If you want 2026 to be the best year of your life. Please watch this video…

Here's my advice to make 2025 the best year of your life. There's 4 steps: eliminate distractions, get started, get better, never stop. Number 1, elimination of the things that are distracting you. When I was young, my father gave me this advice: rich people buy time, poor people buy stuff, ambitious people buy skills, lazy people buy distraction. I can give you the first and easiest 2025 prediction. Look at what you spend money on, look at your calendar, and wherever you invest is what you will get more of. So many people are surprised when they look at their bank account next year and it's lower than they want it to be. They look at their accomplishments from that year and it's not the things they set out to do. But when you look at their calendar and their credit card expenses, it's very obvious why those things didn't happen, because we vote with our dollars about the things that we care about. We vote about the type of person that we want to become. And as the first thing that you can do today for next year is actually comment below this video, and I rarely ask for this, the thing that you're actually going to do today, not what you're going to begin doing next year or what your resolution is going to be, but if it's important enough to do for future you, it's certainly important enough to do for current you because current you, by the way, is the only you that's ever going to enjoy life. I'll give you this story. So I remember when I was, a few years back, I was walking with Layla and we went to Sephora, which is like a makeup store. So we walked inside, you know, I'm sitting, you know, standing there awkwardly because I'm like, I don't know, I'm supposed to do here. There's this lady with the smock who like helps out and she had these 2 girls who were young. They must have been maybe, well, about this old. I'm guessing between 9 and 40, who knows. She's leaning over and she has these 2 paintbrushes in her hands and she says, okay girls, now that you guys are women, you need to start budgeting for this stuff because you're going to be spending money on this every single month to do your makeup. And so, the girls grabbed them, they were super excited and they went to go check out. And I saw that exchange as actually a really beautiful lesson when it comes to identity. Our priorities we dictate by what we spend, not by what we say. These girls, because they wanted to step into this new identity, had to match it with new priorities. So they had money or they had saved up their shekels or whatever they do for chores or babysitting or whatever. By doing that, they had to start prioritizing some of that money towards their new identity from girls to women. But the thing is, is that many people who want to start next year think, okay, well, I'm just going to see if this happens. But it doesn't work that way. You have to basically make the decision that this is the type of person that I want to become, and then these are the actions that that type of person would take, and then we align our calendars and our budgets in accordance with that so that the investments we make yield the results that we want. But the thing is, is that people wanna say, hey, wouldn't it be great if I owned Apple? But they never buy the stock. If you want to be that version of you, you need to start buying stock in that today. Both by paying in time and paying in money to vote with your dollars about what you truly care about. And the reason that I'm hitting this so hard is that it's never been easier than it is today to be successful. It's also never been easier to be distracted. So along the theme of investing in the things that matter most, the first thing we do is we eliminate all the stuff that sucks. I define commitment as the elimination of alternatives. If you get married, you eliminate all people of whatever sex you're married to that are not that person. Actually, you eliminate everyone who's not that person independent of sex, right? That is commitment, right? If you enter into a partnership and you say, I'm not going to do any business besides this business as part of the terms, then you've eliminated all alternatives. And so if you want someone to commit, ask them to eliminate everything else that's not the main thing. These are all the things, a laundry list of things that are probably not your main thing that very likely are getting in the way. And these are the most common things that I see in my DMs, that I see in my comments from people who are not getting where they want to go as fast as they'd like to get there. First big category is bad friends. So if you want better friends, get used to seeing them less. Better friends are busy friends. So I remember when I started working more and some of the friends that I had were a little bit more ambitious, I started realizing that the people that I liked the most, I actually didn't spend as much time with. And the people that were always available were the ones that I didn't want to become more like. Here's 5 questions you should consider when thinking about whether to keep a friend in your life or cut them. Question number 1 is, if someone told you that you're a lot like your friend, would you take that as a compliment? Second, are you truly fulfilled by the friendship, or is it just someone to keep you from being lonely? Third, are you able to be unapologetically yourself, or do you feel the need to act differently to please that friend or to be around that friend? Fourth, do you like who this friend is right now today, Or do you like the idea of the friend and who they could be someday? And then finally, 5, would you want your future or imagined child to be friends with someone like this person? And I think it's a really wonderful litmus test because it forces you to take a look outside of yourself in order to have perspective from a third-party angle on the true quality of that person. But the reality is that rare people are by definition rare. It's normal to have fewer of them. And so if you only have a few friends or one good friend, then that's normal if you want rare and exceptional friends. If you have many friends, it's far more likely that the bar for your friendship is too low. And to give you a filter that I actually used for the most important friend in my life, Layla, I like to think, does this person have the same scale of goals that I have? So it doesn't mean that they have to have the same goals as you, but it has to be the same level of goals as you because at least you're going in the same direction. So that's number 1. Number 2 is do they have the same level of dedication and commitment to those goals? Because I don't know about you, but I had plenty of friends who were like, I want to be an NFL player. I want to be a really rich tech entrepreneur. I want to be a touring musician, right? And they had these goals, but I'm like, dude, I see you just playing Fortnite 4 hours a day and you practice guitar once a week. Like, what do you Do you really want that or do you just like saying it because it makes you feel good? And so I wanted people who walked the walk and I wanted people who would keep up with my pace. And if you are someone who's ambitious, and this is me just talking specifically to you because there's only a few people who are watching this who really are and you'll know that if it's you, you have to get used to being alone because there are seasons where you'll basically transition from one group of friends into another. And it's not even a group of friends, you'll usually transition from a group of friends into no friends. And then you'll find 1 or 2 people who are at a new level, and then sometimes those people introduce you to some of their friends. And if you keep walking and you keep outpacing, then that group will then start retiring past you, and then maybe 1 person stays with you, maybe no one does, and you'll have another lonely period. I'm saying this because I used to think that there was something wrong with me when in reality I just didn't understand what the nature of being exceptional meant. And so I'm saying this purely from a definitional perspective. To be exceptional means that you are the exception. It means that you are not normal. And so it's normal for normal people to find you abnormal if you do things that are not normal. Don't let people who have mediocre goals deter you from taking actions that make you great because it makes you different. Realizing that I thought most people actually made no sense. They say they had these goals, but they took no action. And they called me work obsessed and they would tell me I should take time off and they're like, hey, you're not as cool anymore. You're not hanging out with the boys. Like, why aren't you participating in the fantasy league? Why aren't you watching football on Sunday with us? And for me, I actually used to love watching football with my friends. It was actually one of my biggest things that I looked forward to. But the thing is, is that like I needed that Sunday 'cause I had to prep workouts, I had to prep the music list for the next day, I had to run billing, I had to do all this other work. And the thing is, is that like, I looked at that football game and I was like, my goals are more important to me than this. And so I think that a lot of people don't actually look at themselves in the mirror and say like, one year from today, will I remember this football game? Or will I remember the fact that I'm not where I said I wanted to be? And to me, that was significantly more painful. Now, this is an uncomfortable fact for a lot of people. Your ability to delay gratification is actually a function of intelligence.. And so your ability to learn at a longer and longer delay is something that comes— I mean, we're talking from primates all the way up. And so basically, if you want to teach a monkey how to do something, you have to say, hey, do this thing, and then immediately give them a reward. And the longer that period goes on, the less trainable they are. The sign of intelligence is that you can actually expand the reinforcement window and they can still abstract it back to the original action. If you want to practice intelligence, then being able to actively delay your need for a result or reward from the work you do will make you a more intelligent person because your rate of learning will actually increase despite the fact that your reward rate will decrease in the short term. And so to give you full transparency on what 2025 might look like if you accomplish your goals at the end, you might have a different friend group or no friends at all for a season because you don't become like the people you admire, you become like the people you want to impress. Harvard made this, you know, wonderful study years ago about the best predictor of someone's long-term material success was what they called their reference group. Now this has been misquoted in places by the 5 people you spend the most time with, but it's actually the 5 people you compare yourself to. And that's a very big difference. Now, I want to take it a step further because I think to myself, what are the things that affect our behavior? And so it's really about the people that you want to impress, not necessarily