24 Brutal Truths To Make Real Change In 2025 - Alex Hormozi (4K)

Here we are again. Hard things are hard; that's why they're hard. Another episode: the biggest risk to your future isn't your competition; it's the distractions you insist on keeping in your life rather than doing the things you know you should be doing but aren't. People delay doing things they don't like for longer than it takes to do them. There have been so many times in my life where I knew I needed to do something, and then I filled all this extra time not doing that thing. The moment I did it, I was like, "Wow, that took way less time than I thought it was going to take." Not only that, it took way less time than it took me to delay to actually get to this point. If I had only started with just doing what I was supposed to do, I could have done four or five other things that I was also supposed to do by this exact same point.

Thinking about it from that perspective, I've tried to eliminate as much time as possible between thinking, "I should do this thing," and beginning to do it. I think you get this positive reinforcement cycle that occurs every time you start. I call it "pulling the thread." It's like I just need to start pulling the thread, and then all of a sudden, what feels really unknown becomes very tangible. You're like, "Oh, I understand the six problems I have to solve to do this big thing." Now I know the problems, and it feels like I can wrap my arms around it, and then I can start taking it one bite at a time.

The same thing works in reverse as well. When you put something off, it makes putting it off more "mañana, mañana, mañana." I used to define power by the distance between thoughts and reality, meaning if you think about somebody who's omnipotent—so if God or the god figure would be omnipotent, as he thinks things are—there's zero space between thoughts and reality. If we want to be more godlike in our lives, the distance that we can shrink between wanting to do something or thinking something should be done and it being done is a direct indication of our personal power in our lives. That has helped me basically think, "Don't be a powerless [expletive]; just shrink the gap."

I think that's why a lot of my little personal hacks of waking up and then trying to shrink the time between when I wake up and when I start working, and shrinking the time between one task and the next task—like you don't need to take 30 minutes getting ready to start working; you can just start working—because as soon as you get into it, you start pulling the thread, and you're like, "Oh, here it is." All of the time that I was getting ready to work, I was just using up my best brain power time on things that truly don't move the needle at all.

I came to call that the productivity rain dance. You sort of do this weird sacred ritual beforehand. We've spoken about this before, but there are certain things that you can do that will make success, productivity, or focus more likely and better. That doesn't mean that you should disregard them; that over-reliance on them makes for a very fragile, unrobust way to get into working. I would delineate the difference between preparation and routine. If I'm preparing for a presentation, for example, I might assemble my notes, read some stuff about the audience ahead of time, and learn more about whoever's doing the event. I see that as preparation for the thing, which I still see as work.

Some people might say, "Oh, see, you have a morning routine." I was like, "No, no, no, I don't need to stand on one foot, do 17 cold plunges, and write six affirmations because none of those things are directly related to the work that I'm going to do." For me, preparation is just a stage of the work. If I need to prepare to work, then that's fine as long as it's related to the work that I'm going to be doing.

We spoke about this yesterday: the difference between focusing on inputs and focusing on outcomes. If you optimize for outcomes, the inputs are always optimized. But if you optimize for inputs, you go, "What did I actually get done at the end of the day?" The person that does the productivity rain dance and it takes ages—everyone's done this; everyone's got a blank piece of paper in front of them, and they end up washing dishes that they never use. The weirdest tasks become alluring because of that focus on outcomes.

When we brought this up, it was perfect because I had a whole thing that I wanted to talk about. I'm a big proponent of something I call the rule of 100. I'm not the one who invented this, but it's basically 100 primary actions. I talk about this within the context of advertising: you make 100 minutes of content, you do 100 outreach if you're doing outbound, you spend $100 a day on ads, or if you've already spent the money on ads, then you're doing $1, 100 minutes a day of writing ad copy, looking at other people's ads, looking for hooks, and then trying to create more advertisements for your business.

The rule of 100 for most people takes about four hours a day. The thing is that that's pure inputs, not outputs. But I've already taken the time to define what those inputs are that create the outputs. Later on in the book "$100 Million Leads," I talk about the rule of 100 on steroids, which is something that I learned from a guy who owned 13 or 14 really successful gyms. He called it "open to goal." He said, "My managers work open to goal." I was like, "What does that mean?" He said, "So they work open until they hit their goal." Sometimes that means they hit their goal by noon, and they can cut out, or that means they have to go from 5:00 a.m. until midnight that night because that's how long it took them to hit the goal.

I've seen this across a lot of high achievers across domains. For example, "I'll keep shooting free throws until I hit 100 free throws." I will run until this happens. I will practice my presentation until I do zero mess-ups, or whatever that output is that you want for quality or quantity. I think you have to first figure out what the input is that most closely correlates or tracks with the output you want, and then you jam as much as you possibly can into inputs.

If I said, "Hey, go get me 10 customers," somebody would freeze because it's like, "What do I do?" Normally, people start to skew behavior, so it's all over the place; it's scattered, it's shotgun sprays, and then they eventually figure out one thing that works. Once you hit that, then you just jam that button as hard as you possibly can. I think I've been disproportionately successful in different domains of my life by ruthlessly focusing on one input.

Even when I was a kid, when I played video games, if you find a spawn point for zombies right before the end of the level, I would just sit there for like eight hours and just wait for the troll to come up and just slice them again and get my little diamonds and put it in. I would just do that for hours because I was like, "Oh, I got to level up my avatar." I think I play the game of business the exact same way. Andy Grove says there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little, and that's the lack of correlation between inputs and outcomes.

I think the vast majority of business owners—obviously, I come from the business perspective—work a fair amount; they just work on the wrong stuff, and they do it the wrong way. They get so little for their effort that they wonder when they're at home empty-handed in bed, "Why isn't this working when I am working?" If you define work, at least the way I do, which is output, I define work by output. In order to get output, it's volume times leverage: how many times you do the thing times how much you get for each time you do it.

Do you work smart, or do you work hard? You do both. You do as many reps as you possibly can, and you do it with the most leverage possible. If I make 100 phone calls, the leverage that I can have there would be how skilled I am. If I make 100 calls, I might get 10 times more, and so I worked more; I had more output than somebody who has less skill. But the only way you get skilled is by doing more inputs, by working more. It's this virtuous cycle of doing more and getting better, and then you get more for what you do.

The magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding all the time. Every single time that we're not making progress in this way, what is the highest pain task that's in front of me that I've put off the most? It's always that one. It always is. After you spend enough time thinking about work and deconstructing the way that you piece your day and your life together, you sometimes believe that the answer is still out there. What you actually realize is that you've already learned it. It's that quote or that insight or that book; it's one of the first books you read because all of the big insights from productivity and personal development are the lowest hanging fruit. They're the ones that are repeated across the most books because they're the most reliable, scalable, and robust.

I don't need to be looking out there for most of the new insights; they're just [expletive] that I already learned. We need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. It's one of my favorites: bad things don't come in threes. Bad things happen; people don't know how to cope, and they allow one bad thing to snowball into more bad stuff. The only thing worse is letting one bad thing ruin many good things.

I'm glad you found that one. That was one on that list of things that, you know, quotes I had gone more viral. The amount of—I think it happens more when you're younger—but you know, girlfriend breaks up with you, okay? Then you go into work and you sulk because you're distracted, and then you don't do the same level of effort, and you're not enthusiastic. All of a sudden, your work suffers, and you get put on a PIP or you get fired. Now you're fired, and you don't have a girlfriend, and then you start gaining weight, and you stop going to the gym. All of a sudden, you're like, "Man, bad things happen in threes." It's like, "No, bad things happen all the time, and they only become interrelated if you let it affect your behavior."

I think the equal opposite of that is thinking, "Okay, this bad thing occurred. What can I do to decrease the likelihood that something else bad occurs in the meantime?" Then boiling everything down to activities or the actions that I have to take. I think about that a lot, which is how, like, if you think about it from the power perspective of, "Okay, something bad happens. How much will it affect my behavior?" The person who is indestructible would have something terrible happen, and then nothing would change.

I love that, or they get better. Exactly, yeah, that's anti-fragility, right? The Sword of Gryffindor only drinks in that which makes it stronger. Ah, [expletive], Harry Potter reference; weren't expecting that. The people who don't know how to cope, especially with bad stuff, does explain why you end up with this weird spiral—tiny little avalanche pebble at the top and then this huge sort of over-exaggerated reaction downstream.

People don't know how to manage their emotions. I think the more—at least for me—the more I've tried to create space between how I feel and what I do, the more consistent my outcomes have been. What do you mean? So if I need to create content and I'm not feeling it, or I'm feeling tired or things like that, the more times I give in to that excuse or that feeling, then the more superstitious I become about doing it in the future.

A lot of times, if I can just start when I am tired or when something is painful and then still execute about the same as before, I look at game tape or I look at video or look at the content from those sessions, for example, and I see that I remember feeling terrible during the session, but I can't really see anything. The more times you get that loop going, the more you can separate how you feel and what is required. The more times you do what is required to get what you want, the more times you get what you want.

