Why I don't go home for the holidays

in this video i want to talk to you about the growth uh that i had to go through as an entrepreneur going from zero to 85 million dollars a year um and one of the things that i decided to stop doing which is going home for the holidays and i want to explain the decision making process around this and this comes from this is an older video that i did release into a smaller community and in that group uh i can see the best performing videos um and out of 300 plus videos this is among the top uh performing and so uh people seem to very much like this and as we're going into the holidays at least the time i'll me posting this i thought it would be timely but it really doesn't matter what holiday uh you were you're celebrating it's really a video about how to navigate our pasts and use them to walk with strength and conviction into the future that we choose to create and a lot of time it comes from shedding old identities and learning how to unspeak the things that were spoken over us in our childhood from our parents from our friends those who do not understand the path that you're trying to go on as an entrepreneur those who think that what you're doing is stupid those who do like who just don't believe um and at the end of the day we need to believe and we also need to create conditions that are conducive to the goals that we have in our lives and so this video gives you the most tactical raw breakdown of how i did it and i got so many people who told me that the video changed their lives in terms of how they approached uh their pasts and the people and the relationships that they maintain there and how to protect their space tactically in a way that will give you the um the attention back to allocate towards the things that matter so uh moseynation uh i hope you enjoy the video this is just uh because i love entrepreneurs and i want you to crush it there's a lot of people who are broke and i want you to be one of them see you in the vid

good morning happy saturday i'm really excited for this because i've actually had this concept on my mind this piece probably for the last two and a half weeks i feel like it's been like in the back of my mind like percolating and whatnot and it's combining with like four or five other ones and i like felt it this morning as i was eating breakfast i was like all right today's the day i'm gonna make it but recently i wanted to call this why don't go home for the holidays there's probably gonna be some things that i say that are a little bit controversial but there are things that have absolutely been some of the keys to our continued growth and success and i thought you might want to hear them and so i put the title as this for at least for right now as success equals ingrained intolerance so one of the reasons that i don't go home for the holidays is that a lot of people haven't grown since i left right they haven't had 10 years of growth they've lived the same six months 20 times right since i was gone and when i go back they want to meet me in my past and so they want to speak things over me that aren't who i am anymore and then because it's difficult for them to connect right the their perception of who i used to be and who the person is standing in front of them how they reconcile thank you um reconciling those two things is really difficult for a lot of people because it's breaking the box they want to put you in but the reality is that most people don't change entrepreneurs do because we have to right we call it growth instead of change but for the outside world for the non-entrepreneurs who stay in their same box every day it's it's hard to calculate and so i'll go home and they'll say like my dad says this they'll say you have a you have the shortest views out of anyone you just have such a short temper anyone who is in our company my wife like i mean anyone who knows me and spends time with me would probably not say that and so i will be i mean very aggressive in combating that immediately because i'll be like don't speak that over me that's not true that's not who i am and it makes people really uncomfortable and so there's a lot of times if i go see an uncle you know what i mean if i'm at a holiday event and then they're like oh alexander you've always been a little bit loose with the alcoa like i don't even drink anymore you know what i mean like you're speaking about my past and it makes people really uncomfortable and i would implore you to meet those things head-on and the reason that i don't like going home for the holidays because i have to be on guard because when i leave i feel like i have to like wash myself of the

