, right? We wonder these things. So the reason external validation is so hard, at least for me, is because it's how I learned everything, is because external validation gave me the directional guidance of what's good and what's not. And then as you get older, it's where am I going to get that validation from? And so I would say that my external validation is still 100% there. It just comes from different sources. So I'm more selective on whose validation I want.

So how much external validation do you need in order to overcome this belief to go all in and do it in half the time?

No, I think I just, I need to be able to validate myself. And that's fundamentally, I think Epic Tita said this. He said, if you need someone else's, if you need, he has this quote, it's so good, but it's basically like you need to be able to give, you don't need to swear to somebody else. You should be able to swear to yourself and bear witness to yourself because your word should be good enough.

So you need to eliminate external validation.

From you feeling good enough.

Probably, yeah, it's probably that link.

Obviously, it's good to have feedback in life, you know what I mean? So I think that's why it's also difficult for some in general because it's not eliminate or have more of, it's to what degree and from home and about what. And so then it gets a little bit more complex. But even using those different lenses, I think it's good to unpack it for anyone who's listening, which is like, okay, Layla said this, so this is not mine. But most times when we're afraid of something, it's not actually like this amorphous crowd that we're afraid of. It's like one or two people's opinion. That's a good point. Like it's your dad or it's your whatever it is, right? and you're worried about what they're gonna think. And they're not even thinking about you, but you think they're thinking about. They're thinking about their dad. Whatever it is, right? And so she restated this earlier on in Mike, like, when we were together five years ago, she was like, are you. And she, like, made me name the person. It wasn't my dad. It was somebody else for this particular thing. She's like, are you gonna let this guy stop us from getting what we want?

Wow.

And it was like, when I saw it, it was, like, looking in front of me. I was like, She's like, what if this guy hates you and thinks you're terrible? Is that a worthy enough reason to still keep going? And I was like, yeah.

She's like, Let's go.

You know what I mean?

And so she was very good with that. What do you need to say to yourself every day to believe you're good enough? If you could say one thing to you that no one else needed to hear, but you needed to hear it from you, what would that be?

I don't know if it would be a saying thing. I don't think it'd be like an affirmation.

I think it's just a belief.

You know what I mean?

What would the belief be? Yeah, I mean, fundamentally the belief would just have to shift that the doingness is enough. Validation for me.

Not the results.

Right, and that's, I mean, fundamentally that's always the goal is that you can detach the doingness from the result. I think what I've been able to do has been to extend the time horizon between the doingness and the result, but not necessarily fully eliminate it. I'm patient in that I can continue to do things very long periods of time before seeing a payoff. But if I were able to truly eliminate it, I think that would be.

Kind of like a next step.

Then again, it's that borderline on insanity, because if you never get feedback on.

Sometimes you're like, maybe I should change direction. But you'll keep getting feedback though, because you're creating and taking action. The more you do that, you'll have more businesses, you'll be acquiring, you'll be creating more content, and everything will be growing at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right? 100%. I love seeing you go through this process internally, because I think I'm open to it. I just want to win, you know what I mean? Like, I just want to be better.

What does winning look like?

It's achieving the potential. It's taking all this raw potential. The line in the Bible that always scared me the most was to who much is given, much is expected. And so for me, I always felt like I was given a lot, you.

Know what I mean?

Like, I was born in America right off the bat. I was born as a guy. I have insane genetics. Like, from that perspective, I was six back when I was 15. You know what I mean? I have a pretty high processing load. Like, I can usually, I do okay with complex problems. I was bilingual at basically at birth because parents talked to me in different language, so that gave me good language abilities. And so it's like, these are all things that were given to me, right? And I was born into, like, from a money standpoint, a decently wealthy family, right? Not ultra-billion, but never worried about food or shelter or anything like that, right? And so these are all the things that were given to me. And so to me, I'm like, man.

Much is expected, right?

And not necessarily that that's, you know, God, whatever, just I expect a lot.

