Today, we're going to go through as many of your lessons as we can in about three hours. And we're going to see what we can get through. First one, a friendly reminder that in three generations, everyone who knew us will be dead, including the people whose opinions stopped you from doing what you wanted all along. Imagine that someone you know achieves every dream and hits every goal they have.
Years later, they get old and die. Two years after that, how much do you care about as much as everyone else will if you accomplish your goals and dreams do it for you? So I think about death all the time, because it's probably the central theme. It's probably the thing that I think the most about and I think that influences how I see time and also how I think, how it influences agency, like what actions I'm willing to take despite the judgment of others.
And so a lot of times, it might be because I have more insecurity than everyone that I think, like, man, I want to do this thing. And then I hear all these other voices of reasons why I shouldn't do it or why somebody else will say, like, that's bad or you'll bad or like, that's wrong, whatever. And so I think I've had to come up with a lot of these devices to get around my own and insecurities to take action despite those insecurities. And the biggest one that I think about is that it doesn't matter whether I achieve all of my goals or I don't achieve all of the goals in three generations.
I'll be forgotten. And the only people who were nacing against me will also be dead. And so then it's like, just do it for me. And then when I wake up every day, there's only one voice I have to listen to.
But that means that you need to be able to work out what to do from first principles. You now no longer have societal norms or assistance or role models or archetypes or expectations. And that's also difficult in a different way. I think that the more you flex whatever that muscle is of like independent thinking, the more it becomes the default way that you think.
And then everyone else's action is to start looking more and more insane to you. What's an example of that that you can think of? I mean, shoot, just the most basic ones of like living the life that you don't want, not wearing what you want to wear, not dating who you want to date, not living where you want to live. Like you're living at home and you want to move and your parents say, no, and you don't make the move or you're dating a girl because she's socially accepted, you know, by your friend group, she's safe, but like there's always some distance in between you.
But you're like, I don't want to risk it, right? Or like you're in the job and every day you go there and you're like, I mean, it's okay. And the idea of just living an okay life just sounds so terrifying to me that the freedom to fail over and over again is still more fulfilling to me. At least it feels like it's real than walking through kind of autopilot.
And so I think that's a lot of the choices that other people make that seem insane to me now, but didn't seem to me a decade ago. You know, I think it's just like as you practice taking more agency, taking more responsibility for the decisions, then you just get better and better at it. And then it just seems more and more ridiculous. You're like, I just can't quit my job.
And you're like, why? Like, no, physically, why? Like, why can't you quit your job? Like, you know what I mean?
They start hyperventilating. It's like, could you move in with your parents? Could you move in with a friend? Could you split rep?
I mean, I could, but I mean, other people who are going to die in a hundred years would think what. And one of my favorite ones is, um, and I say this all the time, but like whenever we're getting to some sort of like mini complaint, it's like, you know, if you zoom out far enough, you can't see the earth. So we're talking about like, oh, man, they're going to mess up this order on this vendor is doable about, you know, if you zoom out far enough, you can't see the earth. It just like, it just puts everything immediately into perspective of how ridiculous some of the things that we're concerned about are.
Sean Puri's got this thing where he says, don't follow what most people do because you don't want the results that most people get. The average person is obese likely to be divorced and has less than 1k in the bank. It feels safe to do what everyone else is doing, but it's actually a terrible decision. It's like the best way to guarantee to not have the life that you want is to do what everyone else is doing.
Unless you want everyone else has with no one, which no one does. Yeah, it's being able to think for yourself and treating it like a muscle, I think is a smart way to consider it because in the beginning, it's really, really hard. You've been resting on societal norms and the way you dealt with past trauma and your parents expectations and what all of your friends do and what's accepted and all of this stuff for so long. But when it first comes to you needing to step on that muscle, it's like trying to move your ears, like all humans have got muscles that can move their ears, but because no one works it as a child, they're just atrophy away.
And this is the ear muscle of personal growth. I think I had a lot of practice with it because I had a, so like a lot of people have many voices that they hear that they feel are judging them, right? They have their friends, they have their uncle, they have their siblings, they have their cousins, coworkers, whatever. I think I had just one voice that I heard really loudly.
And I was talking to one of our employees the other day and I was trying to put in perspective, a younger guy. And I was like, I imagine how much you care about your mother's opinion and your father's opinion and your, and all of those other people. And I was like, and now imagine that there's literally only one because I had no siblings. I basically had no mother.
I had just a father. And so like his approval was literally everything. And he disapproved of the path that I wanted to take in my life. And so I think a lot of these mental faculties or these little frameworks or these isms just came from like, how can I combat this incredibly booming voice in the background?
Because like when I look at what I was doing at the time, like I was a consultant, you know, I graduated in three years, I took the consulting job, I did all the things. But the craziest thing was that the moment that my father was most proud of me and he approved of my life the most was when I was the saddest. And so that's when I was like, maybe his approval isn't the right way to feel good about life. And so that started basically the sixth month journey of from when I decided that I wanted to change my life till when I changed it.
And I think that like I should become more able or more potent or higher agency that timeline between when you decide you want to do something and when you actually do it just continues to compress. Like, now if I want to change something, I'm like, let's change it. Like, done, I like, we walk out of the things like we're never going to do that podcast again. I don't want to talk to this person again or whatever it is, right?
Whereas before it's like, okay, I have to sleep on it. I have to really think about it. Like, how am I going to say it's like, why do I care about how I'm going to say it? This is what it is done.
And it's just like that timeline is compressed. But the hardest one for me, like the first one was by far the hardest and everyone since then. The nice thing is that no matter how difficult your circumstance is, if you have like the bigger the wall that you have to get through is, as soon as you get past that one big wall, you then can use that wall is the evidence for why you can jump over the next wall because that will be the biggest one. And so like, after I did quit my job and left my house and left Baltimore and didn't tell my dad and told us across the country because I was so afraid.
Like, people think of me as like some big awful whatever. I was like, I was so afraid of my father's disapproval that I didn't tell him until I physically left the state. Like, like, I'm not like, think about that. Like, I was saying just one state over.
I was like, five states over. And then I was like, hey, by the way, I'm going to California. And he was like, well, let's come over. We'll talk about it.
