Brutally Honest Advice To Achieve Your Goals
In this extensive video Alex Hormozi shares the hard‑earned lessons from 14 years of selling that explain why many entrepreneurs fail to make money: they use the wrong words or deliver them with the wrong tone. He first outlines a concrete sales script framework (problem → overview → past experience → vacation pitch → objection handling → reinforcement) and then details the three immutable elements of a "sales tone" – volume, speaking speed (135‑185 wpm) and clear articulation – that guarantee comprehension. The two variable levers are pauses (short vs. long) and pitch (raising voice to solicit a response). Hormozi provides a memorization method (read‑then‑black‑out‑word technique) to internalize scripts so the salesperson can focus on listening. He then shifts to pricing strategy, arguing that every business must occupy one of two profitable positions: zero customer‑acquisition‑cost, low‑price mass sales, or high‑price, low‑volume, high‑LTV sales. He illustrates this with his own $106 M book launch and with Tesla’s Roadster story. He advocates selling one‑on‑one, unscalable, premium services as a bootstrap lever, showing the math that a tiny number of high‑ticket sales can out‑earn many low‑ticket sales. He introduces three mental frames for designing high‑ticket offers (what‑if scaling, word‑of‑mouth only, and stripping unscalable elements while preserving value). Hormozi also covers discovery tactics ("pull‑teeth" probing), chunking, and using specific punctuation in scripts to cue pauses. The latter part of the video is a mindset primer: suffering is inevitable, pick goals worth the pain, embrace volume‑based repetition, treat every action as a bet with uncertain payoff, and use long‑term thinking to out‑perform. He stresses feedback loops, transitive skill transfer, and the importance of relentless daily execution. The video ends with practical advice for beginners, the danger of chasing perfection, and a call to act now.
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You're not making as much money as you want because you're not saying the right words or saying them the right way. Saying the right words comes down to the correct scripting. Saying them the right way comes down to tone. This video, I'll explain what I've learned over 14 years of selling stuff. Last 8 weeks ago, I just did a launch. We did $106 million in 72 hours. So there's a weekend and we broke the Guinness Book World Record for the fastest selling nonfiction of all time and became 4th of all books of all time, only to Harry Potter 7, 6, and 5. So JK, still the GOAT. Either way, right now you're not making as much money as you want because you're saying things the wrong way. So let me give you an example. So if I said, "She didn't kick his dog," that's different than, "I didn't say," sorry, I'll say it a little bit differently. I'll say one a little bit racier, how about that? I didn't say he hit his wife. I didn't say he hit his wife. I didn't say he hit his wife. I didn't say he hit his wife. 4 different ways of saying that statement all have 4 different, very different meanings. And so if right now you're like, man, I got this script or I wrote this out of how I'm supposed to say this stuff and people aren't buying, it's like because they think that you're telling them that you hit your wife. That's not really it, but they're not doing it because the words you're saying aren't communicating the meaning that you think they are. And so tone is a huge difference in terms of pitching, in terms of a one-to-many setting, or just in a one-on-one conversation. And so a lot of the things that teach around tone are super amorphous and very confusing. And I know this because as I came up, I would hear things like curiosity tone, aggressive tone, laid-back tone, and I was like, what? Does any of this actually mean? And so number one is that in order to do any of this, you must have a script. Duh. If you don't have a script, get a script. I have whole videos on this closer framework and you can walk through that. Clarify whether they're labeled in the problem, overview past experience, sell the vacation with a 3-step pitch, then transition into explaining away their concerns, reinforce the decision. That's what a script looks like. Now, how do you make sure that you have the correct tone? So there's 5 things you can do to modulate your voice, and 3 of them will be fixed, 2 of them are variable. And so when you're writing a script or you're observing somebody who's better than you at selling in order to learn, these are the 5 things that you need to look for. So 3 create what I call sales tone. These are constants. And so number 1 is that you have to speak loud enough that they can hear you. This should sound obvious. If they can't hear you, they can't understand you, they can't buy from you. Number 2, now this matters more in person than it does over the phone, 'cause over the phone they can adjust their volume. In person it matters a lot. The second part of sales tone is that you have to speak slowly enough that they can comprehend you, right? If you talk too fast, trust goes down. If you talk too slow, they think you're an idiot. And so you have to hit the sweet spot, which is typically under 185 words per minute and above 135. So that's a bit of the sweet spot. So for me, I tend to talk fast. And so when I gave my presentation at the book launch, which I referenced earlier, I know that I speak at 185 words per minute. And so I had to reverse engineer when I knew I was going to be dropping the link in order for people to buy at that timestamp, and then knew I had to have this many words prior to that point. And when you get consistent with how you speak, what happens is your sales conversations, if instead of being like, well, this one took an hour and a half and this one took 10 minutes, these start to become more consistent. Now I said the first was that you have to speak loud enough. The second is they have to speak at the right speed that they can actually understand you. The third is that you have to articulate what you're saying so that you're rounding out the words. You're not mumbling. You're actually saying and pronouncing each word clearly. So if you do those three things, you maximize comprehension. Now, someone might hear that and think, oh well, if you do that, you're gonna sound unnatural. Now, the way that you have a, quote, natural tone is to have consistent variability in your speaking cadence. So what does that mean? If you sound like you're reading a script, the reality is it's because you don't know the script well enough, and so you probably are reading the script. If you want to sound like you're not reading a script, Stop reading the fucking script. So how do you do that? So this is scientifically backed. This is one of the fastest ways to memorize anything. So you print out two versions of your script. You're going to have the script you read from, uh, sorry, the script you, uh, correct yourself from, and then the script you read from. So here's how the practice works. This is how I train salespeople. You're going to sit down and you're going to say the entire script. You're going to read it out loud, enunciating every word clearly. That's it. After you finish the entire script, you're going to have one marker. Looks like this. And then you'll cross out one of the words, and then you will read that document again with the word missing. Then when you get to the bottom, you go back to the top and you'll black out a second word, and then you'll read it again. And by the end of this process, you will have repeated the script as many times as there are words in the script. And guess what happens when you do that? At the end, you'll be looking at a blank page that has all blacked out words, and you'll be saying the script. And so you will no longer be saying it, you will be breathing the script, which is the terminology that I use. The reason this is important is because if you are selling, the last thing you should be thinking about is what you're going to say. You should be thinking about what the prospect is saying, because a lot of sales is in your ears, not from your mouth. The person who speaks the most in the sale loses. So the idea here is we want them to give us as much information for us to be on defense as much as possible, which is only possible when you actually know the damn script. And so for us at our team and for you, you have to keep script as gold. It has to be paramount. It has to be— no one is above the script because people fought and died to figure out these words, which we know close prospects. And if you have different people saying different things, You can't do any of this because you can't even do the basics. So it's like trying to build a skyscraper on a foundation of sand. If you can't at least pour concrete, if everyone says the same words, you don't have a team. And the reality is this is 95% of sales teams, and that's why they are not world-class. Now, I said there were 3 things. So number 1, you gotta speak loud enough. Number 2, you gotta speak at the right speed. And number 3, you have to articulate every word so they can understand you. All 3 of these around comprehension. To make sure that it sounds natural, You will just always have variability in how you speak if you are not reading something. If you read something, then you'll sound like you're reading something because you don't actually know the words you're saying and you actually have less variability in your speaking cadence. Now, what are the other two variables that change whereas these three are constant? The first is pauses. So if I want to emphasize a point, What am I going to do? I'm going to pause. And the length of the pause will dictate whether you're just getting someone to draw attention or you're expecting a response. So a short pause is to draw attention to a point you make. So we have 3 things that we do here. We have thing number 1 that's very important, thing number 2 that's very important, and thing number 3 that's very important. And when we pause this way, People know that we're competent, but we're also speaking in a way that they're going to be able to pay attention and hear what we're saying. That's number 1 in terms of the things you change. The way that we document this in the script is that I have single periods on words that might be in the middle of a sentence, or dot-dot-dots to dictate that you have— excuse me, flipped it— dot-dot-dots to dictate that you have shorter periods, and a full period for a full stop. And so when you're looking at a script, you should be able to read it the way you would read anything. If you had a dot, dot, dot, you'd maybe make a point, take a quick pause, and then get to the next point. If you have a period, you have a full stop. Correct? Everyone with me so far? This is how you have the first of the elements that draw attention or get someone to respond. The second is your frequency on your voice. Basically, does your voice go up or does it go down? Now, if we want to have your voice go up, what would we do in normal writing? We would put a question mark, which means I could have a single word with a question mark behind it. I might say, "John?" By saying that, I dictate that I am asking a question and I'm soliciting a response from the person. If I said, "John," I'm clearly not asking for a response right now, and so it would then follow that the most important time to solicit a response from a customer would combine the two things that show the customer that it is their turn to talk back to us. So what would that be? We would have a long pause and we'd raise our voice. AKA, you ask them to buy and you shut the fuck up. That's how it works. So, the reason I'm saying this is because some of you train sales teams, some of you are being