even who you compare yourself to, because it's the people whose voices you hear when you're about to make a big life decision. And so when you make a big life decision, you don't listen to the people closest to you. You should listen to the people closest to your goals.? And some of them may not be in your neighborhood or your city or your state or your high school or your college. They might just be people you follow on the internet. And you have to abstract, what would that person think about this decision? Not my mom, not my homie, not my uncle or that person at church. And so I think this is a great transition of thinking through, instead of necessarily even having mentors, having heroes. And transposing what you think their decision-making calculus would be onto your life. And so what's interesting is that I will have conversations with entrepreneurs and they'll say, hey, here's my current condition, this is my desired state, this is what I perceive my obstacle to be. And I say, okay, well, what do you think? And they're like, well, I think you're gonna say I should do X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, you're right, why aren't you? They're like, well. And the thing is, is that basically what they answer with after that well is in essence other people's opinion who aren't at the place they want to be. Here's the uncomfortable truth, which is that winners focus on winning, losers focus on winners, and you never receive hate from above, always below, because winners have their eyes on the goal, not on other people. And so you have to decide whether you want to be a loser or a winner. And I'm just being real with you. What this looks like in reality, and maybe for you in 2025, will be like this. First, you look like an idiot. To everyone else while you try to figure it out. Then everyone else looks like an idiot for ever doubting you. Seasons. And so everyone takes a different amount of years to stop giving a fuck about what everyone else thinks. And if you're going to get there eventually, you might as well start today and enjoy the benefits longer. So if I'm 85 years old, I think about what that man cares about, and that man cares about very, very little. All you have to do is talk to an elderly person or a grandparent and be like, what do you think about this? A lot of times they're like, ah, who cares? Like, it doesn't matter. Life is literally too short. They literally don't have time for it. And so I think to myself, if that's the ultimate version of me, if I'm going to get there eventually, and that's what the wisest people think after having the most life experience, then why would I not try to cheat code that into today and then not have to go looking back from 85 and think, man, I wish I knew then what I know now, Look forward to 85-year-old self and say, I am going to choose to learn the lesson I know I'm going to learn and act as if I knew it today. Because the difference between them and you is that what they consider work, you consider life. And so you have to accept that you have a fundamental different understanding of how life works. And I believe that is a more accurate view of reality. The reason that the rich can get richer is because they see the world differently than the poor. And so it makes sense that if your poor friends don't see what you see, that they see through the lens of poverty. And all my goal in life is to be able to see reality more accurately. And so in the beginning, you have to develop this armor, this thick skin around people saying those little snide comments of like, you work too hard, you're too obsessed, you have a toxic work capacity, and why are you working weekends? Why are you working late nights? You're not like, this is not worth it. They're not paying you enough for the work that you do. All of these different things. Because eventually, that armor on the outside actually just becomes one with you and you don't even hear it anymore. Because I can promise you that those people who are in my life decades ago, they're just not even— I don't hear those claims anymore for 2 reasons. One, because my reality changed so drastically that they couldn't say anything. And secondarily, they're just not in my world anymore. I was only able to get here because what they deemed acceptable, I deemed intolerable. How far you go in life, I truly believe this, is based and predicated only on one thing, which is your actual standard. And so I believe that the person who runs any company or runs any division should be the person who has the highest standards. And if there's ever a day that someone has a higher standard for Acquisition.com than me, they should run this instead of me because they would be the one who's best serving the company. And so the person who should have the highest standard for you is you. And so it makes sense that they have a lower bar, but why would I listen to their bar on my life? I think that that standard is the one thing that rich kids get from rich parents more than anything else. It's because they have an expectation of life. They don't accept opportunities that are below that standard. And so they actually get their huge leg up on the pick, on the vehicles that they choose to pursue. And so one of the tougher parts, if you're not from an area where people make a lot of money, or not from— you don't know anybody who's a, you know, super successful entrepreneur— is that you basically have to borrow someone else's measuring stick. And you have to say, is this the standard that Elon would pursue? Is this the standard Bezos would pursue? Is this the standard Jobs would pursue. And if it isn't, then why are you doing it? If you want to be like them, then act like them. If you want to be like your friends, then you can act like your friends, but don't be surprised that you have what they have or lack what they lack. If we're thinking about elimination, we're eliminating bad friends and tangentially their opinions about you that are affecting your behavior. So the next thing are what things are playing interference on your time and your attention. All right, so I would say opinions of other people are affecting your behavior and your decisions. I think that your environment affects your efficiency of behavior. So think about how much more you get per hour of output. If you can't sit still, ignore notifications, and focus on one task for 8 hours straight, never expect to build anything great. And as uncomfortable as that is, it's also the truth. Like, I, I don't know a single incredibly successful entrepreneur that can't sit down and have hyper-focused periods of time, sometimes weekends, weeks at a time where they don't talk to anyone and they just hammer away. And it's whether they're coding for software or they're making some insane marketing campaign and all the email follow-ups and all the text follow-ups and the affiliate promotions and incentives, or someone who's creating a product that they're designing and they're in the shop and they keep tweaking at it, or they're somebody who's hyperscaling a company and saying, I'm going to sit in 20 interviews a day for 7 days straight so I can hire 20 people this week because I need to get going. Right, like if you can't sit still and ignore notifications and focus for a day, nothing great will get accomplished. Because it's not about what you want, it's about what's required. And whether that's your best or not is irrelevant. It's just there's a price tag and you gotta be willing to pay for it or you don't get the thing. And a lot of times it's not what you want. And I spend a lot of time trying to dispel the concept of like follow your passion because I think it leads more people astray then it helps because it's very easy for someone who's successful, who's already delegated tons of things to only then focus on their area of genius and then say, here, for my seat, do what I do. But there's a very big difference between doing what someone does and doing what they did to get there. And I think this is what's lost in a lot of the content that I see in the entrepreneurial space. And to be clear, whenever I'm trying to get to the next level, I often have to take on things that I don't know how to do and I have to learn how to do that, which means I have to suck for a period of time. And sucking sucks. But the thing is, is you have to be able to embrace that period of time and say like, this is the cost of greatness. And so I'll give you something very tactical. So I have timers in a lot of my offices and my team has adopted this too, which is I like to time block, which is essentially saying how long do I think this is going to take? And you can do this on a week scale, you can do it on a daily level. It depends on the level of project you're tackling. But for me, even on the most micro level, I say, okay, how long should this take? I'll then crank this thing. Boop. I think this should take 20 minutes. And then I hit start and I let the timer go. And if for whatever reason something distracts me, I pause it so that I know that I didn't actually work that period of time. And so what happens is it will give you a very real look at how long you're actually working versus how long you think you're working and you tell other people working and you Instagram how long you're working. And as I've become more efficient at work, meaning my output per unit of time has gone up. I've realized that there's just been a significant decrease in the distractions that I allow to interrupt me. Again, if you want to stay focused, staying focused is not like zeroing in and saying, I'm going to do it just like, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to just zoom in on this thing. It's more that focus occurs when you remove everything else. What's left is focus. And so Jerry Seinfeld has this, uh, this famous process that he talks about with writing. And I think writers are also wonderful people for talking to for deep work because it's the nature of the work they do. One of the things that he did, and he has done for years, for his stand-up so he can script it out, is that he locks himself in a room that has no windows and has nothing but a yellow notepad and a pen. And he tells himself that he has to go in that room and he doesn't have to write, but he can't do anything else. And so what ends up happening is that writing occurs as a default. And so focus kind of works the same way. You eliminate everything else to create focus. You don't try and push harder while also having these disruptions. So there's 3 easy ways that I make my phone less distracting. The first is I switch it to grayscale. And so grayscale decreases consumption across all people by 30%-ish, and that's research-backed. It's pretty cool. The second thing is turning off all notifications across all apps on your phone because you never want your app to be dictating when it's convenient for the app to disrupt you. Like, how ridiculous is that? But we let apps have that permission. Most phones and people want to push notifications to you. I want to pull them when it's convenient for me. The third thing is other people. And so I have a mode on my phone where no one can get through, and when I do that, then I can reach out to them when it's convenient for me. Because if it's actually an emergency, call 