Brutally Honest Advice to Build Your Confidence

This is brutally honest advice to my younger, less confident self. Having an epic story is about asking the girl. It's about shooting the shot, it's about launching the business, about running the ad, about knocking on the door, quitting the job, taking the risk. When you're 85 years old and on your deathbed, you're not going to wish you had fewer crazy stories. You're going to wish you had taken more shots. Don't build confidence, build evidence. Confidence comes as a result of evidence, not the other way around. Confidence without evidence is a delusion. It's you beating your chest, looking at yourself in the mirror, trying to pretend you're something you're not. Do it so you get the confidence, but don't think you need confidence to do it. The whole idea of fake it until you make it should switch to walk it before you talk it, right? Prove it to yourself so you don't need to prove it to other people. And let your path do your talking for you until you win. Effort always goes unnoticed. Get used to it. If you aren't willing to suck, you're never going to get good. Losers stay losers because they aren't willing to lose. Confidence is also domain specific, so you can be really good at public presentations and really bad at talking to girls. It takes a lot for a skill to transfer between domains and so if you want to get good at the thing, don't try and do something to the left of it, just do the thing. The first sales consult I ever took, I didn't close. And I say that because everyone just imagines that Mozi just came in just slinging credit cards and stacking bodies, right? It didn't work that way. I came in, it was a five minute conversation and the girl was like, I need to go get my card from home. And I said, oh yeah, okay, go do that. And she walked away. And I went to my boss and he's like, how'd it go? I said, oh, I close poster. And he was like, oh, that's awesome. He's like, you got the credit card? I said, oh no, she's gonna come back with the card. And he literally stopped what he was doing with six other guys around him. And they all non stop laugh for a minute straight, like they couldn't breathe because they thought how stupid what I had just said was, but I had no idea. And so that was my first ever experience in sales. I'm known for sales now and I wouldn't even say I'm confident in sales, it's just more like this is what works and has worked for me. Take it or leave it. And so people perceive that as confidence, but it's simply just based on experience. And confidence comes from experience. What it really is is a prediction. What you think is going to happen, will happen. And so even in statistics, what is your confidence metric? This is 0.7, 0.8. It's literally just what the percentage likelihood that what you think is going to happen is going to happen. And so how do you increase the likelihood that what you think is going to happen is going to happen? Have it. Have happened already. Have it. I could have either spent 30 minutes every day looking at myself in the mirror and telling myself I was going to be a great sales guy, or I could have reviewed the fucking script. Which one do you think would make me a better salesperson? Reviewing the script, you can take all the time that you're trying to spend psyching yourself up and you'll feel significantly more confident not having done that and simply knowing what you're going to say, which you get from practice. The world belongs to those who can keep doing without seeing the result of their doing. And the longer you can wait to see the result of your doing while still continuing to do is the extent to which you can win big in life. For example, to be a top 1% podcaster, you have to upload 21 podcasts. 21 top 1%. 90% of people don't get past one, 9% don't get past 20. And then 1% of podcasters of all of them make it to 21 plus. So when people say try harder, it usually just means don't give up. The price for excellence has never been so low. People give up so easily now that it's just so easy to win by just being willing to post 20 times. You're in the top 1%. Like I'm at the top 1%. We're not even talking 10. Top half, top 1%. People are so afraid of being humiliated, they get the long term humiliation of never amounting to anything. No one's going to watch your first 20 episodes anyways. And even if they do, it doesn't matter because that's not what you're building towards. Like you posting those 20 isn't what you judge yourself on. You should be judging yourself on the difference between your first one and your 20th one. On are you better? Probably. And the difference between your twentieth one and your hundredth one. Because the win is you. You are the asset you're building, not the downloads that you get on your first shot. Mosey immediately. Had a podcast with millions of downloads every single month. No, I spent four and a half years making two podcasts a week straight. Didn't miss. And guess how many podcast downloads I was getting per month at the end of that? 2 to 3,000 downloads a month. Not a lot. I used to think to myself, okay, well, each one of these podcasts gets, like, 200 downloads. Well, 200 downloads is like an auditorium of people. And so would I feel okay giving a speech to 200 people? Yeah. And even before that, when there was getting, like, 10 or 15 downloads per episode, if I had a little lunch and learn that I would. I used to have to do to, like, get leads for a business, I'd be fine talking to a group of 10 or 15 people, because the reality is that those people are doing me more of a favor than I'm doing them. They're literally giving me their ears so that I can practice my voice, how to talk, and how to present. And it was only at year four and a half to five when things started taking off. And, you know, the two things that changed are. One is I did call it. I changed it from Gym Secrets to just the game, which was a business thing, so it made it more applicable to more people. And the second thing, and here's the real one, is that I sold a company for $46 million. And so people are like, oh, what does this guy have to say? And the big thing that everyone misses is people try and dissect my content. The message is 10% of. Of how people