How Your Beliefs Are Keeping You From Being A Millionaire w/ Alex Hormozi EP 1324

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. Right?

And it's just because they literally cannot see it. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. The School of Greatness is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. As Amica says, Empathy is our best policy. That's why they'll go above and beyond to tailor your insurance coverage to best fit your needs. Whether you're on the road, at home, or traveling along life's journey, their friendly and knowledgeable representatives will work with you to ensure you have the right coverage in place. Amica will provide you with peace of mind. Go to amica.com and get a quote today.

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So I think, like, people have two sets of resources, right? That they allocate. So they've got time, they've got money. Yeah. 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. 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 at the base level, they're distracted.

They're not doing the right stuff. Right.

Well, I would even say, Not doing anything.

Just distracting them.

Like playing 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 just distract yourself, right? 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, right? So they're doing things that do not give them a lot of return on their time. Right? 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, right? 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. And so that's an example of it didn't require money to make that money. That's skill that's required to do that. And so first is the time. 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 one of the easiest ways to gain leverage on your time and when I say leverage, just for everybody, leverage is the difference between inputs and outputs in a system. Archimedes said, if you give me a lever long enough, I can move the world. And so to the same degree, if you have enough skills, you can do anything. 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 than somebody who sucks at it. Same time, more output.

But because they developed a skill at a masterful level.

100%. 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 learnings, watching stuff like this, 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 what? Like you'll learn more from that than you'll learn from every single book you read up to that point from a 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 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. 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 what skill investing does. And so that 'cause a lot of us talk about like, you gotta get educated, you gotta 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 'cause a lot of people aren't gonna 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. like, 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, 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, total. 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 going to dollar cost average, long term, I wait four 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 this is 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 a 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 Airbnbs. 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. Right? And then it's not like you have a finite capacity to learn. The more you learn, the better you get at learning. Right? And then the more lines and synergies you find between different skill sets and opportunities.

The more dangerous you become.

100%.

So 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 because he was into it. And then he started rapping. So that was his first level skill. And then he learned, you know, writing lyrics and it's like, okay, because 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-- how to start a label and then he started to learn. 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 like 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, all. Yeah. Yeah, you want like, because each one of them, you will learn things. And there's going to 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. I, 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.

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 gotta learn how to get people to give you money for stuff, gotta have the stuff to sell them, and then you gotta 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 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 regret in 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 because he had some other dogs. He's a dog. He's a dog, like, Walker, right?

Yeah.

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? Because I see him hustling. I see him, like, 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 500, 600 bucks a day? He goes, I go 1,000. I go 2,000. He goes, I go 3,000. He goes, 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 service.

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? 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. People don't want to 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 at the same time, like 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 like exhausted, but now he's figuring out how to build and lead.

And what will happen is he'll stop.

Walking dogs and then he'll have a team. He'll be managing it, yeah.

Right, exactly. And so it's like, that's like such a, that's such a perfect microcosm of the three skills being put to use. Now it's taking him years to do it. It didn't happen overnight. He had to build his brand. He had to, you know, show that he could deliver the value of the product consistently and all these different things. He had to be communicating and you know, 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 or, 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.

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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, right? 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, right? 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.

Yes.

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. 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, because in the middle of the.

Day, you get pestered and it's hard to get into that deep focus that really the 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 gotta figure out who you are. It's like if you wanna 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 5-10 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. 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 track 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.

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 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. You'll hear, 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.

Yeah.

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 afraid to launch their thing because they don't understand how to do it. And they think it's going to take a lot more time than it actually is. You may not be good at it right away.

Yeah.

Your website probably wasn't perfect.

Yeah.

But you got the website up within four hours.

Yeah.

And then you can make it better over time.