trained by a sales manager, and some of this language is very confusing, and it was very confusing to me as I came up as a salesperson. And as somebody who has trained many, many, many salespeople, this is the simplest structure for getting people to consistently speak in a way that gets people to buy. And so as long as you fundamentally know the script, then the volume, the speed, and your articulation should be constant. And the variety that you'll have in terms of your, of your going up and down, that'll happen normally because you actually aren't reading it. The actual words that you'll dictate inside of how you'll notate it on the script so the salesperson knows what to say and how to say it will literally just be these 3 punctuations: a period, a dot dot dot, and a question mark. That's it. And the reason I wanted to make this video is because so many people spout so much bullshit and they say so many words that no one understands that they themselves have never defined. And so they're like curiosity totem. You're like, how do I do that with my voice? Hey, have ambitious tone. What? What does that mean? You can only do a certain number of things with your voice. And so these changes will make sure you say the words the right way. And when you say the right words the right way, you allow the right words to do their full job the way they were intended. And by doing it this way, you will be able to duplicate the same sales process in the same people so you can get more consistent outcomes between reps and within a rep's career. So if they go off track, you as a salesperson or as a sales manager can look at their, can listen to their calls or listen to their sales recordings and say, okay, this is the language I can use to describe the changes they need to make in order to improve their conversions. Hey, you're not speaking loudly enough, which might translate in somebody saying, hey, have more confidence. It's like, what does that mean? Speak louder. Okay, cool. You might be speaking too fast, which they might say, hey, you sound nervous. You're speaking too fast. Just say that. Stop sounding nervous is not helpful. Speak at a slower cadence is helpful. And so I would say that from a tactical perspective, as somebody who's trained a lot of salespeople, the third element I said about enunciating the words, fully pronounce each word will automatically slow someone down who talks too fast when they are nervous. And the point that this is most crucial is in the close. The close is where you need to manage your tone the most, and that's typically where people have the highest emotions, have the highest adrenaline, their cortisol is spiking because their hearts start fluttering 'cause they're like, I hope they buy, I hope they buy, I hope I didn't mess anything up, and then also if someone says no in response, that's when the objection handling comes in. And if you talk too fast, it can come off aggressive, right? If you talk too loud and fast, it sounds aggressive. Talk too slow, you sound, well, you sound slow, I'll just put it that way. All right? And so functionally, big picture here, the reason the close has the most pauses and has the one question that matters is because we wanna make sure that they're paying the most attention when we're asking them to buy. That's the point. Now if you look back at the pitch that I just did in August for the book, you'll notice if you look at the entire 2-hour-plus thing, where is the longest pause? When I ask people to make a decision, to make a purchase. That's where. And so this is just, and also there's tons of research that supports this. There's 3 big meta-analyses, I don't remember where they are from, Columbia is one of them, where they showed that people who wait up to 8 seconds after asking someone to buy closed 30% more sales. Now, the reason that I think this is very important for anybody who sells anyone is that you have to give people time to process, right? Like if you ask a question, they have to have some time to make that decision. So not trying to fill the space and allowing them the room to then respond increases the likelihood they close. Many people will fill the space that you create because they get nervous or feel awkward in situations where no one is talking. If you had to pick between you talking and them talking, which one do you think sells them better? Them talking. Why? Because people believe what they say, they believe very little of what you say. And so the reason that selling is about asking questions to get someone to sell themselves is because the questions lead them to respond, and their responses, it's what sell them on why they should buy your thing. This is the point. And so, when you're in the objection handling parts, so a little bit later, I'll give you one more pro tip, which is outside of the scope of this video, but I think you'll still like it, which is I have spent a long time creating, scripting out overcomes for, hey, I don't have time for this, or hey, it's the wrong time in my life, or I gotta talk to my spouse, I need a decision maker, Give me a little bit of time, which is a different thing, which is a stall. This is really expensive, which almost no one ever says. They just come up with other excuses because this is really expensive is rare. Now they might say it's out of my budget or I can't afford this right now, blah, blah, blah. So there's all these different things that I would try and script to overcome these particular issues. And I will share something with you that was a huge aha moment. The salespeople who close the most sales are the salespeople who ask the most times. Now, in hearing this, the immediate response from a simpleton or a mundane person might then say, "Oh, well, that means that you're asking me to be a really annoying salesperson." No, why would that be? Because the opposite effect of this is that people get annoyed when you ask a lot of times. So it's a balancing act between I have to ask as many times as I can without pissing off the prospect, which then becomes the skill. The reason that I believe all of these overcomes exist is literally just to give you an excuse to ask again. And so if someone says, "I have this issue," and you say, "If we resolved it in this way, would that work?" They might say yes, you say, "Wanna buy?" And so when we do that, it gives a reasonable reason for you to make the ask again, which then translated for me over time to, oh, so I don't even think their response to what they're saying, assuming it's not a true logistical concern of like, I can't make that date or whatever, something like, I have 5 family members and you're trying to sell me a 2-seater and I need the whole 5. Like, if it's not a logistical concern, all the things match their preferences, but then they're just saying decision maker, time, money, et cetera, around the issue. We can just memorize 7 closes that anyone can learn that are universal closes. And so I'll give you an example of one of them, which is whatever reason they say, you would just take that reason and say, well, I think maybe that's the very reason you should do it. So I don't have time right now to do XYZ. It's like, well, I think the fact that you don't have time is probably the reason you need this more than anyone else. I don't have money right now. I think the fact that you don't have money is probably why you need to do this more than anyone else, because if it's a consumer product, I would say then it means you're gonna care more than anyone else because you're gonna be so invested in it. If it's a B2B product, I would say, The reason that you need to do this more than anyone else because you don't have the money is because this is exactly what this B2B thing is supposed to help you with. You don't have enough customers, our SEO's gonna help you. You don't have enough, you don't have the right pricing and packaging, which is what we're gonna help you with. Right, like the problem that you're using to not buy is the problem that we solve through you buying. And so that is one of the 7 universal closes. And so the idea is instead of trying to get really cute with, oh, I wanna overcome this thing, I'm gonna say this and then say that, say that. You're never gonna sell someone by being right, ever. It's kinda like winning an argument. No one wins an argument. And so, like, they will just feel bad and hate you, which you don't want. People don't buy from people they hate. And so the idea is, how can we just reframe and then ask again? And that's it. And I would say from my experience and from looking at the sales data we have, you're only, and as much as people love to obsess about objection handling, myself included earlier in my career, You're really only gonna pick up 20, maybe 30% of your sales after the no. The vast majority of the selling happens prior to the ask. And so that's two components. One is everything prior to them having the conversation with you. All of that has a larger influence on selling than the conversation you have. Now, from the beginning of the conversation to the close, those things absolutely do matter. And typically you'll lose them in discovery. I would say of the places where most people mess up the sale, it's going to be discovery. Most people understand the pitch pretty well. Closing is fundamentally like, if they say no, then you have objection handling. The intro is very short. You should know that like you can breathe it, of course, breathe in the script. But the discovery, the disco, is where most people mess up. And so I'll give you a little pro tip on discovery and then I will wrap this little tonality guide, which is, Fundamentally, what discovery entails is that we're trying to match their problems to our potential products and solutions. That's all we're doing. And so we ask them questions like, so what have you done so far to solve this problem? You know, how long have you been struggling with this XYZ, right? We try to ask them questions so that they can say, I have this problem. That's the whole point. Now, what happens when you have somebody who's either not very communicative or somebody who's not that warm is they're going to give you one-word answers. They're going to give you empty, empty things that don't give you enough ammo, enough meat to then match what they're saying to something that you sell. And so the way that you overcome that is something that I call pulling teeth, which is you say, "Can you give me an example of that?" And the beautiful thing is that you can continue to repeat that basically over and over again. So they say, "Well, you know, business isn't growing." And you're like, "Can you give me an example?" They're like, "Well, I mean, you know, this year is the same as last year." You're like, "Okay." Can you give me a specific example of like what's different between this year and last year? They're like, well, nothing's different between this year and last year. You're like, okay, so breaking down just like specifics here. So I'll alternate between specifics and example, and you just bounce back and forth between those things until eventually they say, you know what, I have the same amount of leads as I did last year. Okay, and here's the point where discovery turns valuable. You say, once you've got that meaty thing, You have to recap or chunk up, which says, okay, so you're not getting leads on a consistent basis, is that right? Yes. So it sounds like, it sounds like, we draw this inference, it sounds like you have a marketing issue. Is that fair to say? Great. What else do you think is holding back your growth? And so we continue this cycle, and then we say, great, can you be more specific? Can you give me an example? Can you be specific? Can you give me another example? You keep doing that until you have 2 to 3 key points that you have chunked up And what do we do when we