Of myself because I see so much potential.

And I want to train, like, by the time I die, I would like to have nothing left in my potential tank. And it just all have been transformed into my reality.

Yeah.

So that's what winning looks like.

What do you feel like is missing in your life?

Not a lot.

I'm like really right off the bat.

Like I really like, I'm amped right now.

I'm super pumped. I love what we're doing. I love the businesses that we're helping. I love the mission.

I like doing this.

Not a lot. I mean, if I got into things that were missing, it would be like super tactical of like, I want these roles are ones that I want filled in the company. You know, I mean, like it'd be stuff like that. It wouldn't be anything else.

Right.

If you enjoyed that interview, then I know you'll love what we have coming up right now. And so what do you look for when you're acquiring a business or investing in a business that has cash flow and what businesses have the best cash flow?

So this will be relevant for everybody in the audience and also hits on what we were talking about with the wealth thing, like wealthy people choose higher leverage opportunities and we went over what leverage was earlier. The best businesses, especially in an inflationary period, are businesses that have low capital expenses.

Okay.

And that's because it's-- Can you have some examples?

Yeah.

I'll give you opposite examples to make and then I'll drive it. So something that does have high capital expense, which is what you would not want to get into, would be stuff that has lots of inventory, stuff that has lots of supply chain, lots of manufacturing, heavy equipment, things where you have to constantly buy more stuff in order to increase capacity. Low capital expense businesses are things like services, services, digital businesses. Software is mixed because sometimes the development team can be considered a capital expense. It really depends on how you build the dev team. But the idea is that if you can produce 10 times more units without phenomenally changing the cost basis, then you will have a business that has lower capital expenses. And so that's what you like. And most of those types of businesses produce more cash flow, have more pricing power. And so, I mean, that's what Warren Buffett invests in. It's high cap, like insurance, Geico. There's no capital. It's risk. They're literally assessing risk.

Air.

It's math.

Like the business is math. Like if you really think it's just.

Math is the entire business of insurance.

And what's crazy, just as a side.

Note, is that a great way of figuring out the highest leverage businesses that exist is looking at the business that have been here the longest. Insurance has been here since before the World Wars. Banks have been around forever. J.P. Morgan was in the 1800s. The biggest insurance companies, they're all 100 plus years old. They're found in the 1800s. And so when you have a business that's lasted that long, to me, that's a great breadcrumb of like, this thing has to print money because it means that they were able to still keep making money through Wars, through famines, depressions, all of it, and they were still able to keep going. And so I think that when people are like, when you look at all the, like, many of the biggest businesses that exist, they have phenomenal gross margins. I don't want to get too, like, you know, business terming here, but, like, the gross margin is how much incremental cost it is to make a new, an extra widget. And so like a pill, for example, costs $100 million to make the first pill. And then every pill after that costs a penny. And so the gross margin on the pill is very high because if they sell each pill for $10, they cost them a penny, those are great margins. And most people who are small business owners or people who are trying to get into small business price like small business owners. They say, well, it cost me a dollar. I'll sell it for three or I'll.

Sell it for two.

But if you're already starting on like a 50% gross margin, it's very, very hard to make money. Because think about it, like that's at 100, you're already at half and then you have the rest of everyone else you have to pay off that extra 50. Very hard to do. And so like, I'll give a couple rules of thumb if anyone wants this. But like, if you're, if you're building a service-based business for us, I would, I, by all means, I have to get gross margins above 80%, which means five times the cost of goods. So if it cost me $100 a month, the minimum I'll charge is 500. And so that also gets you to think about business differently, which is not necessarily even how much can I charge, but how can I provide value and make it cost as little to me, how can I be as efficient as possible? And if you think about what technology does over time, is technology takes something that's valuable and makes the cost of delivering it less. And so that's what happens is a lot of people are able to have access to things that were once only for the wealthy but now become for the common man because the cost basis decreases as a result of technology. And so technology, as we see it, we can create technology, but you can also have technological breakthroughs just through process.