consume it. 90% is the context around the message. So Elon Musk can tweet on the toilet and be like, I'm on the throne, taking a shit, and it'll get a million likes. Why? Because it's Elon Musk. He's the richest man in the world and owns three of the biggest companies that are most innovative of all time. I don't kid myself and think that, like, my content is so much better than other people. There's plenty of people with better content than me that don't get the same views. And the reason is because they don't have the context, they don't have the proof. And solve for the proof, and then the content will take care of itself, because, one, you will know what you're talking about because you have proof that you know what you're talking about. And people will believe you, which is why you should solve for evidence above everything else. Like, evidence gives you the confidence. If someone Says Alex. I don't think you know shit about business. I'd be like, okay, it doesn't really affect me. I do know we crossed $100 million in net worth at age 32. I know that. But if someone said that to you and you haven't accomplished anything, you. You don't have anything to stand back on, and it hurts you more. But I have proof. So it's like you can just deflect it towards the proof and keep living your life. The secret to longevity is, especially in the content game, but really in any game that you're trying to at least help other people with, is that if you've done the thing, you can be certain rather than confident. Be certain based on what you've done, not based on what you say other people should do. There used to be too big to fail, and I think there's an alternative which is too good to fail. If you make your stuff so fucking good that only one person who gets exposed to it sends it to somebody else, then you have nothing to worry about and you will eventually get discovered. It's a time game. And in the meanwhile, you just keep getting better, which is the point, because the other day you're going to die, everyone's going to forget about you anyways. And so you might as well just work on the one asset that you get to keep for the rest of your life, which is you. And rather than measuring yourself based on how many views he gets versus how many views you get, measure yourself by how much work he puts into one of his shorts and versus what you put into one of your shorts. And then you might think the output is more reasonable. And if there's a top sales guy in your organization who's making more money than you, compare not what his commission check is to yours every month, compare how many calls he's making, how many times he practices the script, how many calls he's made before you, how many sales he's closed before you, what time of day he shows up at work, what time of day he leaves, whether he works weekends or not, whether he's willing to hop on the phone in a family context so that he can still close the deal. If you're doing all the inputs, the matt, the outputs will always match on a long enough time horizon. And if you are new to the game, then my recommendation is not only to match inputs, but to double or triple the inputs that someone ahead of you is doing. And the reason you do that is because if you just match your inputs, then you're Always going to be behind them because they're already ahead of you, because they're better than you. And so if you both do the same amount of work, they're going to keep getting better, and so are you. So you have to do twice the work. You got to be like Kobe, right? Where everyone else is doing one practice a day, you do two practices a day, and in the beginning they'll be better than you, and then you'll match them. But because you're doing twice the work, eventually you'll get better and you're. And then that's how you win. And one of the biggest misnomers in whatever endeavor you're trying to track is people track the wrong metrics. They track the lagging metrics rather than the leading metrics. Lagging metrics are what happen. Those are the outputs. And if you want to track those, fine. But the real things to track are what you're doing to create the outputs. So I don't want to necessarily even track sales. I want to track how many calls I'm making. If I'm trying to get in shape, I'm not necessarily going to track the weight I'm doing. I'm going to track how many calories I'm eating. And so the more ways you measure, the more ways you can win. And so the idea, the ultimate win at life is where you can shift things that are out of your control, that you deem winning to things that are under your control, which you can deem winning. Because if you're measuring on whether you lost the fat or not, sometimes people take longer. Some people don't. That's something that you actually can't control. What you can control are the inputs. And so if you say based on this, if I do this one thing every day for a long enough period of time, I'll eventually get there. The real winners are cut out. The I'll eventually get there and say, if I do this every day, I have won. The thing that I try and focus on now is the delta between how hard I tried and how hard I can possibly try. And if I know that the gap between those two is zero, then I have won. And I've decided to spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to make that. My definition of winning is that there's nothing left in the tank. If you get into a harder career path or one that takes more reps to get good at or more reps to get into, then every day you can win based on saying, like everyone else does, 100. I do 250 and I have nothing left to give. I won. And that should satisfy you. And if you're. If you're obsessive on the external thing, that takes too long, and you will give up too soon. One of the things that took me too long to learn was the difference in the finite and infinite frame. And so finite frame is where you have known players agreed upon rules and a way to win or lose at the end, and then the game is over. In infinite frame, you have known and unknown players, no agreed upon rules. And the point of the game is to keep the game going. And all the greatest games that I've ever participated in, marriage, health, business, you don't win at marriage. The point is to stay