And there's this, there, 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 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 embarrassing yourself the way I feel I get. These skills that you're gonna learn, they're gonna bring you a lot of value long term. They're not easy to start with. They're not. And so you've gotta be okay with accepting embarrassment of your own self. 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. 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? what 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 overcomplicated. 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, $110,000 things, we can sell $1,000, $1,000 things. And 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. 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 gonna 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 if you're trying to make money, 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, one product, one channel. That's all that is. You add the fourth piece, which is consistency. That's what goes from six to seven. That's hard for people. And the consistent, 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 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- I get my flyers up or something like that. Or the urgent care for dogs, or or pet co, like whatever, I mean, there's a million ways, right? Like, I get one of those guys, I figure out 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. Yes. 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 can reach out to people you don't know, which you can do through posting notes, cold calls, emails, door knocking, flyers, 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. Exactly. You want people to feel guilty that they're not doing all this stuff for their dog. And then you start, you feel inbound, right? And then finally, you have ads, right? You'd have run paid ads to get new appointments booked, right? And so those are the six primary things you can do to get customers, right? And 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 a hundred 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 gotta 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. Right. 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. Right. 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 a hundred 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 a hundred 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 are going to need.

To hire and how many? Exactly. And then you start with the inputs. Because in the beginning, the only inputs you have is going to be the constant, it's going to be running the ads, it's going to be doing the warm, it's going to be doing the reach outs. That's it. Those are the inputs. And then everything else is going to 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. And so then the focus then becomes, how do I use that same, if you really want to 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 rechats, I still have to run ads, I still have to make content, I still can have affiliates or get referrals for 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, 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 want. 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'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 we went to a mastermind, and we were just starting out. I was not making a ton of money. And the guy got up there and he gave his little spiel and he was like, yeah, 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.

And you were like, how is he doing this? And 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. 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.

Score.

There's certain things I think we need to learn on our own and fail and, you know, 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, you know, 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 going to 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 break the beliefs in you and tell you what you need to do.

If you think about human, like the human race, just zoom out, because I think it's a really interesting concept. I was talking to Caleb about Gary, and I'm a competitive person. I like, you know, thinking like, oh, by the time I'm that age, I'm gonna be further. You know what I mean? 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 the like, man, these kids have it so easy, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? I did YouTube wasn't even around when I, you know, like all this 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. That was the mission accomplished. And so 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 like 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. Right, who had me to help him out. Because, you know, we have guys who apply for acquia.com who are in their twenties. 20 to 100 million a year, right? And I'm like, and that wasn't possible 50 years ago. It just wasn't. And so if you think about 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, 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.

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Retirement, and then there's living in it. At Fidelity, we can help you make that transition and plan for whatever comes next. With a free personalized income plan, you can view and manage your cash flow across accounts, plus you'll get investing insights to help you make your savings last. Ready to take on retirement? Get started at fidelity.com/incomeplanning. Expenses charged by your investments and other costs and fees associated with trading or transacting in your account apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services member NYSC SIPC. 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 share 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 learned them to accelerate way past. 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 want to share because 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's 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, VH 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. 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 they would 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, rather than putting the player above the game. And so 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 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 ego first. And so 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. But the game will always have his fingerprint, right? And so 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.

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. And we've hung out for dinner a couple of times and I've seen you a few times. But there's been like a transition in you in like three to four months. 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.

Yeah. When do you think being a billionaire will happen for you? I'd like to do 5 to 7 for a billion. I like to hit 10 and 10. That's 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, how like 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. 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 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, 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 gonna die and we're gonna lose it. We're gonna lose all those lessons. And so part of it that excites me is just calling my shot because I think that always just enlivens a little bit of the competition. But I do believe from a mathematical standpoint we will get there. to me, it doesn't feel like a super big. I'm not really pointing that far to the fence. But seeing the hordes, the scores of businesses that are using the stuff in the books, in the courses and YouTube and podcast and, you know, Tick Tock and Instagram and LinkedIn and use those in the message I get every day of, like, dude, you helped me go from a million to 5 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 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, it's 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 acquisition.com side and the companies that we're scaling there and the impact they're having because many of them are also education businesses, not all of them, but like probably yet 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, 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. In exchange for money. Right, and then the hope ended up healing 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. 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 have probably a little bit different approach with goals. I want to hit every goal. 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 un, 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 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 two, three thousand 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, in terms of how much we're stretching, I feel good about it. I 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, Yeah, with less resources.

What would you need?