In your own business.

And that's where niching down and being very specific about the avatar becomes important, especially when you're starting, because then you can productize the service. Because if you're doing everything custom, which most people when they're starting out do, it becomes really difficult to become efficient. And it's really difficult to be efficient at a very low margin.

Right?

Or you have to charge huge fees, which most people are too afraid to do. And so the flip side is if I do the same thing over and over and over again, I will get better and more efficient at it and I will know how to do it faster and quicker and cheaper. And I specifically choose this type of customer so that I can have more margin because there are millions of even this one specific type of avatar. And then from there, I can take the gross margin, the extra cash that I have, and I can hire the best people. I can invest in marketing. but when you have such little margin to work off of, it's very difficult to make money.

Yeah, it's so hard to grow. That's interesting. Do you think it's going to be harder or easier to become wealthy and start businesses over the next few years with everything that's happened in the last couple of years and where this whole great 2030 agenda is coming and all these different things are happening, the war and all the, there might be another pandemic, whatever it might be. Do you think it's going to be easier or harder to make money?

I think technology in general makes things easier for most people. I mean, because at the end of the day, it's just, it's increased access for more people.

And so I think-- To reach more people at any moment.

Yeah.

If I were just to use history as a guide, business has only gotten easier to get into. It's gotten more competitive and easier to get into. And so I think that what happens is just the arena gets bigger. So you got more gladiators, so it's.

More competitive, but more people can walk in.

And so I think, but for the world in general, the more people you have fighting to make amazing products and services, the better it is for society. But the downstream effect of that is that in a capitalist system, it is a winner-take-all for many, not all, but for many businesses. And just by the nature of it, that does create social disarray. But the thing is, it's still the best system that we have. We don't have a perfect system, because the other systems remove incentive.

Humans are driven by incentive.

Even the survivorship bias, like every MLM in the world exists off the fact that there's that one guy who makes $500,000 a month selling Shake Mix, and the other 5 million Shake Mix producers are like someday. One day I'll get there, yeah. It's just survivorship bias, right? But that's why the whole capitalist machine works. So I think they're like figuring out some sort of a creative way, like my, I put this in my YouTube channel, but like the idea of having.

100% death tax, I thought was like.

Take down the income taxes and all this stuff, but the thing that creates the conglomerate at the top is that if, let's say I have $100 billion, right? That's interesting. And if I have $100 billion, I'm probably pretty good at managing it, because that's why I have $100 billion. So let's say I gain 15%.

You're just holding it.

You're not using it yet.

Yeah, let's say I gain 15% on my assets. So I make $15 billion on my assets. It is so hard for anyone to make that up in a lifetime. With just the one, and like that might be my kid who gains 15 and the next year he gains 20. And so the compounding effect of the wealth is across generational is where I think it gets crazy. But if there were 100% death tax, because obviously this is aligned with my belief that all of it disappears anyways. So this is obviously Alex's two cents in the world. But it's just basically dramatically lower the income taxes. I think income taxes should be as close to zero as possible. And then make the capital gains tax as high, because that's only going to really affect the wealthy if you really want to think about it. Because people who-- if you make with your hands, awesome. If you make on your assets, that's the stuff that has infinite leverage with time. So if you trade the most expensive thing for your money, then I feel like you should get taxed less than.

If you trade no time for your money.

Sure.

This is like a weird thought experiment. What do you think would happen if.

It was 100% death tax?

