# A Hard Learned Lesson (ALEX HORMOZI)

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Alex Hormozi
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kt-EYieNko
- **Дата:** 24.11.2020
- **Длительность:** 11:28
- **Просмотры:** 41,566
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/16732

## Описание

Download your free scaling roadmap here: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap-yta21
The easiest business I can help you start (free trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi
Business owners: Want to scale faster? We provide in-person advisory for companies doing at least $1M per year: https://www.acquisition.com/workshop-yta21

If you're new to my channel, my name is Alex Hormozi. I'm the founder and managing partner of Acquisition.com. It's a family office, which is just a formal way of saying we invest our own money into companies. Our 10 portfolio companies bring in over $250,000,000+ per year. Our ownership stake varies between 20% and 100% of them. Given this is a YT channel, and anyone can claim anything, I'll give you some stuff you can google to verify below.

How I got here…

21: Graduated Vanderbilt in 3 years Magna Cum Laude, and took a fancy consulting job.
23 yrs old: Left my fancy consulting job to start a business (a gym).
24 yrs old: Opened 5 gym locations.
26 yrs old: Close

## Транскрипт

### Intro []

every time I take a step towards kind of a better ideal in this direction, I make significantly more money. And so, I figured I'd share it with you. But, uh, recently, I've been spending a lot of time reading um, and specifically reading from people who make a lot more money than I do. And I think that I haven't had a good, um, kind of a little bit more heady of a podcast until recently. So, I'm going to try and break that streak today. So, one of the hardest learned lessons that I've in and I'm still actively learning it, but every time I take a step towards kind of significantly more money. So, um

### The Matrix [0:35]

figured I'd share it with you. So, um, in some of my earlier podcasts, I talk a lot about focus, right? About learning to say no. And I think that over the last year and a half, two years, um there have been my hardest learned lessons were where I said yes to opportunities that were now at a larger size than what I used to learn to say no to. And so I've referenced the opportunities that come to us as like the woman in the red dress, if you're familiar with the Matrix, is that the thing is that at every opportunity level, as you level up, the opportunities become sexier, right? The woman in the red dress becomes more attractive because you know in the very beginning before you've made any money, anything is attractive. You say yes to anything. But then as you acquire more and more skills, more and more opportunities open up and better opportunities open up which is why you have to like relearn the same concept but at a different level, right? Um because at one point you don't say you say yes to a $10 million opportunity or a $1 million opportunity. Everything's relative, right? But at another level, you have to learn to say no to that if you were above that at that certain time. And I think I've made that mistake multiple times at different levels. And so I'm partially making

### The Road Less Stupid [1:42]

this, you know, video for me. And so, um, there's a book called The Road Less Stupid. Um, it's really, really good. I'd highly recommend it, especially if you're an entrepreneur. Um, and especially if you're prone to getting excited about new ideas, constantly wanting to innovate, constantly wanting to tweak and change things. um which is really you know the thing that excites us a lot and it's a lot of times it's the key to big breakthroughs. That being said, one of the quotes I used to quote a lot uh was from Jeff Basos who said um basically b business is different from baseball in that uh in business uh in baseball when you swing for the fences the most you can ever score is four runs, right? But in business every once in a while when you step up to the plate if you hit the ball hard enough you can score a thousand runs. And um so big people who bet big win big but they bear the cost of experimentation, right? And so um the he references earlier on in that little address that he said if you have a chance of 100 times payoff and you've got a one out of 10 chance of hitting it, you should take that bet every time. And after having thought about this, I mean Jeff obviously makes a lot more money than I do. Um, I think

### Realistic Context [2:50]

that that's not it's correct mathematically, but in practicality, I think there's another sentence that needs to be added to it. And so, to give it a realistic context, imagine you're going to the casino and that's the bet, right? That's the bet is uh you have to put uh let's say $10 down and you can win a,000, but you've got a one out of 10 chance, right? Now, here's where it makes it realistic. Let's say you only go into the casino with $30. Then what do you do? Think about it. So that means that if you were to bet three times, you've got a one you've only got a one out of three chance of ever of coming out of the casino with anything, right? And so that's I think a more realistic paradigm for what most entrepreneurs go into is because you have a constrained amount of capital, money, and time and resources and bandwidth for your team. And so kind of adapting that extra sentence on there of just understanding that there's a cost to making that bet. It's not just, oh, if I have a one out of 10 chance of scoring a thousand, um, then I should definitely make that bet every time for a $10 bet. Yes, you absolutely should mathematically. And in Jeff's case, he's had access to unlimited money, virtually unlimited money for 20 years. He's been able to re raise funding um, and fun. I mean, they have $500 million mess ups and they're like, "Whoops, that didn't work. " But a lot of us don't have that. And so, um, there's, uh, in the the book, The Road Less Stupid, he gives a context, um, that I think has really been useful for me even lately in making decisions about opportunities, right? It's the things that I have to say no to. And so, the three questions are really simple, which is why I've been using them so much, which is, what's my upside? What's my downside? And can I live assuming that the downside's going to happen? And so the third question is stated a little bit differently, but that's how I'm using it. And um in phrasing the three questions that way, it's helped me so much in saying no, right? In like, man, why don't we try this new follow-up sequence so that we can get, you know, uh more leads in? Well, what's the what's my upside? Maybe I get a 10% boost. What's my downside? I lose 50% because the test doesn't work or it bombs because what I'm going against is a control which has already been tested against other things and is working and can I live with my downside of losing 50% for the hopes of gaining 10? No, I can't because I'm going to assume I'm going to make that loss. And so then I just say no. And what's happening is it's giving me so much attention back so that when I'm making my bets because ultimately if you really think about what business is at its very basic it's just betting which is why a lot of entrepreneurs love gambling. Uh because it's what we do. We do in a controlled setting it's like g you know business is the ultimate version of poker right like poker is a combination of skill and luck right business I would say is even more skill and still a little bit of luck. And so it just has more skill under our control but at the end of the day there's still bets they're replacing. It's not just on black and red. It's should I hire a salesperson first or should I spend more in this marketing campaign? Uh should I test out this new follow-up sequence or should we try and run SEO? Uh or should we do cold outbound messenger? Right? And so it's like all of these things are decisions where you're choosing between two different opportunities. And I think if you apply that framework, that three question framework, it's been I just like for me it's been a gamecher. It's been so helpful. Um, and we've seen, you know, huge reaps, you know, we've reaped the benefit in the business. Um, just in the last 90 days, even during COVID, we've had some explosive growth. I'll tell you more about it in a couple months. Um, but it's been in really trying to hone that discipline. And I feel like at every level, you get that discipline muscle gets stronger and stronger and the things that I'm able to say no to get better and better. And so um one of the things that if you look at if you study like Charlie Mer Buff it they talk