I spoke to Huberman last year; I think it's called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. It's an area of the brain—if I've got that right—[expletive] yes, bro, the best advert for Neonic ever. Basically, there is an area of the brain that tracks when you do something that you don't want to do, and you strengthen the connections in it by doing things that you don't want to do, especially when you really don't want to do them. You're hypertrophying. It's this exact sort of intuition that you've got that some people would call it resilience or willpower or whatever, but this is neurologically represented in the brain. These connections get stronger.

I think it's so funny. Gym bros will need a gym analogy in order to be able to believe that their brain changes, but it's really useful to think, "Hey, you're hypertrophying this area of your brain." I snapped my Achilles; I had to do a very particular series of rehab movements in order to grow it back. This is just the same.

Agreed. Successful people—this is kind of similar to what you were talking about—bad things don't come in threes. Successful people see opportunity in every failure; normal people see failure in every opportunity. Both are right; only one gets rich.

This has been something I've been thinking about a lot, which is basically the shittiness of stuff. When you're growing in a business, it's very painful. When you're stagnating in a business, in your plateau, and you don't know what to do, it's very painful. When you're declining and you also don't know what to do, it's very painful. That means that all conditions of reality are painful. If pain is a prerequisite for reality, then it means it's just a signal that we are alive.

Thinking about that, rather than pain as a problem, it is a signal that I'm breathing. Then it becomes irrelevant. How do you ensure that you're not suffering unnecessarily? Pain can be a useful signal; it can tell you to move away from certain things that are suboptimal.

I probably have relatively contrarian views on this, but just even the judgment on pain, I relatively reject. Just like pain is good, pain is bad. In the gym, to give a gym example, they found that the pain that you experience when you're going to work out—there's a difference between massive joint pain, like, "Oh, I just snapped a muscle," and just feeling bad. But feeling bad has zero correlation to your performance in the gym.

I remember reading that for the Olympic weightlifting team, they talked about that, and I was like, "Oh, well, if it has no correlation, then it's almost irrelevant, and I can just keep living my life." The ultimate version of the resilience that you're referencing earlier is that in the beginning, you're like, "I feel bad," and then you think that that should weigh on the decision of whether you do the thing that you're supposed to do.

Then you start realizing that you can do the thing even though you don't feel good about it, and you start hypertrophying it. But I think the ultimate version of the hypertrophy, when the muscle becomes a tendon or it just becomes fused, is when you don't even consider how you feel. It's just not a thought; you just keep doing it.

That's that movement from sort of type two to type one thinking, you know, from it being very conscious, very effortful, to it's just a reaction. I get up and I start to write, and you don't use up any willpower because it's just what you do.

There's Rory Sutherland that we were talking about yesterday. He's the only guy that I've ever heard swear in a TED Talk. He gave me this idea, which is kind of related: things are not what they are; things are what we think they are. For instance, you're doing a hard workout, which gives you a signature feeling. You're laid on the floor, panting, heart rate at 180, sweating from everywhere, with the taste of metal in your mouth. This is oddly enjoyable. But if this exact same sensation was to spontaneously occur in your car while sitting in traffic, you'd call an ambulance for fear that you're having a heart attack.

Framing is everything. Rory Sutherland says sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. The problem is when you're not smoking and staring out of the window, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand and stare out of the window with a cigarette, you're a [expletive] philosopher.

The power of reframing things cannot be overstated. It's significantly easier to find a way to reframe your experiences as enjoyable while you improve them rather than waiting for them to be done before you give yourself license to be happy.

A friend of mine, she's a very, very successful therapist, and she always asks her patients when they come to her and say some terrible thing happened. She says, "What would it take for this to be amazing?" For example, a lady comes and says, "We're getting a divorce," and she says, "So what would it take for this to be amazing?" It just completely shifts the reality of, "Okay, how could this be an amazing thing that could happen to me?"

This is relevant for me shifting gears because we just had a big tryout inside of our company for a presentation slot that we have at an event. We had a bunch of the leaders in the company—like the [expletive] Hunger Games. We put a cash prize—fight to the death, pitch folks. We did. No, we put a big cash prize out there.

I totally did that. I told them, "I'll have no expression, just in a toga." I could tell that some of them were nervous, and I thought about this because, you know, I speak a fair amount, and I don't get a lot of nerves in general. I have a whole bunch of thoughts on that, but the most basic one is that if you're still feeling anxiety—which many of them were, like, "Hey, I'm so nervous," or "Hey, I have a lot of anxiety before going up"—I thought about it, and champions just interpret anxiety as excitement. If you're excited to go up, then you're like, "I'm amped," versus "I'm stressed."

But it feels the same. The way you frame it totally changes how you feel when you're stepping on stage. My two cents is that if you are feeling lots of anxiety, it means you need to practice more. That's just my two cents, and that comes for everything—whether it's to have a meeting, give a presentation, write an email, or do a book. If you feel nervous before you release it, then you probably didn't work on it enough.

The reality is that most people, to get not anxious about whatever they're doing, have to do it so many times that by the last time you're doing it, you're bored of it. You don't even want to see the thing again. When you're sick of it, that's the point where you'll have no adrenal response to the stimulus because you've seen it so many times you could do it in your sleep.

When you get up, you're like, "Oh my God, let's just do this because I can breathe this over with." What's the gap between your expectation of what is going to happen and the requirement that you need to perform? This is where I need to be, and this is how I think I'm going to perform, as opposed to the other way.

I saw this firsthand when I did the live tour last year. I did, I think, 17 shows in 28 days—three continents, right? Like a proper tour, like a real proper tour thing. I did four work-in-progress shows, and then that run all around the UK, Ireland, Dubai, Canada, the US, Canada again, and the US again. I could see because it was around about every other day for a month, and each time that I stepped out on stage, even though I'd done the prep, I'd spent all of this time, I'd tried to, you know, "I'm not nervous; I'm excited. I'm not nervous; I'm excited."

Still, that degraded over time until the end of it—and this is why comedians, I think, when they end up doing really big tours—one of my friends did a 300-day tour of the same show. He said, "I no longer felt like a comedian; I was a performer." Because he's not stepping out on stage; he is so dialed and routinized that he's bored while he does it.

That's how you look at, "Oh my God, Joe Rogan just did Netflix live to [expletive] God knows how many millions of people." The metropolitan area of San Antonio's internet probably went down for him to be able to get that connection moving. How could he do that with all of these people watching and all the rest of it? That set that Joe did, I have seen at the Vulcan Gas Company downtown in Austin, and I've seen it at the Mothership in different iterations for coming up on three years now. His last special was six years ago.

That guy has said those sentences and waited those times and got those laughs and understood the inflections and the little pauses he needs to do maybe 300 times on that one set. There's no more degrees of freedom. The only thing that could go wrong is a real quirk mistake that's kind of, to be honest, out of your control. If you misspeak a word when you're paying attention, that's not your fault.

So yeah, that's how people have unbelievable performance ability, and it's just a case of stepping there sort of one degree of competence at a time. If we think of confidence as the percentage likelihood that what we think is going to happen will happen as a predictive metric, then in order to be more confident, we want to have more proof that what we think will happen will happen.

So the easiest way to do that is to do it a lot of times. It would be reasonable to say that you're confident that it will go the way you want because it has gone the way you've wanted so many times in a row before. I've just realized I've never thought of this before—the fact that the word confidence is in how we describe it from a psychological perspective, and confidence is in the interval level that you have numerically at the same [expletive] word.

That's so funny. Operationalizing: how do you become confident? Do it enough times that you feel like it is unlikely that what you think should happen won't happen. My model of the world is accurate. I'm confident when I go up to girls. Well, you start going to girls, and you start tanking, and then one out of ten times it goes well. Then you do it another ten times, and two out of ten times it goes well, and then four out of ten times, and then eight out of ten times. All of a sudden, you're confident because you have a high degree of predictive power when you say it will go this way.

That's such a good reframing of confidence, and the best part is you get to use the same word, and you can boil it down to inputs. You just have to do more. I've been using my Eight Sleep mattress for years, and I absolutely love it. When I'm on the road, like now, I'm miserable. I go to bed, and I'm too hot, and I have to use the air conditioning to try and cool me down, and it doesn't work, and my sleep sucks.

If you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night because of temperature, this is the solution: Eight Sleep's brand new Pod 4 Ultra can cool each side of the bed down to 20° below room temperature. For those who snore heavily, it can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve airflow and stop it. It cools, it heats, it elevates, and it is clinically proven to give you up to one hour more of quality sleep every night.

Best of all, they ship to the United States, Canada, the UK, Europe, and Australia. If you're not sure, there is a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 days. If you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com/wisdom using the code "modernwisdom" at checkout. That's 8sleep.com/wisdom and "modernwisdom" at checkout.

This is my favorite one, I think, from you over the last few months: "You once wanted the life you have, and if you don't like the life you have, you probably won't like the one you want but don't have either." This one I think about all the time because I think about the life that I have now, and I know that I wanted this life. But I obviously do a lot of thinking about this type of stuff.