And I was like, I'm in Ohio already. Yeah. Yeah. Then obviously he had a different reaction.
But like, but then after that, it was like, what do I have to do now? It's like, oh, I got to, I got to self strangers. And I was like, I told my dad, I didn't want to do what he wanted. How hard could this be?
And so like, it then becomes this one huge proof point. So the bigger the dragon is that you have to slay the more evidence you have that you can slay the next dragon. And I think that is if there's ever been a good point for why getting over the one first hard one is so hard is that it will then give you the reinforcement that you can do whatever you need to do next. Yeah.
The life you want is on the other side of a few hard conversations and you're living a life you hate because you're too afraid to have them. I think about that a lot because like whenever I feel anxious or insecure or angry or sad, then do I need to have them not having it? And so then, and usually if I just think for not that long, I'm like, this is the conversation I've been putting off. And then, you know, I'm not that the poster child of mental health.
And so I'll just call myself a pansy for not having the conversation. And then, and then I just have it. And so again, I think it's like, I need to have this conversation and the time between when I have it versus when I know I need to have it, when I actually have it, just because it continues to compress. And if you've ever had like a breakup or an employee firing, one of the quitting, if you're an employee, like these things that you dread, I don't know if you notice it, but like the day you do it, the moment after you do it, I'm like, how many other conversations can I have?
All good conversations. When I, so like the next series of part conversations that I had after I left home was actually like years later. So I had, I had multiple partners in my, I said, I had a partner in one of my gyms, I had a partner in four other gyms, I had a partner in a Cairo and dental marketing agency, and all of them relied on me to make money. And so all of their livelihoods were still dependent on me, but I was splitting everything and it was horrible for me at the time.
And so I remember when I ended up getting in a DUI and, you know, I talked to a performance coach or whatever, and he was like a stress and these conversations could literally kill you. And so I got in a head on collision at six miles an hour and I walked away, no injuries. But it was like my wake up call, but not to tricking. It was my wake up call that I needed to have these conversations.
And that's what I was avoiding when I was drinking. It wasn't the alcohols. The war with the things that I'm avoiding that I'm using alcohol to get away from. And so the next day I had the first conversation with the first partner and it was horrible.
But the moment I was done, I was like, I got to call the other, I was like, this is how it is and the thing is this, I had this backstop of my death of like, you almost just died because you wouldn't have this conversation. And so then it just gave me this courage to just be like, like, and whatever the reaction was, I was like, I'd rather be alive. Like that was it. And so it's weird though because death has been this really recurring theme in my life that like the same thing happened when I was like, the only thing that gave me enough balls to stand up to my dad to be fair from a distance from the car and I was driving halfway across the street.
Like, let's not make me to be here. I was the idea that like, I started thinking like every day, I was like, I hope I don't wake up. You know what I mean? And that was the thing where I was like, this is a big enough problem that like if you don't want to wake up, then what have you got to lose?
Exactly. And that was it. And I was like, I have nothing to lose. And that was when, I think in the last podcast we talked about this where it's like, if everybody who's like at the bottom and feels like they have nothing going for them, reframe that as I have nothing going for me, which also means that I have nothing to lose by taking action, it makes you a much more dangerous person.
And I think that was the flip that I've had repeatedly shown to me in my life that allowed me to take the step that I was afraid to take. Have I told you about the region beta paradox? You've seen that one? No.
Okay. So this is interesting. So imagine that you had to go a mile or less. And if you did a mile, a mile, if you had to travel a mile or less, you would walk it.
And if you had to go more than a mile, you would drive it. Okay. So if you had to go more than a mile, you would go more than a mile. If you follow that rule, the important insight here is that if you only take action when things cross a certain threshold of badness, sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things.
So if you look around and you see that people are stuck in region beta, this zone of comfortable complacency, right? It's the guy that sticks and it's just okay job because his boss isn't too much of a dick, but the pay isn't that good and he's not really that passionate. But whatever, whatever. The person that stays in the acceptable relationship, they're not that fired up, but they're not really in love and the part that's not really got much alignment with their interests or the person that stays in a crappy apartment and it's a bit of mold and it's cheap and it's in a good area of town or whatever, all of these people would be better off if their situations were worse because it would give them the activation energy to kick them out of the bottom and that only regret would be not doing it sooner.
Did I love that? It's funny because if I look back on the instances that were the most painful in my life, every single one of them without fail has created a disproportionate gain. The most painful thing early on was quitting my job and leaving my dad basically. And then that created my first business in the gyms and all of that stuff.
Getting into the DUI, the head on collision and that whole situation got me out of all of these failed partnerships that I wasn't willing to do. But in the moment I was like, I'm such a failure. I suck at everything. But that gave me the springboard.
When I lost everything the first time after that, that then gave me the idea that I needed to change the business model around. And that's what switched me into the licensing model. So each of these times, and then that became the first real fortune. This is kind of like alchemy.
Turning something which is worse than useless into something that's as precious and useful as possible. I'm sure you know the parable of the man in the sun and he buys a horse and breaks a leg and they're like, oh, it's so sad. And the army comes and the sun doesn't die. And it's like, oh, it's so great.
And so it's one of those really interesting ones where whatever negative situation, and this is probably good for the audience, but if you think back to all the negative situations, you have a really, really bad ones. When you expand the time horizon, most times they become net wins. And so then it just means that if you're in a really tough time right now, you just got to wait. And then you get your reference point back on all the things that changed as a result because most times when shit is bad, it can't get worse.
So then you feel like, well, it can't get worse than this. And then your action threshold decreases. And you do all the things you should have done anyways. And so we have this big stack of shadoos and we just wait until it's two miles.
And then you just are like, you just get in the car. Like the firing conversation. And you're like, why just five person or like I just ended one part and I just work up with one girl or whatever it is. And you're like, who else do I need to talk to today?
And then in like a period of these rapid periods of growth that happen and then you have the next web of comfort because it's way better than you were before. And I think it's, I wonder, this is more just like an open thought, but I wonder how long like more successful people stay in that next plateau. Like I wonder if they're threshold for action. It stays low.