911. And if it's not a true emergency, then it can wait. And my team wanted to remind me that I don't email. I heard in, I think it was like 2016, that Bill Clinton didn't use email. And I was like, if he's the president and he doesn't use email, I cannot use email. And so my team doesn't contact me via email. And so if you can eliminate entire channels, that's also an easier way to concentrate fewer flows of communication. And here's the thing, it's always harder, takes longer, and costs more than you think it will. That is a reflection of poor expectations, not that that reality is bad. And so it makes sense that it would be harder, take longer, and cost more, because if it didn't, then everyone would have it, and if everyone had it, then it wouldn't be worthwhile. And so literally the difficulty of the task that you embark on is proportional to the reward that you ultimately get because you are the asset that you build more than the achievement. And so if it's hard, that's amazing because it will make you that much harder once you conquer it. And it will also make it harder for anybody else who wants to follow in your footsteps. And so the higher up the mountain you climb, the thinner the air gets and the rarer the climber or explorer must be in order to get there. And so I don't know about you, but I would so much rather climb a mountain that so few people have been able to climb so that I can see a view that other people haven't seen. And so speaking of expectations, let me talk about the worst expectation of all, which is entitlement, which is the expectation of life or other people to give you something without earning it. And I think that this is a virus in today's culture right now. And so there's the famous quote, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. It makes sense that right now we have a lot of weak men because it's been pretty good times. The good news about that is that it's so easy to beat them. You just have to show up, be on time, prepare the night before, remember people's names, actually follow up when you say you were going to, and try like you mean it rather than trying like you want to get credit for trying. And I see this is this thing that's pervasive right now is that people will comment or they'll DM me and they're like, "Hey, I'm trying really hard," as though I'm supposed to give them credit for trying. The world doesn't work that way. It gives you credit for achieving. And the reason that you want credit for trying is because you want it to cost less, take shorter time period, and be easier. And so if you restate your complaint about the difficulty as, oh, I have false expectations about the ease or the price tag of this goal, then all of a sudden you realize that the only real problem was that you expected it to cost less. It's like going to the store and being like, oh, I've got these Jordans that I really want to buy. I got $50. I'm so excited to buy them. You go to the store and see that they're $300. At that point, you can just say Jordans aren't for me, or you can say, oh, I will have to keep working and keep saving so that I can afford this. And so it's a lot about affording the goals that you want to achieve. And a lot of things that we have to spend in order to get them is the time and the rejection of not achieving what we want on the timeline we originally thought. Like, what makes success hard is that the expectation that society puts— because we only see the highlight reel, you actually only see people after they finish the race. People think success is like watching a marathon, not running a marathon. When you watch a marathon, you look at the beginning and you look at the end. It only takes you a couple of seconds to see both of those. But running a marathon is 4, 5, 6 straight hours of breathing heavy, wondering when it's going to end, counting, starting to play games in your mind of like, okay, I'm two-thirds of the way there, I'm two more quarters of that, I'm only one-fifth of one-eighth of the way there. And you keep doing this to play tricks on your mind to keep going. But the thing is, is that in a mile marker race, it's very clear to know how you're going to get to the finish line and how long it's going to take. The only difference with success is that you just have to keep running and you don't know where the finish line is. And people will only cheer you on at that finish line that they don't know where it is either, which means you have to get used to running alone. And so the difficulty is you have to start running and you have to keep running, but you just don't know whether you're running for a mile or 300. And so this is where the pacing is important. So a lot of people run really hard, though, though, think because they only saw the beginning of the marathon on TV and the finish of the marathon on TV that they can just sprint because both those clips only lasted a couple of seconds. So they start their marathon of success of whatever it is they're going after by sprinting as hard as they can, and then they realize that there's no one around and there's just a bunch of open road ahead of them and they're like, how long is this going to take? And that's when reality sets in. And so I make these videos to say that a lot of times it's going to take longer. So one of the big nasty things that you have to eliminate on this path is the identity that you have about yourself, the isms that you claim. And so for example, like, oh, I'm a neat freak. I'm not good at math. I'm not techie. And so you make these statements and they don't serve you. Fundamentally, you should have one razor that rules all decisions. And this is pretty cruel, but it's also the reality of the world, which is, does this thing, person, belief, make it more or less likely that I hit my goals? And so if you run every single thing you do The actions you take, the people you hang out with, you having your phone in the room, you saying I'm not techie. Does this increase or decrease the likelihood that you hit your goals? And I'm not saying this to preach because I had one that I dealt with for a long time. So I always considered myself to be bad at math. I remember I was decent at math and then in 9th grade I had a really bad teacher and it basically put me back a year. Basically after algebra I didn't really learn anything because the year after that I didn't have the the foundations from the year before. The difficulty was I kept saying after that point, I'm just not good at math. But when I was in my 20s, I made the decision that that didn't serve me anymore. And so I was like, okay, well, what would I have to do to feel like I was good at math? And I was like, well, people who like can do math in their head, I think that's a pretty cool thing. And so I didn't use a calculator for anything for years. And then I learned, I mean, I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, but then I got better and better at doing math in my head. And I would check it obviously after I was done, but I always let my head try and do it first. And so nowadays if you were to ask people, man, is Alex good at math? They're like, dude, he just rattles off numbers like crazy. But the thing is, is that until I was in my 20s, I thought I was bad at math. And so it's like we are so much more pliable than we think we are, and we had something that, set us on a trajectory a little bit earlier in life that just gave us maybe a little bit of disadvantage. Fine, because you just have to get over it. Everyone's childhood was difficult, and if you want to win the award for hardest childhood, congrats, you win. You feel better, right? No one cares about what happened to you then, only what you can make happen now. Identity is a lie. We only describe people about who they are by what they do. Doing is being. And so if you want to be somehow different, you have to do different things, and then only afterwards will people describe you based on the actions you take. Think about back in the day, the actual names people had was, he's John the Carpenter, he's John the Stonesmith, he's John the Mason, right? People literally had their names based on what they did. That hasn't changed. The first thing you do when you meet somebody is you find out, what do you do? And that gives you indications. And if you want to describe who someone is, what do you say? You describe what they do. And so this means that our identity is 100% under our control because we control what we do. And then only after the fact will other people describe you in that way. So we covered environmental things like with the phone and having a timer. We covered interpersonal things in terms of our identity and voting with our dollars and time about the things that we care about. We eliminated the bad people and their opinions about us that affect our behavior. And so we've eliminated all these things. So now we've made room to get started. And the good news is you only need 3 things to win: the balls to start, the brains to learn, and the heart to never give up. And the best thing is you already have all 3. And for the girls, you have gonads, so it's fine, it still counts. And so my ask of you is to make the commitment. Now this is again the elimination of alternatives. To make the commitment to never stop. And so it doesn't mean that I'm asking you to commit to be successful. I'm asking you to commit to keep running, to keep walking the marathon, even if you have to pant and you have to slow down. You just can't stop. And so the best way to hit next year's goals is to not wait until next year to work on them. It's to start now. Because I'll tell you this, if you feel like you need a special occasion to begin making your life better, then it assumes that a special occasion must always be there for you to want to improve yourself. It shows that you don't think today is worth improving, and so that means that you typically will always cast forward when you think things are worth improving. And so the easiest way to vote with your action is to make today the only day that is good, because it's the only day you have control over. My hot take, which shouldn't be, is you don't have to wait until January 1st to better yourself. And I'm purposely posting this before the year ends because I think it's stupid to wait. Like, why would you wait on getting better? Why would you— like, if you had a lottery ticket, why would you wait to cash it in? You would cash it in as fast as humanly possible. And that lottery ticket is the life that you want on the other side of this. Why would you wait? Here's a harsh truth: you're young, you've got time. False. All that lie does is extend how long it takes people to realize tomorrow isn't guaranteed, nothing is going to be easy, get over it. It takes time to get good, and the sooner you start, the sooner you act, and the sooner you act, the sooner you get. And don't stop until you do. And as harsh as that sounds, I do have good news. It only takes 20 hours of focused effort to get decent at anything. The problem is people wait years before they start their first hour. So many of you could probably start achieving next year goals before the end of this year. 20 hours is not that long. If you're like, man, I really want to learn ads, I really want to learn how to make content, I really want