things that people were trying to speak over me and it's constant it's un it's unending it's incessant right they're constantly trying to put me back in the box that makes sense to them i refuse to have that happen and so when i have these conversations it's passing comments it's little things it's never because most people aren't confrontational right and so it's never oh like you are like you don't mean like it's not like that but it's just like oh you know how you always are and they'll say it even with like a smile like it's a good thing but like you have to catch it because you know how it makes you feel when you hear it you're like that's not true that's not me right i'm done with that that's in my past right and so like this is who i am and so i have to take like a week to detangle and then basically re-speak over the things that i am or that i choose to be it's one of the main reasons that i don't go back for the holidays and i really don't like it and i definitely don't like spending any portion of extended time there is because it feels like i'm going backwards you know what we are all as a community trying to accomplish is not normal and we just have to come to terms with the fact that it isn't normal it's okay that it's not normal but it also means that normal people aren't going to like it the higher up we go in business i think at least this is just my subjective understanding of how i'm perceiving it as i go through it the more intolerant we become of people who try and i mean it's even tones like i'll be like don't speak to me in that tone even if they're saying that i think i'm like it seems disrespectful it bothers me and like you become more and more aware because you're like let me teach you how to treat me right and sometimes you have to do that and especially when it's been a long period of time you have to teach people how you like to be treated now and a lot of times it's a lot different than it was when they first met you right and it's the hardest with family because i'll be really real with you there's a lot of people that i'm connected with that i probably would never see again if i didn't have a blood relation i manage our space very well if we you know if we go back it's only going to be for a short period of time because there's no other reason besides the fact that we share a biological bond that i would ever see you again because you haven't you don't have the same goals values you don't want to do the things i want to do when we see each other you make me feel worse why would i see you right i'm just being very real with you guys and maybe this is something that i'll look back at this video five years from now and i'll have grown more and i'll have more perspective but that's where we are now being so intolerant of this stuff is like is so key to being able to like grow i'm telling you because and that's why there's just we keep such quiet space right because it's like the only place that you don't have to have your guard up constantly fending off what other people are trying to tell you about yourself right and so you can kind of build it while it's in its infancy and you're not as strong yet in these new attributes that you're trying to have i was talking to a high-level entrepreneur uh yesterday who's like ah i mean i'm just horrible at details and i was like don't speak that over yourself i was like because your business might need you to be good at details when you go from 10 to 20 million don't say that and he was like you're right i was like yeah you choose you're choosing to not be good at details do you really think that if your kids were going to die like because you need to learn to remember things to be able to do it like well yeah i'm like all right then you're choosing to not be good at it that's your choice that's your belief right and so like if you identify these things like man i'm getting really deep on this i know but like the identity is so fluid

we can change in an instant like tony robbins talks about this stuff all the time like the only moment that we're actually able to live in is right now right and so all of the things that we had before us are only stories that we can either choose to replay because they're positive attributes or choose to ignore if they're negative attributes and a lot of us just stay in these loops of speaking these things over ourselves that don't even serve us right one of my favorite sayings in the world probably one of my favorites like one of the most profound sayings is we question all of our beliefs except for those that we truly believe and those we never question at all and i always i love that because it just makes you aware of like i love catching myself on a belief that i've always had that i believe so thoroughly that i never actually thought to question it because that's how much i believed it right it's just been there and so like the higher up we go the more we kind of uncover these beliefs about what's possible what can we do how can we grow how quickly can change happen you look at our business right like we pivoted from a done 40 model to the done with you model that we have now in april of 2017 right and so from april of 2017 until today right that's like 19 months i think right we've gone from zero to arguably the biggest company in fitness like in the brick and mortar gym fitness world and we're like two or three times the size of anyone else who's like the second runner up 2019 we're gonna probably three to four x that i can say that pretty with a lot of certainty and so like how quickly are you able to achieve what you want to achieve is it supposed to take a year because you're choosing to believe that it's supposed to take a year how quickly can you onboard someone let me give you another story we're about to do a very big launch for our legacy group i can't tell you what it is but a friend of mine