The equal opposite of that is that when I was poor, I was pretty happy. I was okay with being poor, and now that I am rich—I'll put quotes on that—it's about the same. Then it just goes down to, well, then the richness had nothing to do with the level of contentedness, which means that my wants in past, present, and future all go into the bucket of irrelevant in terms of their ability to affect my perception of reality in the present.

Thinking about that makes my wants have less stake today. A lot of anxiety that I think a lot of people have around things that haven't happened yet, either good or bad—like, "I hope this speech goes well," or "I hope I get this job promotion." But the reality is that once you get the job promotion you wanted, you resettle. The negative version of this is—and you've probably seen this stuff—but when handicapped people get handicapped, so they have a terrible accident, they get paralyzed or they lose a leg or whatever, there's a dip in their subjective well-being.

After three to six months, it typically restabilizes, which means that if I didn't get paralyzed, or even if I did get paralyzed, I'd be just about as content as I am right now. It's like whatever is about to happen is probably not as bad as that. That's the worst-case scenario, which is nothing. So, okay, good things aren't as good as you think they are; bad things aren't as bad as you think they are.

Yeah, life is life. Well, it's the—it's the—you've already achieved goals that you said would make you happy. Again, it's the other side of this. The fact that we take for granted things that only in recent memory we would have begged to have had the opportunity to have, and now we're flippant about them. The new car that you thought about and you researched for 18 months, and then you finally got it, and you just curbed the tires yesterday, and you go, "All right, whatever."

You realize you spent all of this time thinking about the house that you're going to move into, the marriage that you were going to do, the holiday you were going to take. I told you about this last time: Morgan Howell steps out onto, after this huge big buildup with his kids, and his wife steps out onto the balcony of this holiday that he'd taken, and his first thought was, "Wow, it would be so good if we could come back here next year."

That was like during the process of experiencing the thing. He was thinking about the next thing, and he caught himself and thought, "Okay, this means that success isn't a goal, a journey, or a destination." When you get it wrong, it's a horizon. Every single step that you take towards it runs one step further away.

During my year off that I took after the sale, when I couldn't really work on the business because you don't want to change anything major when you're going through a sale, I didn't know why if I was going to be owning this business soon. So I basically just had to do nothing because I also had to demonstrate that the team could do it without me, so that's still a sellable asset. I basically just sat there for a year.

That's when a lot of my thoughts kind of caught up from when I had started years earlier, and that was when I kind of refined my theory of living for me, which is that hard work is the goal. It's not like work hard so that X, because as soon as you have a "so that," then the X is the thing. But if the goal is to work as hard as you possibly can, then the only real output we have is who we become along the way.

In reframing that, then it's something that I can win or measure myself against every day in real time throughout the day, which is how hard am I working? Because that is the goal. Even I say this just for audio, but like everything else takes care of itself. Still puts everything else as the goal; it's just being vaguer. But if you just say, "The only point is working hard," because I know that whatever I'm going to get is stuff that I will become accustomed to.

The opposite of the hedonic treadmill is like your resilience piece: my ability to work hard itself is growable. I just need to keep my RP—my rate of perceived exertion—at 8 or 9 or 10 because I know that when I look back on my life, the days that I loved the most were days when I had nothing left in the tank.

There's this thing that Jesse Itzler has, and I love it; I hate him for having it so [expletive] good. He has his kids, which is he has them—they have a little zero means that there's nothing left in the tank. When they finish a race or they do whatever, it's like, "Did you leave anything in the tank?" I thought about that, and the best days of my life were ones when I had nothing left in the tank.

So then the goal becomes to empty the tank, not where I drive, but just to drive the car as hard as I possibly can. That means that in the beginning, it's just straightaways. I'm just seeing how high I can rev the engine. But as I become more advanced, it's like, "All right, well, now we've got turns." Then it's turns and elevation, and then it's turns and elevation without guardrails because we have risk.

When I think about how hard I want to work, the interesting thing about that is that the only person who can judge you on your success is you because you're the only one who knows how much you had left in the tank. The better you get—and you can resonate with this—you start winning externally, and that's when people are like, "It felt so empty." It's because they didn't actually work as hard as they could have; they just worked hard enough to beat everyone else.

That discrepancy between how hard you could have worked to work your hardest versus what was required in order to win, to me, that's the opportunity that shifting towards the work being the goal unlocks for you. I work harder now than I did when I was poor, and I think it's because I've learned to enjoy it.

How do you ensure that the hard work focus doesn't detach you from outcomes and inputs? This seems like there's a little bit of a tension with what we started talking about in the beginning.

I just—totally—it's direction over speed is the first one, but we're now talking about maximizing for speed. So how do we balance direction and speed? With the question, if the outcome that we're trying to have is being present, then the outcome actually is irrelevant because it's about how much you empty the tank. If we're talking about the signs of achievement, then the outcome does matter, obviously.

Balancing both of those things, which is that if I want to accomplish all my goals, then I need to make sure that my inputs are tied as closely as humanly possible to the outcome. If I want to be satisfied, it doesn't matter at all. So I think it's marrying those two ideas where the perfect world, in my opinion, would be you work as hard as you possibly can because you thought ahead of time, "What is the input that has the closest correlation with the outcome that I want?" Then you put your blinders on and you start digging.

We don't rise to the standards we have when others are watching; we fall to the standards we have when no one is watching. The only work that really matters is the work that no one sees. It shows you who you really are rather than who you say you are. There's this line that I heard David Goggins say on Rogan, and I can't remember who he was saying it to or what he said in response to, but he just said, "I'm David Goggins [expletive]."

I remember him saying it, and I thought to myself, "You want to be able to say that in the mirror to yourself and not laugh at yourself." The only way that I can do that is to know that when no one's watching, I work harder than when they're watching. Thinking about it like that has given me this persistent and ever-present scorecard or third party that's like, "No one's watching," which means now you have to work because otherwise you're full of [expletive].

It's this continuous reinforcing cycle of the me and other me holding the whip behind me to see how much I can take. As long as you keep going, you bear witness to yourself of what you are capable of, and I find that incredibly satisfying in the trenches of misery when you have to go through it. You're not full of [expletive]; I'm still here. It means that you're not full of [expletive].

What it comes down to is—I think I told you this story about when I was with Sam last year in LA. Sam Ensign used to make content on the internet; now he's very much an operator rather than a front-facing, which is funny to think about Sam the creator as opposed to Sam the operator. I asked why he'd stopped making content, and he said, "Because I felt like I had to start living up to in private the things which I was saying in public."

He was beginning to feel discordance between the two. He was making changes personally, but he created a brand publicly. I think if you can get to the stage where the public version of you is the best version of you, and then private you has to live up to the best version of you, then you get to do this sort of self-reinforcing cycle. That's kind of the virtuous version of that, which I guess is kind of similar to what you're talking about here.

What we're teasing at is authenticity. A lot of people feel like imposters because what they think, what they say, and what they do are completely different. But from an operational perspective—because that's how I like to define a lot of words—which is what do I have to do to be that, right? What do I have to do to be authentic? You can describe someone as authentic by saying, "How would you behave if there was no possibility of punishment?"

If you could not be punished at all, that behavior is who you are authentically. In my opinion, our degrees of freedom are predicated on how much—to what extent we act as though we could not be punished. If what we want to do and what we do have no possibility of punishment, that is what we are when we are our true selves.

Jimmy Carr talks about nobody throws a Coke can out of the window with kids in the back, right? That means you're a [expletive] monster. It's what you do when there's no one around. Your old one about authenticity: people are attracted to authenticity, but it's hard to define. For me, here's my best attempt: true alignment of what you think, what you say, and what you do.

The hardest part is realizing that our thoughts are [expletive], and that we have to fix them instead of faking the next two. It's exactly that, and I think that actually, ground zero of that is living out your [expletive] thoughts and then slowly trying—like I think it's the hardest jump is actually doing and saying what you think. When someone's like, "Hey, what do you think about this?" and you're like, "I wasn't paying attention at all."

It's like, "Oh wow, okay." Then you basically become—because I think if personal truth is not lying to—if you start by not lying to yourself, and then you start saying those things, then you start not lying to other people. I think if you can decrease the friction between what you really think and what you say, it starts to create some virtuous cycle outside of you that starts to orient your behavior so that you actually start doing what you really think.

I have integrity, but in the truest sense, as one of my personal goals. But it's jarring to people when you're just honest and really honest. Like, "Hey, do you want to go to this Sarah's birthday party?" "No." And they're like, "What do you mean? Are you busy?" "No, I'm not busy, but I don't want to go."

People have a hard time just saying no to things, and I would encourage you, if you're listening to this, try saying no to—try actually telling the truth when you don't want to do something. We say we have so many social niceties that we say, "Oh, I'm really busy," or "It's a really bad time right now," or whatever.

I had somebody the other day—I was with a friend, and I didn't notice that I did this, so sometimes it's nice to have somebody from the outside. Somebody came up to me; we were looking at a real estate property, and someone knew I was going to be there. That guy showed up unannounced or whatever, and he was like, "Hey man, can we do a podcast?"