to learn how to edit videos, I really want to learn how to sell, you can do that now and you can have that skill. Like we can onboard a new sales guy in, in a few days. There's this massive delay that people think because of the unknown. They don't know what is going to happen, and so they therefore assume that it's bad. And so the reality is that most people don't like surprises, even if they're good ones. Have you ever heard people like, "Oh, I don't like surprise parties"? It's a fucking party. Why would you hate a surprise party that's in your favor? You hate it because you don't like the unknown. And so it's a really good thing to test for yourself, which is, Why would I hate a good surprise? You hate it because there's a possibility that the surprise is negative. But on a long time horizon, you know, 85-year-old you isn't even going to remember it to begin with. This is a— this is going to be a weird one for you, but just stay with me. If you've ever been so drunk that you're throwing up and you think to yourself, man, I'm probably not going to remember this, the good news is, is that once you do succeed that terrible period of vomiting or whatever the difficulty is that you're going through, it'll actually compress in your mind. And so as difficult as it may seem in the moment, it actually doesn't stay with you. All you'll have left is the thing you accomplished. You won't remember the work that it took to get there. There'll be a significant discount on the punishment you endured. I tend to have a bad habit of really not looking back very much, and so I occasionally will go through my photos and I am reminded about all of the mistakes and the detours that I took along the way to where I wanted to go. And I'll tell you the story that my father told me when I was very impatient. He said, listen, you think that this is taking too long for you to be successful. He said, do you know how long it took me to become a doctor? I was like, no. He's like, well, so my father's Iranian and he left the country to get educated. And there was a program for anybody who was a runaway that the government would pay for your schooling as long as you came back with the education. Now, the revolution occurred during the time he was away, so he actually never got to go back. He went to France, Paris, to try and enter medical school. Only problem, he didn't speak French. And so he's trying to do pre-med in another language as somebody who doesn't even share the same alphabet. And so he failed. That year. He then took a— the second year he tried again because you're allowed in France, it's a different system, you can just basically try as many times as you want. He started again and the second year he failed again. And then he talked to his brother and he's like, "I don't know if being a doctor's for me." Like, I just feel like— imagine this, like failing 2 full years in a row. And his brother said, "Hey, why don't you go to Belgium? You know, change the environment, you know, different school, different people, go there." So he went to Belgium and then his third try he made it past his first year. Now mind you, at this point he had 2 years of learning French and so he was able to finally actually understand what the professor was saying. So was it that he wasn't smart enough to understand how to become a doctor or was it that he just had other skills that he lacked along the way? And so a lot of people right now are judging the fact that they didn't succeed because they somehow think it's some innate trait. I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough. But sometimes you just lack some prerequisite skills, right? Like if you're like trying to learn calculus and you've never done arithmetic before, it's gonna be really hard, right? Dare I say impossible. And so if you jump straight into calculus, you're not gonna win. So sometimes you have to take 2 steps back in order to build the foundation to get forward. Now I'm gonna keep the story going. So he then graduates in, you know, 7 years, 'cause how long it takes, the actual medical school system's different in, in Europe. They actually do college and the next degree all as one thing. So 7 years later, he graduates. Okay. Then he's this Iranian dude, can't go back to his own country, meets a girl in Belgium. She says, I'm from the US. And so he comes back to the US with the lady who would eventually become my mother. And when he's in the US, he then— his doctor, his MD doesn't apply here. So he then has to basically do it again in the United States. And in order to do this, you have to get a residency. Now, getting a residency as someone who's a foreigner back then was pretty tough. And so it took him 2 years where he had to basically work minimum wage jobs. He was like, uh, he had to like run slides, like radiology slides back and forth as like a runner, a courier, when he was a full surgeon, but he couldn't do it here in the US. And so imagine how emasculinating it is, right? Where your wife comes back, she was a US citizen and had all this other stuff, right? And she got her internship immediately because she was US and she was a girl, whatever. And my father didn't. And so he then had to do 2 more years where he didn't have progress. So he told me this whole story and then eventually, obviously, he got the residency and then he was able to get in the path. But if you look at that, he basically had 4 or 5 years of his life where there was basically no net gain in progress towards his goals. And so he's telling me this story when he's 50, and he's like, look at my life now. He's like, no one knows. He's like, no one asks me how long it took. They just know what I have now and what I can do now. And so you have this idea that it should take a certain period of time. It should only last this long. It should be this level of difficulty. CPA. But the thing is, is that, that level of perseverance, when he decided to go out on his own and start his own practice, rather than, and left the practice that he was working in, he then didn't know anyone. And he still had a heavy accent, was a new guy in a new area, and it took him time to build up. And what did he do? My dad learned how to be a general contractor. He built his own surgical center because he couldn't afford having these outsourced third parties that charge $250,000 to build a surgery center. He built his for a fraction of that. And so is my dad going to Home Depot, measuring and figuring these things out as a full plastic surgeon. It's not about the resources you have, it's about how resourceful you're willing to be. Right now, getting started is 100% under your control. And I love taking this frame, which is that every self-made billionaire is self-made. Now, if you're like, wait, there are billionaires who aren't self-made, right? That's why I didn't say all billionaires, every self-made billionaire. Is self-made. And every self-made millionaire is self-made. And here's the one people hate: every self-made person in poverty is self-made. Now, that may make you feel uncomfortable, and you know what? You may be right. You probably did have more disadvantages. You probably did have things that worked against you. And now what? You're right. So that's it then for you. The rest of your life will never go the way you want to go. The harsh truth here is if you want to feel better, blame others. If you want to get better, blame yourself. And so my father told me that story multiple times in my life, as I'm sure your fathers have told you stories multiple times in your life, or you had a parent or an uncle or brother and they told you those big meaningful stories. And so I'll tell you another time he told me it. So after I lost everything for the second time, Think about, like, I tell the story, but it's very easy to gloss over. But think about this. I had left my job, went to a new area, didn't know anyone, started a gym, didn't have enough money to have an apartment, slept at my gym, just grassroots got it going, made the gym successful by working there every hour of the day, was finally successful enough to be able to open a second location, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, finally feel like I tasted success, like I'm actually doing something, I'm actually pretty good here, like, That bet that I made actually paid off. And then I lose it all. And so, I sell all those locations, I put the money in a new thing and then it's gone. And so, I could look back and say, "Wow, I just spent all those years and I actually have nothing to show for it." The only thing I would have had to show was the money that I made. But my father retold me that story. And he said it was never about the amount of failures he had. It was about the education that he had. And so one of the other repeated fatherisms that he gave me was that education is the only thing that no one can take from you. The skills you have, the skills you acquire along the way, are the only thing that are truly yours. There's nothing else in this world that actually belongs to you. Your clothes can get stolen, the belongings you have. And he said this from a place of reality. Which is my family came from a country that took all of our assets. They seized everything. They seized land, they seized homes, they seized wealth. They just said, "Oh yeah, all that, that's ours now. Good luck." This may not be as real for people in the United States, but having people who everyone in my family had everything taken from them, that is very evident in how they talk to me and how I've always seen the world as these things are ephemeral. These material goods, the studio, the setup, the lights, the whatever, the platforms, like, gone. But the thing is, is that my father came here with $1,000 because of the revolution and had nothing and built the life he has. And you can lose it all and gain it back. And so we've seen so many entrepreneurs who've actually lived through this cycle. It's actually a common thing in entrepreneurship and it's because you have to understand and Expect risk. The beauty of it is that after you fail, the likelihood that you're successful goes up, not down. This is the part that people miss. They fail and think it somehow decreases the likelihood of success, but it actually increases it. And so it's like you want to just get the failures out of the way. Why would you not want something that increases the likelihood of your goal? And the reason that it increases that likelihood is that failure is a requisite probability for taking action. And so anyone who has failed has taken more action than someone who's done nothing, which means it increases the likelihood that they are successful. And so when you fail, you get feedback, and when you get feedback, you get better. And when you get better, it increases the likelihood you win. Losers stay losers by never being willing to lose. Everyone loses before they win. And so there's this great moment in The Matrix, which is the, the famous jump where Neo is trying to jump across the buildings and everyone's gathered around because they think he's the one. He obviously takes the jump and he falls and they're like, "Ah, what does it mean? What does it mean?" And Cypher, who ended up eventually being the Judas of this, says, "Everybody falls the first time." And so even the one