I think that billionaires would become far more giving. And as they approach the end, they know they can't keep it. And I also think it would change the way the game is played. Because if you know, because this is the analogy that I like, I haven't heard it anywhere else, I think it's mine. But if you were to imagine life as a poker game, right? And everybody grows up, they're 18 years old, they can go into the casino, they get a chip, or 21, whatever age you can be. And then you get a chip, and then you sit down at the table, and you're dealt cards, right? And there's all the other players around the table. and depending on the cards you're dealt and the skill you have, you begin to amass chips, right? And the difference between this fictitious, you know, casino and the casino of life is that in the real world, you can amass chips, you cash out, you have a big wad of money, and you walk out the door. But in the casino of life, when the Grim Reaper taps you and tells you it's time, you have to get out from the table, but your chips stay on the table, and they push them to the middle to be distributed by everybody else and continue to get played for. That's when you realize that it was a fake game with rules that never mattered to begin with. And so I bought this piece of land in Austin. It was like a big, really, really nice lot. And I remember thinking to myself, like.

Got me some land.

Yeah, got me some land, right?

I own this.

Yeah, I have that trade to that.

Thing on the rise. My yeah, right?

And then I thought to myself, I was like, well, the guy before me thought the same thing, and the guy before him thought the same thing, and the guy before him thought the same thing. and I was like, and we've literally still been looking at the exact same piece of dirt and it's just been cycled. Even if it was father to son, even if it was family to whatever.

Like the like death taxes everyone 100%.

Like, even if the government doesn't death taxes everybody 100% and then time taxes your money to infinity because like people are like, I want to build a legacy. It's like, that's even just with like within Americana, you know, I mean within the times of America, but like you go a thousand years and there's never been the same superpower over a thousand year period. And so we're like, I'm going to leave a legacy. It's like, but that would be like, let's say an ancient Greek saying I'm gonna leave a legacy for my kids when they might change their currency by XYZ. And there's so many things, and I've had real experience with this because my great-great-grandfather was a ruler in Iran, which.

Is where we're from.

We got kicked out because we were loyal to the Shah back in the day, which is why my dad came to the US. And so despite that, my great-great-grandfather had like 400 wives, ruler, very, very wealthy.

Really?

Yeah, very, very wealthy. Different time, different culture. Very, very wealthy. He's a ruler, right?

Yeah, yeah.

All the money, all the women, everything. Literally a ruler, right? And it doesn't matter. And here I am, I'm not even that many generations separated from him, right?

Even that.

You don't have all that wealth.

You don't have that land, yeah.

Right.

And so like the idea that we're gonna somehow, because the desire for legacy.

Is the desire to cheat death. Like that's what it stems from.

It's like we don't want to die. We want to last forever. It's we want to make something that is impermanent. And so we fool ourselves into thinking that the accolades and the material success and the books we write, whatever, are going to last forever. And they're probably not. Right? And so, like, I mean, the sun's going to disappear at some point, right? So, like, if we don't do anything before then, like, at the very least, that's going to happen. And so if that is the inevitable outcome, I think it shifts the way people think. And I think that's when you start changing, I mean, Tony Robbins talks about global belief systems. And that's why if someone adopts a new religious belief, everything changes because the reasons they do and the way they believe the world works changes. And so I think that if they did do 100% death tax, it would be a really interesting way to see the downstream effects of how it would.

Change the way the players played the game. What do you think would happen if all the billionaires started distributing their wealth sooner? I think what would happen is-- Or would they be as hungry to be and driven to push and build and innovate to generate the wealth if they knew, I gotta give this away anyways quickly.

I think they would.

I think it's because it's, I think it's, I think, I'm gonna say something that may sound bad, but I think winners win because of who they are. And so I think it's like sales guys, like you can have an incentive.

Or a comp plan, they just wanna win.

But they are salespeople. And if I get on the phone, I want to sell because of who I am, not because of the comp. The comp is the ticket to get me to say yes to the deal. but it will not change my activity. I will do it because I love to sell. And so I think billionaires get there because they love the game. You don't get to a billion without just-- because you obviously don't need it for you. You stopped needing it for you millions and millions ago. And so you do it just because you love the game. What I do think-- the reason that I like that solution is because-- Elon Musk said this-- but private enterprise is 10 times as efficient at capital allocation compared to the government. So every dollar that private enterprise spends, it's 10 times more efficient. And so it is like if we were to death tax 100%, so whatever you accumulate while you're alive, it just goes back. And the thing is, it's not that it would go back into the system through the government. It would if you were lazy. But most people, knowing the government was going to take it, the less efficient vehicle at the end of your life, you would then start thinking about how can I allocate this money efficiently? And so I think what would happen is you'd create far more ingenuity and innovation around social enterprise.