Yeah, they're like, like, I'm getting comfortable. Like how quickly they get comfortable into like, I need to change any to get better. Next one. The heaviest things in life aren't iron and gold, but unmade decisions.
The reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make and you're not making them. It's a good quote. You said it. You said it.
I think a lot of times the decisions that we make are predicated on the conversations we need to have because usually like that. And what's interesting is like, you can define commitment by eliminating alternatives. So if you're committed, you've eliminated alternative actions, right? Like you can say I'm committed, but until you eliminate other options, you're not committed.
There's always a get out of jail for you. Right. A lot of people make decisions to end relationships, to quit their job, to start the new thing, but they don't become committed to the decision until they remove the other options and then you're forced to take action on it. And so I think actually defining those two two different things.
Now you could define, you know, decision is to kill off like dickhead area from Latin, but from a from a from a colloquial thing, I think there are two different instances. Like I need to change this and then I do change it. And the making the decision is when it becomes a commitment. Why unmade decisions so heavy?
I think at least for me, it's because I have this hamster wheel on my back of my mind where I keep playing out different scenarios. And so I keep thinking like, maybe I need to change what I'm currently doing. Maybe if I just rethought like is I'm a big frame guy. So I'm like, maybe I need to be thinking about this.
Maybe if I zoom all the way out, the earth doesn't exist. Maybe this doesn't matter. Maybe I'm just making a problem that doesn't exist. Maybe the best action should take is nothing.
Like I reframe all those things. But usually it's just because I'm afraid of something. And then that's why I'm not making the decision. And I think once I name and put a face and it's usually not even a thing that I'm afraid of, it's one person's judgment I'm afraid of.
And then when I name the person, then it becomes real. Instead of being this amorphous like people, society, judgment, it's like Tom. Like do I really care what Tom thinks? I guess so.
It seems like I'm not making this big change of my life because of Tom. It looks like Tom's more in control of my life than I am. Dude. So I remember this when I was 19 years old, I was super angry, like all 19 year old men.
That's the standard default. I was angry with both my parents because I was 19. And I remember blaming them for everything, blaming them for my life, blaming them for not being a better person. I literally blamed them for being a bad person.
And I remember realizing that when I blamed them that I gave them control over my life. And then the idea that the people that I hated the most at the time were the ones who actually were controlling me was the thing that most sickened me to then actually flip my narrative to actually take control. Like that was the one thought process. Like my mother, I'm giving her control over my romantic relate.
Like my mother controls this. Fuck that. I was like, no. And so like just the idea that somebody who I was disgusted by at the time had that much power is what gave me the power to start taking action.
So this hamster wheel thing continues to distract you. I've got this concept called anxiety cost. So kind of like opportunity cost. When you have an unmade decision, every single second that you spend thinking about the unmade decision could have been gotten back.
Had you just made the decision and realizing that it's a justification for eating frogs earlier in the day. I need to answer that email the longer that you wait until you answer that email, the more times you will think the thought I need to answer that email. And if we assume that what truly truly matters in life is the time and the attention that we spend within that time, your time has been captured and your attention has been captured by thought that could have been gotten rid of had you have just done it had you just had the conversation broken up with the relationship left the job told the father, whatever, done your stretches, cleaned your teeth, had a shower, whatever it is that you needed to do. People of that anxiety cost could have been gotten rid of had you just gotten it.
You can move through life at seven times the rate of other people by simply changing when you say you're going to make a decision from end of week to end of day. So think about how that stacks up. It's like let's say that there were four decisions that you needed to make. If the normal person takes a week to make the decision and then their mind moves on to the next thing that they have anxiety for and start making that decision and decide another week, decide another week, decide another week, decide another week.
It's a month to make those four decisions. Whereas the super, the Superman that takes one decision day one, one second decision day two, third decision day three, fourth decision day four. They aren't even finished the week yet and they're where the other person is at the end of week. And like that speed of decision making, like not paying the attention cost, the opportunity cost of your time.
I think that's really profound in terms of how quickly people move through life in terms of achieving the goals that they set out. Because people are like, how is that guy so young and he's a chief of x, y, and z? It's like, well, what takes you a month to make a decision? We make an hour and then the next hour, I make another decision that takes you your next month.
And so like that's how you can go 30 times or 100 times faster than the quote average person who's overweight has $1,000 in their bank account, you know, and it's going to die at 70. Can you just go back to before you made that first decision with your dad? Because you've mentioned it, you know, people might look at your, I would say ruthlessness, at least in some regards with decision making, you know, hiring and firing and making these business decisions. And there's all of these great stories about, I had this thing and I realized that partner wasn't right.
So I got rid of that business. And you know, that's the sort of thing that would tear most people up for six months, 18 months, maybe forever. Yeah. And so look at that degree of cutthroatness or at least decisiveness, I think is almost unfathomable for a lot of people.
Are you a representative avatar? Is pre-leaving Baltimore Alex a representative avatar for the average person? I think so. I mean, I was high achieving, you know, I said, I mean, I did well in school.
I tried hard. I did those things, but in terms of my risk tolerance and my fear of failure and my insecurities. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if anything, real talk, I'll bet you that I have more insecurities than most people because those insecurities are what drove me to do well in those things, not because I cared about school, but because I cared about what other people thought about me.
Yeah. Yeah. I, I've spoken to hundreds and hundreds of high performers on balance. People are driven way more by fear of insufficiency than they are with some well-balanced, perfect desire to just maximize their greatness in life.
Like the activation energy for almost everybody is I'm scared I might be a piece of shit. What? Hang on. I genuinely might be a piece of shit.
I need to go and do something so outrageous that I can't be a piece of shit. There's no way that it can happen. I might be a coward. Oh my God.
What can I do to stop myself from being a coward? That's the activation energy. It's funny because if you regress fear to its most basic form, it's death and death is the greatest motivator. And like you can prove it in a simple example.
It's like if I all of a sudden go up to anybody on the street and I put a gun in their head and I say, you know, point a gun at their head and I say, go do this thing. They'll go do it. But if I say, you can have anything you want, if you do this, they're willing to go 10 times harder with a gun in their face to not die. And so if you take fear and regress it all the way down to its basis form, like that's what the insecurity is like, if they think I won't be enough and if they don't think I won't be enough, then this one happened.
