STOP trying to be happy.
Alex Hormozi argues that negative emotions like pain, anger, and fear are better fuel for success than chasing happiness or passion. He points to Olympic athletes, Steve Jobs, and Kobe Bryant as examples, and describes his own method: accept the discomfort, use it to push through hard work, and focus on outcomes instead of waiting to feel motivated.
Chapters
You have this big vision for your life that you want. And on this side, your family gets kidnapped and if you don't do something, they will kill them all. Which of those motivates you more right now in this video? When I was 15, 16, 17, I was a pretty angry kid. I thought that I had all these issues. I would tell people I have anger issues. I'm not a nice person. I would tell people those things because I believed those things to be true and I saw them as problems. And then I went to college and in college, it's all propaganda of people who are teaching, who've never actually done work in a real economy ever. They're all tenured, they don't live in reality. They tell everyone they should pursue their purpose and their passion and the things that they love. And I ate it up. And so I read all these books on positive psychology. I watched all these TED talks. And the problem was I didn't make any progress. And I felt like there was something even more wrong with me because I didn't feel any of that stuff. I wish I could go back and tell myself, dude, all the stuff they're saying is just not true. Like you don't need any of that. You can embrace the fact that you are angry, you can embrace the fact that you feel like you are in pain. And you can use that to make the life that you want. You don't have to use the lovey dovey purpose passion to build the life that you want to build. What it does is it tells people that having a negative emotional experience is a bad thing. But half of your life is below average by definition. And so if you are not using the half of your life as energy or motivation to create the life you want want, then you're at a huge disadvantage. They interviewed the top Olympic medalists and they found that they don't actually love winning. They hate losing. When they win, they experience relief, not euphoria. If you look at Steve Jobs, he wasn't some happy go lucky dude who was like, man, I just want to make the world a better place. He was a tough dude to work for, but he created something beautiful from that pain. Mj, you look at Kobe, they had imaginary situations that they created in their minds to create more suffering in their own lives to motivate them and use as fuel. Imagine you have this big vision for your life that you want and on this side your family gets kidnapped and if you don't do something, they will kill them all. Which of those motivates you more? Right now in this video, probably the one with your family getting kidnapped. It's not trying to harness a lovey dovey feeling. It's harnessing pain. Felt like I had experienced more pain than I had. Good. I saw it as a disadvantage. I saw it as something that I had to overcome. I didn't have this big purpose. I didn't have this thing that I loved. I didn't have this thing I was passionate about. And if I could have just skipped all of that and started the moment I accepted that it was okay to be angry. What wasn't okay was not doing anything about it. While I procrastinated by trying to find purpose, jumping from thing to thing to thing, trying to find the thing that really lit my fire and just accepted that it was totally okay to work my face off in. Disgusting. From my current circumstance and who I was then I would have gotten to where I wanted to go much faster. So many people are believing a lie. They have to be happy, they have to have purpose, passion for what they're doing in order to get out of their situation. They think that they are poor because they don't have passion. That is false. You are poor because you're not doing the activities that make you rich. And you can fuel those activities whatever way you damn well please. And so if you are somebody who is more motivated by the dark side, then lean into the dark side. Unlike the saying the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the equal opposite of that is the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions. You can do good shit with bad motivation. And when I say bad, I mean negative experiences. Pain, anger, etc. I still have tons of motivation from that side. You can use that negative fuel, hit it on speed dial. Every time you're confronted with that thing that you don't want to do, you push through it. And what happens? You do that enough times, you start to get good at the thing. You start seeing the result of of work that has compounded and start to see a purpose or start to see a bigger vision. The big vision for Alex's life until maybe four years ago was don't be broke. What was your mission with Jimbo? My mission was to stop being poor. There are elements of shit that I do that I absolutely love. But there is tons of shit that I do every day that I fucking hate. I just don't hate it more than I hate the alternative. And the richest people in the world, they all say it's not about the money. Because if it's about the money, you stop the moment you have enough. The people with the wealthiest in the world have the three things in common. They have the big goal, they have massive fears about never being enough. And then they have impulse control to stay on goal. And oftentimes that impulse control comes from right. As you approach the guardrail, looking over the edge and imagining what it would be like to have your friends tell you that you were a failure, or have them laugh behind your back or talk down about you, or have your parents when they're introducing you as their fun loving kid. You know he's still figuring himself out. That is what would crush me. The boring shit that you have to do is not fun. Jeff Bezos talks about overhead in business. There's tons of things that you have to do and be willing to do that you do not enjoy. The question is whether you do not enjoy them more than you do not enjoy the pain that you are going away from. As long as the pain of moving forward is less than the pain of going back and the pain that you imagine from not taking the action that you know should be taking, then you can use that energy as the single fuel that you can stay on path for an extended period of time. I'm writing my book right now. I'm on the 11th draft. Like, there is no feeling that makes me more sick than the idea that I could have done more. The pain of the idea of that book not doing well or that book leading to people being like, I don't think he tried as hard. That is the thing that hurts so much more than going from the top yet again. To make another video, to make another article, to make another short, to. To make another fucking chapter revision yet again. So that when I do launch it, I think to myself, I literally exhausted every option on this. One of the sayings that I live by is that I will not do my best. I will do what is required. And the difference between what your best is and what is required is the difference between what you think your real best is and what your actual best is. And what your actual best is is the thing that you would do to prevent everyone you know from dying. What people care about is the outcome. What you put out in the world now, why you do it, what fuels you, that's your business. And so if you are in one of these situations and you can't find that purpose, you can't find that passion, cool, but it doesn't give you permission to not be successful.