or the person who was going to become the one was somebody who had to fail first. And I love that because everyone falls the first time. Your first business is very unlikely to be your last business. The first product you have will be a product that you will be embarrassed of years from now. But what's important is having the product, getting the product, building the product, launching the product, shooting the shot. And so if you're never willing to lose, you're never going to win. So in 2025, if you start a podcast, you start making content, you start doing cold outbound, or you, you, you, you take a new job, whatever it is, just remember that your second try after you fail, which you inevitably will, takes twice the emotional effort but half the actual effort. So you'll fail and you'll emotionally feel bad, but guess what you did? You actually gripped your hands on the unknown. And you go from unknown optimism to known pessimism. So it's like, okay, now I know what it takes. I now have realistic expectations what is required in order to be successful. And although it may be bigger than I originally thought, I now can quantify what is required to win. And so here's the thing, the best entrepreneurs in the world have the biggest failure resumes. And so I don't even want you to win. I want you to build your failure resume. And so if you're like, oh, it must be easy for you to say, I lost money on my first 2 real estate deals I ever did, almost lost all the money I put in. I've lost money on crypto when I put it in years ago. I lost money on bad hires. I've lost millions in bad hires, actual hard costs, not soft costs. I've had 6 failed businesses. I've had 9 failed partnerships. And so, I bring these things up because like you're not going to hit it out of the park on the first shot. But the crazy thing about how success works is that you only need to win once. That's the crazy part is you only have to win once. I'll read you this quote from Jeff Bezos which is what I started my first book, $100 Million Offers, with. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot. But you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can hit is 4. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments. And when he says big winners pay, they pay in failures. They pay in the scars that they have to incur and endure along to hitting it out of the park and hitting it out so big that they never have to swing again. And so I want to make this as real as I possibly can. I just found an old note from myself to myself that's 12 years old. And so I talked about my $10,000 per month income goal, and reading it got me actually pretty choked up. This is all to say that no matter where you're at in your journey, you've just got to believe with all your fucking heart that you're going to make it because no one else is going to believe for you. Because you can never expect someone to invest in you more than you invest in yourself. And the crazy thing is some people say they'd kill for a shot or they'd die for a chance when in reality they won't even wake up 60 minutes earlier for it. So we've eliminated the distractions, all of the things associated with not doing this stuff. And now hopefully I've removed some of the mental BS around getting started. And so now once you start, you got to get better. Connections, money, looks, intelligence, those are all great. But you can beat someone with all of those things if they have only one trait: an insatiable desire to improve. No matter where they start, it's hard to beat someone who improves every second of every day without giving up. And this is why earlier I said ambitious people buy skills and they pay for those skills with time and money. And in order to have the time and money to invest in those skills, they have to take them from somewhere else. Because the thing is, is that your resources are zero-sum. And this is something that a lot of people aren't comfortable with. Whatever you choose to spend your time on, you take from something else. Whatever you choose to spend your money on, you take from something else. And so most people don't have a resources issue, they have a priorities problem. You are choosing to say that other things are more important. And hey, I want to be real. If that stuff is more important to you, then amazing. You won at life. Congratulations. But if you don't have what you want and you're spending money to proliferate a life that is not the one you want to lead, then you need to shift the list to invest the time and money and pull from those things that you don't want to put more in the ones you do. And you want to starve out failure. So think about this. One of the easiest ways to, to have more money is to work more hours. And you're like, how is that possible? Well, when you work more hours, it actually kills two birds. One is that you actually make more money when you work more hours, but on top of that, you don't spend money because you have less time to spend it. And so every hour of work is a net positive in two directions. So it saves you money you're not spending and makes you money. And so you want to find those little twists that you can make in your investments of time and money that are outsized. It's not just that you gain, you also stop the loss. I've always been willing to bet big on me. And so a lot of you guys are trying to like bet big on Dogecoin or some meme thing or like some get rich quick. And I promise you, the guys who have all the money know how to do it better than you. And if you have your last $1,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 that you're like, what do I do with it? Bet on you because you'll never sell you. You're a long-term hold, right? And so if you get better, you guarantee the win. And every investment you make compounds. You guarantee compounding because every skill stacks on top of other skills. Steve Jobs talked about how when he went to college and learned calligraphy, it was the reason that fonts showed up in the Mac later. And so he talks about you can only connect the dots looking back. You want to double down on investing more into you getting skills. And I'll tell you something that you probably don't know. So I spent $10,000 and I only had $50,000 saved up after years of being a consultant. So I had $50,000 saved up, I was 23 years old, it was my life savings. I spent $10,000 to get a gym coach. I joined a mastermind for gym owners. Fun fact though, I didn't have a gym, but I figured if I go to a mastermind of gym owners, I'm going to learn so many of the things that they made mistakes on when they started their gym. They're going to have opinions on how I should lay out the square footage. What locations I should pick. What model I should use. And so rather than say, "Oh, I'm just going to find out all these failures on my own and take 5 times as long." I was like, "I'd rather pay $10,000 to pull 5 years forward into the present." And so I was able to get that first location up and profitable and outsourced by month 9. Now, some of the guys in the mastermind were at year 5 and still hadn't done that. I pay down my ignorance tax as much as I possibly can. Because The cost of you not being able to achieve your dreams, the price is ignorance. And the debt that you pay is the distance between where you are and how much you'd be making if you knew how to do it. I've told this story before, but I think it's something that's so ingrained in how I think in terms of how I price what I'm willing to pay in time or money. And before I tell that story, I move geographically whenever I see an opportunity to get around someone who's better than me. And so when I wanted to learn fitness stuff, I moved to an area where I knew there was other fitness entrepreneurs that I was like, well, maybe I'll be able to hang out with them a little bit and I'll learn a little bit there. And I went to a city I didn't know anything about. I knew no one. And when I wanted to, when I wanted to get in the gym space, I said, well, California is like the capital of fitness, SoCal, so I'm gonna move out to Southern California because the best guys will be there. And if I can win there, I'll be able to win anywhere. And so I moved out to California without knowing anyone. Whenever I've had these big transitions in my life, is not only being willing to bet with my money and bet with my time, but also bet with my geographic location. I'm willing to risk losing the relationships that I had to gain relationships that I need. And so 2025 for you might mean that you have to leave where you're at. And that could mean across town, but it could also mean across the country or even across into a different country. It may mean that you're going to spend— take all this money that used to spend here and spend it an entirely different way. You probably are going to have less stuff, and that's okay because that stuff only deteriorates, it only gets worse, but you will only get better. Don't invest in Dogecoin. Don't even invest in the S&P 500. Invest instead in the SME 500. Invest in you because you will always beat a 10% return in the stock market. And if you think that Dogecoin is going to outcompete your personal growth, you're never going to win. Anyone can get rich fast as long as you're willing to make no money for a long period of time while you work to get good enough to get rich fast. And so I told you I'll tell you that story. The story goes like this. A guy is actually using this as a sales close to an audience. He wrote a million dollars on a whiteboard in front of an audience. And so then he called out to a lady in the front row and he said, how much do you make, ma'am? And she said, $50,000. And he said, okay, well, right now You pay reality $950,000 every single year for not knowing how to make $1 million. And when I saw that, I realized that the value of the skill of making $1 million is the difference between what I'm making and what I could be making. And people wildly undervalue how much more they could be making once they have a skill. And so if you're the type of person who can actually follow instructions, show up on time, smile, be able to fail and keep going, virtually all education will net you a positive yield. Because let me ask you a question: would you pay $950,000 to make a million dollars and be able to make a million dollars every year? Well, that would be an insane deal. You pay it once and you get the skill forever, so every year after that you make a million dollars a year? Well, of course you should. Now, once you make the million dollars a year, are you willing to give 100% of what you make to make $10 million a year? Of course you should. And that's why education is by far the highest return. You can learn how to make a million dollars a year for probably close to $200,000 a year. And you're like, well, well, where do I spend that? You'll spend that on conferences, you'll spend it on seminars, and it'll likely be in $2,000 to $5,000 sometimes $30,000 chunks. But for some reason, you're willing to spend this on some academic who hasn't been in reality for 20 years because they're on tenure and thinks that the world is just going to hand you stuff because that's their reality because they're government funded. Or you can pay money to people who live in real private businesses