17 Life-Changing Conversations I Wish I Had Earlier

These are 17 conversations, maybe millions in my 20s. Number one, I was going back and forth between quitting my job and starting a gym or starting my entrepreneurial journey. Another early mentor, he sat me down and said, man, I've been listening to you waffle for months now. He said, at some point, you're not going to know anymore. You just have to jump. He said it in a way that made me feel like a pansy. I realized I didn't need more information. I'd already done all of the research. I just needed to decide. The definition of decision comes from the Latin de cadre, which basically means to cut off or kill off. Question was, which future was I deciding to kill off? Was it the future that I was in currently that I didn't like anymore? Or is it the future that I had the potential to accomplish the dreams that I had by not deciding, I was actively killing off the future that had my dreams. And then I needed to choose which one I wanted to kill. Number two, very beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I didn't know how to sell anything. When a mentor just said, do you want to know the secret to sales? I leaned in. I was like, yes, please. I, like, have my notepad out. And he said, the secret to sales is making an offer so good people feel stupid saying no. And that obviously became the subtitle of my $100 million offers book. I kept thinking that I had to learn how to, like, manipulate and going through sales scripts and building rapport. And sure, some of those skills are useful to have when it's so much easier to just find things that people really want. Chick Fil A doesn't need to sell you on chicken sandwiches. They just have amazing chicken sandwiches, and people go buy them. And that forever changed how I created new products, created new services, was I started with, how do I get the most people to say yes? And then worked backwards. Number three, my next mentors was a $10 billion COO. He always said, you got to go slow to go fast. He kept repeating it to me over and over and over again. You only unlock the compounding, which later on grows significantly faster than the erratic activity of small thing here, small thing here, new thing here, new thing here, than just doing the same thing for an extended period of time. And so what feels slow in the micro looks fast in the macro when you look at the trajectory over a long period of time. But what looks really fast in the micro is usually really slow in the macro, because people can never get that compounding start harnessing because they're always starting back over at ground zero. Whenever you change something, the one cost is guaranteed is that change will have to get paid for. And what isn't guaranteed is that it's going to work. You know, you have this fixed cost, which is how you should see it, is that whenever you change something, you have to pay a price. Number four. The next lesson I learned was in level of effort. One of my early mentors told me about flyer. Thought I needed to go put a lot of flyers out to get business. Put out 300 flyers. So I called the mentor back up, and I was like, hey, this didn't work. And he said, you know, what was your test size? What do you mean by test size? And I just put out 300 total. He just laughed. 300. You're not gonna know anything with 300. He's like, we test with 5,000, then we do 5,000 a day after that. 5,000 a day, 150,000 flyers a month. I might have been doing the right thing all along, but I was just doing far too little of it. And at that point, I decided that whenever someone gave me advice, I wouldn't let the volume of activity be the reason it failed. But I just hadn't done enough of them or I hadn't done them long enough. I see so many smaller, younger entrepreneurs who do something for too short, too little time, not enough volume, that they might have been doing the right thing. They just didn't wait long enough or they didn't do enough of it. Number five. I was at actually a mastermind, and I saw a guy get up, and he seemed so disorganized, and he said, yeah, you know, we're making three or four hundred thousand dollars a month. It's like, we've been stuck here for a few years. Layla and I were actually together at this point. We both looked at each other, and we're like, if this guy can do it, we can do it. It was one of those moments that beliefs are broken because what you find out is that they are made of the same thing as you. Rather than write off, this guy's such an idiot. Despite being an idiot, he's still more successful than me. Imagine if I used my work ethic and my intelligence, and when I shifted my perspective from that way, I was able to start using other people's successes to fuel me rather than to make me feel bad. It switched from wanting to cast stones at people to being inspired by them and thinking, if they can do it, so can I. Within six months of seeing that Conversation happen. We were already doing a million a month. Number six, at a different event, I went up and I spoke and I told my whole plans of how I wanted to build this national gym chain, be America's Next Gym. The guy who ran the mastermind said, you know what, Alex? I don't think you should do that at all. I was crushed. And he said, I think you have a level 10 skill set, a level 2 opportunity, one of those simultaneously incredibly encouraging things and incredibly heartbreaking things. So it was a very, like, emotional moment for me. He was both encouraging me to say I could have been doing more. And this person from the outside put a bar up that was significantly higher than what I was shooting for, and that stretched my horizon for what I was capable of. And I think getting around people who can do that for you is one of the most valuable things you can possibly have in your life. What he didn't say was a level two opportunity as he was defining it, an opportunity that has low leverage. There wasn't a very good compounding vehicle for capital. The fact that I was successful in what most consider a shitty opportunity, he saw as the skill sets that would create a much bigger win later. If you are in a lower level opportunity, I wouldn't say be upset about it. I would say, you're learning with extra resistance against you. You're getting stronger now. And then when you go onto the moon where gravity is lighter, you just knock it out of the park. Number seven. It was a private event. It was 10 people. Everyone was doing eight figures or more a year. And I got invited. A guy came up to me, and this Guy had done $27 million in a single day. Holy shit. This guy's made more in a day than I made my entire life. He said, fat pitches in life don't come very often. When it gets easy is when you