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, like, from the debt perspective, right? So rather than think of the businesses or like 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. Team. 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, and as we're talking about it. 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.

Say if we had to do it tomorrow. If you had to do it in two and a half years, 'cause you need time too. Yeah, yeah. You know, five to seven years, 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, 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, right? 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. Go, you're, 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 like all businesses start with debt. It just depends what type of debt you're dealing with. And so if you don't have money, then that's fine. You just incur other debt. Like even we think about how we're building the holdco right now at acquisition.com, like, I am building more fixed costs in the infrastructure right now because of what I want it to be in a year, two years. And so if I wanted to run it, we already do reinvest, obviously, a big percentage, but I would just reinvest more into it. To be okay with it. I've just grown accustomed to this. And it was funny because a buddy of mine I had dinner with last night, sold his company for $250 million. And we were talking about how cash flow is a very regular reinforcer from a behavioral standpoint. 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 cash flow entrepreneur. Like I've never been like a reinvest every dollar into the business. I like making money from my businesses. But I've, 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 of like 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. 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 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. 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. 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, Yeah. But because I was so used to, I was like, I don't want to lose my mind. You know, I was like, I want to 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 like have some like 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?

Yeah.

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 as 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. It might be why some of them.

Are stingy, too, with their money. Of course. I'm not gonna spend this five dollars. I'm gonna keep it.

You know, they're very stingy with all of it. Two nights ago, I was. We were out with to dinner with a guy who just got valued at a billion. Right. And it's off cash flow. It's not one of these software things. Like, it's off. Like, he's getting. Yeah, like, he's making real money, crazy money. And he's like, I'm not going to that gym. He's like, for. 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 your membership. Like, 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 like, 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. Well, 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. 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. Even the idea of 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 so this one, even though it was lower, like I had a low chance of success, the other one had a 100% failure guarantee. And 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 people are like, I'm really risk-averse. I'm like, so am I. I hoard money. I do.

You must have spent any of the money from the exit still. It's like just sitting in the bank. Nothing.

We started working the next day. We didn't even take a day off. We literally sold, wire hit, and we started working on acquisition.com the next day.

Let's say you had to start putting that cash flow every month into other things, team, resources, whatever it is. And that wasn't coming in. And let's call it 100 grand a month was coming in with cash flow. I don't know how much it is, but let's just 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 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. Mm-. 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, I'm not that bad. This money thing came in. Yeah, no, I'm not that bad. Right. And so, so I'd have to, 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 you, you know, if everything disappeared, you know, 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 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 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. Because clearly I don't know what I'm talking about because I'm not making any money. 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%.

-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. -Right. -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? That'll be 10 billion. Yeah, of course. No, but it's a fun convo and it's great because I this is wonderful though. Because I get to see my own limiting beliefs. And just for everyone who's listening, like everyone deals with this. You know what I mean? Like at every level you're dealing with this, of like feeling of inadequacy, feeling not good enough, feeling like you're not smart, feeling like you don't work hard, whatever it is. Like I have that stuff all the time because you think that the external circumstance is gonna 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 to the accelerator 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 it.

If you, 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.

I do not know when you started the question.

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, 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 that you get reinforced you do more of, the things you get punished you do less of, right? Like that's just how we learn behavior, how we learn to function in society, right? Touch the thing, ah, it hurts, 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. We learn 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. We wonder these things. So the reason external validation is so hard, at least for me, is because it's how I learned everything. It's 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 comes, 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, like, 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 in general because it's not eliminate or have more of. 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, 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 you. They're thinking about their dad. They're not thinking about it, whatever it is, right? And so she restated this earlier on to 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 was 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.

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

Not the results.

Right. And that's all, I mean, fundamentally that's always the goal is that you can detach the doing this from the result. I think what I've been able to do has been to extend the time horizon between the doing this and the result, but not necessarily fully eliminate it. I'm patient in that I can continue to do things for 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 an 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 or taking action. You know, 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, you know, 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. 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 a, you know, from a money standpoint, a decently wealthy family, right? Not, you know, ultra billion, but like 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 just 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. If 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.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple podcast as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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