If this one happened, I'll be alone. I'll be dead. I'd be like, if you just regress it all the way down, like this all it is. And so like the biggest achievers in life, I think have most directly tied them not doing whatever it is that they want to do to death, either they're consciously aware of it or not.
And then that's what motivates them harder. We'll get back to talking to Alex in a minute, but first I need to tell you about element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mixed with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. But if you're afraid of that, imagine what they think of you when you want to even try.
Oh yeah, they aren't. So just a dicks and tops. Is it strange to hear that your like angry toilet tweets read back to you now in the cold harsh light of day? That's a particularly difficult poo that I was cracking on there.
You know, real talk, the tweets that I have, people don't know this, but the tweets are notes to self. So they're just directed at me so that I can look back on them and be reminders of like, I don't don't do that. And so like, I think to myself, man, I'm afraid of doing this. And I'm like, no, I'm not.
I'm afraid of what this person's going to think about me. Because if I were to be able to fail in quiet, in complete isolation, then I wouldn't care. And then I think, well, what if I, what if I don't succeed in public? What do they think then?
Nothing, right? They don't think about me at all. And so obviously that comes from the perspective of seeking to gain approval and attention from others. Anyway, it's like, listen, if you're insecure with everybody is, let's be real, you might as well use the insecurity to get something out of it, right?
Like one of my favorite things about entrepreneurship is like, use what you've got. And so a lot of people think that they need to fix their conditions in order to get like the perfect conditions before they start. But the perfect condition is whatever one you're in, because it gives you whatever assets you have, that's the cards that you're dealt. And so you just play the hand.
And a lot of people have great cards. It's like, man, I'm so afraid of it. It's like, use it. It's like, I have nothing.
What makes you very dangerous? Because you have nothing to lose. Right? Like, one of the really interesting things about, I think about from business perspective, it probably applies to everything, is that there's always an advantage and disadvantage from every position, right?
So like, I remember one, I mean, Jim Olch is still big company and still continues to grow. But in the gym licensing space, there's not many people can compete with us there, and it's not fair because you have this big advantage. And I was like, you have a way bigger advantage than I do. And I was like, because if I were in your position, I would go to every single gym owner and be like, you don't want to be with Jim Olch.
You're just a number to him. Like, you're never going to talk to him. Like, you're just a cog in the wheel there. With me, you're going to get my personalized agenda there.
It's just some employee down the chain that's following some process, right? I was like, but on the flip side, if I'm talking that same homeowner, then I'm going to say, you don't want to talk to Jimmy, he lives in his mom's basement. He has no proof that he's good at what he's got. The reason that we're number one in the space is because we've done it so many times and we have a system that we know that if you go on this side, you will get this result on the outside.
I was like, there's always a position and there's always an advantage. I was like, you just have to play the one you've got. And most people just look at what everyone else is advantages and don't think which one do I have? When you're talking about, it's not you that's afraid of failing.
You're afraid of other people's opinions about why you're going to fail. Like, the reason I think that cynicism is so popular on the internet is that the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure. That's fundamental. It's sour grapes at an existential level, right?
It is a cynicism safety blanket. It is protecting you from ever having to fail the downside of anything. I will assure my own failure in private so that I never have to face my failure in public. It's kind of like investing.
Everyone's afraid of losing money when they invest, but the only guaranteed investment that doesn't work is never investing to begin with. And so it's like, they take the long failure rather than the short one. I mean, it's what it is. You just fail long.
And they're like, I prefer that. I mean, that's, yeah, it's like you and I are going back and forth on trying to figure out how many different ways can I say that either the people that you're worried about judgment are going to die or that you're going to die or that even if you do achieve the thing, they won't care anyways. Or if you don't do anything, they won't think about you to begin with. And don't you want to be thought about to begin with?
Like, don't you want some level of significance? I just, you're going to die. And I think like, I was very grateful that so one of my biggest inspirations or whatever you know, influences when I was in Baltimore was I would have lunch with my grandfather three times a week. He was 90.
Old guy. So I'll go to the nursing home and we'd have lunch three days a week. And listening to him talk about the regrets that you had in life. It's so much more painful to watch someone who has no options left.
He's going to die. And he died tomorrow. And he died a couple years later. And he lost all his mental faculties.
And almost sadly, basically, when I stopped when I left Baltimore, one of the sad parts is I was one of the only people that kind of like kept him lucid, you know what I mean? And after that, no one really visited him, no one really did anything. And so I think he just rolled down. I think the lunches might have been the only thing that he looked forward to.
And seeing someone old with no options and nothing but regret, not that he had everything to regret. He had things that he did really well. And I took those things from him. He would he would repeat the same lessons, you know, like every lunch, there'll be a lot of older people kind of repeat a few key lessons.
And everything that he flew during, he fled during the World War II, you know, fled from the Germans and all that stuff because he had a Jewish sounding last name. He wasn't, but it was enough that he was flailing, right? And he always just says like, you have two hands in one brain. It's like you, that was always just thing they said to me.
And I think just like when I think about the things that he was going up against, compared to the things that were going up against now, it just made me feel like, all right, like, this is not a speaking of deals, I really think it is. I don't have Germans at the at my door. What were the regrets that you had? Yeah, yeah.
He would have spent, I mean, again, there's deathbed regrets and then there's real life regrets, but there's things that he would have done differently in terms of the business. There's things he would have done differently with his wife. He got divorced, you know, he would have done things very differently with his kids, some of my mother and her sisters, which actually talking to him about how he raised my mother helped me in some way forgive her for some of the things that I felt were wrong doing that she had done to me. And so it's funny because, you know, one of my favorite quotes from the police Pascal is to understand is to forgive.
And like, when you, I think there's another saying that like, well, which is, it's really hard to hate close up. It's like, if you really see someone and you see all the things that they went through and the things that happened to them to become who they are, then you understand them and then you understand why they did X, Y and Z, because if we don't understand, we assume that it's because they're just evil people and most people aren't that way. They're this way because they've been reinforced or punished for doing something like that in the past. And especially for her, she was reinforced for acting a certain way over and over and over again to the point that it was, it was court or character.