I was like, "I'm just in town; I'm going to hang out with Lila for the next few days. Not really trying to do that." He asked again, and he was like, "Hey, like 20 minutes? We can just rock one out." I was like, "Well, let me show you my calendar." I pulled up my calendar, and it was all empty. I said, "See, there's nothing on there," and I was like, "And I just want to keep it that way."

I didn't think anything of it, but apparently, he left, and then my friend just starts crying laughing, just thinking how hilarious. He's like, "I can't believe you said that. That was so boss." I was like, "What is he talking about?" He's like, "You just showed him your calendar that you had nothing, and you were still like, 'You're still not going to get any of my time.'"

I didn't perceive any of this extra narrative that he added to it, but I think just being able to say no to stuff when people ask you for it—because people ask you for stuff all the time—and it's these little nibbles, these little tiny things. "Hey, can you do this?" or "Hey, can we show up to this thing?" or "Hey, you're supposed to," or "Hey, your aunt did that one thing for you, so therefore you owe her."

Saying, "I don't subject myself to those rules." I had a New Year's resolution, which I do believe in making resolutions—like, why not, if you stick with them? One of my more recent ones was, "There are no such things as social obligations, only consequences." So you have no social obligations; you have social consequences.

You have to go, "I don't have to go. If I don't go, what will happen as a result?" It decreases the likelihood they will invite me again, which is great because then I won't have to say no again. A lot of people don't play out the "what happens if." It's like, "Oh, more of the thing that I would prefer, which is not getting invited to these stupid weddings or not getting invited to these, you know, christenings or whatever they're called."

You know, bris, whatever. I don't—bris, whatever the thing is. You probably know what the word I'm trying to say. What you're talking about? Yeah, well, kids getting circumcised, or I think you go watch a viewing gallery—common thing? Yeah, I think—whatever, doesn't matter.

Point being, if you say no and are honest about why you said no, people will be jarred, but then you get this muscle. When we're talking about that muscle of being authentic, which is just saying what you really think. I think that when you do that, you unlock a certain level of confidence in yourself where you're like, "Oh, I didn't die."

"Oh, actually, what I would prefer to have happened happened as a result of that." "Oh, you know what? It's Friday night, and I am going to get a good night's sleep because I do have a clear day tomorrow, and I'm going to work my face off, and I didn't have to go to Sarah's thing." To me, that's like, over time, I think I just do more and more and more of that, and it feels better and better and better.

It's funny that your friends saw that as a flex, that it was, and I can see why. I think I would—oh my God, dude, like you totally owned him with that thing. You showed off the fact that you've got nothing, but really, if we're all being honest, if we didn't want to do it, that is the truth.

The only reason that it feels like a flex is that it's such a left turn from the social mores that people typically go through. I said this to you yesterday: Dan Bilzerian's superpower is his frictionless from what he wants to his mouth. Say what you want about Dan, but he's lived very unapologetically.

What are the things that you can get downstream from that? Maybe you don't like his values or his principles; maybe you think that he's a bad guy, or maybe you think he's worth more or less money than he actually is—all of these things. But what you can't say is that you don't trust the things that he does are not the things that he wants to do, and that commands a level of respect that absolutely—and it should command a level of respect.

I actually think that when you live that way, people trust you more because their ability to predict your behavior—100%. If I can't trust your no, how can I trust your yes? I think when people see you say no and then later say yes, your yes means a lot more, of course, because it's the same thing.

Peterson talks about that a rabbit can't be good; it just has no choice to be otherwise. You can't—the vicious—actually, I think that some rabbits are a bit like the [expletive]. So you probably can find some that are nasty.

You might have heard me say that I took my testosterone from 495 to 6 last year, and one of the supplements I took throughout that was tonkat ali. I first heard Dr. Andrew Huberman talk about these really impressive effects that tons of research was showing, which sounds great until you realize that most supplements don't actually contain what they're advertising.

MTS makes the only NSF-certified tonkat ali on the planet. That means they're tested so rigorously that even Olympic athletes can use it. Huberman is actually the scientific adviser for Momentus, so if you've ever wondered what supplements he would create or what he really uses himself, this is the answer.

Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it completely risk-free. Use it, and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back, and they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 20% off everything sitewide, including tonkat ali, by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com/wisdom and using the code "modernwisdom" at checkout. That's livemomentus.com/wisdom and "modernwisdom" at checkout.

If you want revenge for the bad things that have happened in your life, start with the version of you that hasn't lived up to your potential. I think a lot of us have the battle of the other self—that we're the lesser version of ourselves that we're trying to kill every single day. A lot of times, we have this desire to point the blame finger externally, but wherever you point the finger of blame, power follows.

Whoever I blame for the life I have is the person who I give all the power over my existence, over my circumstances. It hurts, but if you turn the finger inwards and you start saying, "Huh, I don't like my life. The person that I need to punish or get back at is the real person who got me here, which is me."

You may be right that other people did certain things or you got dealt a bad hand. It also doesn't matter because the only thing that you can control is obviously the actions that you take, and the only person who's in control of that is you. The revenge porn is thinking about what the version of you who got you here did and then acting in the exact opposite of that as many times as you possibly can.

The pain that you feel by rejecting the thing that you used to do that got you into this bad circumstance—that's the real revenge. It's kind of like the stoic fork, the dichotomy of control, but it's just taking all of that and just lumping it all on you.

It's, you know, I mean, this is kind of the pushback against victimhood culture—that externalizing the locus of control. "It is the fault of the politics," or "It is the economy," or "It's the state of the dollar," or "It's the patriarchy," or "It's whatever."

He goes, "Hey, look, you will get 100x your returns placing your efforts to try and change those things on you as opposed to on the world." I think basically the best way to move through the world is to see your entire surroundings as immutable and you as mutable. You're the only mutable thing in the entire world. You're the only anything that can change.

Everybody else—people, opinions, places, economy, politicians, policies—all of that, none of that's going to change. You can change; that's it. Maybe some of the other stuff does, and that would be great. It's a really interesting concept.

So do we accept the world and change ourselves, or do we change the world and accept ourselves? It's a really interesting dichotomy when you ask the question because both of those sound right. You're like, "I should accept myself and change the world." But on the other hand, you're like, "Wait, no, I should accept the world and change myself."

Because they're both Pym, PA, right? All of it comes down to when you change yourself, you will change the world because you will change how you see it. I think as well, when it comes to accepting yourself, do you want to accept you? Do you want to accept a version of you that you shouldn't accept? One that you're not proud of? One that doesn't live up to their word? One whose thoughts, actions, and intentions aren't aligned?

You go, "Well, I mean, I can, but I don't particularly feel good about that." That feels like the higher version of me, the potential version of me that I want to live up to. I'm sort of derailing them; this isn't really the try to them that it should be.

That's why the self-acceptance movement—that's why people feel icky about it. People feel icky about the self-acceptance movement because they know that people are accepting a version of themselves that is falling short from what it could be. I would say that they're not accepting themselves in saying that they accept themselves.

If I say, "Is there a version of yourself that's better than you are right now?" Most people, hopefully, would say yes. It's like, "Great, accept that person." I think that, to me, when we talk about authenticity, accepting yourself is accepting the ideal that we can live up to. That is what we accept, not the shitty version of that that we are today.

I think that marries both sides of the argument. Jimmy Carr broke my brain with this one: "Everyone is jealous of what you've got; no one is jealous of how you got it." I love that quote. My God, people see the trophies but not the training ground. Everybody wants the view, but no one wants the climb.

I love it, but the people who win love the climb, and the real mountain has no peak. The view is always present the whole way up the climb, but it seems to me to push back there. It seems to me like a lot of the time, your head down—the pleasure comes from the climb, not the view for you.

Again, maybe sort of non-typically constructed from a psychological perspective. That was nice; that was diplomatic. So what would you say? This is something that I think, you know, with these episodes that we do, I often want to try and get you to push a little bit more to adapt your ideas and your insights for people who may do have a little bit more of that emotionality that comes through to try and sort of soften this up.

I understand that people need more degrees of freedom than me, typically. I understand that people probably can't get themselves to the level of work that I can. So do you ever sort of play with that idea of, "Okay, what does a little bit of view-taking in look like whilst we're climbing?"

I think a lot of the discontent comes from the judgment people have about what they should or should not do along the way. They take my description as a prescription for what they should do, and it couldn't be further from the truth. If you want to take a break at every two steps and take in the view, do it. I mean, in four generations, no one will remember your name, so enjoy the view if you feel like it.

I just happen to enjoy how much I can see that I can do. That's what I enjoy, and I feel like I exercise absolute freedom in my life. Freedom is reinforcing for all species—dogs, cows, fish, humans. Freedom is one of the most positively reinforcing things that people have; everyone wants freedom. Everybody wants to be able to say, "F you."