who do this stuff for a living. And here's the thing, I have never paid for education and not gotten more than what I paid for. Now, I don't want to conflate that with the fact that I've paid for things that I didn't think was worth that money to other people. But I always ask myself, okay, number one, how can I become the best student who's ever gone through this? How do I become this person's number one success story? And I've told every program, every partner, every vendor that I've ever worked with, I will be your biggest success story. And so the reality is, once I am their biggest success story, Is that because of them or because of me? And I think that's a choice that you get to make. Am I going to be the number one success story or do I want to be right and prove that they're not good? Well, congratulations, maybe they're not that good. Well, what does that leave you with? No skills and less money. If you choose to succeed anyways and say, what can I learn from this person? Because I've learned just as much from bad people as I have from good. Because a lot of times getting good is actually the removal of bad. And so if you find out other ways that people do a terrible job, it's also a wonderful way of figuring out how to not do a terrible job. And so if I want to create a product that's exceptional and I say, let's say I want to put a phone, a camera, the internet, email, all in one place. If you remove all of the stuff that sucks from all of those things, what you're left with is an iPhone. Most times you can always get more than what you pay for when you invest in you. So let's get really tactical. If you really want to double down on you, which will by far— I mean, think about this, 10% improvement is the S&P 500. So you're saying that you could take— okay, let's be real. Let's do real math. So let's say that you've got $10,000 saved up. Okay? Let's say that's what your savings is, which by the way makes you like a top 40% American, FYI. So let's say you've got $10,000 saved up. You could put it in the S&P 500 and have that $10,000 be $10,900 one year later. Or you can spend that on something that can triple your earning capacity and next year instead of making, let's say, $50,000 a year, you make $100,000 a year. Well, which of these increases, the $50,000 plus increase is more than the net of the $900,000 because you lost the $10,000. You spent the whole thing. Here you invested it. Here you spent it. But did you spend it or did you invest it in an asset you could control? And so I don't know about you, but I'd rather have the extra $50,000 and put the $10,000 in. And then what do I do next year? I'm going to take this $50,000 and I'm going to ask myself, is there anything I could put this $50,000 into? So I could put in the S&P 500 and I could go and add myself an extra $55,000, whatever. Let's say I get 10% that year. Okay, so I get $55,000 this year, or I could put that $50K into 5 $10K things or 2 $25K things, and all of a sudden take my earning power from $100K to $250K. Wow, what a deal! But I'm gonna lose the whole $50K again. And so the thing is, is that on my way up, I basically took my savings and I spent it almost every year on education. Because why on earth would I want the future to take longer to get to me? When you buy skills, it's the closest approximation to buying time. And so there's this big thing like you can't buy time. False. You can buy the future at a discount and you buy the future at a discount by buying the skills required in order to get there faster. And so if it could take you 5 years if you did it on your own, or it could take you 1 year if you paid 4 different people to help you out with each step of the process, Why would you not want to pay all of the money you have to get to there and then have 4 years of gain with that new baseline? You now are living 4 years, 5 years into the future. It's like you skipping from being 20 to 25 and you getting the earning power at 25 plus, but now you're just 21. And then when you're at that point, you pull the next 5 years forward. And when you're 22, it's like living like you're 30, right? Like now at that point though, you might spend all your savings yet again. And this process has been one that I have consistently done for the entirety of my career. And it just gets to a point where you can't even spend the money. And so my very controversial advice is spend all your money on education for as long as you possibly can until you can't even spend the money because you're making too much of it. And so how do you become an expert? You do more repetitions than anyone else in a narrow field, which also means you fail more times than anyone else in a narrow field. And so if you want to beat someone, just try 10 times harder than them. And you only really need to try 2 or 3 times harder, but you probably don't realize how much harder they're trying than you are. So try 10 times harder just to make sure you win. People reject this idea that someone can work 10 times or 100 times harder, but I define work as output. And so for you to say that someone can't produce 10 times more than you is just factually false. There's tons of people who produce 10 times more. There's tons of people who produces 100 times more than you. I'll give you the easiest example in the world. A lot of departments run on weekly cadences. They say, do this thing by end of week. Oftentimes you can ask that person, how many hours will this really take you? And then that person will say something like, I don't know, 3 or 4 hours. You say, okay, well why don't you just get it done by noon? And then at noon you say, okay, what's the next thing going to take? And they'd say, uh, probably another 3 or 4 hours. You say, cool, get it done by the end of the day. Now from those two cycles, That would have normally taken 2 weeks or 14 days, but instead it got done in 1. And so just right there, you got something done. You got 14 times more done than the competitor who's doing things on a weekly basis. And so this is how you drag the future to the present, is that you're not focusing on how hard you're working, you're focusing on how much you're getting done. You'd be amazed at how much better you get after you've done it 100 times. If you want to win, do it again. I want to be clear, you don't just post 100 videos in a row and see what happens. You post one, see what worked, and then try and do more of that thing. And so the idea isn't just raw effort, it's raw effort with an improvement loop. And so I remember one of my favorite words that I have to teach sales guys, because it's a very repetitive task to teach someone how to sell, is great, do it again. Great, Again, great job. Again. And so it's that repetition that breeds the nuance of skill, and you want it to be so drilled into you that you no longer have to consciously think about how to do the thing because you can then do it as a natural skill so that you can move on to putting your attention to the next skill. So it's not just about learning how to do it once, it's about learning how to do it so many times that you don't have to think about doing it at all. Especially if you're starting out, your goal should not be passive income. Mainly because you don't have enough money for the passive income to mean anything. Instead, you should learn how to make money while you're awake before trying to learn how to make it while you sleep. You crawl, then you walk, then you run. Once you have more money than you can possibly reinvest in education and acquiring more skills, then you can take the leftover and put that into your passive income pool. And so very, very tactically, this is what I'll walk you through. You should have an education investment budget. And so just like you spend X dollars per month, so let's say you, we pull all of your expenses down and you're making an extra $1,000 a month. Okay. Now if you're not eating out, you're not buying new clothes, you're not going out with the boys, you're not spending money in stupid ways, that if that's what you're doing, then you're going to have $1,000 left. If you have that, then you can take that money and every month you can put it towards a bank account that you can either choose to immediately spend or save up for something that is more expensive. And I can tell you that a lot of what I learned when I bought programs and seminars and conferences and things like that wasn't even from the content itself, but it was connections that I was able to make at those types of events that I was then able to leverage the one skill I had, which I was good at sales, and then start giving that away to every person I met so that I could collect those IOUs and then learn skills for free. And so it's like I really just needed the ticket to get in the room, and then I could trade with everybody else with the skills I had to then get to learn theirs. And so as wild as this sounds, at the end of 2025, you could be dead broke but rich in skills. And so let's say at the end of next year, you actually have no more money, but you would now have the ability to make more money. And so just like my father had to start over from nothing after losing everything, he didn't lose everything. He still had the most valuable thing he had, which is that he was a surgeon. And so he knew a skill and he could make it work here, like you'd make it work there. And that is something that no divorce can take from you, no government can confiscate, and it's something that's with you till the day you die. And so that's how you get better. You keep going, you keep improving the feedback loops, you invest appropriately, and you keep going all in on you. We've eliminated everything that's bad, we've started something that's good, we've gotten even better at being gooder, and now finally, we've gotta stick to it when it gets tough, because it will. Here's something that's taken me way too long to learn. Staying focused is like beating addiction. It's not a one-time victory. You have to fight it all day, every day. Then wake up and do it again tomorrow. Because the thing that's going to distract you is going to change every day. The thing that's going to trigger your addiction to distraction is going to keep morphing and changing its form so that it can steal or rob you of your future. And so you have to be adaptable in knowing that you have to fight it every day. And so it's not good enough to just say, "I was focused for this week." You've got to wake up on the 8th day and the 9th day and do it again. And so you remember that guy who got rich dropshipping and day trading and buying crypto and wholesaling all at the same time? Yeah, me neither. Focus. To win in business, you need to be able to say no without remorse and hear no without a loss of enthusiasm, which means that you have to keep feeling rejection, keep failing, and keep going while being willing to reject basically everyone else. And that seems so counter because you're right there and you're like, man, I don't want to reject this person because I know what it feels like to be rejected. You need to be able to maintain this discrepancy so that you can create the space to do the work that needs doing. So there have been a couple of lessons that I have learned over and over again in my career. I've had to relearn. So it's a lot