And so when that got put on me, I was like, I hate you, you're terrible, you're evil, like blah. But like, when I looked at it on a much longer time, right? And if like she was four years old when she came here, she couldn't speak English, she got beat up as a kid. Like all these things, I'm like, you know what, maybe give her a little grace, you know, and I remember when I came back and it was right around that same time where I realized I was giving this person all this power, she yelled at me for something when I came back home from college, my freshman year.
And it was a standard fight. You know, like, here's the button that I pressed to get into the normal fight that we get into. I just remember she hit the button, I just like wasn't that upset. And it's like, I thought nothing.
She like hit the button, she like hit it again harder. And I was like, and I just remember looking at her and being like, again, I'm sorry, like you had a tough life. And then she just broke down and started crying because it was like, she felt understood. And I think, I know that was a roundabout way of getting back to regrets, but he regretted how he'd raised her.
But his, through his regrets, I got to see why she was the way she was. And then it diffused the bond that was between me and her. That tell you that story, Douglas Murray told me about regrets from Christopher Hitchens. Brilliant.
So Christopher Hitchens, one of the new atheists was sat in some British pub with Douglas Murray, when Douglas is young. And you know, you can imagine it's some musty, chest of field sofa, he's probably got a cigarette in his mouth and his glasses got just something. And Douglas is vacillating between these two different choices that he needs to make. And he is complaining, lamenting the fact that I have this thing, but I have this thing.
And if I do this thing, I can't do this thing. And what do I do? And apparently hit like sat back and Douglas in life, we must choose our regrets. And I was like, fuck.
So I'm three Manhattan's deep in Douglas Murray's apartment in Manhattan at two in the morning. And he sneaks after the toilet. And I quickly write this down because I know that my like half cut alcohol brain is gonna remember it. So I'll note it down.
That was all the trigger that I needed, which is also a good argument for noting things now. And I reflect, I'm just reflected on that for a year. I must thought about it for a year in life. We must choose our regrets.
What the fuck does that mean? Okay, first off, in an existence where opportunity cost is baked in because you don't get to split test life. And by doing a thing, you can't do a different thing. I have to choose from going to the gym and go to the theme park.
If I go to the gym, therefore I can't go to the theme park, even if the decision of going to the gym was the right call, I will always have the open loop of, yeah, but what if I gone to the theme park? You can't ever know, right? Okay. So that means that fundamentally, regrets are baked in to our existence.
And I always thought that the reason I had a regret was due to some suboptimal decision I'd made. If only I'd made this decision better, I could have ameliorated the regret. Okay, so regrets are an unavoidable part of being a human. And they're a byproduct of opportunity cost, which you can't get away from.
But what does it mean that you have to choose your regrets? Okay. Well, if regrets are inevitable, if they're going to happen no matter what, an easy way to look at a decision is rather than which do I want to do, which regret could I live with? Because there are certain regrets that you can't bear living with.
No, you can bear living with them, but they're going to be worse than other ones. So what is the difference between I need to have a difficult decision, I need to have a difficult conversation with my boss about leaving to go and do this thing. Or I need to, that's the regret of the sitting down and seeing them face to face and telling you to leave their small mom and pop business, you're the main salesperson and it's going to be terrible and they're going to cry and you're going to feel like a piece of shit. That's one regret.
Another regret is looking back at a decade that you waste in a job that you fucking hate. So in life, you have to choose your regrets. I love that as a decision-making frame, because it also jump starts our fear engine, because rather than saying like, what do I want, it's what I hate least. And so we get to run it.
So then you get to use your run away from engine rather than you go towards it. Yeah, the mouse and the cheese again. Yeah. And was it you selling me that?
I mean, so I'm just going to butcher what you told me. Why don't you share that like how much? Yeah, this was on our last episode. So this is the sequel for the people that were listening.
John Peterson talks about the study where they start a rat and they put it into a tube. They waft the smell of cheese in from the front and there's a spring attached to the rat's tail. So they can work out how hard it's pulling, how hard it's pulling is a proxy for desire for how much it wants it. You think this rat is starving?
It's going to pull as hard as it can. So it waft the smell of cheese in and it runs towards it and whatever. They do another iteration of the study. This time they waft the smell of cheese in from the front and the smell of a cat in from behind.
It pulls harder. Yeah. Why? Because not only in life do you want to run towards something you want, but you want to run away from something that you fear.
And this ties into your the three most common traits of very successful people, superiority complex, massive crippling insufficiency and impulse control. So superiority complex, I can achieve this thing that she's crippling sense of insufficiency. I fear the cat impulse control. I'm in a choose.
There's only one direction I can go. I don't need to make a choice. I love this a lot as a frame for decision making because that like think about the decision that we were just talking about. Right.
So it's like I'm the sales guy and I stay and like if you were to frame it in upsides, it's like upside is I keep these friends, right? And but I want to leave so that I can start this business, right? Those are the upsides. But when you think about it in terms of like I waste a decade of my life, not living the life I want to me, I mean, even when I say it, it sounds more motivating, even though it's the exact same thing, it's like losing $100 versus gaining $100, people have three times higher loss aversion.
And so it's like, if you can't get yourself to do something, think about it from the perspective of what you have to lose rather than what you have to gain. You've got a quote that I love. My biggest fear is getting to the end of my life and thinking I wasn't good enough. What's that mean?
And how to find good enough is I could have tried harder. Like I want to leave everything on the field. And one of the things that has helped me a lot, I mean, in the quote that went unbelievably viral. Do you want me to do it again?
Do I need to do it again? You don't gain confidence by saying shouting out formations in the mirror, but by giving yourself a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are, outwork yourself out. And again, a lot of the tweets that I have are notes to self, because like I have a big presentation coming up, 500,000 people who are registered for this book launch that are coming out. And I'm thinking to myself, it's like, how can I guarantee that when I step off stage, no matter what happens, I feel like I've accomplished that I've done a good job, that I can look myself in mirror and say, good work.
