In this informal vlog, Leila Hormozi reflects on her experience building Gym Launch into a multi‑million‑dollar company. She explains how, during the first two years, she and co‑founder Alex deliberately sacrificed personal life—no friends, no dates, no spending—to focus entirely on the business. In 2019, a vacation revealed the unsustainable misery of that approach, prompting a mindset shift toward "constraint‑based goal setting." Hormozi argues that true success should be paired with happiness, and that imposing deliberate limits on work hours, meeting days, and available time forces greater efficiency and creativity. She outlines concrete constraints she now uses (e.g., 5‑hour workdays, three meeting days per week, scheduled travel and family time) and describes how this structure has allowed her to run a $30‑$40 million business while maintaining a fulfilling personal life. The video serves as a motivational guide, urging entrepreneurs to rethink the belief that sacrifice is required for growth and to design intentional constraints that align business goals with personal well‑being.
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What is up? In this video, I'm going to talk about goal setting. Not what you think about goal setting, but, uh, understanding constraints when setting goals. I am frankly walking in the middle of beautiful Vail right now, and it came to me and I just felt like taking a video. So, uh, sorry if it's clunky or the sound sucks, but I feel like it's important enough to talk about. So something that, um, I feel like I have learned in the last— I want to say 2 years— is the idea of putting constraints around goals. And What I think is really easy is putting like normal constraints on goals. And when I'm talking about like normal constraints, think about this, right? How hard is it to grow a large or just say a multimillion-dollar business if you literally work yourself to death, work all the time and hate your life? Like you sacrifice fun, you sacrifice relationships with friends, you have unlimited hours in your day to work. And I think that most people, if you're fairly competent, can achieve a multimillion-dollar per year business. If you're doing that. Now, what I don't think is easy to achieve, what I think most people actually want, is to be able to have a business that does multi-millions of dollars a year and not hate their lives. Right? And so they want to be able to have friends, have a relationship, have the body they want, everything while running the business. And so when frankly, when we first started Gym Launch, Alex and I, we actually made a pact with each other. It was so bad. We were like, we're literally going to sacrifice everything. Like, we're not going to see friends, we're We're not going to eat out. We're not going to go on date nights. We're not going to spend any money. We're literally just going to hunker down and build this freaking business and make an empire. It served us for the first 2 years, but in 2019, we took our first vacation ever. And I remember, like, I was so stressed that the coach I had at the time was like, I feel like you should have a drink. And I remember I was like, nobody's told me, like, I think you should go against your values and actually go have a drink. And that was when I knew, like, I'm really stressed. I need to figure out— I need to change something. And so we went on this vacation and we sat down and I was like, I was ready to have this conversation, be like, I am so unhappy. And it turns out Alex felt the same way. And so he was like, me too, this sucks. Like, I'm so sick of being miserable. Like, why is it— and this is what I said— I was like, why is it that we think that we can't have everything we have and be happy at the same time? Because success and happiness are very different and there's very different formulas to achieve each. I think Tony Robbins talks about, you know, fulfillment versus, I don't know, success or something to that extent. It's the same thing, right? Since that day in 2019, I've challenged myself to say, how can I have the success I want while also being happy, while also having a phenomenal marriage, while also being in shape, while also traveling and seeing my friends? Like, how do I do all that at once? And so that is what I wanted to explain. It's just this mindset shift, which is just thinking in terms of Setting constraints so that you actually have less resources to get the job done. And I think this is something that most people are not great at doing, which is, okay, I'm going to set the constraint that I actually have to have less time to achieve things. I have less hours in the day. I have to have more social things on my calendar. I have to commit to doing more in my marriage, more date nights, more traveling, right? And so I think that what happens is that most of the times we do the opposite. We say, I'll just sacrifice literally everything to achieve this success. And I'm like, well, no shit, you can be successful if you literally sacrifice your whole life and hate yourself, right? I've seen so many people do it. I've done it myself and it sucks. And the reason I feel like this is so important is because I am now at a point where I literally have the success I've always wanted and I'm happy. Like, I am so happy and I love my life and I love everything I'm doing. And it was just a belief, right? Right? Like, it was the belief that in order to have success, I needed to sacrifice everything else, or I need to be so regimented that it's like date nights and exercise and seeing friends became like a checklist almost. It was like, well, did I do all this in my week and my day? Rather than like having more freedom and flexibility in life. I think that a lot of people, especially in the beginning, struggle with flexibility versus rigidity. And especially if you're setting goals and you're trying to achieve things, it's very easy to achieve goals and you have very rigid, like a very rigid lifestyle. Right? And I say that because I'm somebody who— I had a very rigid lifestyle, and I've just now come out of it in the last 6 months. And I'm achieving more now than I feel like I ever have, because I've set these constraints. I'm like, I'm only working these hours of the day, I'm only working these days, I only take these kinds of meetings on these days, I'm going to force myself to travel. So this is something really interesting, is that for the last 2 months we've been traveling. And I'm like, how can I do all of this while also traveling? And and having fun and seeing my friends every night, right? And the funny thing is, it all happens. It all gets done. And so I'm really challenging you to think, just challenging your beliefs. How do you achieve your goals while setting constraints? You know what I mean? Like, how can you achieve and have a $5 or $10 or $15 or $30 or $40 million business while working, say, 5 hours a day? Say you take meetings 3 days a week. Say you only, uh, work 35 hours a week, you know, like putting constraints around it and then also filling in what you're going to do with the rest of your time so that you have a fulfilled life and that you're happy. Because I just don't believe that anyone can sustain success while sacrificing happiness. And this is something I'm working on with my team lately too. I'm like, you need buffer time, you need time to think, you need time to go do stuff with your family and your friends. Like, you can't just hunker down and work all the hours of all the days. And the funny thing is everyone thinks they're the exception. I thought I was the exception, right? And then 2 years ago I just cracked. I was like, what the hell? Like, it's been 15 years I've run my life like this, and all of a sudden you just kind of crack. And that's when you realize all of us are made up of the same stuff. And I think we always think we're more different, uh, from others than we really are, but we're not. We're all very similar. Um, that's when I realized it's just how humans work. It's just how our brains work. There just comes a point where it's almost like if, like, if you feel like right now you've accumulated like life or fun debt, then you really need to take a look at it and say like, how can I integrate this back into my life and actually can create more constraints around my goals? And trust me, it is much harder to achieve your goals in business with limited time and resources. And so you actually become a better entrepreneur and a better CEO if you limit those. So I hope that's useful for you. Just thinking, how can I achieve the goal while setting these constraints around it so that I actually can achieve all these other things at the same time and not hate my life? Works way better. So hope that's valuable. If so, go ahead and hit subscribe. I will see you on the next one.