chunk up to, oh, it sounds like you have a marketing problem, oh, you have a packaging problem. We're gonna chunk up to the things that we sell. And so then when we transition, we say, hey, real quick before I dive in, it sounds like you said you have inconsistent lead flow, so you have some marketing issues we gotta deal with. We need more reliability there. You said you have some, you're not making as much profit as you want per sale, so it sounds like we have some pricing and packaging issues. Is that fair? They say, right, okay. So if we solve this, marketing and pricing and package issue, do you think it would help grow the business? They say yes. Then we've— they've already accepted the sale. Now we say, great, now that you've already agreed that whatever I'm about to sell you, you've already— would help you grow, can I tell you about our thing? Because I think, I think it'd help you out given what you just told me. They'll say yes. Then you say, hey, I'm going to match the problem you just had, which was so that for that marketing issue, because you're getting inconsistent lead flow, do you think it would help if you sat down and talked to one of our marketing directors who did this thing in cancer and was the best marketer in the world and did $106 million for this book launch, do you think he'd be able to help you grow your $1 million business? Yeah, I think that would actually, that probably helped me out. Great, problem one solved. Second issue, but we can't really do the marketing unless we have proper pricing so we can increase the gross margin of the business so we can propel the machine. Is that right? Great, so if we were to have you meet with our pricing and packaging expert who only meets with home services businesses like yours and has done this for 6 years, and it's helped over 2,000 businesses, do you think they'd be able to help you with your pricing and packing issue? They'll say, yeah, I think so. You say, great, then I think you'd be a great fit. Ready to rock and roll? That's it. Now at that point, if you have a quote pitch, then you'd say, hey, the 3 ways we're going to do it is this, this, this. That's going to help you, you know, create or resolve your constraint or resolve your, you know, your overweightness, whatever it is. And then you make the invitation and then you shut up. That's it. And so fundamentally, the reason that you are not making as much money as you want is because you're either saying the wrong words or you're saying them the wrong way. And if you use the tone guide that I just outlined, you'll have the 3 constants, which is you speak loud enough, you speak at the right speed, and you enunciate every word so they can understand you. And then the 2 things that will only be variable in your script will be when you pause and when you raise your voice. That's it. The rest is hullabaloo and mythology, and this is what creates consistent sales. Thank you, my name's Alex Hormozi, I'll be here all week. Is that cool? Was that fun? Was that as good for you as it was for me? Okay. Gotta love, gotta love tonality. Gotta love tonality. Okay, so. That was exciting, right? What's up, Saif Ali? You said hi, I'm saying hi back. Mr. Wannabe, what's going on? Squid Lord, my business is producing revenue, but it's not cash flow positive. We're cutting off two bad partners and taking a business loan just to pay the bills. Any advice on what not to do from here? I don't like taking business loans to pay bills. I'm not a fan of that. I think we need to fix the business. Yeah, that's— that, that feels a very high-risk situation. Okay, uh, where do content creators fit into social media workflows for service-based businesses? Content creators into workflows? I mean, you make content that gets them leads. That would be what I would imagine, and they would pay you to do that. Or you are the business owner, in which case You make content and then you get your leads for yourself. Charles Saloum, how would you sell new mothers on high-end baby clothes? Do you have shitty baby clothes? Does your baby look like it's homeless? Well, no more, because my fancy baby clothes will make your baby look rich because everyone wants fancy baby clothes. There's also an interesting company called Coterie that does this. Um, they do— they have like super luxury diapers. They're like cloth cotton diapers rather than the Synthetics, you can look at their marketing and see how they angle them, by the way. With that being said, it sounds so simple when you explain sales, but somehow I still mess this up. No, dude, you're not practicing enough. So the first part of this I said was you have to write the whole script out, number one. Number two, and assuming that that script works, which I don't know if it does or not, but assuming that script actually is good, how many words are in the script? Let's say you've got 500 words in the script. That means you've read it 500 times. Did you read it 500 times yet? Probably not. And so because of that, you probably struggle to think about what you're going to say next because you're thinking about what you're saying next rather than thinking about what the prospect is saying. And so I'll give you one more tidbit on this, which is that every, every pitch to sell the same prospect is the same pitch up until you explain what they're going to get. And that's because you don't sell the product, you sell the man in front of you. It's like poker. You don't play your hand, you play the person, right? And so if I were to sell somebody who's overweight, the entire front end of the sale is gonna be the same. I'm gonna introduce it the same way, I'm gonna set the agenda, and then I'm gonna say, tell me what you've tried so far. And they're gonna tell me all the same things they've tried so far, and they're gonna tell me all the same struggles that being overweight has caused and created in their life. Only when I transition from there Is it when I match what their problems are to what we sell? And so if I'm selling supplements, then I'm going to have it be more nutrition-oriented. If I'm selling meal plans, then they would be also nutrition-oriented but different. I talk about the deficiencies with supplements. I talk about some of the benefits with nutrition plans. I'd say more holistically. If I, if it was like, oh, it's because you don't have a high enough metabolism, the only way we can do that is through exercise. In the long term, we got to get you to gain some muscle. So whatever it is, the front end is going to be the same. And that's where most people mess up the sale. And so the whole, like, sell me this pen idea— you never sell a pen. You ask a prospect what is going on in their lives, and then if the pen matches their needs, you sell the pen. And really, you present the pen as the solution to the issue that they're not being respected in a certain way because they're using a Bic rather than a Montblanc. That's the idea. Okay, so with that being said, uh, Alex's brother— thank you, Alfredo— what is your experience on school communities for trades that also require some hands-on? I'm launching my school this month. Um, I actually don't entirely understand the question. Um, if you're saying, can I have something for other tradesmen to learn trades in a community, absolutely. That's very straightforward. It's going to be videos of you showing how to do it and doing it in real world. The alternative is that you could have— you could host events in person, you could host that group digitally and then have those people come out to where you're at, your shop, whatever, and teach them what you're doing. If you're saying, I have a trades and I want to have a community for my customers, then it's going to be more around probably their homes if it's a home service, or their cars if it's a, you know, if it's a car thing. But fundamentally, you're probably going to be more in the community business of like trying to just connect homeowners around things that they find mutually valuable. So I'm not really sure what your community is about, but that's how I think through it. So with that being said, you guys want, uh, y'all are some weirdos. I'm reading these comments. Some of y'all are wild. Okay. All right. So, uh, this one is going to be on, what is this one on? Selling a one-to-one unscalable. Ooh, this'll be a fun one. So this has been top of mind for me. So this is gonna be a good one. And for those of you who do use school, share this video in the school community when it comes out because it 100% applies to many of you guys. All right, you guys ready to rock? Was that first one fun on tonality? Was that good? Yes? All right, let's roll. Let me clear my nostrils because of how nasty my nostrils are, hold on. So I can sound pretty for you guys. Okay. Um, in 2016 I had $1,000 to my name sleeping on a gym floor. 9 years later I broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest selling nonfiction book and generated over $106 million in sales in a weekend. In this video I'm going to show you how I'd build a business if I started all over. So first here's the fundamental principle and how this applies if you're just starting out or you're a current business owner. This is it. Either sell extremely expensive stuff to a select few or sell something super cheap to everyone. The middle is where people die. And so there's only two winning positions in a marketplace. Either you have to have zero CAC, as in you sell to everybody because it costs you almost nothing to get customers, or you sell to a select few and you sell them with infinite LTV. So fundamentally all businesses have the cost of getting customers and what you make from those customers as the core economic arbitrage that makes a business a business. You have a more efficient way of taking resources and allocating them to get superior throughput on the other side. That's literally what a business is. I have labor that costs me this much, and when I combine this labor in a specific way or combine these, these raw materials in a specific way, the sum of the parts is greater than— or the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, right? What I can create with them is worth more. Now, Why did I start with sell really expensive stuff or sell really cheap stuff? Let's dive in. So having worked with thousands of businesses now, I can tell you that it is significantly easier when you're starting to sell extremely expensive to a select few. And the reason for that is that you have to make enough money to be able to serve the masses. So what do I mean by that? So if you look at Tesla as a great case study for this, Tesla started with a $250,000, uh, Roadster., right? Clearly selling to a select few. And it was like a beta test car. So like, it definitely wasn't like completely street ready, all this stuff. But from the few that they were able to make, they were able to get enough money or enough proof of concept to then eventually get to making the S, right? And then after making the S for a few years, then they were able to work their way down and make the Model Y and then eventually the Model 3, right? And so the idea is that you start high, And then you can work your way down. And so despite what most people believe, one of the simplest ways to create an expensive offer is to sell your time one-on-one, even if it's unscalable. Now I'll give you a personal story and then I'm gonna sell you on why I think this is actually useful. So when I started my personal training business, which was a gym on Huntington Beach, um, I had a client who wanted personal training. Now my gym wasn't a personal training gym. It was a large group training and semi-private training gym. I did all group. There wasn't any one-on-one. But this one guy got referred to me because he had some like specific mobility things and like whatever. He liked me and so he ended