Rise before they die.

Solving problems. Knowing that the wealth would eventually disappear. So like it's more there's this backstop that no one wants to hit. And so I think what happened is they would change their behavior before hitting the backstop.

I don't think a lot of people.

Would just be dumping their billion to the government. I think just knowing that they had to would then trigger them to yeah, yeah, that would be, you know, hey.

That'S Alex's two cents of the world.

Which is obviously different. What's, you just had a big exit, right? Last year, what was that for?

How much?

It was 46.7 million.

46 million. So when that enters your account, what did you expect would happen? What did happen? And what can you teach other people about what they should expect to happen when they have a big exit?

So I will say that I did not feel the money. I did feel the loss of cash flow because I had this, you know, I had measured myself off cash flow.

For since- Now you don't have any.

Right.

You got a big chunk, but then no money coming in every month.

So I actually felt-- Interesting. And I probably still feel poorer now.

Than I did before the exit.

That's interesting.

Because the cash flow is going down. Now, I know that acquisition.com is going to be, I think, significantly bigger than those companies were. But in the interim, I definitely did not feel any better after that. I am happy that I did it because I do think I'm in the right you know, vehicle doing what we're doing now, making the books, making the YouTube channels, the Twitters, the social medias, all of them. But the cash flow is what I felt. And because I'd taken dividends my whole life, the amount of money that we got out was pretty much about what we already had anyways. So it was not life changing in any way. It didn't change how I lived at all. Like, not at all. We didn't have any big, like, what are you gonna buy? I was like, well, I could, you.

Know, I'm happy already.

Yeah, I could buy 100 Lambos before the sale. You know what I mean? Like, that wasn't, and I never bought them. and I never did. Because I don't get a lot out of that. What else was different? Losing the team is hard. Because when you sell a company, you sell the people. Like that's something that people-- the connection.

The-- it sounds bad.

Yeah, but you sell the organism.

You sell the system, the people, the processes, and everything.

100%. And so that was hard because there's definitely times now that we're building acquisition.com where I'm like, man, I wish I had so and so. I already taught this person everything I'd have to do it again.

So, there is a, but there's also.

Some level of beauty to it because now that I'm doing acquisition.com.

I have.

A different appreciation for what I'm doing because every other time that I've started something, it has been from a place of lack. It has been from a like, well, this is what's going to not make me poor. You know what I mean? Like the gyms was all about that and then I lost it all. So, the second time was all about that again.

Wow.

So, this time starting not like that. And I know what it got like before we sold the companies last year. I spent basically 12 months not doing anything because I wasn't required in the business. Like it truly, it ran. And so I had a lot, like it was very depressing. Exactly. It was very depressing for me.

What happens if we don't have a purpose?

I mean, you find one.

You know what I mean?

And so for me, but you're in.

A depressed state, even though you have.

I mean, I'm sure you were fine. mind, but you are emotionally, mentally, like.

What am I doing every day? Exactly.

I've never.

I go to the gym for so long, right?

Can I go out to dinner?

Yeah.

I mean, like, what else are you gonna do? I can eat every meal I want. I can travel. Okay, now what? After three months of that, you've got some mission.

You have some purpose, right?

Even though you have the money, your.

Safety, you have everything.

Yeah.

Security, but it wasn't fulfilling. 100. And so that was. That was 12 straight months. And it was because we were going through a sales process, so. you can't start new initiatives because I'm in the middle of a sale. And you don't want to like make any massive new hires. And so you just basically have to just like maintain. And the whole time you're wondering, I.