And when I was younger, I used to have no way to do that. That's because I mentioned everything when it comes. But I feel like I've got a little bit more experience. I do have a way to win now, but it's hard.
And the way that I win is when I finish and I say that there's nothing else I could have done. And so that means that like the reason that I feel confident about this book that's coming out is I wrote 19 drafts of the book for full rewrites end to end to make the book at six hours a day, my first six hours from six a.m. So noon every day for two years to get this book to where it is now. And when I was done with the book, I was like, there's nothing else I can do to this.
Like this is it. There's nothing else like I can't make it simpler. I can't cut it. I can't add a visual that I should have added it's done.
And so the same degree with the presentation that I have, I gave myself this framework like, okay, well, if I were to speak in front of 10,000 people, I would probably spend a good amount of time prepping the presentation and make sure it was good. I was like, I'm speaking from 500,000. I was like, so I can rationalize spending 50 times the amount of work and effort and time to make this thing exceptional. Because I mean, the numbers are hard to fathom, but that is the numbers like five to 10,000.
That's what I would do. And so it allowed me to take a presentation. And you know, I have 900 slides that I'm going to get through in 60 minutes. And I have now, every single day, I do a full draft of the, I'd say the presentation my head.
And then I do a second run where I say out loud and I record it. And then after I record it, I play the recording with the slides up and I fix or add every slide where I stumble or there's something that should be there or visual and I keep going until now right now I'm a we can change out. And there's not much else I can do to it. And so I'll still continue to do that from now until the day that it happens.
But I probably won't have as many changes because I should just keep nailing it. And then when I get up there, it doesn't matter if the tech doesn't work or if the book shopping page cart doesn't work or whatever it is, because I'll be able to step off stage and look in the mirror and be like, you did everything you could. And the thing is, no one else will know that because I know that I could not do that. And a lot of people are like, dude, you have so much good, well, you can probably just say like, here's the book.
But I would know. And if I believe what I say, I do, which is that I'm the ultimate judge, jury and executioner of my own self esteem, then I'm the only person who can say good job or not. And unfortunately, I have incredibly high standards. And so I can either just always feel like a failure because I always fall short of my own standards or I can create a standard that I willingly and consciously accept, which is that I will do enough work that there is nothing left to be done.
And that means that I can also do fewer things, which means I have to be more selective about the things that I choose to do. But when I do them, they will be done well and they will be done right. They say the true hell is on the person that you are meets the person you could have been. Yeah.
And a lot of the time, I think we look at sports stars and watching this quarterback on Netflix at the moment, and is Patrick Mahomes is just this artist, you know, he's a halfway between a warrior and a savant and an artist and a musician and everything rolled together. Right. The reason that we love seeing behind the scenes with stuff like that is it is somebody at the absolute zenith of their capacity. And they are putting everything that they can into making this as good as possible.
And I think that I sometimes find myself getting, I certainly did before I had the podcast, I was wistful that I have the raw materials to work very hard at things. And I'd never had a pursuit that I could have applied it to. There was nothing. I remember the first time I ever heard Peterson say, work as hard as you can at one thing for a year and see what happens.
And I'd never had a thing I could work hard at business. But the line between your inputs and your outcomes is so meandering and messy that I can always excuse away good or bad performances as not being on me. And for the most part, I would take responsibility for bad ones and not take responsibility for the good ones because that's why I'm wide. But I never had something that was linear close to linear.
I'm like, I put an hour in and I get an hour out or more than an hour out. And it's direct. And then about three years ago, I had this conversation with Dean, my video guy, I said, I want to turn pro. I read Stephen Pressfield, War of Art, then I read Turning Pro.
I want to turn pro with the show. What's that mean? What would it mean if I treated this pursuit like an athlete does? So an athlete, they review game tape and they do mindset work and they go to sport psychology and they look at what they eat and they look at what they drink and they go to bed on time and they're hanging around with people that are growth minded and they're getting the right coaches and they're all the rest.
Everything is done in order to facilitate performance in the thing that they say they care about. Everybody has the opportunity to do that. You just need to define what the thing is. I'm never going to be Patrick Mahomes.
I know. But I managed to find my thing and then nearly kill myself in dedication toward it. There's a photo that I put up on my Instagram a little while ago, two weeks after I ruptured my Achilles. And I'm in a boot and I've got the laptop on my lap and we've created this arm that'll bring the mic to me because I didn't want to stop doing the podcast because I made this commitment.
I'm good at turn pro. The three years we haven't missed a single episode, three times a week, three times a week, three times a week, for three years now. Before that it was two a week for a year and before that it was one week for a year and it just keeps on ramping up and the opportunity to commit yourself fully to something that you care about is beyond a blessing. And when you do it, the way that you feel once you know that you've worked hard is great.
And we said before we started, you got this big thing coming up, which I'm super proud of you for managing to achieve even though it hasn't happened yet. The difference between being nervous and being excited before you do something is your level of preparation in advance of it. If you step out on stage or in front of half a million people on a webinar, which is the craziest sentence I've ever said, if you step out on stage in front of half a million people and you don't absolutely everything, there's nothing to feel. And that's why it's not about what everyone else will think because when I'm on stage making that presentation, the only person whose voice out here is mine.
And I will know if I have done everything in my control to be prepared or not. And what's the best thing that comes out? I didn't do everything that I could to prepare and I managed to fluke my performance. I managed to like close my eyes, throw the dot and oh wow, hit the bullseye.
You'll even know that. They'll even be guilt. You won't even be able to fully enjoy your success because you'll have tarnished it with your lack of input. And what's interesting is that when you start defining your own success that way, it actually starts to feel under your own control.
But the downside is you realize that you can do very few things and then all of a sudden life feels very short because you're like, shoot, there's like not that many things I can do before I die if I'm going to actually do my best. And what's interesting is I was talking to a CEO friend of mine, he's a public CEO. And he was like, I need to start making content right after you're like, I'm just going to play a dollar company. I was like, you're doing okay, man.
But because of that type of person, he's like, I need to be doing better with my content, right? He's got a few hundred thousand followers anyways. And so I was like, all right, well, how many pieces of content you put in a week? And he was like, well, I mean, I put out one a day.