up doing personal training with me. Now this guy would do 5 days a week of 90-minute training sessions, which is huge for a personal trainer, right? So I'm making, I think I was charging $125 an hour or something. So I was getting almost like $180 a day for that whole period. So I just remember that I got something in the neighborhood of like $4,000 or $5,000 a month in cash. He paid me in cash, it was amazing. That I would get per month from this one client. And the thing is, is that I had my business to work on and all this other stuff, and he would come in the middle of the day because it was between my sessions where I could do this one training thing. And him— me having that one-on-one time gave me the cash flow that I needed, nothing from the business, so I could just keep reinvesting the business's money to growing it faster. And so a lot of people have this fear around like, oh, it's not scalable. It's like, it doesn't have to be scalable. Right? Like, like when I speak to business owners, they have a lot of limiting beliefs around charging one, you know, charging a lot of money or selling their time. And so I want to drive this point home and give you a lot of reasons to show why it is superior, especially when you're starting out, to sell your time one-on-one, even if it is unscalable. So let me kind of sell you on this. So number one is that you will learn more from fewer high-value clients. Alright, and if you're around those higher value clients, you will work with better people and it will shift your belief set about who really is in the market. Anybody who sold cheap stuff for a long period of time assumes everyone is broke, right? Like if you've ever struggled to sell a $50 membership, as someone who has, you then— it's insane when all of a sudden someone's like, here's 15 grand. You're like, what just happened? $15,000, that's 3,000 $50 sales that I'd have to make in order to get $15,000. That's how absurd that is. But when that happens again and again, it shifts how you see money and what services you think about creating. The next one that people get hung up on is like, well, I don't want to sell my time because selling your time is what poor people do. Well, let me sell you on a— let me learn you some stuff, all right? Which is every single person on planet Earth earns money per hour. They just don't necessarily denote it per hour, but all you have to do is take what you made last year, divided by 2,000, and guess what? Voila, you have your hourly rate, which means you worked 40 hours a week, assuming you work 40. And so even if you work project-wise, you spent a certain amount of time on that project and you were remunerated, a little fancy word. You got paid based on that work. And so even something like an investment where people are like, well, You know, investors don't trade their time for money. Of course they do, because you think, oh, Warren Buffett bought this company, he just wrote a check and then that was it. He was done. But what we're not taking into consideration is the amount of analysis that he does on macro markets, the amount of research that he's doing on a regular basis, the thousand other deals that he did all the due diligence on, then to say no, to only decide to do this one deal. So when you take all of that work in aggregate, for sure he's working. Now after he makes the investment, assuming he has no effort inside of it, which isn't always true, but assuming he had none, then at that point he would get increasingly larger returns, but still on a fixed amount of time that he put in. So the proof point is you live in time and you earn money in time, which means everyone has an hourly rate. And so the idea here is that as long as the thing that you sell your hourly rate for is more than you currently own, you will make more. Next point, when you are doing one-on-one, especially in the beginning, you have significantly more flexibility in delivery. And so that means because it's one-on-one, you can change things on the fly. And also when you have fewer clients, you can make these kind of quick iterations. So this kind of relates back to the first point of like you learn a lot faster when you can just have these tiny little pivots. You don't have to change the systems, you have to retrain staff, you don't have to look, you have to recode. You don't have to have the scalable solution fixed perfectly. It's a great way to beta test ideas. The next one is that because you can still cap the time that you choose to spend with clients, you can still make sure that you're allocating as much time as you need to, to, to, to do everything else. And one of the big lessons that I've learned in terms of making more money is that when you have demand, cut supply. And so when you cut supply, what does that do? Why is, why is the acquisition.com logo two concepts? Leverage, which is a fulcrum, and then a supply-demand curve because those are, in my opinion, the two most powerful concepts in business. And so when you have supply and demand at work, which we do, the reason one-on-one is so powerful is because the supply is so contracted, so fixed, it's so small. And so it forces, as long as you don't have limiting beliefs, which is why I'm trying to make this for you, it forces you to raise your price. And so the next one, and this is controversial, You make the money, nobody else does. If you trade your time for the money, you have 100% margin. It's fantastic. Now some people are like, well, hey, well, my hourly rate— it's not though. You're awake. Your hourly rate is the food that kept you alive. That is your hourly rate. Beyond that, the rest of it goes in your pocket. And so what I think what people lack consideration of is like every business can have 5 one-on-one clients. Now, when you're like, how would I do this in a lawn care business? Well, it's just who's gonna be your account rep. You can say some people get your cell phone and some people get the account rep's phone. Who's gonna lead the, who's gonna actually design the whole garden? Is it just one of my guys or is it gonna be me? There's always an opportunity to make yourself the super premium version of whatever it is that you have. And I so hardcore believe in this because let me give you another benefit of this. When you have a one-on-one, unscalable, super expensive offering, what it does is it also anchors the price for your more scalable, less one-on-one version of whatever it is that you do in whatever service business you have, assuming you're selling services, right? Even if you sell SaaS, software as a service, you can also sell the service for an amount of money. And so you will get higher conversion rates on the— on the base because of the anchor you had above. Now here's the fun part that I, I get excited about. So if you have a rat in a cage, okay, and you have one lever, then there's only one lever that the rat can pull, and they either pull it or don't pull it. Now here's what's cool: when you introduce a second lever, no matter how bad looking it is, covered in poison and smelling bad, the probability that the rat will hit the second lever is above zero. And as soon as you have an option where people can hit the lever, and let's say this lever is a super expensive lever that's greater than zero, why would we not introduce that lever? It's like a lottery ticket that you're taking out on. Maybe one of these customers is going to choose to spend that kind of money. Now the question then comes, and here's, here's a fun one. This is, I want to, I want to break this because I know the next one that comes up, which is it's still just not worth my time, bro. It is worth your time if I give you $1 trillion. And so the idea here is not, is it worth my time? It's you have to fix the price so that it is worth your time. That's the point here. And so we have to fix the price to a degree where you'd say, yeah, I'd happily do it for that. Not you would begrudgingly do it or think to yourself, well, no one would ever buy that or no one ever spend that money. Or I think someone would be crazy. Fine, let them be crazy. Let people live a little bit. Let them be wild. Let them be a little spicy. If they want to pay you more money, You should give them the opportunity to do so. That's the point here. Now, what else happens when you have a super high-ticket, unscalable, premium, one-on-one experience? You lift your entire brand. Because if you charge $10,000 an hour, something absurd, doesn't matter, and the thing that you have is $100, you can then have a very natural narrative of, listen, a lot of people can't afford to work with me one-on-one. That's totally cool. I've taken the The lessons I have here and I put them in a scalable format for everyone. It literally increases the perceived value, not just from the anchor effect, but from the narrative, the association, the branding that occurs as a result. Because even if you charge that and no one ever buys it, they still assume, because that is the narrative and that's what you put in front of them, that that big price tag, the value associated with it still gets transferred to a degree to the lesser thing that you have that might be scalable. Now, hopefully you're digging this, all right? Like, this is a big deal. Like, every business can do this. Like, this is the action step before we get into like tactics on like how we can make something be perceived as more valuable. The action step is this: just have the price listed wherever you sell. And if you don't list it anywhere, say the price when you offer. And here's the thing that people mess up about this. You must confront the high price. You have to confront it. If you just say like, oh yeah, working with one-on-one means like $10,000. But anyway, what most people want to do is— no, you have to— in order for an anchor to work, you have to allow the prospect to make a full consideration of the decision, which means you have to say, hey, would you like to work with me one-on-one? It's $10 grand an hour, right? And that's, I think, the highest likelihood thing that I can do to help you get to where you want to go. And this is what we're gonna do over the next X period of time. Now they're gonna be like— now the thing is, is at that point, what do we do? We shut up. We let them take the next— we let them talk. Why? Because talking might result in them saying yes. And if they say yes, you get money. That's amazing, right? And so we're at this point right now. If they then balk, you say, don't worry, I'm gonna pull out a couple of the components of this and give you this thing that has 90% of of the elements of this first thing, but it's significantly more scalable. How's that work for you? They'll be like, oh my God, thanks so much. This sounds amazing. This is exactly what I need. And they buy. The thing is, is even if, and let me do the math for you, cause this is important. Let's say you have 100 customers who buy your thing. All right? If 2 customers, let's say you have a $100 thing and you have a, let's keep the math simple. And you have a $1,000 thing. Okay? $100 thing, $1,000 thing. So 10X. Okay, add a zero to whatever the core thing is to the more expensive one. You can add more zeros, you have my full permission, but let's start with 10 and let's say of the 100 people, 10 of the 100, so 90% of people buy the $100 thing. If you're like, okay, only 10 people are buying the really expensive thing, what does that do to your business? Guess what it does? It doubles the revenue of your business. And not only that, all of that incremental revenue, the stuff that came from those top 10 people, is 100% margin. So let's say that on your 100 you make, uh, on the 90 people, excuse me, on the $100, uh, that you charge, let's say that you make 40% margin. So you're actually making $40 on those 90 people. So you're making $3,600 in profit off of 