married. You don't win at health, the point is to stay in shape. You don't win at business. The point is to stay in business. And so by default, if you don't give up, you win. And so that's the big frame shift, which is why leaving everything on the field is the way you have to define winning. If you want to win in the long term. And anything worth doing takes great time, if you stick with it and you make that the win, you'll notice that the external win will just happen on its own. And if you really commit to that perspective, it won't even mean much to you. Because if you make that everything, it's the same thing with the guys who win the golds and then kill themselves or win the championship and then go to these massive depressions is because they're playing the wrong game. When Kobe was asked shortly before he died, like, do you think that you're somebody who's afraid of losing, or do you think you're somebody who loves winning? He basically denied both frames. He said, I'm paraphrasing. I just love playing to the best of my ability. And that's what he measures himself off of. The fact that the world chooses to measure him on the fact that he's won so many games, that's the world's problem, not ours. It's saying, I'm game master, not a player, and I choose to play by these rules. And as long as I am playing, I win by default. And it's because I'm not accepting the world's rules for winning. I make my own. An easier analogy here is, and this is a Naval Ravikant quote, but he said, what looks like work to other people should feel like play for you. If you look at an artist and he's painting you're like, hey, how soon are you going to finish that painting? The point for the artist is to paint. He'll finish that piece and he'll start the next one. But the process of painting is the thing that they enjoy. And so the idea is that if you can commit and the broader you can generalize what you're committing to, the easier it will be to stick with it. So you might be like, I love making calls, but I hate entering things in the CRM. I. Well, both of those are required for the role of sales. And so I prefer to chunk up a level and say, I prefer to do hard work because of what that work does to me. Then whether I'm putting shit into the CRM or editing a document or having a hard conversation, all of those things are difficult. And I see those as all contributing to the person I ultimately want to be until eventually I die and it won't matter anyways. And so the only asset that you really get to keep with you is your character, and that's the only thing you keep building. And so if you make the character the W, at the end of the day, did or I, did I not contribute to the character of the person that I want to become? If that's the W every day, you can never lose. If you have your menu option of things that you can do in life, just remove quitting as one of them and then try your next idea. And if you are in that rocky cutscene and you're two months in, three months in, remember that the rocky cut scene in the movie lasts a couple seconds, and the rocky cutscene in real life might last a few years. And so whenever I get to a low point where I think, why do I even bother doing this? I just like to remind myself, this is where most people stop, and this is why they don't win. And as hard as this is going to sound, the best thing that I ever did was not listen to other people's opinions about my life. They don't want the best version of you. They want the version of you who best serves them. And unfortunately, the closer people are to you, the more similarly they'll see themselves in you, and. And the more your success will make them feel bad about themselves. And I can promise you this from somebody who might be a little further. I have more people who root for me now that I've already won than people who rooted for me along the way. No one is doing as well as you think they're doing. So by comparison, everyone is better off than they think because the cumulative median visually is probably three times higher than what the actual median is. And so if you're like, oh, I'm average or slightly below average compared to the perceived median of society, you're probably way above average, and that's okay. And being above or below average doesn't even matter anyways because you've got a lot of innings left. There's a lot of quarters left to play. And so, like, until the day you die, you still have hope, you still have a chance. You can still keep moving forward. Whenever someone gives you their opinion about what you should do with their your life, it's really them saying, this is my preference of how I want to live my life. And I say, great, live your life that way, and I'll live my life this way, because me living my life has no effect on you. So live your life the way you want to live it. And I don't want your life either. They make those statements because they feel uncomfortable, and so they have to, like, release it. And so they say that to you to make themselves feel better. And that's their problem, not yours. I think I've learned a lot of frames around not caring about other people's opinions out of necessity, because I was so crippled by the opinions of other people for what felt like such a long time that I always had to face my death in order to get myself to move. And so I talk about death a lot because it has actually been one of the few things that actually motivates me to change my behavior. And so when I had done all the things that I thought would impress other people, one, I realized that they didn't really care. And secondly, I realized that I deeply cared about how much I hated my life when I was like, is this what winning feels like? Because if this is what winning is, then I don't want to play by thinking I'd rather be dead than continue to play this game. I was forced to change the game I was playing, which is like, well, what is a game that I would like to win at? Well, I'd like to win a game that is by rules that I set out. And there are things that I can control. And then those people, because you break their mold of what they're supposed to be doing, and they might be miserable, too, but they are not willing to take the risk that you're willing to take, because they care