15 Brutal Truths I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 20

No matter what your goal is, you will suffer to achieve it. So pick a goal that's big enough it's worth suffering for. I'm Alex Hormozi. I've been in business 14 years, and just a few months ago, I broke the world record for the fastest-selling nonfiction book in history and generated over $105 million in book sales within 72 hours. And I've distilled everything I've learned from that experience and a decade of building businesses into only lessons that truly matter for achieving big-ass goals. Starting with number 1, Poor people suffer. Rich people suffer. Single people suffer. Married people suffer. Entrepreneurs suffer. Employees suffer. Suffering is a fixed cost of life. So pick a life, pick a goal worth suffering for. Your business will be painful when it's shrinking. It will be painful when it's plateauing. It will be painful when it's growing. And so the biggest alpha that we can generate as entrepreneurs or as human beings is picking destinations that we believe are meaningful enough for us to get through the hard times, right? I think it was Viktor Frankl who said, "A man who has a big enough why can bear almost any how," right? And so the idea is that the how, we know it's fixed, it will suck. It will suck. And the flavor of sucking will change. Sometimes it will manifest as uncertainty. It will come in because you don't know what you have to do, but you have to take action either way. You know you have to do something, you don't know what to do. And so you have this fixed cost that you will incur for taking this action, for spending this money for making this bet, but the casino table has odds that aren't predetermined. You don't know if you put it on 32 you get 30x, if you put it on red you get double, right? You don't know that. You don't know it. And so you basically just have to put your chips on the table and hope. And that consistent process of making bets with uncertain payoffs is incredibly painful. It's almost the antithesis of what allows you to survive. And so you have to go against your human instinct of surviving to make it through in business. Because if you had that instinct naturally, you'd say, oh, these berries, I'm just going to go eat them. And then you eat them. So variable. And then you die and then your genes wouldn't proliferate. And so the genes that we have are literally meant for us to survive, not for us to build big businesses, because the entire process is horrible. This ties directly into something that I mentioned at the start of this, which is that no matter what your goal is, you will suffer in order to achieve it. Right? So just pick one that is big enough that it's worth suffering for. The other part of that pain, so one is uncertainty. Some of the other pain is from outside people, right? If you do nothing or you do anything, people will criticize you. They'll criticize you if you do nothing. Like, think about it. If you do, ah, he doesn't do anything, you'll get criticism. If you do anything, they're like, oh, he's doing this, look how stupid it is. People will criticize you. So the idea is do things that it is worth being criticized for you. And to me, pursuing goals, my own goals, is worth being criticized for. Like, if you believe that you want to make this difference, make this change, help people out in some specific way— I think Alex Becker said this, and I just love this. He's like, you have to embrace the cringe. Whenever you start at anything, you will suck and you will be embarrassing. You will look back at yourself and you will be embarrassed. Think about how you were as a toddler. Think about how embarrassing you are probably to your parents, or were to your parents when you were a child learning how to be a human. It doesn't mean that being human and not living is not worth doing. It just means that you have to go through that phase. Big picture number 1 is that the cost of the suffering is fixed. And what's beautiful about that is like, what we're looking for is arbitrage in the difference between our suffering and what we get for it. But the beauty is our suffering is relatively fixed. Life is hard. But what we get for our lives is what we get to pick. And I think that's pretty cool. Like, we get to pick how big we want our goals to be. And so this fixed cost, like, let's say someone says to you, whatever your life savings is, whatever the amount is, your life savings is a lot of money to you. It's your life savings. If someone says, I'm going to take your life savings and you get one thing, wouldn't you make that one thing worth giving your life savings for? And so it's the same idea as that, like, your cost is going to be suffering. It's going to be uncertainty. It's going to be criticism. It's going to be mistakes. It's going to be failures. It's going to be feeling stupid. It's going to be looking cringe. It's going to be being embarrassed. That's your cost. And so the question is, most people trade it for a bag of chips. They trade it for Netflix. They trade it for staying in on the weekend. Right? They trade it for sleeping in. And that's why it feels even worse. Because you traded your life savings, you traded your life for something that wasn't worth it. And so we can't control this one, but we can control this one. And I think that's the value. So it brings me to my second thing. You can beat 99% of people if you can master the shame of rejection, the boredom of repetition, and the pain of feedback. You could be almost anyone to anything if you're willing to fail 20 times in a row, look stupid in front of people that you care about, and keep going long after it stopped being convenient. So let me unpack that for a second. In 20 hours, most people can achieve a base level of competence in just about any skill. And that, like, that includes money-making skills. That's what's crazy. Like, you want to learn sales? Your first 20 hours of sales, you