But once you say, "[expletive] you," you have to do something because you can't just stand there saying, "[expletive] you" over and over again for hours for the rest of your life. You start to do something, and that thing that you choose to do after you say, "Thank you," is what you want to do.

That's an interesting point. There are certain things that you have to do to get to the point where you don't have to do things you don't want to do. When you're liberated, there is a whole new challenge now because it's a completely blank map where you have to actually define that.

That's one of the things, you know, about working for yourself. There's a lot of derogation about 9 to 5 and university education and kind of the typical track and stuff. Like, bro, you should be very cautious about criticizing people that have more normal salaried 9 to 5 jobs because I look at most of my friends, and they can't not take their work home with them.

For certain psychological makeups, who's more free? The person that actually gets to shut their work laptop at 5:00 p.m.? In France, they've got this new policy now where you can't email staff after, I think it's maybe 5:00 p.m. or 6:00 p.m. at night in certain businesses to try and sort of enforce this work-life balance and stuff like that.

So for certain people, you're shaking your head. What's your problem? I mean, my first thought was, "Well, France just took the irrelevant economy and just made it less relevant." Secondarily, the person who made that rule is someone who fundamentally doesn't understand human behavior.

So if they were to pass that rule for me, then what they did is they actually made my life worse. This was the thing when Elon took over Twitter. It's one of my favorite stories over the last couple of years. Elon buys Twitter; Elon finds out that 80% of the staff base just drink smoothies and go on hot girl walks all day, and he fires them.

He says, "This team—it was him and a bunch of Asian dudes—selfie." He says, "This is the team that's going to run Twitter now." He put, I think, a job posting out there, maybe on Twitter, and he says, "I want people who want to work harder than they ever have on the most difficult problems in the world," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He got tons of [expletive] for it.

They said, "This is a regressive policy for the industry. This is taking people back to sending kids up to chimneys," and so on and so forth. It's just a complete failure of theory of mind that there are people out there for whom that is the job advert: "I want to work harder than I ever have on the most difficult problems in the world at an intensity that would kill most people because that's where I derive pleasure and satisfaction from."

That's the best situation that I could hope for. Trying to take your model of, "Well, yeah, but what about my maternity leave?" and "Yeah, but what about, you know, jeans Fridays?" and "Yeah, but what about, you know, hot girl walks?" All of that is—those are things that people don't want. Adding those in gets in the way of the thing that they do want.

I think a lot of the confusion around the people who are wanting to work harder than they are or don't like that I work hard or that you work hard think that they take this statement as a judgment or criticism on how they live their life. It's because on the other side of that free line, you're like, "Okay, I'm now free. I have a blank slate."

If I do something or you do something that they deem painful for them now or something that they don't enjoy, they then say, "You are suffering, and that is bad." Both of those things I reject wholeheartedly. First, you don't know that I'm suffering because you have no idea what's going on inside of me.

Also, what does your judgment mean at all to me? There's a Tim Cook internal memo that he sent. There's a saying that if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life. At Apple, I learned that is a total crock. You will work harder than you ever thought possible, but the tools will feel light in your hands.

So good. Chef's kiss. Tim Cook, I feel like you crushed that one. I have a friend who worked for a very high-level recruitment company, C-suite XX, for the biggest companies on the planet. I don't know whether it was some internal internet thing or whether they actually saw these people or maybe candidates with other companies, but he was able to see the breakdown interviews with some of the best CEOs in the world.

He was able to see the summary of Tim Cook and Susanna, the lady, and apparently, the first line—so these guys are seeing everybody, the best on the planet, right? I was like, "Okay, so just explain to me the interpretation difference between the guys that are already AAA and then Tim Cook." He said the first line of Tim Cook's summary just said, "Rockstar."

That was the first thing. All it said was "Rockstar." He realized that in a pool of the best executives on the planet, people like Tim and people like Susanna still are heads and shoulders above the rest. I just thought that was so cool to see these people in their next stage before they've got the thing that they're going to really magnify.

They had all the attributes; they didn't have the proof yet. They didn't have the playground; they didn't have the petri dish to be able to show just how much they could multiply it. I think about that a lot when it comes to kind of like potential energy versus reality for people on their way up.

There's this huge time delay between when we start behaving in a way that a winner behaves and when we start winning. The problem is that the bigger the mountain you're trying to climb, the bigger the W you're trying to get, typically, the more delayed it is between when you start behaving like a winner and when you start being a winner.

Most people don't get the fast enough feedback loop to know that they're on the right path when they are taking these first steps in the right direction because they have this really big goal, but they forget that with that really big goal comes the even longer delay that it takes to get there while still continuing to act with no feedback from society, positive reinforcement whatsoever.

I think that's like if I actually had to put a real—what's been—what has worked so well for me and why the input-over-output focus has been so powerful is that I can extend the time horizon basically indefinitely because the goal is me, and then the external goals occur. You don't need the positive reinforcement.

I mean, everybody's seen it; I need the positive reinforcement, but the positive reinforcement is coming from me internally. I'm just being like, "Just because I think it's important." The positive external reinforcement that most people are looking for, right? But if you are the goal, then the actions you take every day are reinforcing who you believe yourself to be. That's where the confidence comes from, as long as it's directionally correct.

If you just want to be satisfied, then just work your ass off. Yeah, I mean, everybody's seen one of those exponential graphs. One of my good friends, George, bought me a professor—he's great; he's [expletive] fantastic. I found—I'll tell you once—Ro [expletive] he won't let me say it. But he's just got the most insane client, like one of the coolest companies on the planet.

He bought me for a gift last year. It's the 1 million subscriber announcement post that I did. It's the first-ever test footage episode I did in 2017, and in the middle is the play graph that goes between the two. You look, and it is up until a year at the time—up until like a year before—it's flat. There was nothing. There were days—I remember looking back—there were days when we were doing this show in March, April, and May of 2018 where we did zero plays.

We'd already launched; I was releasing an episode a week, and there were days where we did no plays. I went back through and looked. I don't think I even told you this. I messaged every single one of the thousand contacts in my phone that I'd accumulated from nightlife promo on WhatsApp, saying, "Hi, I've just launched a podcast. Would you mind subscribing to me?"

A thousand different people bunched into 50-person broadcast lists because that was the maximum broadcast list you used to be able to do. It was the most ground-floor, door-to-door sales to try and accumulate an audience, and it just keeps happening. There's no presuming that you keep on going exponentially.

It makes every previous version poultry, and yeah, being able to continue doing something without seeing the results of your work is one of the best competitive advantages because everybody else is feeling the same discomfort that you are. Everybody else is going, "I don't know if this is going to work, and this is hard, and why is no one telling me that I'm doing a good job?"

Another day with no plays—that's stupid. Then you end up looking at the top 100 podcasts in the world. I think account for 80% of the global plays. 100 shows out of about 4 million account for 80% of the plays, which means there's what? 399,900 [expletive] that has got the entire rest of it—that's 20%.

The leading indicator of a successful person is the ability to act without anything happening. When you continue down that path, it happens slower than you expect and then faster than you can imagine. I think that's the part that everyone misses. They expect the faster than they can imagine, and they imagine really big.

Their expectations are really big, really fast, but they take the intensity and they don't apply it to a timeline that's appropriate. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. You might not be—you might not need more caffeine; you might just be dehydrated. Proper hydration—it's not just about having sufficient water; it's about having the electrolytes to allow your body to use those fluids.

Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium that helps to regulate appetite, curb cravings, and improve your brain function. This orange salt tastes like absolute godly nectar first thing in the morning. It's the way I've started my day for over three years now, and it's a complete game changer. I can feel the difference when I use it and when I stop.

You can try it completely risk-free with their no-questions-asked refund policy. Buy it, use all of them; if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back, and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom.

This is from Mark Manson: "Why I hate being around negative people. Being an [expletive] is a weak person's idea of strength. Complaining is their connection. Never let yourself be held back by other people's fears. People criticize what they were afraid to do themselves because bold action reminds them of their own inaction. If you're afraid to be criticized, why do you care about the opinions of those who are too timid to do it themselves? If you are the criticizer, does tearing down someone who has the courage you lack make you better?"

Yeah, people criticize because it helps them justify the risks they chose not to take in the hopes that it'll dissuade you from doing it so that you can be in the exact same position as them, which then justifies that they made the right call. This happened when I stopped drinking. You know, it was now going low and no on alcohol is kind of in vogue and super-duper common, but as a club promoter in whatever, 2015, 2016, that was pretty rare.

I think a lot of the pushback that I got from the people around me—some of the people around me—was, "Your behavior is throwing my behavior into sharp contrast." You know, this is the lonely chapter, right? This is why the movement away from your existing friend group—this is Neo. You've already been down that road; you know where it leads. You know you don't want to go there.

It's all of those things, but because, at least for me, I always have such inherent uncertainty of my own opinions and such a sense that everybody else is balanced and actually knows what they're doing, that I give undue weight to the criticisms of others. "Oh, maybe they are right. Maybe it is stupid for me to stop drinking. Maybe this does make me boring. Maybe it is pointless for me to do like, who even knows if meditation works?" [expletive] Sam Harris, right?