need to go hard. Otherwise, there's someone who's 10 times bigger than you who's going take everything you have and not even think twice about it. That was literally fueled by that one conversation. If you're like, wait, how are we doing three or four hundred thousand a month, taking over three hundred. I had, like, no employees, and I was making it all myself. You do have one of those opportunities that comes up in your life when things start working really well. That's when a lot of people ease off the gas. That's when they go easy. When it gets easy is when you go hard. Because you don't have that many fat pitches in a lifetime. You might get two or three. And you just got to crack the shit out of it when it comes and expect that you're going to sacrifice some short term for some long term later. Number eight, the same event, a different guy came up to me. He said, you're scared. You're like doubling every month with this current thing. Like, why do you want to start a supplement business? What if you just spent three times as much on marketing and didn't start a supplement business? I didn't start the supplement business. I actually delayed it for 18 months. In the next three months, we tripled the ad spend and went from 400 to 78780 to a million, from a million to 2 million just the next six months because of that piece of advice. And I think the underlying part of that advice is that when something is going well, oftentimes entrepreneurs think, great, I won, how can I get another win? But the, the real win is just doing 10 times more of that thing. The hardest part is getting product market fit. It's getting people to want to buy the thing. Once you have that, you don't need to innovate that anymore. All your innovation has to go through. How can we do more volume? Number nine, the next lesson was from a guy who had a big E commerce brand. So he was doing like 30 million a year at the time. And I was like, oh my God, this guy is God. He gave this huge presentation that was like two hours long. He said, so pick a percentage, whatever it is, 10%, 20% of your marketing spend and put that towards new ideas. Expect to lose it. But when you're losing it, you're gaining the lesson, you're gaining the experience. And what happens is he's like, you know, four out of five times my crazy ideas fail, he's like, but one out of five, they crush and become the leading edge innovation that pushes us to the next level. I immediately took a number and I wrote down what my new learning budget was going to be and it gave me permission to spend money without a return immediately. You think big picture. He just extended my time horizon for a return. And so rather than saying I have to make my money back immediately within 30 days of me spending this, I said, if I extend my horizon over my lifetime, if I spend this money, I will learn and be better and I will learn faster than somebody who doesn't. I just gave myself a budget to say it is acceptable to lose this. And then I committed to that. And that was a huge pivot point for how we were able to scale and try New things. And I looked forward to spending on my learning budget every month. And it just gave me permission to be creative, knowing that it would be okay to fail. Number 10, the next one I got from a pastor. Between Layla and I, he gave us a single piece of marriage advice that we have taken today. We have used countless times in our lives, both in our marriage, personally and professionally in the business. He said, if you don't agree, don't move forward. It was such a simple piece of advice because we have always made our decisions together, and if we don't agree, we slow down. A lot of times we impose this false sense of urgency on ourselves when there's almost nothing that is urgent, like, unless you're going to die, which is the only real urgency. Then a lot of times taking an extra second to think, okay, is there something we're missing? Is there a frame that we're not seeing if we don't agree, the first question we always ask is, what information are you using? Oftentimes, one of us will have data that the other person doesn't. Because we have the same values and same mission, we do ultimately come to the same decisions. That has saved me so many mistakes. Number 11, I went to a big half a billion dollar mastermind. Said it was like 10 of us there, and the total sales of everyone in the room was about half a billion dollars. But I was still among the smaller ones. I think we were doing 30 or 40 million dollars a year at the time, and plenty of guys there were at 100, 200, etc. What do they have? Are they smarter? Are they working hard? Are they sacrificing more? They had a bigger total addressable market. They had a bigger tam. They were going after just a much wider audience. So you start small. So the riches are in the niches, but at a certain point, you do need to open up the aperture. So, like, Facebook started with, you know, college, right? That was the niche. And then slowly expand time. I had to open up my eyes and say, you know what, Maybe I can go broader in some way. Number 12, this was one of the first billionaires that I ever met. I'd been stuck at 30 to 40 million for like three years. There was a lot of learning that I was trying to do in this period to break through that wall. I was telling him all these things that I was doing to try and grow my business, and he just laughed. He said, it's not about you, it's about everybody else. And what he meant by that wasn't like me versus Customers or anything like that. He was like, all you've been telling me is what you're going to do. You need to have a stable of stallions. You need to give people a slice of the pie and let them get rich, too. And up to that point, I had hoarded everything. I was like, you know what got me from $100 million top line to $500 million top line? Doing less and getting really smart people to help me out and giving them a big slice. It's about talent. It's about people. You have to get other people who can make decisions on your behalf. And you feel not only that they were as good as your decisions, but even better, because the beginning, you're a jack of all trades, master of none, but you need to have mastery in every department of the business in order for it to scale. And you can either see that as I have to learn everything, or the faster way, which is I can go buy it through other people who've already given 10 years. If I can get 10 people who've all spent 20 years in their respective departments, I basically have 200 years of experience. And if every person the organization has learned everything from you, then it's only one brain and one lifetime. That is the limit of the organization. That thing is what got