will learn more about sales than all of the videos and all the books you've ever read. Because you have so much more feedback because you're actually doing it. That's the thing is that you need feedback cycles to learn. And learning for everyone, same condition, new behavior. So if you watch more videos but your conditions are the same and your behavior does not change, you entertained yourself. You did not educate yourself. Learning only manifests with a change in behavior in the same conditions. And so if you're going to consume stuff, you have to act on it in order for learning to occur. And so I say this because as somebody who once was a wantrepreneur who liked to tickle my ears with different books and self-help stuff, I realized one day, this was when I was 21 or 22, I had read like 14 self-help books over like a quarter. And I was like, I'm going to read a book a week, that whole thing, right? And I realized at the end of the 14 books, I was in the same job, working in the same city, and nothing in my life had changed. And so I was like, well then what was the outcome of those books? What was the point of reading them? And then I was like, oh, if I don't do anything, nothing's going to happen. And so then at that point, I then vowed that the next book that I read, I would do everything in the book. And until I had done that, I wouldn't read another book. And then I quit my job and I drove across the country and then a lot of things changed. Right? But I say that because some of you guys are in that boat. But it scales all the way up. You can change your entire bloodline the moment you realize that what you do next always matters more than what you did last. And so even though I'd read 14 books in a row, it doesn't mean that on my 15th book, or your 15th book, or your 15th video, or 500th video, that what you choose to do after that can literally change and can overcome, can supersede everything that came before it. And I think if that's not an inspiring message, I don't know what is. And so I saw this tweet the other day by Chimp. So Chimp, what up? Maybe you'll see this. But this is what he or she said. The past 9 years feels entirely wasted, to be honest. I was 23. This year I turned 32. No job, no wife, No kids, no generational wealth. Like I promised myself that it would all be worth it. I just fumbled my 20s chasing imaginary numbers on the internet. What the fuck? So I read this and I think, I think it hit me when I was scrolling on X. And the thing is, is that like if you ask high school seniors which of them believes that they will be a millionaire by 25, it's over 50%. And to me, that demonstrates a huge amount of delusion. People have no idea what it takes. And to the same degree, the fact that governments, you know, will give $100,000, $200,000 loans to people who've never made money in their lives to earn a degree that has no earning power anymore at all is unbelievably irresponsible and arguably unethical because you're talking to somebody who barely barely has any life experience. When I think about that last line of, I just fumbled my 20s chasing imaginary numbers on the internet, I can promise everybody who's listening to this that in every realm of human endeavor, there is a significant amount of volume that is required in order to unlock a new skill. The amount of volume is different by person. Some people learn fast, some people learn slow, but everyone learns eventually.. And so if you want to take the position that you will learn eventually, no matter how bad your genetics, no matter how bad your upbringing is, which is the position that I prefer because it's under your control, then you just have to do so much volume that it is unreasonable that you fail. And so I see this and say like, I fumbled my 20s chasing imaginary numbers. To me, I hear that and I think like, you don't have a wife. How many dates did you go on? Did you go on 10? Did you go on 100? Did you go on 500? Now you might think to yourself, wait, well, I can't even get dates. Then I would say, okay, how many girls did you ask out? 1 a day? 5 a day? 10 a day? Well, oh, I don't leave my house. Okay. How many times do you leave your house a day? Right? Like all of these things can be solved with volume. And it's just that like, it's just people radically underestimate how much, how many repetitions it takes to get good. Like people saw the presentation that I gave at the book launch and were like, oh, You know, Alex is such a natural. Like, if I've posted some of my early videos, I do not sound natural. Like, this does not sound good. I do not sound cool. I have virtually no achievements to my name now at that point. And so one thing I will say in terms of having some level of confidence is this: extrapolate your past success of any kind to your next success. So what does that mean? Like if you were good at one subject in school, then it's like, okay, if I was good at that subject, then I can be good at all the subjects. And then once you're good at all the subjects, it's like, okay, well, I did, I did pretty well in that grade, then I can do well in all the grades. And then once you do well in all the grades, then you graduate and you're like, well, if I did well in all the grades, I could probably, I could probably do well at working out and getting in shape. I mean, there's no reason I, I can apply all that work here and I can't apply that work here. And then all of a sudden you're like, well, you know, I'm not rich, but like I'm in shape and I did well in school. And so I can apply that work ethic and that thinking of just doing repetitions, doing the studying, doing the work that I'll be able to figure out this new job or I'll figure out this new role or I'll figure out this new AI system, whatever it is. And I think I could apply that to this. And so fundamentally what separates humans from other animals is the ability to apply the transitive property. If A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C. That