Hope this deal goes through.

Because if it doesn't, then you just.

Wasted a year just doing nothing.

And then you might have to do it again. So it was this, it was, it was a super, super, it was one of the most emotionally tiring years of my life because it's always like, this.

Is about to happen.

It's not going to happen. The deal's on the table. The deal's off the table. Like there's all of this drama that's happening constantly. And I also, one of the things that sucked that I didn't like was as soon as I had made the decision to sell or that I was going to entertain the idea of selling, and this is a mistake I made, everything became about satisfying a fictitious overlord of like, what will they think about this move? Well, how will they value this? And I started thinking, whatever acquirer whatever private equity was going to buy the company, like, how are they going to see this? Are they going to value this? Or is this a waste? And so what happened was I started making the private equity buyer my customer. And that was a mistake. And so I think that, like, at the end of the day, and now that, and what happened was, interestingly, we started the sales process because my wife and I were beat down. We were just very tired of, you know, we've been in gyms for almost 10 years, you know, at that point, not to say that that's not a good thing, but, like, whatever.

We, we, we were ready.

We were ready. But in order for us to sell it and make it a sellable business, we had to fix all the things that were wrong with it.

Right.

And so we took a year before the year.

So it took two years, basically, one.

Year to, like, fix everything, and then one year to sell it. But the thing is, it's just like when you have a house that you, like, fix up before you get ready to sell it. By the time you're about to sell.

You'Re like, I love this.

This is amazing.

I just fixed all these, all the problems I fixed. I've got more cash flow. It's more efficient.

We got rid of the toxic people. Exactly. And so it was again a very like mind trip experience where I'm like, well, maybe I should just hold it as an asset that just produces cash flow. Uncle Warren never sells anything. Selling is what makes you rich. Keeping is what makes you wealthy. I've got all these kind of things in the back of my mind. But I think ultimately, I think no matter what we had done, we would have been fine. But I think for me right now, I think the likelihood that the choice If I had two alternate realities, which I don't have to play in, I think that the choice will ultimately yield more impact for more people. I would not have the attention to do acquisition.com and the media stuff that.

We'Re doing right now.

I wouldn't be here.

I wouldn't be focused on your gyms. Yeah, exactly. On those companies that were in that portfolio. And acquisition.com would still be a side thing, but it probably wouldn't be the main thing. Whereas now it is 100% of my attention and the companies are killing it. I feel renewed.

When I launched School of Greatness 10 years ago, I remember saying, I'm gonna do this for one year because I. I wish I had access to this. I wish this was a thing that I could go listen to. Yeah. In the world to teach me. Yeah. And I'm not gonna try to make money.

Yeah.

Like, I'm gonna do it for a year.

Yeah. All in.

But I'm not gonna try to make money. I don't want to make money.

Yeah.

I mean, if the money came, great.

Yeah.

But it wasn't my intention. It was just to how can I create. best content to serve people on the things that I wish I would have learned in school growing up.

Yes.

The school of greatness.

Yeah.

And after one year, I was like, man, this thing is really starting to take off.

Yeah.

You know, but it wasn't based on how do I make as much money?

Totally.

It was, how do I create something that can really make a lasting change?

Yeah.

And that intention is what's made me sustainable for 10 years, loving the process.

Totally.

So when people come from a place, I'm hearing you say, when they come from a place of that intention of service or because this needs to be in the world.

Art.

Art exists not to do something, it exists to exist.

Right.

It's like no one says, why did you paint that?

It's like, it needed to come out. Exactly.

Exactly.

And so I think that if people chose their businesses that way, I think, and don't be wrong, I'm all about making money. Like, by all means, go get your back.

Yeah, by all means.

But I think that what it does is it ends up freeing you to then make real impact because then you can start whatever the next thing and hopefully your first thing is that thing but realistically it probably isn't and all you have to do is look at every entrepreneur that's really wealthy, the amount of graveyard businesses they have in their back.