like a fine wine. It's like it gets better with age and there's more nuance to the flavor. So I think focus is not a are you focused or not, it's how focused are you. And you can measure someone's focus by, again, the quality and quantity of things that they say no to. Which means that as you get better, more opportunities will emerge, which is interesting because people who start out can't see opportunity anywhere. And it's because they have so few skills. And so, there's very few opportunities for them. When you have a lot of skills, there are so many opportunities that are in front of you that you feel like you're missing out. But the real opportunity is actually in solving the problems in front of you. I was able to, in my opinion, become another order of magnitude greater in terms of entrepreneurship which I would just measure by wealth. Once I was able to learn to say no and accept that I would not be able to pursue the many things that I know I could crush. Because once you realize how much actual work it takes to make something good, you realize how few things you're actually going to be able to do in your entire life. And so this is why picking becomes so important. Right now, the things that you're going to have to say no to are really the distractions and kind of in some ways easy. Saying no to fantasy football, saying no to drinking beers with the boys, going out with the club, whatever. But in a year from now, once you have more skills, there will be more opportunities. You're gonna have multiple $10,000 a month income opportunities that you're gonna have to say no to to stick with the one that you have. And then once that thing becomes a $100,000 a month thing that you're doing, you're gonna have to start saying no to multiple $100,000 a month opportunities. And here's the thing with opportunities that come up. They only show you the upside and not the downside. You have to know where the skeletons are buried. You have to know where the bodies are. If you don't know, and I've gone through this, this, this visual because I think about it every single time I have to walk through not doing something. You are here, you see this new opportunity here, then you understand the downsides here, then you live the downsides, then you experience the upside, then you achieve your goal. And so this is the starting point. This is called uninformed optimism. This is now informed pessimism. This is the valley of despair, and this is where most people quit. But what they do is they don't even quit because they don't want to say they quit. What they do is they start another one of these things, and they say, oh, this is now my uninformed optimism. And then, oh, now I understand this more. But the thing is, is that they never actually get through to this upside, and so they just keep jumping from thing to to thing, to thing, over and over again. And so the reason it takes so long is because you're in a rush. Big things don't happen on small timelines because you have to start from zero over and over again. And if you actually stick with it, it's actually the shortest way to get to where you wanna go. It just takes longer than you think. Must be easy for you to say, is probably something that you might think while watching this or listening to this. And I like to tell the story because in July of 2017 is when I started my podcast. And it was 90 days after I lost everything the last time. And from that point until now, it's taken that period of time to get to over a million downloads a month. And for the first 3 years, and I was making multiple podcasts, we're talking 300, 400 episodes. For the first few years, I never really cracked 3,000 downloads a month. And so I could say, man, why is this taking so long? But the real, real is that it took me that long to get good. It also, being extra real, took me that long to have proof on the outside that what I was saying was true on the inside. And right now, no one who listens to my podcast cares that it took me 7 years to get here. They just care that it's good today. And so people quit here when things get hard because the thought of something being hard forever is unbearable. They think that this line is just gonna keep going this way forever. But it's not because once you fully understand all the bodies, where the skeletons are hidden, then you can actually start solving them one by one. The thing is, is that that distraction only is distracting because you don't know what sucks about it. You might think you know what sucks about it, but you don't know what sucks about it. And so the big difference is you have something called declarative versus procedural knowledge. And so there's two types of learning, and this is actually formal. This is, this is from academia. So you have declarative knowledge, which is knowing about something. So if you go memorize a fact or you learn how private equity works, right? This is knowing about. The other type of knowledge is procedural, which is knowing how to. And so a lot of people mistake declarative knowledge for procedural. And so they mistakenly think that if they watch 10 videos on doing a private equity deal, that it means they understand how to do a private equity deal. Or they watch 10 videos on cold outbound and they think it means they understand how to do cold outbound. Or 10 videos on sales and so forth. But you're never really going to learn how to do it until you do it. And so you're going to learn more from your first 100 cold calls, your 100 cold knock-on-doors, than you will from 100 books or videos that you watch. But I have good news. Nothing hard lasts forever. There's only 3 things that can happen. You either quit, it gets easier, or you get better. So no matter what, it always ends. You only lose when you quit before you see it all the way through. And I think that's incredibly encouraging. So no matter how hard whatever it is that you're doing is, which by the way just means that your expectation doesn't match reality, but no matter how hard it is, you either quit, it gets easier because something changes externally, or you get harder, something changes internally. But no matter what, it will end. Think about it like you're mining for gold, right? You're chiseling away underground and you've got this pile of gold. You don't know how far away it is, but it's underground and you're digging towards it. This difficulty of swinging the pickaxe can end when one, you walk out of the mine and say, there's, you know what, marketing doesn't work. Sure. The second is that all of a sudden you hit a soft patch and then you're like, oh my God, I'm digging so much faster now, this is great, and then you get to the gold. Or you just start swinging the ax harder because you get more muscled, you get more efficient with your movements, and you just keep chiseling away even if it goes from dirt to rock. You just keep chiseling away at a slower pace, but you eventually break through and get there. But in all 3 of those scenarios, hard doesn't last forever. And so I'll give you a little rule of thumb that I've seen on how do I do more of what's working, right? How do I keep going? When it's easy, do more. When it's hard, do different. And so I told this story years ago and I'll tell you guys again. So when Gym Launch just barely started to work, all right, so I'm like 3 months into Gym Launch working, guess what? Guess what brilliant Alex thought he should do? So I went to this meetup of 10 entrepreneurs, all the entrepreneurs were 8-figure entrepreneurs, so $10 million plus per year. I was not making that. We were pacing probably $300,000 or $400,000 a month at the time. It was just me, Layla, and I think we had an assistant over kitchen sink. I was making the most money I'd ever made in my life and probably to this day because it was the most material change in my life by percentage. When you go from no money to hundreds of thousands a month within 90 days, me looking at bankruptcy attorneys 6 months earlier to that, I can't explain how crazy reality shifted. But I had this guy who came up to me after I gave my little presentation of like, hey, this is what's working, and so of course what I wanna do now is start a supplement company. He came up to me and he said, "If what you're saying is true, if the economics of the business that you've outlined really do work as well as you say they do, when it gets easy is when you go hard. It's when you double down on what's working." And he said that to me and I remember he said, "Because what's going to happen is that if it really works this well, someone bigger and badder is going to take all your stuff and immediately try and do it with their distribution, their audience, and their leverage." And so, if there's ever been a time to focus on the thing that's in front of you, it's right now. And I remember Leilah and I felt this huge weight of pressure that started us at that point. Because literally, I think I was really content for like 6 weeks. And I was really thrilled. We had just gotten married. We're 6 weeks into being, you know, married. We're making really good money. She's 23 or 24. I'm 26, 27. So, like we're young. I was like, "Holy cow, this is amazing." Our rent for context was $1,200 a month. I was taking home $400. And so I've always lived far below my means. At this point though, we went back home with the devil inside of us in terms of the fear of us losing everything that we had. And so we basically worked around the clock like someone was trying to put us out of business. And the thing is, is that people did eventually, but by the time they did, we had gone so far ahead that they were way behind us because we were working against a hypothetical enemy who was trying to destroy us. Not the ones that were actually mediocre and distracted. When it's easy, do more. Once it starts working, put the blinders on and hit the gas. And I would challenge you with this tactical setup right now. If you've never worked for 30 days straight, I would encourage you to try it. In China, there's something called the 996, which is basically the standard for Chinese tech work hours, which is you work 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week. That's the bar. And so I like to state that because we think we work so hard. That's just the average. And so I would encourage you, remember hard times, hard men, right? Good times? Well, we need to act as though it's hard times because if you don't, you're surely going to become soft. My challenge for you is work 30 days straight. Work 10, work 12 hours a day, 30 days straight. What you will realize at the end of this is one, how much work you can actually do. Two, that you're not gonna die. You're not made of glass. And third, you'll know that you have that gear if the time calls for it. Now, I will be very real with you. I work more now than I have ever worked in my life, save maybe when I opened my very first gym. So I work in absolute hours more than I ever have, and I produce significantly more than I did then. And this year, I think I've taken something like 10 or 11 days off in 2024. I would measure a day off as any day where I worked probably fewer than 4 hours. I put this as context, and I had a security guard who was here at acquisition.com earlier this year, and he was talking to some of the younger