transition is what separates humans from everything else on Earth. Just being able to say, oh, then A equals C if A equals B and B equals C. And so the idea is that we have generalizable skills. You can learn how to work hard at anything. And just about everyone here has worked hard at something. Maybe it was video games, Maybe it was one particular course in one particular year for one particular teacher, but you have done something. And the idea is to take that something and say, because I did it that time, I can do it again. And to be able to consistently apply that, and then what happens is you create this snowball until eventually you have this feeling that you walk in a room and you're like, I am inevitable. I may not get it the first time, but I will fucking get it because I will either die or I will figure it out, and I've got a lot of life left to live. So if you're under 30 and you have no responsibilities, I recommend working as many hours per week as humanly possible because you will never be able to work this hard again. And the compounding effects of a few years of hard work like this can set you up for your life for decades. And this is what I think people miss out on. It's like we have this, we have this crescendo, we have this early part of the skill gap. It's like, why would we not want to shovel as much towards that as we can? Now listen, I want to be very clear. If you were like, I love my life the way it is, then you won. You're great. Like, hallelujah. I'm like, I'm on your team. You've already won. Teach the world. All right? But for everyone who's dissatisfied with where you're at, and if you don't have these responsibilities, if you're like, well, I have 3 kids, it's like, okay, then you have trade-offs. I mean, straight up, you've got trades.. But if you don't have those responsibilities and you do have the time and you do have the energy and you are not happy with where you are, or rather you would like it to be better, your business to be better, your career to be better, whatever it is, why not give this time and this energy? Because that is the time you have it. You will never have fewer responsibilities than you have now. And I think it's worth digging the well before you're thirsty because having to do that later, not to say impossible, just harder. And to be clear, some of you guys are in that position. You're like, dude, I got a wife and kids and now I'm going to start my thing. Amazing. It's going to be harder for you. Here's the plus side. You got more experience so you can be more strategic with your effort. That's the pro. You look at every pro athlete, it's like by the end of their careers, they're conserving their energy better. They make the right, you know, they strike at the right times. Their technique is better, right? But they don't have the sheer power. They don't have the sheer strength they had, their quickness. Flexibility they had in their youth. And that's what expands people's careers because in the youth, like, you don't have the experience, you don't have the technique, you don't have this, but you have all these other things. And that's what creates longer and it changes how people fight, how people do anything. And so every position has advantages and disadvantages. And so I'll say this one other point and then I'll move my next point, which is this: every position on the board has an advantage, right? If you have nothing to lose, then you have nothing to lose. If you're like, I have nothing, it means you have nothing to lose. I don't know how to say that differently. And see, the idea that you are like, you were in the position where you can literally take endless, unlimited lottery tickets from life, which means you try it and you try and you try and you try because your downside is zero. You have nothing to lose. And so fear comes from having something to lose. And so in order to be fearless, we have to come to the realization that nothing in this world belonged to you to begin with. Like, we're just passersby. Even if you accumulate whatever assets you think you are, you just push your chips back at the end of the game anyways. And so, like, it's just the game. And so you're somebody who has no chips. But the one thing that's different about poker versus real life is that the chips you get get replenished every day with the minutes of time that you have. And so you could run out of chips, but you still have time. Now, if you run out of chips in the real life, out of coins, right? Game over. But until that day, you can play every day. And I think that when you have a capped downside and uncapped upside, that is the recipe for opportunity. Which brings me to the next point, which is that entrepreneurship is one of the greatest vehicles of personal development because I— because it forces you to confront every weakness that you've been avoiding. The market Your customers, your competitors won't let you hide from yourself. And 10 out of 10 times, the person limiting the business, limiting your growth, is you. Real, right? Like entrepreneurship, like the reason that I'm such a fan of this and why I talk about it so much for people who are, you know, in the game or not in the game is that like the amount I've grown as an entrepreneur versus when I was not an entrepreneur, it pales in comparison because people want to protect your feelings, your friends, your family. They They don't want you to feel bad. The market does not care. And if you want truth, the market will give you the truth. And as long as you can humble yourself and listen to the market, it will tell you where you suck. If I made content that no one liked, I would have to change, right? I'd have to change what I was doing. And if you make products that no one wants to buy, you have to change what you're doing. If when you get in front of somebody and no one wants to buy, you have to change what you're saying, period. But if you go and do that