Right.

Right.

And so right now if you're listening and you're like, I'm not sure if this is the perfect business idea. Let me just save you the time. It's not because look at every other person who has been ultra successful, they have 10 failed business ideas. So just like just start. So you can just start notching off the bad businesses. but extending the time horizon, I think, only happens if you do shift the intention through which you're building it or you're just unbelievably self-disciplined. But I think it's easier to just start at it with the right heart because it's a small tangent, but I.

Think it'll be worth it.

The reason that most people aren't successful, in my opinion, is that they sacrifice global benefit for local benefit. And that happens in all areas of life. You eat the piece of cake because you have an acute local benefit versus the global benefit of a six-pack that lasts for a very long time or.

Better health, et cetera.

You mean the instant gratification as opposed to delayed gratification?

Yes, exactly. I just like saying local versus global because it happens in an organization. For example, sales guys don't want to put the notes in the thing because it's a pain in the butt to put the notes in the CRM. But finance needs the notes, customer service needs the boat, success needs the notes. All of these other departments need those notes. for all the other things that we're going to do. And so it's a local cost but for a global benefit. And so I think if people were able to delay that immediate gratification, which is like, this is the nature of success.

I think it's funny, man.

There was the study that was done, I can't remember it.

It's the marshmallow test or the other.

Okay, God, I can talk about the marshmallow test.

Okay, so fun one with that, with the marshmallow test is measuring how long they delay for the marshmallow. So at what point does it not make sense? If they say you can get one, because everyone simplifies the experiment, which is like, if I give you a marshmallow one now or you can get two later, right? But what if two is in a year?

Yeah, you're like, I don't care. I'll take the one now.

Right.

So then the next question I would have is like, if you were to test kids and then say at what point the global versus local crosses would be, and then track the kids who had the longest marshmallow waiting period.

Because then you could measure how long.

They were successful probably in life. They were in the most successful probably in life.

Really interesting. Just total side note.

But the three things that I think.

Were in common of the ultra successful were inflated sense of self, as in they thought that they like they deserved big things, they wanted to go after big things.

They believed in themselves, right?

Inferiority, never being good enough. And impulse control.

Those are the three factors of the most successful.

Like when they did a common factors analysis, like these people think, They believe that they can achieve all this amazing stuff and then it's an amazing paradox because at the same time they think they're not good enough and they are insecure about whether they can achieve it. And they have impulse control. And so it's like if you have- Discipline, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

And they stay focused on the thing. And I'd say the biggest breakthroughs that I've had, I think, that will create a lot of the wealth that we will have in the future is really a deep understanding of how long long is and shooting with the intention of, like, I'm only bringing this up because my YouTube guy said it. He's like, I've never had somebody who actually started that. I was like, We'll see what we do in five years. I was like, We'll measure that. And he was like, no one has literally ever said that to me. I was like, As long as I see progress, I'm good.

Because there's only once results in like two months.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like, if we're going this way, I'm cool. I don't need to say, that's good enough for most people if they could extend the time horizon. It's like, I'll give you another hack. You can know how wealthy someone is based on the time horizons they speak in.

Give me an example.

So if someone's talking about how they're trying to make money today, hey, let me hold 20 for today, you know how poor they are.

I have to say poor.

You know how poor they are, right? If someone's talking about what they're going to make this week, or this month, or this quarter, or this year, or this decade? Think about how different the people are who are talking in those time horizons. And so I think that if we can shift the time horizon that we think in, then we gain more leverage over our time, which we then know we will compound into money. Because I think if you can master.

The time, you master them. The more I learn, the more I realize I was lied to. Like, we're taught to go to school, to get a degree, to get a job so we can then get a job and climb the corporate ladder. But wealthy people don't do that. Wealthy people are not working to climb the corporate ladder. They're working to own the corporate ladder. I didn't even realize that you could do that.