guys on the team. And he said, you should never let Alex work more hours than you. Because he's already ahead of you. And so if you want to catch up with him, certainly don't let him outwork you. Some of the hoodoo mental health whatever people are going to disagree with me. Also, don't give a shit. And so the thing is, is you can just go and make those mental health people happy, or you can get what the fuck you came here to get. You can do what you came to do. And I have found that in my life, I've gotten significantly more purpose and more drive from a long day's hard work, from earning my shower at the end of the day, than anything that I've ever had from a pleasure-seeking perspective. As much as it's great to go to the pool for a day and hang out with some people, or maybe just watch movies, as great as that may be, there's nothing that I get more fillum out of than knowing that at the end of a day that I work 16 straight hours, that I have some product that I pulled out of my brain and into the world, that this thing got life now. Looking back on the best days of my life, it was those types of days. And so when I realized that, I stopped trying to satisfy what everyone else told me my life was supposed to be like. They're like, you should take vacations. I took my first vacation this year and it was supposed to be a 2-day vacation and Leila and I left after 1. Because what happened was I got there at this beautiful resort, $5,000 or $10,000 a night, very expensive. And I say that just to say that it was ritzy, right? It was luxurious. I get there, I sit out on the back of this beautiful patio for this really expensive room and I look out on this, you know, mountain view and I think to myself, this is beautiful. And I don't care. I wish I felt something. And all I wanted was to get back in the game. And so I realized that even that little mini vacation was something that I had done because I thought it was an expectation. It was unspoken or spoken from someone else in my life. And so I have this quote that I live by, which is, if you don't know why you believe what you believe, it's not your belief, it's someone else's. At that time, it's like I had this belief that I should take a vacation. But why? Now, if I can't explain it, which I really can't, then I shouldn't do it. And now I want to be very clear, this doesn't mean that there's no time for rest, but I like to think about the hypothetical extremes. I like to think about the 996 that is just the standard in China, and I like to think about people in the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages. They worked above their shop and they didn't have, like, the 7-day or 5-day work week is something that was invented in the last 100 years. This is not pointing to your human capacity. This is pointing to a societal constraint. I think that a truly liberated individual operates purely from first principles of what do I want, what does it take to get it, and then what are the things that hold me back. And those, those things that hold you back are going to be physical constraints. You can't operate without sleep, not for an extended period of time. So I'm not saying don't sleep. Sleep as much as you can. I'm not saying that you can work physical labor all hours of the day without rest. You need rest, and sometimes you need mental rest, which is different than physical rest, and that's okay. So if you need— and I'm gonna put need in quotes here— if your way of unplugging is watching Netflix, cool. If your way of unplugging is gardening, cool. If your way of unplugging is working out, cool. Do what works for you. But fundamentally, the goal is to increase total net output over the longest period of time. And so it's not about Okay, I'm gonna work 24 hours straight. Well, you're actually gonna take from tomorrow, so your net output over 2 days is gonna be much worse. And so it's really balancing that, and I learned that much later in life. I was able to get significantly more out of myself working 7 days a week and working 10 hours, 12 hours on those days, rather than working, call it, 18 every day. That was for me a little bit too much. Now, I have had seasons where I call it 3 shifts. So basically I work 6 to noon, noon to 6, and then I work 6 to basically sleep time when I get back home. I only usually have to go into that gear probably once a year for maybe 6 weeks to 8 weeks is when I have to go into the third shift. But most of the times I can pretty much sustain 12 hours of work a day kind of indefinitely. I bring this up to kind of set the bar for at least where I'm at, so maybe you have some sort of benchmark. But if you're wanting to get ahead, I can promise you working less is probably not the way to do it, especially when you don't have as many skills. Because the fewer skills that you have, the more labor or volume you have to compensate with in order to make up for the ineffectiveness per unit of time you work. And so in the beginning is when you actually have to work the most, but in the end is when you want to work the most because of how much more you're getting for it. So my team wanted me to make this point because they've obviously seen me work and they're like, I don't think this is coming through in this video. Which is that I have an obsession with speed. This seems kind of weird in juxtaposition with patience, but this is the very classic micro speed, macro patience, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever ism you prefer. The idea is though that you want to pull reality forward. And so I always like to break things down, whether it's me or my team, into how many hours and minutes something's going to take. And then I like to stack those things back and forth. And rather than using arbitrary deadlines of, okay, let's get this done by next week, You use actual deadlines based on how long it should take. And then when you find out how long something takes, you then ask the next question, which is, how can I make this take less time? How can I automate this thing? How can I automate portions of this work? How can I give away chunks of this? How can I deem some of this unnecessary? And so that continuous cutting and pulling forward of tasks is how you can move so much faster through life and towards your goals. And so I have this weird mental belief that there's like this, this big path in front of me that I have all these skills that I have to achieve to hit these milestones. That is laid out on this time span. And so I reject the timeline, but I accept the skills. And so the idea is like, okay, it's like I'm a Pac-Man of like eating those little dots, and each of those dots is a skill. It's like I want to pull it towards me as fast as I can so I can ingest the skills and basically power up myself faster because I know that these skills are requisites. I can't move on to calculus without knowing arithmetic. I can't move on to calculus without knowing algebra. There's no way around it, but I can choose to learn algebra faster. And so then it's like, okay, what is required to learn algebra? Oh, and if I do more problems faster than the standard person, then I'll get there faster. And so if the class says, okay, I need you to do these 10 problem sets and they're due next week, well then how long does it take for me to do those problems? Maybe 30 minutes. Then why can't I do my second lesson 30 minutes later and then do another 10 problems and do my third lesson 30 minutes after that and do another 10 problems? Well, if that's the case, then I can do an entire year's worth of work in a week. And this is how, in my opinion, pulling forward is one of those things that I've seen so many of the most successful entrepreneurs do, is they simply question timelines aggressively and ruthlessly eliminate any waste or gap between the actions required to win and everything else? Honestly, I think the things that I'm working on right now for my skills are I'm learning how to reinforce cultural norms across a company that continues to scale, which I define as the rules that govern reinforcement in an organization. That is the culture, and those are both spoken and unspoken rules. And when I say rules, I mean when someone does this, they get a pat on the butt. When someone does this, they get chastised or they get a ding, right? And the thing is, is that people like to say they have a good culture here, but the culture is 100, 1,000 unspoken rules. And that's why it takes people time to learn and figure out what the culture is when they go somewhere new. You can give someone a list of 100 rules, And if you were very granular, you could figure it out. The problem is that the culture changes based on the people who change the reinforcers. And so that means that the culture in a team could be different than the culture in the company because the person who's closest to them manages it differently. And so that changes the behavior. And so that's why a sales team can have a different culture than a marketing team, a different culture than a finance team, different culture than an HR team. And so I'd say right now, a big focus of mine is trying to standardize the rules that govern reinforcement across an organization that scales and making sure that everyone is aligned with that style of work. The second thing that I'm working on right now is basically the highest level of recruiting. And recruiting and talent is actually kind of like focus, where it's one of those skills that I don't think you ever master. You just keep learning how many more levels there are to it. It's like right when you finish it, you realize that you're at a sub-peak and there's actually another peak beyond it. The mist lifts and then you see the next steps. And so, like focus, I thought, oh, I was focused at $100,000 a month 'cause I could turn these opportunities down. And then you got some even sexier opportunities, you gotta learn how to say no to those. So the same thing happens with talent is that you're willing to tolerate a certain amount of mediocrity at one level. That is no longer tolerable at a level above that. And the types of people that you bring in, you have a higher standard, a higher bar for those people and attracting them and the process associated with getting them to buy into your culture, your vision, and getting them to take their skills and apply them to your opportunity is a skill set that I am working on now because fundamentally I have a belief which is the best talent is always yet to come. And that's predicated on the idea that if I get better, my opportunity will get better and that will attract more people and better people. And I bring this up because I basically want to translate one thing which is that the reinvestment in learning skills never ends. And so Charlie Munger said this, You just have to be a lifelong student. You have to be willing and want to learn. So I actually had an example of this. So recently there was somebody on teams, I did a bunch of one-on-ones over the last week because I was looking at one of the departments. And one of the guys said, hey, I have this particular skill. I was hoping that we could eventually have a role that only does this thing. And I said, you know, it's interesting that you ask or you make that request because if I were you, I would not think that way at all.