launched a new service category in his business and it blew up overnight he had a huge explosion of traffic he was running like some ads and they just took off right he couldn't do anything about it and so he hired 30 people in 14 days for his customer service team and so when we had our q4 planning right our fourth quarter planning we had our customer service director and i and lily i love you to death it has nothing to do but like this was what happened during the actual meeting she was like i feel comfortable saying that i can bring four people on every month between now and x launch date right which would you know get us to probably 16 or so people 16 to 20 right by the launch date which is going to be like three or four months away and so then i told that story about my friends who had just done this he hired 30 people in 14 days because he had to and so a lot of times the necessity is one of the biggest things that allows us to break our beliefs because we have to we have no other choice and that's why when we have scripts and whatnot and the show rates double based on the fact that you know you actually are going to leave a location and you're not going to be able to sell that person the tonality of how you're speaking to the prospect even though the words are the same the fact that it's just what you believe that changes the outcome and the influence on the other person is like so cool to me and so the question is like how can we trick ourselves into believing what we need to believe in order to grow faster i did this experiment you know three years ago where i put on like 35 pounds of muscle in six weeks right and i started and they asked me to write an article it's muscle and strength and i did it natural you can choose to believe me or not but i did it was 35 pounds of muscle but and there a lot of it was muscle um within six weeks and i started the article off by saying like what if you actually had to gain 35 pounds in six weeks and get and add 100 pounds to your batch what would you do and so i tried to put this conf like these confines on myself and i was like i probably wouldn't just lift one you know twice a week right for that lift i'd probably lift it like once or twice a day and then that's what i did and then i got really strong really fast i added a hundred pounds to my pitch in six weeks and i was natural right and i did that because of the confine like the confines that we put ourselves under and so sometimes i wonder like what things are we allowing to be spoken over ourselves by others first and then second what things are we speaking over ourselves that we don't even know that we're doing constantly questioning like those things that we speak over ourselves has been honestly one of the biggest things that has allowed us to grow i know that i haven't been as tactical in the last few content videos i hope you guys don't mind um it's just been what's on my mind um we had chris and rob and barnett who flew out here because they won a competition that we were holding in secret anyway so chris and robin barnett came out and they were like we feel like we're stuck right in a bottleneck and like we just can't we're just trying to break through

and um when i talked to them about it i um the whole time they were here for the whole day i didn't tell them a single tactical thing to do differently with their business not one but what we identified was the things that they were speaking over themselves and choosing to believe about how quickly things can happen right and so i'll give you an example i hope they don't mind robin his chris's wife didn't want to be in the gym anymore she's like it's not my passion you know like i kind of like now we're comfortable want to do my own thing and so um and it was causing some strife in their relationship mostly because like you know she felt you know betrothed to him that she had to keep doing it but then he felt guilty that she know i mean there's just kind of both sides of it right um and so they were like well we're gonna let robin go you know she's gonna leave in four months right so we're gonna get four months um and then she'll get out of the business and i was like why didn't she just get out today like she doesn't want to do it you don't want her there like why don't you just get out today like why are you choosing to believe that it needs to take four months you know like i guess it doesn't it's like right and so a lot of times like i've just this has just been recently for me i've had a lot of conversations with guys who are doing five to 12 million a year in their businesses and a lot of them have been doing this a lot longer than me and they're like how have you freaking grown so if like how are you hitting the numbers you're hitting how is the growth rate that you guys are having like how is it possible right and like we've really just like i've tried not to be weird about this but like we've just chosen to believe it's possible we've really and a lot of times like if you talk to them and it's like you see these guys who are really really high up in the business world a lot of times they do talk very non-tactical very much mindset stuff and i think it's and i used to really not appreciate it but now i think i'm appreciating it a little bit more because the reason that a lot of people aren't successful is because of the beliefs that they have because if you can remove and break those beliefs a lot of times they will go find the tactics that are necessary right to win and the higher up you go the hot like the cleaner people keep their space and the reason they do that the reason they keep it so quiet is so that they can pinpoint anything that comes in their area right anything that's gonna break or ch chip at them or just like bother them in any way to keep this bubble around them and then what that does though is that it gives them such clean perspective and clean vision on what's going on because a lot of times when i have these guys like i said you were doing you know five six ten million a year and they're like what's going on it becomes really obvious it's really it's really apparent i'll give you another example i had yesterday i talked to a guy who's doing um he's doing half a million a month right now and he has it split between two businesses he's got one business that's like 400 000 a month he's got one that does a hundred thousand a month and he's like well the big you know the 400 000 month business is my old business um it's the one that it's got all the complexity in it i hate the customers all this stuff right and then he's like and then this business is really simple it's super profitable i'm running like three times the margin i run in that business and um