All of these doubts that start to creep in, and that, like we were saying before, this is the discomfort that everybody feels, whether you're launching a business or doing personal development or doing all the rest of it. As opposed to thinking about it as a bug, think about it as a feature. As opposed to thinking about it as something that's a personal curse that's difficult, think about it as the selection criteria that everybody has to get over.

That's the reason why so few people are equanimous and actually have peace in their mind because meditation is hard, and everyone thinks, "Am I doing it right? This kind of sucks, and I'm twitchy, and I'm tired today." Why are so few people in shape? Because going to the gym and sticking to the gym is difficult.

Maybe it's a tiny bit easier for some people that like it than others, but for most people, most of the time, it's really, really hard. Thinking about the challenges that you need to face, it's just a selection—the cost of doing business, right? This is just the cost of doing business, and I need to pay it.

It's rarely the information or the intensity that makes things hard; it's the sticking with it that makes it hard. The desire that we have to quit is simply breaking the consistency. That's why consistency has always been the hardest thing for most people to achieve. But the intensity of what you have to do to be successful is much lower than most people expect.

Oftentimes, they suffer significantly more in a short period of time than is required to be successful over a much longer period of time with a much lower intensity. If you walk for five minutes a day, you're going to get, you know, 50% of the health benefits—probably more than that, I'm sure—of just even exercising. You add 10 years to your life if you walked five or 10 minutes a day.

The path of personal development is befriending uncertainty. I obviously sit from the entrepreneurial perspective, but almost all decisions that you make in the beginning, you have incomplete data, and you have to make decisions anyway. It's growing comfortable with taking your best bad guess and being directionally correct rather than searching for a perfect answer because a perfect answer assumes perfect information, which you can only have after you begin.

In some ways, making a decision is the perfect answer so that you can get the information feed to then improve the quality of the decision later. I think that one loop is what a lot of people miss out on. They spend—they obsess for years sometimes on the perfect pick, the perfect business, the perfect job, the perfect mate, when most of the time, beginning each step illuminates the next step.

That means the information, the feedback that you get from walking gives you more about where to walk than trying to sit at the beginning in the darkness and pick a direction. Well, it's the difference as well, I think, between people who are super advanced, super developed, super far down the line, and people who are beginning. It's like, "Dude, what have you got to—what are you risking by trying to do this thing?"

For you, it's fine for you to spend 18 months negotiating with Sam on the school deal, but if you are yet to do any business, that's probably not necessarily the right way to go about things. Tim Ferriss says, "In the short term, your success depends on your intensity; in the long term, your success depends on your consistency. Do not sacrifice the latter for the former."

What's wild about the fear that people have when they're starting out is that they say things like, "I have nothing going for me. I have no advantages. I have nothing to my name. I have no money. I have no network. I have no resources." But using Rory Sutherland's reframing, it also means that you have nothing to lose, which makes you incredibly dangerous.

I think people wildly underestimate how many shots on goal you can take when you have nothing to lose. Whereas when someone has something to lose, they have to be more and more selective about the shots they take. You have the perfect conditions for taking risks because the worst-case scenario is baseline is where you're currently at, correct?

That means that side is this, which means that it's like going to the casino and playing craps, but they say that you can just keep playing until you win. But people are afraid to roll. Reminder for anyone internally debating weekend plans: if you don't want to go, don't go. If they care whether you go or not, they don't care about you. If they care about you, they don't care if you go or not.

Just because you have free time doesn't mean anyone who asks for it isn't entitled to it. I think the second part I want to start with, which is if you see that you have an empty calendar, most people assume that if someone asks you for that time, it's therefore theirs. It's only not theirs when someone else has claimed it, which means that your time only belongs to other people.

Then you're surprised by the fact that your investment of time has yielded nothing for you when you've given the only and most valuable asset that you have to everyone else, who often give a very poor return on it for you. In the beginning, if you don't have money, the only thing you have is time. That is the only thing that you—it's the only currency you can spend to improve yourself or get closer to your goals.

If that's the one currency you have, then why on Earth would you give it away? I think it's genuinely right to say that your calendar is a better measure of your wealth than your bank account. It's also the easiest way to know where someone's going to be in five years or even a year.

How so? You just see where they're investing their time, and you can predict more accurately what their life is going to look like in a year based on what they're doing today. It's a good thing. For us, it's hard for me not to put the business stuff into it, but a reminder that the life that I'm living today is a result of the work that I did six and 12 months ago.

If you look at my calendar six and 12 months ago, then you might extrapolate out to what I'm doing today. Just like people want the immediate reward, they also see their current condition as a result of the behavior they're doing today. It's not at all.

That's why I think having, in some ways, a very vivid imagination of like this is where I think the benefit of visualization comes into play. I don't see it as much as a benefit for like, "Oh, I have to imagine this thing to happen," but I think it's more powerful to think, "I'm doing this thing today, and I'm imagining it happening."

It's an approximation of the feedback loop that you want to have, and so it helps you substitute and get through the period where nothing's actually happening. This is—it was so cool to learn this. Going to the gym is one of the very few pursuits that you can do where in the act of doing the thing, you get a brief window into what it will be like if you continue to do the thing.

If I go on Duolingo and try to learn Spanish, I don't briefly become much better at Spanish, like where I'm going to be at in six months or 12 months' time. But if I go to the gym and get a pump on, I go, "Hey, that's me hopefully flat in nine months' time." How I look now at the end of the session is where I want to be toward the end of this year, and that reinforcement loop is so good.

I think I genuinely—no one's spoken about this—the pump preview. But I think that is the feedback mechanism that makes the gym so compelling. It's one of the reasons why it makes the gym so compelling. You get this brief window into a future version of you, and you go, "[Expletive] dude, I look so—my delts look [expletive] awesome. I can't wait for that to be how I look when I wake up in the morning."

You go, "Okay, that's how I'm going to get that," and that's why it's such a—it’s so gratifying, right? It works in the moment, and it works over the long term. So one of my closest friends, or my closest friend, Dr. Kashi, and I talk about this, but the difference between experts and beginners is that experts have more ways to reward themselves in a given condition.

If you think about an expert salesman, there are so many interactions they can have that they are good at that they can find rewarding and positively reinforcing. The goal is to develop enough skill that your external environment and conditions can deliver enough positive feedback that it can become self-sustaining.

Give me a tangible example. So if you're an editor and you edit videos for a living, in the beginning, you have to, you know, you watch a video, and then you try the thing, and if it doesn't work, there's no—I mean, there is a feedback loop; it's null. Then you go back, you try it again, and then you do get a positive feedback. "Oh, I made that transition happen. I made that color grading occur," whatever.

I'm talking that—you get the idea. There are some roles like sales and editing where there's a lot of people who—music, where people become passionate because there's enough fast feedback loops in the beginning where they can try something and then get good.

A master musician can pick up any instrument and have positive feedback loops everywhere. The more you master any skill, the more ways you can win. It allows—and that's ultimately what makes the rich get richer is that because everything is so positively reinforcing, because they start to develop skills, then they do more and more of it.

As they do more of it, the rich get richer, the better get better, the better become best, and then everyone who's starting out is like, "How on God's Earth does this guy have this work ethic?" But it's really that he has high levels of skill.

All right, I'm going to go on a tangent here, but I think it's going to be worth it. I think about everything in terms of skill, and I have more or less divorced myself from the words like feelings, psychology, intuition, whatever. I've just taken it out of my vocabulary and simple character traits and tried to focus ruthlessly on what are the actions that I can take to become patient.

If you say, "Hey, be patient," what does someone do? They have to figure out what to do in the meantime. That's the definition of patience. If you say, "Hey, be more charismatic," the problem with that directive is that it's a bundled term.

I say charismatic, but what it really means is 12 skills underneath of it. That means that when you walk into a room, stand up straight. When you walk into a room, look everyone in the eyes. When you walk into a room, announce yourself, speak louder, shake people's hands, and look at them while they're talking. When someone talks, nod your head.

If you do all of these 12 behaviors or 15 behaviors, people begin to describe you as charismatic. In the path of personal development, we want to become more of these things, but we haven't chunked down the bundled term into the series of behaviors that create the description that people will then call us later.

By breaking things down, then it's not like, "Oh, I'm just not that [insert character trait]." It's really, "Oh, I have not mastered these 12 skills." By doing that, it demystifies much more precise. This is from a business perspective; it's also really good for training employees.

For example, on our team, I was like, "KB was the first person who did video with me that I ever enjoyed." I was like, "Why?" Then somebody else came in, and I was like, "I'm not having as much fun in these sessions." I'd like to recreate the conditions of success.

How can I make it so that I operationalize fun? Exactly, the most Alex Hormozi thing I've ever heard. "Hey, hey guys, let's operationalize fun for a moment." We had to—but then this is the part that everyone misses: you then have to look with a microscope and say, "What are all the little things that Caleb does that other ones—other people don't do?"