about other people's opinions more than you do, because they haven't gone through that little journey that you just went through. Fine, you do it your way they do it their way. I mean, I went from prodigal son, my father, super proud of me. Graduating Vanderbilt in three years, president of the fraternity, vice president of powerlifting team management consultant to minimum wage employee. Like, that's a pretty significant drop in status. I have these frames because people will say whatever they want. But for me, that relative drop in status was a lot. I went from about as high status as you can get as a 22 year old to about as low status as you can get. I mean, I remember having people be like, so did you go to college? And I was like, yeah, I went to college and I fucking murdered it. And I did everything. And because the implied question is, why are you here? And so that's what in the beginning hurt a ton. But then I just realized that they just didn't know and they were asking genuinely. And all of my judgment around that was just my own problem. How I'm perceiving this question is affecting my mood to such a great degree. What if I applied this to every question? All these people are asking me things and I'm either getting offended or getting complimented, but the statement doesn't change. So that sounds like a me problem. And so the more I started diving into things like that, the less bothered I became by everyone else's opinion, because they also have no context, even if they did mean it as an insult. So what if they're saying, well, I'm better than you? I'd be like, yes, you are. A lot of even really successful people frame their success around trying to prove someone wrong, right? But when you try and create your entire existence in opposition to someone, you actually give them complete control over your life. It means that because of the things that this person has said, I will choose to change all of my behavior. Which basically means that the directives from that person have commanded you to do whatever you do. And if you like to be a free person and want to be somebody who acts of their own volition, then I choose to accept insults so that I can live my life rather than living in contrast to them and giving my control to the person who insulted me. That would mean I put me changing your mind above my goals, which I don't do. My goals are more important to me than changing your mind. I'm super sensitive to I am statements, labeling statements like this, like, I am a neat freak. I'm the type of person who. So whenever you're dating someone, you're getting to know someone. People like to blanket I am statements really early on to set the stage. Like, I'm the same. I'm the type person who likes to show up early, I like to clean things. I'm a labeler, I'm a whatever. And then, and this is the insidious part, they then say because. And then they insert a reason that they made up or that sounded good in the past. And people nodded their heads and agreed with because my mom never loved me enough, because I didn't get enough hugs, because I gave a speech once and everyone laughed at me. Because you don't know. And the reality is you will never know. All we know is that you do a certain type of behavior. That's it. By giving these because statements, all this power, you actually put all the power into something that is unchangeable in the past, and so you have to keep dealing with it. Whereas if you just said, I do these things, period. Now, if I want to change what I do, then I should just reward myself in the present for doing something different. And that makes it a lot more malleable. And it makes your identity and what you do as a result, or rather, what you do and your identity as a result, something under your control. You don't want to blame the things in the past that you can't change. You want to blame things in the present that you can't. So if you said, I have trouble getting close to girls because my mom and I aren't close, one, you give your mother all the power in your love life. Oh, you give power to something that happened in the past that you can't change to things that are happening in the present that you can change. And so would it be more useful to say, in the past, I have struggled to get close to girls, period. Now, that could be for a number of reasons. Thing is, is that you don't know what reason it is. Because I could say, let's say, imagine all these things happen. You struggled with your mom. Let's say you had a bad breakup, at some point in your life, you're not in shape. I could say I struggle getting close to girls, and I could use any of those three as my reasons. But which of those serve me? None of them. All we know is that you struggle to get close to girls. Okay, well, then just look at what it would take to get close to girls and then do that, rather than having this other thing that's attached to the behavior that you can't do anything about. It just makes changing who you are and what you do a lot easier. Sometimes people are such douchebags they will tell a young child, you will never have a successful relationship with a woman because you don't respect or love me. A mother. Or the reverse could be true of a father. They're a fucking douchebag for saying that because they are labeling you with something that you can't change. But that's their problem. It also is no basis in fact. When people are like, look at how the son treats the mother. That's how he's going to treat his wife. Why the fuck would I treat my wife like I treat my mother? Dear God, that's just a statement that sounds good but has no basis in fact. You treat your wife like you treat your wife. You treat your mother like you treat your mother. They're different people. People want to have problems because it gives them a reason to suck and it be okay. It gives them ego padding so they can protect themselves for the reason why they're not successful for the reason they haven't accomplished what they said they were going to accomplish. And so they lean on their potential comma and their trauma as the two reasons that people prop up. I've got lots of potential, but I have all this trauma and neither of those matter. I've gone through three stages of like mental development