in front of your mom, she's gonna be like, great job, Timmy. It was really good, really good, great job. So it just fluffs you, it's not real. And so I think that over time what happens is people end up optimizing towards real, reality, truth. And I think entrepreneurship is one of the best vehicles for that. So one of the next issues is that like most people think the hard part is getting started, but the hard part is continuing to do the work when the excitement wears off. And the grind, the repetitions, the volume without variety feels hopeless. Your inability to work without reward for an extended period of time will hurt your potential far more than your lack of talent. Real. Because the most dangerous person in the world is one who continues to show up every day, even when the rewards are not guaranteed. Your potential is determined by the amount of uncertainty that you're able to tolerate and how long you can tolerate it for. This is what people miss. Like, if you want to be dangerous in any domain, your potential is determined by how much uncertainty that you can tolerate. How much can you deal with? How much can you take and how long you can take it for? So Sam Altman said this from OpenAI. He said, I still think one of the last alphas that exist in terms of a superior return on effort is long-term thinking. He said, because so few people are willing to do it. Actually think in terms of 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Most people can't. And I get that you can't have a vision if you have bills to pay, if rent is due. I understand that. And so this is why I'm such an advocate of like, get yourself out of the hole as fast as humanly possible. Like, do whatever you got to do to get your oxygen mask on. Work 3 jobs, right? Do your main thing, get your side thing going, right? Do whatever it takes so that you can get above that. Just get your head above water. At that point, options open up. And so one of the difficult parts of living in general, and so somebody asked for a definition, I'll give you one, is that if you feel sad right now, it's because sadness comes from a perceived lack of options. It's why it feels so hopeless. Because you don't know what to do. And typically you don't know what to do because you have defined rules that you arbitrarily have chosen to live by. You have seen consequences that are bearable as unbearable. I could never say that to my parents. I could never leave my friends. I could never leave this city. You say these nevers, these absolutes. It would be impossible for me. But of course, that's not true. What it really means is that you are unwilling to make a trade. When you are sad or you feel bad about your existing circumstance, the question to ask is, what trade am I knowingly or unknowingly unwilling to make? Because there are always more options. I think Harvey from Suits, who's like the big lawyer, he says, someone points a gun in your face, what do you do? He says it to his mentee. I think his name is Mike. And he says, I don't know, you just, you know, do what they tell you to do. He said, no. He's like, there's 100 things that you can do. He's like, you can grab the gun, you can shout, you can ask for help. He's like, there's 100 things that you can do, but sadness comes from the perceived lack of options, not lack of options, from the perceived lack of options. And so the big point here is that you can create options for yourself by changing the trades that you're willing to make. Being willing to tolerate things that you were beforehand unwilling to tolerate. I try to share the things that have helped me, and I get a lot of messages when I talk about that stuff, but I also get the amount of just like victimhood. It spikes with anything related to that stuff. I say this as someone who had a family who struggled with mental health. I wholeheartedly understand. The struggle. And I share this because it is what helped me. And like when I talk about options, like the perceived lack of options, like when I am sad and I get sad and I think part of that is genetic, I think to myself like, what trades am I unwilling to make? What, what impossibilities am I claiming are impossible but aren't? And then what is the consequence of that? Because fear only exists in the vague, not in the specific. And so when I want to walk myself down an uncomfortable path, I start playing out, but no, no, what would it really look like? Okay, let's say I could never disappoint my parents. No, no, but what would it really look like? I would go there and I would say I was leaving. And then what would happen? They would block me and I'd have to physically fight them to get out of the house. Okay, am I willing to do that or die? Well, I'd prefer to stay alive, and so I'll do that. And so if I had to fight them, I would fight my way out. Okay. But assuming they didn't want to have a physical altercation with me, what then would happen? Well, they probably wouldn't talk to me. Okay. Well, there's probably been times in my life where that was a nice thing. Okay. So maybe that's not so bad. What else would happen? You wouldn't be able to come home for holidays. It's not so bad either. I mean, I can, I can eat, I can do a Friendsgiving instead of a Thanksgiving. Like Christmas, I can celebrate elsewhere. That's not a huge deal. Okay. You say, okay, so the cost of my dreams is not getting texts from my parents and not being able to have specific foods on specific days of the year. That's what I'm unwilling to suffer. That's what I'm unwilling to trade, that terrible experience. And I think when we frame those things in the specific, all of a sudden these fears we have around the decisions, the actions we know we need to take but aren't, all of a sudden begin to melt away. And I think that is where the chains we put on ourselves get broken. People underestimate how much effort it takes to stick with one thing rather than jumping to the next shiny opportunity