It turned out when he was behind the camera, he would be nodding his head, and if I said a banger line, he would stick his thumb out. I'd get these many positive reinforcement loops while I was recording. As soon as I was done, he would come over and be like, "Dude, that was fire."

Then he would take out his phone and have all of these really interesting follows because I could see that he was actively listening and he had thoughts. When we retrained the team, we said, "Hey, when Alex is talking, nod your head slowly

our lives than we think. The key is to create the right conditions for the behaviors we want to adopt.

For instance, if you want to exercise more, you might set up your environment to make it easier. This could mean laying out your workout clothes the night before or finding a gym that's close to home. By changing your surroundings, you increase the likelihood of engaging in the desired behavior.

Now, regarding the idea that "thoughts aren't true," this is a powerful concept. Many of us operate under the assumption that our thoughts reflect reality, but they often don't. Our thoughts can be influenced by emotions, biases, and past experiences, leading us to make inaccurate judgments about ourselves and the world. Recognizing that thoughts are not necessarily facts allows us to challenge them and seek a more accurate understanding of our circumstances.

Similarly, the notion that "feelings don't require action" is crucial. Just because we feel a certain way doesn't mean we have to act on those feelings. For example, feeling anxious about a presentation doesn't mean we should avoid it. Instead, we can acknowledge the feeling and choose to proceed despite it. This distinction empowers us to take control of our actions rather than being driven by our emotions.

The idea that "things aren't good or bad; they just are" encourages us to adopt a more neutral perspective on events. This mindset can help us respond to challenges with greater resilience. Instead of labeling a setback as "bad," we can view it as an opportunity for growth and learning.

Lastly, the statement "our actions, not our pasts, define who we are" emphasizes the importance of agency. While our past experiences shape us, they do not have to dictate our future. We have the power to change our behaviors and, in doing so, redefine our identities.

In summary, embracing these principles can lead to a more empowered and fulfilling life. By focusing on our actions, challenging our thoughts, and creating supportive environments, we can navigate life's challenges with greater ease and purpose.

Our behavior can be influenced if we can stack the deck in our favor. Part of the reason going to bed at 9:00 p.m. is so powerful is that we're changing the conditions to change our behavior. If all of your friends are poor, Harvard conducted a long study and found that the number one correlate was your reference group, which is who you compare yourself to. It's also important to note that it's not necessarily who you spend the most time with; it's who you compare yourself to. So, if you want to change your life, change who you compare yourself to.

Part of who you compare yourself to is who you spend your time with, or at least who you assume the most stuff from. If you're doing this, then maybe it's a good thing, or maybe it's a terrible thing because you're comparing yourself to the wrong people. But either way, if you want to get fit, getting around fitter people will motivate you because you'll be the least fit person. If you are poor but the richest among your friends, then get around people who make more money. Of course, people say, "But I can't get around people who make more money." Okay, but no one else has ever done it. No one who has had it worse than you has ever figured out how to do it. You're right, but of course, you're not right, so shut the [ __ ] up. Thoughts aren't true.

How many things do we think every day that are just false? They can be factually false, but also from a reactionary perspective. I'll give an example: if someone miscommunicates and wrongs me in some way, I get angry and think I should wrong them back. That's my first thought. If I then ask myself what that behavior increases the likelihood of occurring as a result, what do I want to happen? Well, I want them to apologize or just not do that again. If I react back to them, I increase the likelihood that they will retaliate. So, in doing what my first thought was, I increased the likelihood of the negative occurrence that I'm trying to avoid.

Thinking through what happens after that thing, both in interpersonal dynamics and from a business decisions perspective, has helped me so much. For example, not long ago, someone reached out to me from a relatively big account and said, "Hey, can you read my book? It would mean the world to me if you left me an endorsement." I said, "Out of respect for you, I won't just ghost this message or give you a half-hearted answer and hope you forget that I said yes. I'm not going to endorse your book, but you're welcome to send it to me. I will probably just flip through it because I have a lot of other books that I need to read that are more closely related to my goals, but I appreciate the flattery that's implied in you asking me to do that."

Before I wrote that message, I thought, "What do I want to happen after I send this message?" If I just ghost him, I will probably have a null outcome, and he'll probably have a slight negative because he'll remember. He'll think, "Okay, fine, that was his way of saying no." But if I compliment him, thank him for the compliment, and also tell the truth, I'll probably get someone in the future who knows that my "yes" means something when I choose to do it.

It's about thinking two steps ahead of what happens after I say this thing back and how to increase the likelihood of that second move, not the first move. It sounds silly to say because people are like, "Oh, of course," but I don't think most people do that, and it has helped me so much. Even in my marriage with Ila, if I want Leila to talk to me a certain way, then if I punish her when she doesn't talk to me that way, what she'll really do is avoid talking to me in general. So, I have to find a time when she does that thing so that I can immediately reward her, increasing the likelihood that it occurs.

I think about this all the time with most of the dynamics that we have. This is something, especially over the last year, that I've realized as a rehabilitated people pleaser. Being able to make your needs known and make demands is a real skill. It's strange given that pursuing your needs is one of the most fundamental human things. I realized that especially people you respect in a social dynamics way don't want to hear what they want to hear; they want to hear what you actually think about a thing.

So many times, someone will ask your opinion, "What do you think of the Oppenheimer movie?" What they want to hear is whatever they think, which is, "Oh, wasn't it great? Did you watch it in IMAX?" "Yeah, I did. Did you get Sour Patch Kids?" "Yeah, I did." But what they actually want to hear is, "Do you know what? It was just a little drawn out for me, and all of the visual effects felt a little bit more..." I haven't seen it; I don't [ __ ] know. But what people think they want to hear is not what they actually want to hear; they want to hear what you think. That requires you to tell the truth.

Oddly enough, that means that telling someone what they don't want to hear ends up with a bigger net positive for you than actually giving them the thing that they wanted. For the business owners, advertisers, or content creators in the room, this is the ultimate hack: just tell the truth. When you do that, you will, by definition, make very unique content because everyone else is so focused on saying what they think adds value rather than just saying what they really think.

The benefit of experience is the only way you can stress-test whether or not this thing you're trying to talk about is an actual thing. You also get an extra perspective when you know that this is what most people say about a thing. I have tried it, and this is my perspective on not only the thing but why other people think that this thing is a thing, given that I know it doesn't work.

Feelings don't require action. I think this is super powerful for all phases, but especially for beginners. If you're a beginner, you have to separate feeling something and acting on that feeling. You may feel hopeless many times, but you need to continue doing the activities that align with your goal. You may feel hungry, but you need to not eat the cookie to stay aligned with your goal. You may feel angry, but know that retaliating against your coworker has no likely positive outcome. You may hate your boss, but undermining them in front of the team may make you feel good in the moment but will destroy your long-term career prospects.

Creating a gap is important. I was talking to one of our CEOs who was having a little bit of a stress issue, and I said, "I want you to think that you're a Yeti. I want you to think you're one of these cans that has a vacuum between both walls. You've got your feelings on one side, your internal temperature, and your external temperature." I just want you to create space.

Space, within the context of behavior, is time. When I feel something and have the desire to act on it, at that moment, I have the lowest action threshold, which means I'm the most likely to behave or do something. I want to make as logical decisions as I can. Hopefully, we're all aligned on the fact that logical decisions generally work out better than illogical decisions. If we make logical decisions regularly, we'll have longer-term outcomes.

If we want to increase the likelihood that our decisions are logical, we want to create space between when we feel and when we do. Encapsulated in one sentence: just because you feel something doesn't mean you need to act on it. If you have an idea that you want to act on because of a feeling, if it still feels good in the morning, then do it. But I've never regretted taking time before acting when I was angry; I have regretted almost everything I've done immediately the moment I felt angry.

Things aren't good or bad; they just are. This is the essence of most things. I'm not the only one. What makes life more difficult for people is the judgment they have on themselves about what they believe they're supposed to do or supposed to have achieved, or that this condition or this thing that happened is good or bad or should have been good or should have been better.

There's a story of the boy with the horse in the village. I'll tell it in 30 seconds: a dad gets his kid a horse, and everybody in the village says that's amazing. The old man says, "We'll see." Then the kid is riding the horse and breaks his leg, and everyone in the town says, "Oh, that's so horrible." The old man says, "We'll see." Then the army comes to town to take all the young men to war, and the kid can't go because his leg is broken, and everyone says, "That's amazing." The old man says, "We'll see."

As we continue to play out the timeline of life, we can't know if anything is good or bad until the day we die. And on the day we die, it won't matter because we'll be dead. So, at the end of the day, all the things that occur simply occur. For me, reminding myself that I think this is bad or I think this is good limits the peaks and also limits the valleys. Saying, "This just is," is, in my opinion, an absolute acceptance of the world without casting judgment on it.