90 of your 100 buyers. Now the other 10, you make 10 times $1,000, so you make $10,000. So you actually make 3 times the profit on your expensive thing and 1 times the profit on your cheaper thing. So 3/4 of what you make comes from this thing. That's why people miss it, is they don't get the math behind it. You have the expensive thing because even in tiny, tiny volumes, lots of zeros still add up. And so if you're getting started, I would strongly recommend, if even if you have a scalable thing, even if you're on school, you have a community, you charge $100 a month, whatever it is, Have something that's $1,000 a month. Have something that's $10,000 one time. Have it up there. Just make it available. And when you're thinking about it, have fun with it. Think about the craziest version you possibly can. And so I'm gonna give you 3 different frames to working through this, okay? So the frame number 1 is what if, so we have a 10x, so let's say $100 thing, we have a $1,000 thing. What if we charged $100,000 or $10,000? So 10x or 100x more than your current thing. What would you include? Just go crazy with it. Just think, if instead of $1,000, if someone gave me $100,000, what would I do? Just write down everything you would do and then look at the cost of doing all those things. What you'd be amazed by is many of the things that you have these ideas for don't actually cost that much. And so cross out the ones that have hard costs. And then look at what's left and then say, well, I think I could do that. And then we ask the question, would you be okay doing that for $1,000 or $10,000? You might say like, well, yeah, for 10 grand I would do that. Make it available. The second way to think about this is if I had to make a service or a product that was only grown off of word of mouth alone, meaning I waved a magic wand and the gods of advertising ceased to let anyone, like literally muted you. You could never make a billboard, make an ad, never do outreach, you could do nothing. And all you have is this one customer in front of you. And the only way that you will be able to get more customers is if you get that customer to tell their friends about your stuff. What would that customer's experience, what would the service, what would the components of the offer look like if that's what it was, if that was the requirement? Write down all of that stuff, and if you're willing to do that for a higher price, present it. And an amount greater than zero will say yes. And I'll give you a third frame. This is different than the other two, but I think that's still very valuable when you're thinking through how to make something, um, well, more valuable. Which is this. If you had to, now that we've talked about all the upside value, now let's say that we're back to our, our $100 offer, right? If we had to— let's keep making the $1,000 offer because the numbers will make more sense here. Let's say we're back to a $1,000 offer. If we had to take everything out of it that is unscalable but still make it worth 10 times the value, so now everything unscalable is taken out But we have to make it worth 10 times as much. Now how do we do it? So this gives you 3 different intellectual attack vectors to think through the value creation for making your more expensive, one-on-one, unscalable thing that in many times will make you more money, especially in the beginning, than your less expensive thing. And the other part of this is that it makes for great marketing. One, because you can say, hey, this is one of my clients, one of my private clients, one of my My individual clients, and what that does is people are like, "Oh, this guy must be a little bit, you know, has more authority," right? On top of that, when you share the learnings from those quote private clients, it gives you marketing material to actually talk about, right? And where do you think your best case studies are gonna come from? There, and so you're gonna get amazing case studies, you're gonna have amazing marketing materials in terms of the learnings and lessons that you're gonna have, and then one of the things that I personally prefer is that these people are way cooler, and they will be people that you actually end up being friends with that you like, and they're the ones who actually shift your worldview because you actually will spend more time with these people than all of these people. And that will shift you in the correct direction. Now let's deconstruct value in a tactical way so that we can take that, the 3 frames that I just gave, and do even more with it. So the first thing is, it's like when we're making anything that's extremely valuable, we're not necessarily going to even sell on time, right? Like you might denote it in time if you so desired, but it's more so like sell the very expensive thing. I like one-on-one, time as a component of being very expensive because people all understand what one-on-one means. It's very easy and always inherently valuable because there's a hard cost that everyone can immediately comprehend. So how do we then reverse engineer what someone actually wants? They don't really want your time, they want to buy an outcome. Now why is one-on-one a valuable vehicle? Because the perceived likelihood of achievement when you do something one-on-one in an unscalable way actually goes through the roof. People believe the likelihood that they're going to achieve their outcome goes way up. So if I had a meal plan that I gave you as a PDF, or I said I will talk to you one-on-one every day, the outcome is still I want to lose weight, but the likelihood that they're going to get there is going to be significantly higher. The likelihood, the ease, how easy it is for them— so it's a different vector— that if they get stuck, they're going to have someone they can go to is going to go up. And all of these components, uh, play with one another. Don't be weird. All right, all these have interplay, right? All of these have, um, they're interwoven. Okay, that's right, just get weird. All right, all these values, uh, getting, getting, getting random on each other. Jesus, here we go. All right, so number one is we have to understand the dream outcome. If you are not speaking in terms of what the person actually wants, you will sell fewer people. And so number one, here are the two steps, very straightforward. Pick the right avatar. Do not try to make your unscalable expensive thing and then think about the person who's currently buying your thing for $100 and think, What would this $100 person be willing to spend $1,000 for? Do not think that likely the person that's going to spend the $1,000 is a different person. So you have to think about that person, not the person underneath. Next, once you have this avatar, they have the money, they feel the pain, they're easy to reach, right? Then we have to think, how can we describe their pain more accurately than they can describe it themselves? And so the big hack, and this is also new with some of the AI stuff that's out there, is Go into the books that people are buying in your niche and then extract the reviews and then get the quotes that are specific to their pain. And so one of the really interesting things about copy is that if you can articulate someone's problem better than they can, they will inherently believe that you can solve it. Now, maybe this is a cognitive bias. I don't know, but I'll say in my personal experience, if some tarot card reader read me exactly how my life is going to the T, I'm going to be like, oh my God, you believe them? Because there's no way someone could know this much about the pain and not know how to solve it. So this is what we're talking about, the dream outcome. It's like, make sure we're talking about the right avatar, about what they really want in the way that resonates with them specifically. Because pain and persuasion only exist in the specific, never the vague. And if you do this successfully, your pain can be a greater motivator, or rather their pain and your description of their pain can be a better motivator of persuasion and action than a greater promise. So that's the outcome side. Underneath of that, we have perceived lack of achievement, which I touched on briefly within the vehicle of one-on-one. But within this case, your reputation over time acts as almost an implied guarantee. And the nature of the delivery also has some level of implication that they're going to get the completeness of you. And so as long as they believe you are competent, number one, and two, have strong intention to help, the likelihood that they believe that giving you money will help them get what they want goes really high. And so that's why I like one-on-one. That's why I like unscalable. And to be clear, just cap it. It doesn't have to do it all the time because that will get in your way long term. But in the short term, it can, it can allow you to live on this and then cash flow all the growth. And so this is me giving you kind of like the, the bootstrap strategies to growing a big business is like be willing to take 5, 10% of your time, charge 10 times more, and make enough income from that that you can take all the other money and go aggressive, go on the offense with it. So third one is speed. Now if I had to pick one thing, one that I could do to maximize persuasion? It is speed, or the inverse, latency. How do I decrease latency? How do I increase speed so I can make sure the outcome happens as fast as possible? Because latency beats magnitude 7 days a week and twice on Sunday. The reason that Facebook and Instagram and TikTok have you addicted is because of the delay, or the lack thereof, of reinforcement for the actions you take on the platform. And so They don't even pay you to consume their product because they have figured out how to reinforce behavior. And so they've done that because of the speed of reinforcement. And so the reason that this is important is that it will motivate someone's action to buy more than just about anything else. So you're not going to sell someone who's wealthy on how much money you're going to save them. You'll sell someone who's wealthy based on how much time you're going to save them even more. Because money has an implicit value. Their time is the one that over time will become significantly more value than the money. Now of course, they're gonna make that translation, but I'm thinking, I'm giving you a thinking frame of like, if I wanna go after the wealthy, go after their calendar, not their bank account. The bank account will come when you open up calendar space. And so, one of the things that anyone can do to sell that expensive thing is just take whatever the delivery time you currently have is and cut it in half, cut it in two-thirds. And if you have a one-on-one service or a higher tier service that should add a zero or more, you can just say you will always have priority. You will always be first in line. When I have a new thing, you'll be the first one to see it. Whenever there's an emergency, you'll be the first to respond. I'll pull someone off a job to come to your house, right? I'll be the one who personally shows up. All of these things are about speed. You'll never have to wait over a certain period of time. I'll always respond within 60 minutes, always respond same day, whatever that SLA or service level agreement you want to make is. Those things, like, think about the vectors of value and charge for them. Fourth, effort and sacrifice, right? So what does this mean? The higher the number, the more done for you, the more turnkey someone expects something to be. And so the idea is we want to take, we want to go through the customer experience. This is how you reverse engineer ease. You go through the customer experience and you take a note every time you have to do something. Every time. Now you might find out that in order for someone