And I was like, dude, I was like, we put out 300 a week. And he just he didn't even respond. He just took he just like pursed his lips and nodded. He was like, thank you for resetting my minimum standard.
It's always like, thank you like, and I'm sure like when you talk to feel he then he talks about the volume that is required in order to gain muscle and how much how dialed in he is with food and all the other things. Just the amount of sheer work, like the biggest change in, or I'll say biggest reason that I've had significantly larger returns or outcomes that have happened later on in my career and they continue to get bigger and bigger is because the minimum standard for how much work I know I can do on something has has multiplied a hundredfold. Like I look at the first presentations I was telling this earlier, I look at the first presentations I ever gave. And I remember thinking to myself, and I had this, I was like, this is a good presentation.
It's like 25 slides with like a heading and like three bullets on each slide and being like, man, this is good. I'm like, this is a, this is a, this is like an afternoon. But in my mind, if I spent a whole day on something, that was like a lot of work. Now it's, I, you know, I like using this term like measuring hundreds, which is like measuring hundreds of hours, how many hundreds of hours have you put towards something?
If you do that, I promise you, the thing that you're making will get a lot better. And you'll also see how much more you're capable of, which is like, I think like my undertone of listening, what you were just saying with the podcast is like the more you do, the more you realize you can do. And so what happens is, you're actually, even though you're going pro right now, you're like, dude, next year I'm going pro, because this is now just a minimum standard. Of course, I work out three days a week.
Of course, I do three podcasts a week. But dude, once we have the reality TV show and we have the full crew and we have the headquarter, like, because then the path gets lit of where you're going to go, because you're so singularly focused and you know, you have no other distractions. The attention cost isn't, you're not paying that down anymore. And you're just like, how many times can I repeat this effort?
And then that's when you start unlocking mastery, right? Like, I have this process for creating presentations. And before we turn on the mics, we were talking about it, but it's like, I've done a handful of presentations in my life. And I've gotten decent at making them.
But the process now is so refined, which is like, it is game tape. It is, I make the thing, I do the thing in my head, I do it out loud, I watch the recording, I edit the thing, I do it in my head, I do it out loud, I watch the recording, I edit the thing, and I just keep doing it until it's class. Dude, I listen to every podcast that I did for probably the first two and a half years. I listen back every single time.
But at the time, I didn't cringe because I thought that you crushed it. Anybody can go back and listen to episode one with Stuart Morton in my old office in Newcastle Fontaine and you'll notice every other sentence that he says, I go, it's fucking infuriating. It's absolutely catastrophic. My accent's terrible.
Everything, everything about it is awful. And yet, at the time, I thought it was great. Here's another interesting thing I've been thinking about recently. When you don't have anything to say no to, it's easy to focus on one thing.
As success begins to get you more opportunities, your ability to say no becomes increasingly important. And that's something that I'm feeling now. Just more attention, there's hockey sticking quite aggressively. And I'm not anywhere near like even middling Z-list fame, but it's enough for people to see what they think is a penny stock and decide that they're going to try and throw the hat in the ring.
Which means that there's like 20 things I need to say no to every single week, for any people that want to do a thing. Why don't we try this thing? Why don't we do that thing? Why don't we do the other thing?
It was a piece of piss five years ago to say, oh, three years ago in the middle of COVID, I'm going to go pro and focus on this one thing. Because what else am I going to do? All of my nightclubs have been shut down. I got nothing else to do in my life.
Now, oh, you said you're going to go pro? Interesting. Let's see what happens when you have 30 other things every single week vying for your attention. Now let's see how committed you are.
This is my favorite analogy for this, which is the woman in the red dress. But many people have seen the matrix. If you haven't seen the matrix, you don't need to have seen it to understand the analogy. So Neo is going through a training program with a protagonist, Morpheus, his educator, his teacher.
And the education program only has one objective. And so he's walking through the city, people are going left and right. He's bumping into people going through like crowded New York. And then all of a sudden, it's kind of a black and white, pale-ish look.
It's green, black and white, but it's the black and white. And then all of a sudden this woman in a red dress enters the frame and you can't help but stare at this woman in the red dress. And she's a complete knockout. And Morpheus is talking to Neo, trying to teach him something.
And as he's talking, he's like, Neo, we look at me, or you're looking at the woman in the red dress. And he says, look again, and he looks back and it's agent Smith holding a gun to his head. And he says, freeze, and then everything freezes in the frame. And he's like, if you're not one of us, you're one of them.
And I see that as the opportunities that we have to say no to every day is like another woman in the red dress. And it's become a term that we use internally, right? It's like it's a woman in the red dress. And the thing is that the more successful you become, the more able you become, the harder the woman in the red dress is, right?
You got a homeless girl that you're walking down the street, it's like all dirty, but she's got a red dress on. You're like, the thing is that that homeless girl, when you were in your apartment, actually looks like, you know, I could, you know, but then the better you get, the bigger the opportunities, and that's where you have not your hypothetical 10, but what about your hypothetical 100? And I had a mentor say this to me right as we sold Jim Monge. He said, Alex, you know now that if it's not a billion, it's not worth your time.
And that was such a single, a great razor for all decisions. And so people go, they're like, Hey, we should do this endorsement. Hey, we should partner with this, whatever. I mean, think about like, we're in the deal world.
So how many do we get? We have 3000 companies a month every time. So it's a hundred a day, Colonel. And we've done 13 deals and two years.
And so like you think about from an acceptance rate, it's like, you know, I'm not saying you shouldn't apply, but it's good acquisition. I can apply if you have an awesome business. But the point is, is that like, you're no muscle isn't really a no muscle. It's just a yes muscle for the one thing that matters most.
Well, get back to talking to Alex in one minute, but first I need to tell you about the number one e-commerce platform Shopify. When I was a nightclub promoter in the UK, I started an online apparel brand with no experience, no coding ability, no marketing background, no inventory management. And after a ton of research, I decided on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide.
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It required zero experience. Every single time there was a problem. I was able to sort it myself. That's how simple it is.
