How I Hacked My Brain to Feel Gratitude All the Time

If I were 85 years old and I got to go through a time machine and be back in my body as I am now, to experience my life from my 85 year old self, it's dramatically shifted how I see everything. So let me walk you through it. I've struggled to feel grateful for most of my life. It's not that I don't have things to be grateful for, I have tons of things to be grateful for, but I don't feel gratitude. And so I've tried a lot of different practices to try and feel gratitude. You know, the journals and the daily meditations and things like that, but they've never really stuck. That's not to say that they don't work for some people, but I want to share with you in this video one of the most powerful perspective changes that I've ever experienced. And if you don't know who I am, my name is Alex Hormozi. I'm the managing partner@acquition.com, which is a portfolio of companies that does over $100 million a year. I make these videos because I hope that you make all the money in the world and you experience all the joy that you possibly can in the process. I have spoken in the past about the frame of the veteran, which I won't recap here, but it's really just having different frames or perspectives through which to see circumstances so that you can improve your experience. Recently, I've been trying to toy with one that would create gratitude. There's a clip that went pretty viral not that long ago. It's also my number one tweet of all time, which is when I was 20, I wanted to be a millionaire. Now that I'm a millionaire, I want to be 20 when I'm 85 years old. And in my mind I imagine I will be a multi billionaire at that point. I know that I would give up everything that I have of material wealth just to be poor and 20 again. I call this the frame of the grandfather, or the grandfather frame. And it works like this. If you've ever looked at pictures from your past and you look at where you grew up, or you look at, you know, your old room, or you look at a picture of you with old friends doing something, we tend to feel these feelings of nostalgia. And I tried to quantify, like, what is nostalgia? So to me, nostalgia is gratitude in the present for past circumstances, for whatever reason, we're able to kind of look past all of the kind of minutiae of how we were feeling, our moods, and we're able to kind of like see big picture, the things that we are grateful for. Take a pause here. I'm sure all of us have tons of childhood shit and things that we wish were different and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there are still elements of our past, our childhood, our adolescence, our teenage years, our college years, whatever it is right where you feel grateful. Some of you guys are superstars and are always grateful for everything. And I'm, you know, I'm jelly. I don't roll that way. It's not like I wake up and I'm like, man, I just want to count my lucky stars. Like I just don't. That's just not how I function. And I've been trying this on and I hope you do too, because it's been, it's been really like improving my life. I tried to do this. I wake up thinking to myself, if I were 85 years old and I got to go through a time machine and be back in my body as I am now, to experience my life from my 85 year old self, seeing it again. If I wake up and I feel my body and I'm like, ah, this is so nice. I don't have all the joint pain, ah, my wrists don't have arthritis. And then I wake up and I'm like, I remember when we used to live here, even when I looked at Layla this morning, I was thinking to myself, man, like, this is my wife. Right at the beginning of our marriage, you know, we're only six years in. We wake up and we walk over to, you know, to have our coffee in the morning, which we always do. And I'm like, isn't this so nice? I remember when we used to have coffee here together. This is great. And I look out the window, look how young Vegas looks. It doesn't have all these buildings and these flying cars like it does now. It's, it's so underdeveloped compared to what it is today. And I feel gratitude for an external just environment, which I would never really think that. But I know that my 85 year old self will totally appreciate those things. And as I'm going through the day applying that frame also to business, where I can see that, you know, the CEOs of our companies and the people that work within our holding company@acquisite.com, they're stressed about things. And in my mind I'm thinking, oh, isn't this cool that we get to do this together? Isn't that fun? Isn't that neat? Look how cute that is. It is the most powerful frame that I've encountered. I think the reason it's so powerful is one, it operates almost entirely from a frame of gratitude that for me I can feel for whatever reason, gratitude journals, the meditations, things like that, like I don't feel that, but thinking about my 85 year old self being able to re experience life through my 32 year old body, it's really shifted how I see things. It also decreases the amount of anxiety and stress I have over outcomes because I'm like, this isn't going to matter in the long run. I also think it helps from a business, the term loosely, but like a business wisdom perspective. Because when you think about the decisions, you think about it within the larger context of your life and you're not like, oh yeah, I'm going to make that short term dollars because you're like, I'm 85, I don't have anything to prove, you know what I mean? If you think about like the really stressful things that you've had happen in your past, I feel nostalgia for the sleeping on the floor that I did at my gyms, for how tired I used to be at the end of the day of taking 20 plus consults for months and months and months on end. And rather than feeling stressed about it or resign the fact that I have to do it, like I get to do this, I get to make videos, talking to a camera, look at my 32 year old self go, trying to make his content, trying to help other entrepreneurs, like, isn't that cool? If I had to characterize seasons of my life, I would say I was very angry as a teenager and young adult. And then I went from angry to being aware of the deficit between where I was and what I considered to be happiness. From there I kind of switched to what I have affectionately called the fuck happiness mantra, which I lived for a very long period of time, which was I stopped trying to optimize for happiness at all and just really stopped thinking about it altogether, which I think moved me closer to something that I would consider to be joy. You can be joyful independent of circumstance because joy is from within. Happiness tends to come from external, right? It comes from circumstance. And I think when we look at the grandparents or at least the people that are older that I aspire to be, it's like they just have an internal joy. They have gratitude for being able to live it one last time. Because at the end of the day, like it is our last time. I'm being real here. Like, I've had a guy that I graduated with died a few months ago, and he was a really successful guy, really smart kid, did really well. I mean, this is really dark, but he got randomly murdered and, you know, he had grand plans for his life. And I think to myself, I'm like, you know, tomorrow really isn't guaranteed. Thank you for your attention. I know you have a lot of places that you can put it, and I'm grateful that you chose to share the moment with me. So those nation appreciate you guys. Bye.