to get the outcome that you want, they might have to take 10,000 actions. It's a lot of actions. And so then what we do is we systematically go and reverse and delete friction point by friction point, actions that they need to take. And so this is the process of, of making an exceptional product. Now it might cost you more money to make this product, which is why you charge more money for it. So if you have, of course there's technology that can automate some of this, but for many services that exist in the real world, which 70% of people or 80% of people in the US at least are service-based businesses, then you're going to spend some more money. Now here's the magic of this. Well, some of my business relies on other vendors or other parties. Guess what happens when you charge 10 times as much? You can pay them more to prioritize your customers. And so this allows you to make your own priority ring on top of that. That allows you to consistently outcompete competition because you pay your vendors, you pay your partners better than anyone else does because you have this service tier. And so the TL;DR big picture is that number one, if you are starting out, selling fewer people is easier. Number 2, when you cap your supply, you can increase your price. Number 3, you will be able to learn more from these few customers than you will from very small interactions with many. Number 4, these customers will, who are wealthier, will expand your horizon of what is possible. Number 5, if you're in a service-based business, there is only one direction that you will go. It is more expensive and it is upmarket. That is how you will measure progress in any service business, period. How can I prove this? Because the other direction means that you're going to go more towards automation because there is a floor on how much you can pay people and there's certainly a floor on how much you can pay really good talent. And if you're in a service business, you're going to want to have the virt— the virtuous cycle of charge more, attract better people so you can charge more, so you can attract better people. That's the game. When you go the other way and try to be a low-cost leader, unless you have automation and hardcore offshoring, and that was day one, the strategy, you're going to be in the middle that dies. And so then finally, there's also a strong narrative that comes from the top down, like the Tesla story. We say, hey, I have my private clients, they are very expensive, you probably can't afford to work with me. Let me give you access in a, in a more democratized way to the findings of this expensive thing, which have anchored my brand. And the sales process so that people are more likely to buy this. Because no matter what, no matter how many customers you have, if you simply make a 10 times more expensive offer, you will have a percentage likelihood that is greater than zero that someone will buy it. And when that happens, you will be reinforced for doing so. And I think you will actually see how powerful adding one, sometimes two zeros to your price tag really is. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Charge more money. Good talk. Was this fun? How do you make 3 fucking from you advice? I don't even know what that means. Mutasem, media buying, you make no sense. Can you share word definitions from your Google spreadsheet? I'm glad you enjoyed my expensive talk. Okay, let's take some— I mean, I can do some definitions. I can do some chitter chatter. Better lessons than my business theory. Thanks, Dajean. I appreciate that. Let's look at Jay Holden. I'm 17, one year left in high school. I want to start a business but not sure what kind or how to begin. Any advice on picking direction starting with Help a Duck? Honestly, go to Skool, skool.com, and just join a group. There's plenty of free groups that are in there for free. You don't even have to start a school community. Like, you can obviously do it, it's $9, but you can join tons of communities on there for free of people who, who have businesses and start businesses and teach about business stuff. You can also watch videos like mine, right? Obviously we have courses on the site which are free, but at some point you have to just Take action. You have to just make a bet. You have to start. And I think the big issue when you're starting out is what I call the fallacy of the perfect pick, which is that you think that if you do enough analysis, you're going to pick so well that it's going to be successful. But the reality is that most paths with enough work will lead to success, and all paths have stuff that suck. And your level of subjective well-being in your life will be relatively fixed with 80% of it being genetic. And so this idea that like, oh, I'm going to be so much happier, or all these other things are, these magical rainbows are going to occur as a result of me making the right pick, is mostly fallacious thinking. And so fundamentally, if you don't like what you're doing, you can change what you're doing and ideally find a business that allows you to do more of the things that you like doing. You will still do lots of things that you hate doing, but at least some of the things you do you will like. And that over time is the shift that you'll make towards building a business that you ultimately like. Now, part of the difficulty of this is that as you scale a business, you'll have to do more and more things that you don't like to do in order to scale it. And so we run into this very difficult contradiction where it's like, I built this business that I liked, but I want to scale the business. And to scale the business, I have to do things that I don't like. And now all of a sudden I don't like the business that I have. It's part of the game. At some point, taken all the way to the natural extreme, you will just own something that makes money. And so this is why all the paths start the same and end the same, which is that you own the thing and the thing makes money and you might be chairman of the board and you have a team of people who are executives who run different functions or different territories that report into you. That's it. And so the idea of like, I don't like this business really means you don't like the current stage of business that you're in, which means that you lack the skills to move to the next stage. Because I promise you, the ultimate stage, the final stage, whether you're starting a SaaS company, whether you're starting e-commerce, whether you're doing a service business, a brick and mortar service business that's national, any of these things all ends in the same place. You own a thing that makes money. And so we have this huge, like, huge amount of pressure that we put on ourselves when we're starting that we have to find this perfect thing, when in reality, like, literally the start game's the same, the end game's the same. It's just the middle that's different. So hopefully that helps you just take the first pick, because the reality is, I probably, I probably message in the chat, but most people in business do not start just one business unless you're Bezos or you're, you're Zuck, you know, and your first one becomes a trillion dollar company. Unless that's you,. But since there's like 10 of those humans on earth, the rest of us, right? The rest of us, um, most people start more than one business because you learn stuff and then you're like, oh, you know what? Now I learned from this and I'm going to use these lessons, start the next thing. Okay. So, uh, with that being said, you will have to go through this very terrible period between that start and that end. Um, and I think I said this at the beginning that, um, people go through cycles. I, the last two videos I made super tactical, one about on tonality in sales. The other one was on selling a really expensive thing, especially if it's unscalable, especially if you're starting out. But this one is dedicated to my— I feel like if I'm Fran on the late night, like, hey, I'm putting this out there to all my mindset, mozy people, all the folks that love the word definitions. This is for you. So if you're going through a hard time, which basically everyone in business is because business Anytime when you're basically— business is, is, is basically always hard. So think about this: if you're growing, you have growing pains and it is painful. If you are shrinking, you have shrinking pains and it is very painful. If you're plateaued, you have plateauing pains. And so basically you're fucked. Business is hard. It's going to suck. It's going to be painful at all stages. Going up, going down, or staying the same. All of them suck. And so having frameworks to think through these things can make it a little bit more bearable. So without further ado, this is for you, my man. I think it was Salim. I think it was who it was. You asked and therefore you shall receive. All right, let's do it. Julian, run it. So I'll make my voice pretty for you guys. 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. And 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 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. That sounded a bit rare. The flavor of how much this, I can't even say, the shades of suck, 50 shades of suck, all right? 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, or 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. And so 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. And so 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 wanna 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. Like, 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. And so that's big picture number 1 is that the cost of the suffering is fixed. We just have to like, 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, is that like, you, your, 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 can beat almost anyone at 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. Most— so 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, that sounds weird, 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 gonna 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'd 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. So number 3, 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. And I don't know if Chimp's a guy or a girl, so I guess we'll see. 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 has any life experience. And so 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? And to be clear, maybe, well, I said Chimps, I didn't say the actual name of the handle, but like, 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, 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? Uh, well, oh, I don't want to 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 much, how many, how many repetitions it takes to get good. Like, people saw the presentation that I gave at the book launch and were like, "Oh, Alex is such a natural." Like, 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? So I tend, and I actually think about this like, well, I won't go in that direction. When I, 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 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 do well at working out and getting in shape. I mean, there's no reason 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, 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 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 here. 