us past the 30 to 40 million. That was a huge breakthrough for me. Number 13. The next conversation I had was really the one that pushed me over the edge. I have a famous friend. I was at his house, and we were sitting at the kitchen table, and I said, don't you get tired of all these weirdos, like, messaging you stuff and, like, sending you threats and, like, three people a week stopping by your house, like, trying to climb your fence? Like, isn't that, like, not fun? He said, if that's the price I have to pay to make the impact I want to have, then I would pay it every day of the week for whatever reason. It just, like, stabbed me in the heart, and it made me feel like if I want to spread a message, if I want to help more people, that there is a cost to it. Having now been a little bit the other side and having more recognition and whatnot, is that fame has pros and cons. There are cons, but I believe that there are more pros than cons. Are there things that are inconvenient now? Absolutely. You get stopped every time you go to dinner. Like, you get disrupted. It's harder to be, like, private and public. If you have a bad day, you can't do it. Because someone says hi, and it's the one time they're gonna see you. There are things that are cons, but the pros outweigh the cons. You get amazing people who will come and want to work with you. You get amazing teammates who otherwise would never know you exist, who also have the same mission, have the same values, and it creates significantly more alignment and real world value. In terms of economic value, how much money you make by having people inbound coming towards you. I used to talk shit about people make guys. I was like, you seem to do cold outreach and run ads like, don't talk to me. But now, having been on the other side of it, I can tell you that it was mistake number 14. Big influencer. I said, hey, you're way further ahead of me. Like, how do I just shortcut this thing? And so he said, hey, start making content. Every platform. So I did that. And then I came back six months later and I said, hey, look, we went from zero to, you know, 200,000 people in our audience in six months and noted the progress. But I was like, what's your blueprint? What's the. What's the model? Give me the flowchart. He said, dude, we don't have a flowchart. Anybody who's trying to tell you that is just trying to sell you a system, you just need to do so much more volume than you currently are. He said, just pull up your Instagram and pull up my Instagram. So I pulled it up, pulled his up. He had posted five times, I had posted once. He's like, pull up your LinkedIn. Pull up my LinkedIn. He had posted seven times. I posted once platform by platform. He kept pulling one up, and he was embarrassing me with the amount of content he was putting out compared to me. So in the next six months, I put 10 times the content out, and we grew 10 times faster. The interesting lesson I learned from this is that there are principles that are ubiquitous. The more work you do, the more you get. So the boring work applies to everything in business, whether it's relationships, whether it's cold calling, whether it's making content. The more you do, the more you get. Number 15, the next one is about investing. I was actually a pretty big pansy when it came to investing. And this was the breakthrough. I had had all this money, and people were like, I've got this real estate deal. I've got this crypto thing. When you have lots of money, deal flow is not a problem. But I didn't have was like, set of rules or parameters, and you have to make those. Otherwise you get too much decision fatigue. You waste too much time doing diligence deals, reading, having multiple phone calls, having lawyers come in, and then deciding not to do it. This one conversation I had changed my life. He was telling somebody who had a lot of real estate experience, if you were to put a circle on this table, what percentage of your brain knows real estate? He was like, I guess 85%. Okay. What percentage of your brain knows stocks and stuff? He's like, oh, 10 or 15%. He's like, that is your new capital allocation parameter. 85% of your net worth should be in real estate. 15% should be in stock. And it was so simple for me. I know business. And so what do I invest in now? Only businesses, Only risk. If you don't know what you're doing, I can write a five or $10 million check and be fine if I know if it's a business because I understand. I know what pitfalls are going to come up. Like, I get it. Sticking with that just forever made my life simpler. Because now when deals come to us, I'm like, that's just not in my wheel. And I can just immediately say no. So the amount of time and effort and lawyer calls and conversations that that saved me has paid so many dividends, and now our investing do significantly better because it's what I know and I feel comfortable with it and I can move way faster. Number 16, leverage behind a product. Naval said, you only sell because you know how to market. You only market because you don't know how to build a product. An exceptional product is a quadratic relationship with your audience. Good marketing or good sales is a linear relationship. If you make an exceptional product, something that's so unbelievable that people cannot help themselves but tell other people about it. One person buys the product and they tell 2. 2 tell 4. 4 tell 8. How do I do that? You work on it and you keep working on it. And you don't make new products until the first one's right. And if you're like, that might take years. That's why good shit takes time. $100 million offers. That book continues to sell more copies every month with zero advertising dollars. Actually less work in the long run to build a better thing than it is to build a shitty thing and then have to spend the rest of your time marketing and selling. You want to have leverage in every aspect of your business, and the product is the strongest one. Number 17, the last one I learned from Uncle Warren, the power of brand. Brand was always this amorphous thing that I thought was complete bs. I was like, you can't quantify brand, blah blah blah. But the thing can quantify brand. And that is what I learned from Uncle Warren. He said the amount that you can charge above the commoditized version of your product, the delta there is the power of brand. If you have a T shirt that can sell for $20 normally and can sell for $100 with your brand on it, all of that pricing power goes to bottom line. Which is why Warren Buffett invests in brands. It's one of the strongest ways to retain pricing power. The brand itself becomes a huge compounding vehicle because the audience and the awareness around the brand compounds.