It's difficult to do because we all want to make judgments, and we have to make judgments in order to live. We have to approximate what is a good decision, a bad decision, or a decision that will increase the likelihood that what we want to happen will happen. But most of the good-bads that we have coming up are not for our own benefit; they're not aligned with our goals. They're aligned with one person who told us something when we were seven years old, and we incorporated that. We say, "Oh, this is bad," because someone else, when we were kids, said, "You hit your head," and then you look at the adult, and the adult says, "That's bad," and you say, "Oh, it's bad. I'm going to cry now."

There are so many thousands and millions of those tiny judgments that are passed on to us that do not serve us. For me, it has been more beneficial to whitewash everything and then actively rebuild what I believe to be good or bad based on those things, but with a baseline reality that none of it is. It is kind of narcissistic or solipsistic to believe that you know whether a thing is good or bad means you know the future, you know what the outcome of this is going to be.

There's a story that I couldn't believe was about September 11th. I didn't realize this, but the night before September 11th, there was quite bad weather, which meant that people getting home from baseball games got home much later. You'll remember the morning of September 11th; it was beautiful, with blue clear skies. Had that storm been only 12 hours later, the whole world would have been different.

There's a story of a guy who was going for a meeting, and I think it was his birthday. The lady he worked with had gotten him one of those illustration ties—sort of gaudy, hideous things with drawings all over it. He was wearing a shirt that clashed with it. She gifted him this as they had coffee on the morning of September 11th, early in downtown Manhattan. She said, "Look, your shirt's wrinkled, and it really doesn't go with this tie. Wear the tie; it'll make you feel confident. It's a nice present for you."

So he goes back to the hotel, she goes to the North Tower, and she dies. He's alive. How on Earth are you supposed to say that giving that tie was good or bad? You have no idea what's going to happen downstream from the things that are cut.

I know this guy who has a podcast, and years ago, he snapped his Achilles and could barely walk. The crazy thing is that many people at that time would have thought, "This is the worst thing that could have possibly happened." But because he snapped his Achilles, he thought, "Well, I have to make the best of this. I have to do something. I might as well stick with that podcast that I said I was going to start." Years later, he became a top 50 podcast in the world.

I think an amazing frame is that you can make anything that feels circumstantially negative in the moment better if you ask the question, "What would make this thing the best thing ever?" I would argue that maybe you would agree that snapping your Achilles was probably the best thing that ever happened to you because it got you here. Right now, you probably have your version of the snapped Achilles going on in your life, but there's also the version of the top 50 podcast in the world waiting for you to take action as a result of your snapped Achilles.

I always had this problem with people who said it was meant to be because, retrospectively, you're kind of taking your agency out of the situation. For instance, me saying, "I'm so glad that COVID happened and shut all of the nightclubs down, which forced my business to close so that I could focus on the podcast, restart playing cricket, snap my Achilles, and then move to America," is a long chain of events. But I think that's quite a disempowering frame to put around things because it takes away the difficulty that you had to overcome.

If you're in a car accident and break your femur, and you say it was meant to be because you met your partner, who was the nurse that looked after you while you were being rehabbed back to health, you go, "Okay." Or, on the flip side, you managed to be sufficiently charming to get a partner while you had a snapped femur in the hospital. That wasn't meant to be; that was your agency.

So, retrospectively, you want it all to be on you, and known in advance, you want it all to be completely up in the air and unknown. I think the high-agency frame allows you to break your Achilles and say, "What will I do to make this amazing?" That's where the magic happens because then everything serves you.

Our actions, not our pasts, define who we are. Victims see their past as their fate; champions see their past as their origin story. A lot of people are living through their origin story right now, or they're living through the very reason that they'll never be successful. But it could be the exact same situation, and the only difference between either character is the actions they choose to take.

If you're using Joe Rogan's frame, waking up in your main player character today, as weird of a contract as this is, the past doesn't exist—it's just gone. It's not anywhere. The only thing we absolutely have control over is the actions we take right now. It's a weird eraser of time when you really start thinking that the past only exists in chemicals in my brain, but it doesn't exist right now.

To think about the past that way is freeing because it means I get to start with no baggage. In some ways, it makes the present feel light because you're not carrying anything into it. Have you seen that Tim Urban illustration of the tree of time? It starts off with life, and there's only one black branch that is the particular path you took, and there are all of these green ones that you haven't taken. Then it gets to now, and there's a line where it's now, and then it turns to every branch being potential.

You had lots that could have been, only one that was, and now you have lots that could be and an unlimited number that may be altogether. You're right; it's light when you think about that frame. It makes the present moment feel like it doesn't matter what happened yesterday. It doesn't matter what happened when I was a kid. It doesn't matter; it only matters if you make it matter.

Jean-Paul Sartre once said, "I have led a toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting; I was reserving myself for later on, and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone." A lot of people wait for perfect conditions to start but don't realize that starting is the perfect condition. The part of that quote that I like a lot from little French is, "Your teeth can get sharper and stronger too."

So, he's saving himself to use his teeth, but he could have had all of his teeth at the end if he had been using them the whole time. We have this idea I call the fallacy of the perfect pick, thinking that you're going to have this one shot, this one pick, this one opportunity, this one podcast, this one whatever that's going to take you all the way. But it's the habit of biting that takes you all the way, not where you choose to bite the first time.

I obviously now have a huge history of this, and you do too, which is we have learned to just bite and know that our teeth will get stronger and we will learn how to chomp down along the way. Waiting to begin never got anyone anywhere.

I kind of became obsessed with this belief that one day life's duties will be out of the way, and then you can finally start doing the thing that you want to do or you're meant to do. Marie Louise von Franz calls it the provisional life, which I love. There is this strange feeling that one is not yet in real life; for the time being, one is doing this or that, but there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future, the real thing will come about.

It's also known as deferred happiness syndrome—the common feeling that your life has not yet begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This ideal is a mirage that will fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was, in fact, the one to your death. There really isn't any other time.

One of the melancholy realizations of getting older is that you actually think, "Oh, you know what? There are things that I can't do now that I could have done before." For both of us, it is going to get linearly harder to build muscle for the rest of time. It's never going to be as easy as it was 10 years ago to build muscle. You go, "Okay, well, that's an argument for starting sooner."

The same thing goes for becoming more psychologically healthy, for becoming more balanced, for becoming more wealthy, for investing in good habits. Oh God, Christopher Hitchens said it is a melancholy lesson of older life that you can no longer make old friends. Find your people now. Find your people right now and become friends with them. Find your habits right now and start doing them.

It's never been easier to get a muscle than it was 10 years ago. It's never been easier to make money than it was 10 years ago. But it'll also never be easier than it is right now. It'll only get harder. That's actually a pretty strong impetus to do it now. It'll literally never get easier.

Alex Hormozi, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, I appreciate you, man. These "Fug State" episodes are fun. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with what you've got going on? Do you have any cool stuff coming up?

Yeah, I mean, I've got my next book coming out. You'll know about it, but it's within the next six months or so. I'm very excited about that; I've been working on it for six years, so it's finally ready.

Did you finish writing that?

Yeah, cool, because the last one was a little closer to the W.

Oh yeah, this one... I'll tell you the story. I wrote this book first, and I'll tell you the subheadline, which is "How to Make Money." After finishing that book and thinking, "This is my masterpiece," I realized, "Oh no, they won't be able to use this unless they know how to advertise." You can't use all of these things about making money until you get someone to know who you are.

Then I thought, "Oh shoot, they won't be able to advertise unless they have something to advertise, which is an offer." So, I ended up writing this book first and then realized that I had to write offers two books away and actually release that first, even though I had written this other book. Then I had to write leads to bridge the gap between offers and this book.

But this is the book that I've been waiting for everyone to read and consume because I think it will make the most people the most money.

Did you have a problem given that your writing ability has probably improved over the other two books? Have you had to go back and sort of catch it up a little bit?

Oh, I rewrote it nine times in the last year.

Fantastic! But the first draft was done, and the ninth draft, which is now in publication—or not in publication, but is a finished product—is now done.

Heck yeah! What else? Anything else?

I mean, we're continuing to invest in portfolio companies. If you're a company looking to scale, you can go to acquisition.com. If you're a beginner just learning and figuring out how to make your first dollar, I'm a co-owner of school.com. You can start for free; it's a cool setup that we have to help people do it.

Right now, 54.1% of people who start a paid community on school make money. We've put a tremendous amount of effort, Sam and I, into trying to remove all barriers and all friction for people who are getting started so that they have literally no excuses. It's a way better strike rate than only funds.

I don't know what their strike rate is, but we've worked really hard. If you saw the amount of detail—maybe you heard some of this from the podcast—the amount of detail that went into where buttons go and what things we remove was actually a big one. We asked, "How can we pare this down so that people don't get overwhelmed?"

The number one reason people cancel or decide not to do something is overwhelm. So, we thought, "Okay, how can we funnel action into the clearest possible steps?" People go step one, step two, step three, and then all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, this actually worked."

It's been really cool to see the thousands of people who have made their first dollar, which is what I make all my content about to begin with. It's been the ride of my life; it's been awesome.

I can't thank you enough, man. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, you will love my full-length conversation with Mike Isrel waiting for you. Come on, go on. There it is.