### Bet Big [6:40]

about the best bettors the best gamblers actually bet the least frequently. they actually bet the fewest amount of times, but when they bet, they bet big. And so, um, I'm trying to really apply that and when they bet big, they bet on what they call no-brainers, right? It shouldn't be like you should have in their mind virtually no chance of not succeeding when you make the bet, right? And then if you think about that, then you're like, well, shoot, there's I mean, when will I ever see those types of bets? If you look at them over 40 years, they only have 15 bets that have created all of the billions that they've been able to generate. 15 winning bets out of all the bets they've made have been the winning bets that have got them to where they are. And I think that in business, it's a lot like that. So, let me just tell you one quick anecdote to wrap this up. To make this real for you, tell me if this sounds realistic. You get really excited about a new concept, a new idea that you think you're going to test out, right? and you uh you pitch it to the team, you let them know what's going to happen. You're saying, "We're starting on Monday. This is going to be the new way we do things. " The team's not 100% um trained

### Your Feet Are King [7:50]

up on it, but they're kind of go, you know, fly as you go. Your speed is king. Let's rock and roll with this thing. You know, we'll pick it up as we go. And after a month or two months, you look back at your stats and they're pretty much the same, maybe even a little bit less. But there's like three other things that happened during that same period of time. you're like, I don't know if it was this or it was because of the new process. Honestly, you know, there's this and that. And then all of a sudden, you realize that you didn't even get a definitive answer on the test that you ran. Um, and you definitely didn't get the result that you were hoping for. And so, what ends up happening is that your company and you incurred this enormous cost of change without real like without any real upside. And so in thinking through the bets that I'm making now, I'm assuming the cost. And what I mean like I'm assuming that I'm going to have the downside, even the one that I'm understanding, but I'm assuming there's going to be some that are unknown that I'm going to have to incur. And so when I'm making that assumption, which is that third question, which is and can I live with it assuming that it does happen? I it just like it's been so illuminating for me and so helpful for me because what happens is you get in these vicious cycles especially um especially if you're in an emotional situation, right? Because I know a lot of um a lot of business owners in general right now are cash constrained. They're trying to figure out what to do. They're trying to pivot fast, make fast decisions on incomplete information. Sometimes that's just the name of the game, right? Um but in doing that um they're hoping for the Hail Mary and so their internal optimism which is what leads them to be an entrepreneur ends up weighing against them. It ends up stacking the chips against them because that one thing which has been your hope, right? Your greatest strengths can become your greatest weakness. As an entrepreneur, there's no different, right? Our optimism can become our Achilles heel because we believe that the chance of success is actually greater than it really is. And we underestimate the cost of taking the bet. And that's where we get [ __ ] right? And so when you go back to the casino and when you're considering the bets and you're like, man, if this hits, this could be 10 times what we're doing right now, right? But just remember, you only might have three bets to make and you got a one out of 10 shot. So use them wisely. So anyways, I hope that was useful for you. It's been incredibly useful for me. Um, I've been saying no to way more um tests and tweaks and variations and and and just small things that would really distract the team and just saying, "Guys, we're just going to keep we're going to keep focusing on executing. doing better at the fundamentals. " And it continues to pay dividends because the team doesn't have to be scattered. They just have to think, how can we get 1% better every day rather than 1% better for two weeks and then change everything and then everything, right? um where they never actually get to get that long-term compounding uh improvement which is what ultimately will separate you over time. So, like I said, hope that was valuable for you. It's been uh it's been a huge lesson for me and in studying some of the greats, the all-time greats, seeing how they make decisions, seeing where they place their bets. Um I wish I had learned it earlier. Um but hopefully I can pass, you know, at least that nugget on to you because it's been really helpful for me. So, lots of love. Keep being awesome. Hope you have an amazing Saturday and um hopefully a beautiful view here from the from Bear Lake and I'll catch you guys soon.