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 were 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, the 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 were like, you were in the position where you can literally take endless unlimited lottery tickets from life, which means you try and you try and you try and you try because your downside is zero. You have nothing to lose. And so like, 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. Um, 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, 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 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's— 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 going to 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 the 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. And so 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 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, 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. And what happens is, and I think the reason that like people feel like the only option they have is to like off themselves, is because they just feel like one path is unbearable and all of their things, all of their trades they're unwilling to make. And a Claire, uh, I don't even get into mental health stuff, so I'm not going to. We'll end up clipping that out of the main one. Um, I don't even feel like dealing with the comments, Jesus. But you know, it's, it's fucked for me because I, I try to share the things that have helped me, and, 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. And I say this as someone who had a family who struggled with mental health. Like, I, 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, um, 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? Okay, well, you wouldn't be able to come home for holidays. It's not so bad either. I mean, 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. What else would happen? Again, it's like, 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. And so people underestimate how much effort it takes to stick with one thing. So this is me transitioning back, back to reality. So point, next point. 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. And so 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, 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 where 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's a company that is beating Y Combinator in terms of its returns. It's called HF0. They've 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, they had 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 operationalized 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. And so you will— 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, 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, like, 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 writer of Ender's Game. This is my adaptation, so paraphrasing. We believe— sorry, 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. So anyways, um, hope you guys, uh, when is the definition book coming out? Um, I don't know. I have a full book's worth, that's for sure. Um, I have a lot of them. I had one that came up today, actually. Um, no, I won't, I won't, I won't blast them. I'll, I'll, I'll probably, I'll say, I'll say in the future, I'll say in the future. I had somebody on my team did something I was gonna Zero debt is the goal. Okay, Si, zero debt is the goal. So big picture, if that's the goal, you have to stop spending money and you have to start making money. So let's walk through this for a second. Let's just take the logical extreme. Saving money is a really interesting one because the trades are so clear and yet there's so much emotionality around it. Like, let's say that you have a wife and two kids. I'm not saying you do, but let's say you do. The question is like, is there anywhere on earth that you can live for free? The answer is yes, there is. There's ones provided by the government, and you probably, you know, if you have a parent who might be willing to let you crash, or you have a friend or a friend's family might be willing to let you crash, those are things. Now you might be like, I'm not willing to inconvenience someone like that. Then it's like, fine, that is a trade that you are unwilling to make. And so again, if we can always frame the things that we're not willing to do is trades we're unwilling to make for what we want, then at least you're conscious of that. And then you can at least ask the question like, if I could be debt-free in 12 weeks rather than debt-free in 2 years, would it be worth that, the uncomfortable conversation and having that friend think that I'm lame? For some, I mean, the question is like, how much is your life worth to you? A year and 3 quarters? For a conversation or two of shame? To me, that's not a bad trade. Confrontation or two around that you feel shame and you feel like less than or unworthy to get a year and change back? All day. All day. And so this is the whole thing where ego keeps you poor. Ego prevents you from getting what you want. It's because we're trying to live through other people's eyes of what we want them to think who we are. And it's a farce. It's imaginary. It's not real. And so I'll leave you guys with that. That is my two cents on some of the hardness of getting where you want to go. And hopefully that was helpful for at least one person. Cool. All right. We got on time. We have 10? Oh, 30. Oh, rock and roll. That's before the hard stop. Yeah, rock and roll. Okay. Hmm. Hmm. Nike said it best, just do it. Yeah, I agree with that. And seeing a lot of value out of the stream. Thanks, Metrics. I appreciate that. Mr. Clean, how would you reverse engineer offers in the AI space to conclude what to start pitching? All right. This is a real one. AI. So people are like, how do I make an AI offer everything? Okay. AI does the same stuff humans do, right? Right. So the problems that humans currently solve for other humans, are the same problems AI solves for other humans. No one wants to buy AI. People want to buy the solutions AI provides. Just like you don't buy drills, you buy holes. The drill is the vehicle for getting the holes. And so if you want to sell AI stuff or AI solutions or AI implementations, You don't even need to mention AI. You just need to say the benefit of the experience they will have after AI is installed. Said differently, hey, are you having trouble getting back to all of your leads? Do sometimes your front desk miss inbound calls with highly qualified customers that you then lose to your competition? If you had to roughly estimate how many sales per month you're missing because the phone isn't getting picked up fast enough, people aren't getting responded to on time, and, uh, you're not getting enough information per customer on a timely basis. That person might say, probably $5,000 a month. You say, okay, if I could take care of that for you, uh, for $5,000 one time, would that be worth it for you? And they might say yes. And you say, I want to be clear, if I can truly solve this and it takes me less than 20 minutes to install, will you be upset about that? You still get all the benefits. No, if you can do it in 20 minutes, I'll pay even more. Fantastic. What I'm going to do is train an AI agent and I'm going to have it pick up all your phone calls. You already have all your recordings that I'm going to use to train it on, and I'm going to do all that training on my own time. And then I'm just going to install it. And as long as you like the way it's picking up and that it beats the performance of your existing front desk girl or guy, will you be— will that be satisfactory? Yes. Fantastic. So the point there is that you sell AI by selling the problem it solves like you sell anything else. Don't try and sell AI. No one cares. It's just jargon. And most of the people who are buying it don't even understand it anyways. So just sell what it does. What does it— what's in it for me? Always the, always the best pitch. Okay, let's see. Uh, Alex is right. Just needs to be told again and again. It comes down to the basics and trade-offs. Yes, true. Okay, let's see here. Uh, Marjan, I find it hard to surround myself with people as ambitious as I or more. I know where to look for them. But it's hard getting their attention. Any advice? All right, Marjan, be real with you. It will be easy to get their attention if you succeed. Being ambitious without the actions that come from ambition mean you just have big dreams. And many people have big dreams. What is rare is the people who are willing to suffer the costs of making them into reality. Like, it's the size of your action that determines your outcome, not the size of your dreams. And your ambition is irrelevant unless it's paired with the actions you're willing to back it up with. Okay. James Burkett. Alex, we know the benefits of digital business. Any benefits unique to a physical manufacturing business? I think that in the US there's going to be I think AI will— because so you think fundamentally like this: manufacturing became difficult in the United States because of the cost of labor and because of unions, right? And so it became cheaper to outsource that labor to other countries. Even with tariffs and shipping, it was still cheaper because labor was so much cheaper than it is here. Now, in a world where you have robots that can manufacture everything, it then the cost basis changes materially to number one, hard materials, and number two, energy and power. And so a machine running here to serve businesses here is going to be more efficient than a machine built in China to serve businesses here because you won't have the cost of shipping and you won't have any tariffs associated with delivering to the businesses that are close by. And so do I think that it makes sense in today's day and age to get into or back into manufacturing in the US? I think if you start from the premise, I will have as few humans as possible, then the leverage with technology and automation and AI and robotics, where it is now, I think absolutely there's opportunities there, if that's what you're talking about. Um, how should I do sales for software agency service while working as a full-time software engineer? Um, I think you should probably pick one because both of those are full-time jobs. So I would just do the one that you want to do long-term more. I would, if I had to bet, I would, I mean, I, it depends how good you are at coding, but I would say coding is a skill that takes longer to learn than sales if you were taught well. Most people don't get taught well, which is why sales takes a long time to learn. Um, Alfredo Palacio, Alex, should I sell my kidney? Well, it depends on the price. It depends on who's buying it and depends how many kidneys you have, right? And how many you need. So let's say you have multiple kidneys and someone's willing to give you a trillion dollars for it. In that instance, it might make sense for you to sell the kidney. If you only have one and if you sell it you die, then it probably wouldn't make sense in that condition. Depending on maybe for you it's like this, this dollars can go to a cause that I care about and I'm willing to give my life for it, it's like fine. So I think it's an entirely individual question. Great question, Alfredo, like the pasta sauce. Um, okay, uh, Hang Loose, do you have any tip on getting hired fresh out of business school? That's actually like kind of funny. Well, congrats on going to business school. You're kind of like setting yourself up for this one, so I'm going to not dunk on you. It's tough though. There's a lot of dunks coming to mind right now. I'd be like, what business did the business school teach you? And I would go to apply to businesses where my relevant business knowledge applied and then try and I get them to give me money in exchange for that knowledge and experience. Um, probably not the sexiest answer. I would bet that you're like, it's kind of like the girlfriend thing earlier. Like, have you gone on 500 dates? Have you gone to 100 interviews? Well, no one picks mine. Okay. Have you done more research on those companies and then send manual messages to multiple people in the firm about how much you care about this particular company? Have you shown