every 6 months. The price of wanting to be good at everything is being good at nothing. This happens at all stages in business. So being good at everything versus being good at nothing, typically you could think about that as a business owner in terms of the number of services, the number of products that you try to provide, the number of SKUs, because you're like, well, "Well, they want this, well, they want this, they want this." The thing is, is that if you give customers everything they want, they will create their own demise. Nobody wants a thing that has everything. It doesn't work. Right? This is where simplicity, this is where design, this is where elegance, this is removing friction. All of these things matter, but they are strategies, they are decisions, and decisions comes from the Latin, which means dicidere, which means to cut off, which means which path do we remove when we make decisions? And when people are afraid of making decisions, they say yes to everything. Because they're so afraid of saying no. And so the effort that it takes to compound is the length of time you have to say no to everything else. It is the paths untaken, the opportunity that you believe in your mind, imaginarily, that you were missing out on, is the price of getting good at any one thing. And most people can't succeed on whatever they're going for if you just give it 6 months. 100 days. That's less than 6 months. But if you just did one thing for that period of time, you'd be amazed at what can happen. There is a company that is beating Y Combinator in terms of its returns. It's called HF0. They like tripled Y Combinator's returns. Let me tell you their operating model. So first off, of course, they've got a lot of founders that apply because they now have reputation. But I think something in the neighborhood of— they promise like the average company that like 70% of their companies get to $2 million in ARR within 12 weeks. Which is pretty crazy, right? 70%, very high success rate. So how are they able to do this? This is what they've operationalized. They operationalize putting someone in a hole and not letting anything bother them. So this is a residence. People fly out, founders fly out, they go in these windowless rooms in the basement and they take care of literally everything that the founder has and they remove every distraction. And so the only thing that they have to confront is the work in front of them. And so what they have found is that the compounding effect of having full context of big hard problems in your head where you don't have to switch contexts because you have to take a call or do a meeting or someone says something mean to you online, where you actually can just wade through and swim through these complex problems, the compounding returns that comes from that time of uninterrupted flow, that is where huge amounts of value get created. And it is impossible to do that if every 6 months you change your mind. You get lucky by staying in the game long enough for luck to find you. You cannot beat someone who has already decided that they will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes. And so that person, if anyone could do it, it might as well be you. At least that is how I think through these things. Because there's really only one belief that you need to win, which is belief in your ability to figure it out. That's it. Start and you'll figure out the rest. Because sometimes you have to be the only one who believes in you. And we are rewarded as entrepreneurs and human beings for believing in ourselves more than other people do. Like that is, that is the gift that we get. And that is why entrepreneurs earn disproportionately more than others. And not all entrepreneurs, In fact, the vast majority of entrepreneurs make less. But there are a select few entrepreneurs who make significantly more. And it's because they were able to stick with the uncommon path for an extended period of time, long after it made sense reasonably for them to stop, said no to imaginary opportunities in their minds, and were willing to make trades that other people were not. And so right now, everything that we want in our lives is a few trades away from where we currently are. It's just that the trades that we have to make are trades that are so deeply embedded in our belief system that we don't even see them as possibilities. And so one of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Orson Scott Card. He's the, he's the writer of Ender's Game. This is my adaptation. So paraphrasing, we question all of our beliefs except for those that we truly believe. And those we never think to question. And so the reason that sadness is a perceived lack of options is it means that we have beliefs that are so deeply ingrained in us that we aren't even cognizant. We are not even conscious of the fact that we believe these things so deeply because they are so embedded in our reality that we cannot see reality without them. And this is why, like, a great amount of my time has been dedicated to defining terms and defining words so that I could try and see reality more clearly. And I think that if you see someone who's able to consistently get what they want, it's because they're able to make better trades or better bets than you are. And so it is always worth learning from anyone who gets what they want because you can model aspects of their behavior and then more importantly, aspects of the weights that they put on decision-making to predict outcomes. Because the better you get at that, the more you get what you want. And if you don't have what you want, then that is the skill deficiency, is that you do not see reality as it is. You see reality as you want it to be, which is not reality. It is distortion. I'll leave you guys with that. That is my, that is my two cents on, on some of the hard, the hardness of getting where you want to go. And hopefully that was, that was helpful for at least one person.