and he's like so i just can't figure out how to grow and i was like do you really can't figure out how to grow he's like yeah just like i got so much stuff going on and i was like yeah you should probably just get rid of the thing that is a big headache for you and do the thing that you really like doing i was like do you think if you got rid of all of the attention that 400 000 month thing is sucking up you'd be able to double the hundred thousand one thing he's like yeah like easy and i was like cool then why don't you do that right and it becomes really apparent and obvious to you on the outside like i mean these guys aren't dumb you know what i mean he's doing 6 million like he's not stupid it's just the beliefs that we truly believe are the ones that we don't see and so it's really interesting and like i think all the time about like i want to be wiser i want to have more discernment and if you really if you start to dissect like what is wisdom right wisdom is being able to see is that is if two people are looking at the same situation the wiser person sees things that the other person doesn't and so it's vision it's being able to see what other people don't see and a lot of times they're just unseen chains that people have already chosen to tie themselves up with right and we're having a lot of gemini's i've had just recently a string of gym owners stopping like man we're just stuck at 60 000 a month like i don't know what this bottleneck is and i always respond i'm like it's not the business model right it's you and it's and i should probably respond more specifically it's a belief that you have that you haven't identified yet that's holding you back a lot of times it's just because you're choosing to make less money like no joke a lot of people choose to make less money so people like we have gym owners right now who are asking like hey like i've got this campaign it's crushing it i think i'm going to turn it off for next month right because like we have a lot going on i'm like if you want to choose to make less money that's your choice you know and so we make these choices if you were to articulate them differently you'd probably think they were ridiculous and i had every conversation i've had just in the last two weeks i've talked to four entrepreneurs that are doing five million or more per year and each one of the conversations ended with like well when you put it like that i sound like an idiot and i was like well are you it's like well no i was like then you should probably change the way you're doing it and so it's just these emotions and these beliefs that get in our way of like what seems so obvious and it's just because so we are emotional beings right we are we make decisions with emotions and we try and logic it later but when you look at things logically a lot of times some of the answers are obvious well i've got this trainer that i've had for two years but they're such a pain they never want to do anything other than anything that's new but i have some clients that still like them okay do you think that if you had a new trainer that was like bought in that you would be able to grow more so what it is the fear of losing these few clients that are attached to this one trainer is outweighing the potential growth you would have from the key player that you know you need in order to make the model work and then when it's phrased that way it becomes obvious yeah i gotta let them go but you don't have the perspective yet until sometimes you just need someone on the outside but anyways guys um thank you for spending saturday morning with me this was just something that was on my mind and i just like it was like stirring in me but be mindful of the things that speak people speak over you and the tone that they do it and just like if you feel weird after someone says something stop the conversation catch it and then address it and be like please don't speak to me like that please don't say those things about me it really bothers me i'm really working on this or i've worked a lot on this and i don't appreciate it really bothers me and if that person cares about you they will change and if they don't get them out of your life you don't need that and the most important person to make sure that you're doing that which is you like if you're the one who's saying man i'm just not good at details man i'm just i hate employees good luck running a business these are things i overhear even in our group like ah employees are idiots i'm like do you really think that is a good belief to grow and repeat inside of yourself if you want to grow and scale a business probably not right like be mindful of the things that you're saying because and then ask yourself like does this belief serve and if it doesn't get rid of it so anyways i hope you guys have an amazing weekend um i love you all thank you guys for for giving me your attention i know it's your most valuable resource so thank you i hope i gave you a good return on it um and i hope you guys have an amazing day all right lots of love bye