up in person? Right. All those things tend to work pretty decently well. It's the unscalable stuff that people pay attention to. Also, side note, handwritten, like big hack for everybody. In a world where everyone gets personalized emails, especially with AI, like it's getting more and more personalized, blah, blah, blah, like, hey, I saw that your CEO in his last post made this thing, and that's how we're personalizing stuff. In a world where everything is automated, handwritten cards and physical boxes of stuff will get noticed by more people than stuff you send to the inbox. And so something worth considering for even high B2B enterprise sales, sending physical products compared to the lead cost of getting those types of contacts is probably negligible, but the response rate and likelihood that they, well, the response rate is likely significantly higher, so I think there's some arbitrage that exists there for anybody who's willing to put in that work. What is your opinion on, I'm not even gonna touch ADHD, let's hear. Nick Procaccio, brand positioning as a solo iOS app developer, Curiously went too fast. Okay. Uh, Eli Pixler. Hey Alex, I run a short-form marketing agency for blue-collar businesses. Okay. What would be the best way out of the core 4 to outreach? I already post daily on Instagram and LinkedIn. So that was a weird question because the core 4 is outreach, content, and paid ads. So I'm not sure, like, what is the best, what is the best way out of the core 4 to outreach? Maybe just, what's the best way to outreach? You already post on Instagram and LinkedIn. I think it depends on the goals, but you could absolutely do outreach via email and cold calls for that specific avatar because they are typically solopreneur or they have a handful of tradesmen underneath them. And if you're like, well, how many? It's like, well, you have to play percentages. People call like 10 businesses and say no one bought. Outreach doesn't work. It's like, dude, you're just— you need to do 1,000, you need to do 10,000, and you'll get the business you want. It's just people, just people's, people's frustration and failure tolerance is very low. All right. Henri Schumet. Hi, Alex. I'm 19, been working since I was 15. Cool. I hate my job and I want to pursue my art. It's one of the only things that I truly love. What advice could you give me? Okay. Well, art's a pretty straightforward one. You take your art and you post it on Instagram. And people like it, they will ask you for it and then you can sell it to them. That's, that's like thing one. Thing two is you can start creating templates around the art if you want to make more money and start running ads to sell multiples of the exact same thing. That's number two. Number three, if you have a specific type of art that you're very good at, going ahead and making art for influencers. I saw somebody do a really good job of this. They had like a specific, you know, combination of style of mediums and things like that that they did. So it was like glitter and physical and these cool canvases, and they would do that, but then they put the face of like an influencer on it, and then they would, you know, tag the influencer, and then people would be like, oh man, this is so cool. And then sometimes the influencer would be like, shit, I'll buy that from you. And so either you get free marketing because the influencer shares it, which they often will, Like, I almost always share fan art if it's good. If I get a stick figure with a smiley face, I probably won't. But like, if I see like fan art, I almost always share it. And so that will get you shares, which is free impressions. Like, no one could pay me to do something like that, but if it's really good, your work is good enough and speaks for itself, that would be a marketing angle. And then also, if I really like it, I might be like, dude, I'll buy it. And then I'll— there you go, right? So there's a lot of ways to make money with art as long as it's cool. Now, if nobody likes your art, then that's a different thing, right? Um, then like you can do the things you don't like so you can do the things you like. But yeah, there's, there's 3 different strategies for marketing your art business. Okay, uh, geez. Okay, can it— did we get rid of the whole like freezing it thing? Because that was helpful. It's very hard to read this. Just pick one. There we go. Okay. Silent genius. Alex, I know it's unfair to ask you. Well, if it's unfair, why are you asking me? Uh, perhaps even lazy. Okay. But how do I pursue greatness without worrying about the road not taken? How does someone focus when they've never had an outcome before? Well, you have had an outcome. It's just smaller than the outcome you want. And so it's, it's much more of a snowball. Of turning one thing into the next, into the next, and the next. Like, you, you woke up this morning, you put on your clothes, like, that is an outcome. For somebody who's depressed, that is a monumental achievement. And so the idea is like, we just draw the bar at the biggest achievement you got, and we just leverage that one to the next one. Real talk. Joel Warren, scaling sales teams. Have you changed your mind on cutting the bottom 10% of salespeople, or do you still suggest that? Also, do you still like incentivizing sales competition every 6 weeks? I would say, yeah, I have a couple tweaks on that. So I used to advocate for cutting the bottom 10% of sales on a regular basis. I no longer do that because I feel like I've gotten better at making the culture of a team exceptional. And basically just the 10% was an earlier version of me forcing function for cutting people who should already have been cut. I would say that we cut people significantly faster now, so we don't need to cut the bottom 10%. That probably happens by default, but it just— it doesn't have to be done on purpose because we weed people out so fast because the culture is so strong. I can't remember the second half of the question, but hopefully that helps with the— oh, and then the incentive thing. Do we still do— honestly, no, because the sales culture is just so strong. I haven't needed to do that kind of stuff. Leaderboards and small prizes, we still do that on a monthly basis, not on a 6-week cadence, but that works fine. We're— we just now run a monthly, monthly cadence for first, second, third, and that, that has been good enough. All right. RS, is it worth building a white label SaaS? Well, you're not building a white label SaaS because it's already built. That's why it's white labeled. Automated low churn business offering AI receptionist, reputation management, etc. for SMBs. If the goal is to exit at 4,000 to 5,000 active clients, I don't know who's buying them. If there's a lot of use cases for people buying white-labeled SaaS companies. Maybe, I haven't seen many. So I think you can look at the alternative, which is like you can also just make money, which I think is a wildly underrated way of building, reason to build a business. Like you can also just make money, which is fine. And the thing is this, you will work until you die if you like the game of business. If you don't like the game of business, you will not be in business that long anyway. So if you like the game, you're gonna be in the game for a long time, And so the idea that you need an exit path, though cool for the story, as somebody who's been through it, I got right back in the business the next day. So we have this feeling of like, I want to be done, I want to finish this thing. The reality is like, the game keeps going, right? It was around before we were alive and it'll be around after we die. Okay, let's see. Divanesh or Divya, whatever. Lalwani. How to make it easier to enforce positive behaviors on yourself and make it harder to give into negative behaviors. Change your conditions, change your environment. Like, I don't have my phone on me, but I have several screens that when I try to open up a social media app, it forces me to take 5 seconds and take breaths before I get into it. On top of that, I have another layer that if I work, I turn that on, that just makes it impossible. So it's either impossible for me to get on social media or very inconvenient. And so that's just an example of a small thing to do, but it's like, don't have ice cream in the house if you're trying to get in shape. Don't have cookies. Don't have the things that you overeat, right? If you don't overeat, not a big deal. Can you make sure that you have a gym that's close by? Can you go to a gym that you like? If there's a gym that you really like that's $40 more a month and you are more likely to go because you like it, pay it, right? So I want to change the conditions to maximize the likelihood that reinforcement occurs 'Cause like, you will, it's like, you will not, like, of course you can like give yourself a cookie, like you can do that, but I would say that for me, by and large, the environment does the vast majority of the reinforcing that's going to happen in your life. And so we want to arrange the variables around us to maximize the likelihood good things get reinforced in general. So if you're around 3 or 4 guys who are ambitious, good behavior will be reinforced far more than you giving yourself a high five for reading an article. All right, uh, Christian Malinovich: Alex, what is the ultimate thing worth going for in life according to you? Um, learning. I think learning, for me, like being a lifelong learner of— and if we define learning as same condition, new behavior, like I will have the conditions of life that are around me, and if I can alter my behavior in a way that makes me a better person or more aligned with like the ideals that I strive to live by. That is the point for me. Let's see here. All right. Alex, talk about passion versus being just good that I know you've talked about before. I actually don't know that one. I don't understand the question. Creative Mako. Hi, Alex. I'm a creative coder and started venturing into Soul NFTs. A tech I'm quite passionate about, but the space lacks trust. Building an online web game, trying to get to money. Is it worth or pivot to Web2? So Sam Altman said this, and I will, I will quote because he came to the same conclusion I have, and he has more experience, is obviously certainly wealthier than me. There is no perfect answer to how long should you push. He's like, I spent all these batches, people would always ask, should I quit my startup, or should I push or should I pivot? It is one of the only eternal questions that cannot be answered by anyone but you. I can give you one piece of feedback, which is the longer that you push, the more likely something will work, as long as you're consistently iterating. Like, said differently, if you have 100 bricks and you keep throwing them together, eventually you have something that looks like a building on enough iterations. And so I think the idea is like people quit far too soon and they don't give them enough, don't do enough iterations, uh, to have something that has a semblance of success that you can start improving from there. With that, my friends, friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. You already did. I appreciate you. We went through a super tactical sales training. Uh, we went through a, what was the second one? Uh, one-on-one Oh yeah, selling expensive stuff. We did that. We talked about adding an expensive service level to whatever it is that you sell and the tactics around doing that. And then we went a little bit broader, um, talked about some life stuff because, uh, based on the data, 25% of you guys prefer that. And so there we are. So that was my full coverage for y'all. I love you all. Keep being awesome. Um, yeah, thank you guys for real. Thanks for spending the day with me. Thanks for hanging. And, uh, I'll see you guys next week. Rock and roll.