And there is a $1 per month trial period that you can sign up for right now with the link in the description, or by going to Shopify.com slash Modern Wisdom, all lowercase that's Shopify.com slash Modern Wisdom to take your business to the next level today. Heroes and villains always have the same back story. Pain. The difference is what they choose to do about it.
Villains says, the world heard me, I'll hurt it back. The hero says, the world heard me, I'm not going to let it hurt anybody else. Heroes use pain. Villains are used by it.
And Fuku to us here, this is a permutation of what Donald Miller said, who's a great writer. He has a number of books and he talked about the first element, the second element of that quote is the part that I added to it about heroes using pain and villains being used by it. And so one of the things for people who are not where they want to be is that they had pain, like oodles of pain. And I remember when I was starting out, I was looking for passion.
I was looking for purpose. I was like, I just want to find something that I'm motivated by. But it's the cat and the cheese. It's like we're looking for cheese, but we have all these cat behind us and all we have to do is look and remember that they're behind us and chasing us.
And so if you have the cat and you're staying in your current situation, you're being used by the cat, right? You're being used by the business owner who, you know, it doesn't treat you well and you're in this job that you don't really want to be in, right? Or you're being used by the situation of the context of the relationship that you're in with the girl that you're like, not that into, right? Versus saying like, this is terrible.
And because of this, terribleness, I now have something that I can run away from. And then, and then like, rather than not looking at the knife or trying to take painkillers to not feel the pain, it's like completely sobering up, taking the knife and twisting it in your own heart and being like, I'm going to fucking do something about this. And I think that that's, that's what the heroes, like if we were heroes in our own story, it's not avoiding pain. It's choosing from the very beginning the alchemy, which is like, you have these terrible situations.
It's like, and you have the opportunity to turn, turn them into magic and, and, and skip or shortcut. All the growth you're going to have in a really short period of time, simply by twisting the knife and being like, I'm going to do something about it. Yeah, I think because people presume in the beginning the passion and purpose and meaning and joy and fulfillment are the things that get people going. But as I've said, of all of the high performance that I've spoken to, the vast, vast, vast majority of them are driven by insufficiency and resentment and terrible parents are terrible at bringing or a chip on their shoulder about bullies in school, pick your poison.
They have decided to use that to create the activation energy, right? You can lower your action threshold and increase how many points you have to prove. It's like, oh, I want to live a better life. Yeah, that sounds good.
Like, I want to prove the bullies that said I was a worthless piece of shit in school, wrong. It's like, that's some fucking potent fuel. I do believe that scaled over a long enough time, it's toxic. And I don't think that it's necessarily how long, like a lifetime, right?
Like, but I mean, it'll, it'll fuel you for a decade pretty well. And I think that, I look at me, I look at, you know, I was bullied pretty badly in school and was an only child and had expectations from parents. And, and you know, I combined all of those things together. And I did have a chip on my children.
I did want to prove to the world that I was worthwhile. And I did want people to, to realize that they had doubted the wrong person. Fuck yeah. Yeah, done right.
I do. I think being really specific about your pain is helpful. So like, even being specific about the cheese, really, specificity in general is helpful. But like, even more so, like, what is the twisting the pain?
What is twisting the knife? Like, what is how you operationalize twisting the knife, right? Instead of being like, I hate my life, right? It's, I hate the way Andrew makes me feel when he says that I'm a piece of shit and I'm not going to announce anything, comma, because he's right.
Like, why does it hurt me? Like, if someone says Alex, you're a piece of shit, you're not going to announce anything. It's only because you've been poor a fat. Right.
I would have, I would have, I'd be like, I have evidence to the contrary. So this will probably not bother me. The things bother, so the ones that you know have an element of truth or sometimes not an element are comprised almost entirely of truth. And we just want to look at it.
And so I think it's, it's the, the twisting the knife is looking at the mirror and saying, what if the right? Success is the only revenge. As you expand, they shrink into irrelevance. As you get louder, no one can hear them.
You don't beat them. You cast a shadow so big, no one can see them to begin with. When people copy, they copy the wrong stuff because they don't know why it worked to begin with. And when it breaks, they don't know how to fix it because they didn't build it.
So don't sweat it. Copycats will always be behind. Good shit. But success is the only revenge.
It is such a lovely, there's that, um, I'm right. Yeah. So I was 15 years old. So this was really early in my life.
Still jacked. Still jacked. Always jacked. Permajacked.
And I, uh, this is a sense of so lame. So I had this teacher. So I'm freshman in high school and I've been 14, whatever the age is, and I'm walking through the hallway and this, this teacher is like an admin of some kind of walks out of his office. And he's like, he's like, son.
And I was like, I'm like, either in trouble. What am I going to do? And he's like, you work out? And I was like, no, he's like, why not?
I was like, I don't know how. He's like, I'll show you. He's like, you got the jeans. And so that teacher, Mr.
Gibbons, ended up working out with me every day in high school and showed me how to work out. And he probably saw on some level that I was so angsty teenager that felt angry about whatever. And I, during our workout sessions would be like, this guy said this to me, like, you know, you know, or like this whatever. And I was like, man, I'm going to come back at our tenure reunion.
And I was like, I'm going to show him. I was like, he's going to be working for me. Like, oh, right. And he's like, no, he's not.
And I was like, what do you mean? I was like, let me just have my moment. He's like, no, he's not. He's like, and you're not going to do that.
Not if I have anything to say about it when you come back to the tenure reunion. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, because if you come back at a tenure reunion and say, Hey, John, like everything I have, look at me now, he's like, the guy's going to laugh and be like, you did all of this to try and prove me wrong. Man, I feel sorry for you.
And when he said that, when he actually played out what my like revenge fantasy was in real life, I realized it looked, it looked stupid. Yeah, I looked like the beta in the fucking situation, right? And so he was like, the only thing that you can do is win so big that all of them constantly compare themselves to you. And then you'll forget they exist.
And he's, and that's when he said, success is the only revenge. He's like, it's not the best revenge. He's like, it's the only one. There's no other revenge.
Because everything else is petty. Everything else does show that you were thinking about these people all day long, which means they win by default. He's like, all you can do is think about your goal and winning. He's like, and when you win, that's when you become so big that they shrink into a relevance.