in terms of how I see changing my behavior. In the beginning I attributed my beh to my past traumas. The second phase was that I chose to change the story. What if my mother was just trying to feel better and it wasn't my fault, so then I changed my behavior in that sense. The third phase, which is where I'm at now, maybe there'll be a fourth phase. But the third phase was I behaved this way, period. The because statement in the second half is completely irrelevant. One, because I don't know it. Two, because I can't change it, so I might as well just choose to do the thing that I want to do. Irrelevant of my past. The single strongest predictor of my behavior is what will make the more epic story. I've thought about that frame a lot and it's still continued to win out. And so when I'm forced to make a decision between two things, I prefer to choose the one that's the more epic story. Because either you have an epic story of failure or you have an epic story of success. But no 85 year olds are regretting their epic stories. They are regretting the stories they never told. Our minds are meaning making machines and they have to be because they create associations between things we know and things we don't. Know, and that's how we learn. The problem is that our brains will make wrong associations and then they will plague us for the rest of our lives. But we can just redefine what the association means for ourselves to make our lives easier. Because whether you miss the game winning shot when there's a huge crowd, or you miss it when no one else is there, the only reason it hurts more is because you choose to let it hurt you more. Now, there are things that you can do prior to the game winning shot that can increase the likelihood that you make it, which is that you practice way more in high stakes conditions over and over and over again. If you do that, it increases the likelihood, your confidence that you'll be able to make it. Why? Because you've made them before. And if you're like, well, I missed my first ever game winning shot, now what do I do? Well, you practice in every other condition that's as close to that as you can until eventually you make one. And then when you do make one, you'll have evidence that you've made one and you try and make one again. What you probably don't know is that Michael Jordan has missed more game winning shots than he has made, but he's remembered for the ones that he made. But how was he able to make them? By missing and being willing to shoot again on that basis of story. The many excuses that we give ourselves in reverse can make a more epic story. And so rather than say, like, these are all the reasons that I can't succeed, I think reframing that as these are all the reasons that when I succeed, it'll be even, even better story and it'll be more inspiring to other people is a much more powerful frame. The more disadvantages you have when you start, the more epic story you have when you win. Donald Miller has one of the most powerful frames of heroes and villains I've ever heard of. Heroes and villains always have the same backstory. It's pain. They're always an orphan, right? Or the villain has some sort of disfigurement to show that they went through hard times. The difference is what the character chooses to do about it. Villains say the world hurt me, I'm gonna hurt it back. Heroes say the world hurt me. I'm not gonna let anyone else hurt this way. So heroes use pain. Villains are used by it. And so I think all of us have the choice to become our own heroes or our own villains in our own life simply by how we choose to deal with the pain that we all inevitably experience. So pain is a constant. The choice about how we react to it is the thing that dictates the path of our lives. You know, there are certain rules of playing the game that have served me really well. One of them is, and that's okay. And I probably use that frame more than anything else, which is I'm not close with XYZ relative, your parent, your mom, your sister, your brother, and that's okay. I spent a lot of my mental effort trying to untangle stories that I told in the past about things that were my fault or were a problem. And the easiest way that I found to solve problems is to decide they're not problems to begin with. I have a handful of pictures that I took for the first five years of sucking during business, and I use those pictures all the time, every day. And the zillions of pictures after I became successful, I barely use any of them. The time to document your life is when it sucks, not when it's great. Because those are the stories that you're going to tell. And those are going to be the reminders that you use in the present day of things that you have been through and prove as to who you really are. Because my favorite line in the Matrix is in the second or third Matrix, when Morpheus is standing on the hill and he's looking out towards everyone. He said, I stand here truthfully unafraid, not because of the path that lies before me, but because. But because of the path that lies behind me. And so the struggle period that you may be in right now is the path behind your future self that you are building so that that man or that woman can stand on the pulpit and look at you straight, dead in the eyes in the mirror and say, I am confident. And I stand truthfully here, unafraid, not because of what I said my goal is going to be, but because what I've been through to get here. And so here's my advice to my younger self. Document your life more. Otherwise you'll forget the details. And the details are what make it worth remembering. It's the times you're sleeping on the floor. It's the time the person walks out and you miss the seventh sale that day. It's the time when your bank account's at its absolute lowest. It's when your car breaks down on the side of the road and you're like, what am I going to do now? I can barely afford this. Right? Those are the moments, the ones that you want to ignore, the ones that you want to look away from that are the ones that you need to capture. Because those are the moments that you will tell in the future of things you got through. Because no heroes are heroes without epic monsters. And the bigger the monster, the greater the hero.