Speaker A
Today is, uh, a not so special day, but it is the day that I was born.
Alex Hormozi shares life lessons on maturity, commitment, and prioritizing what truly matters in an 18-minute talk.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Commitment requires sacrificing optionality and embracing irreversible decisions.
- Maturity involves humility and not demanding external validation.
- Priorities are personal and subjective; others' judgments should not dictate your life.
- Time management is crucial because time invested in one priority reduces time for others.
- Courage is essential to overcome fear of criticism and to finish what you start.
What the video covers
- Maturity is inversely related to how much one demands others celebrate their birthday, emphasizing humility over entitlement.
- Delayed gratification is a lifelong practice that requires courage and endurance to finish what you start.
- The goal of youth is optionality, while adulthood demands commitment and making irreversible decisions.
- Life involves balancing and prioritizing 10 key elements: community, romance, parenting, family, recreation, friends, career, physical health, spiritual health, and personal growth.
- Priorities differ per individual and should not be judged by others; living authentically means accepting criticism and making trade-offs.
- Time is zero-sum; investing in one area means sacrificing time in another, leading to an imperfect but intentional life.
- Many people avoid making decisions due to fear of conflict and others' opinions, but true freedom comes from owning your choices.
- The Latin root of 'decidere' means 'to cut off,' highlighting that commitment requires closing off alternative futures.
- Alex offers a tactical tip on focusing your limited hours effectively to navigate competing priorities.
- Ultimately, the video encourages viewers to be courageous, decisive, and unapologetic in pursuing their chosen path.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and thoughts on birthday celebrations
- 00:42Entitlement and maturity in celebrating birthdays
- 01:37The importance of finishing what you start
- 02:24Premise: Courage and commitment
- 03:10Optionality vs commitment in adulthood
- 04:08Prioritizing life’s key elements
- 05:44Navigating imperfect life and conflicting priorities
- 06:39Fear of criticism and owning your decisions
- 07:40Tactical tip for focused time management
- 09:35Final reflections on priorities and living authentically
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Um, and I'll read some stuff to you to piss some people off in the comments just to get things cracking. How's that sound?
Speaker A
Um, [laughter] don't say I never did anything for you. And so yeah, let's, let's begin with the tweet that has pissed everyone off.
Speaker A
Um, your level of maturity is inversely correlated with how much you want other people to celebrate your birthday.
Speaker A
I've never admired anyone who insisted his birthday was a big deal. And, uh, I want to be really clear.
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I think celebrating other people's birthdays, absolutely. Honoring people for being alive, for making this far, all for it. I think the difference is when you demand everyone do it for you.
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I think that's where, that's where you get the, uh, this is my birth week, this is my birth month, uh, all that kind of stuff. And I think that is, uh, I think that is the wrong direction on
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entitlement. Um, my two cents, obviously, you know, it's all, it's worth and you can take it for what it is. Um, but, uh, on this, uh, not so special day, um, one of my, one of my team texted me this
Speaker A
thing, which is my favorite text of the day. Uh, and he said, "Today is the day Genghis Khan died and you were born." Quote from the Khan, "There is no good in anything until it is finished." Um, and I love that. Uh, it's all about
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starting what you finish. And so, um, I'll read this to you 'cause I've had a lot of deeper thoughts on my mind lately as you, I think you, when you hit whatever deadlines you have.
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Stand tall, don't crack, endure. You can die tomorrow. Today you do the only thing you can do.
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You fight, you rage on, you do what you came to do, you finish what you started.
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No matter how much it costs, how long it takes, or how much it hurts, because you said you would.
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Being cringe is the tax you pay when you start to prove to the world that you care more about what you want than how you look.
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One of the things that no one tells you about delayed gratification is that once you learn how to do it, you keep doing it until you die. And then what you delayed never happens.
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Your goals will become easier to accomplish when you become harder to distract. Whenever you get worried about not achieving your goals, just remember there's plenty of room at the top because the majority of people are just whiny, overweight, in debt little
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[ __ ] You'll blow past them so fast it'll look like they're standing still because they are.
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Be more dangerous than the forces that hope to destroy you. Make reality your [ __ ] today.
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If you do not have courage, nothing else matters. So, with that being said, as our, as our premise for today, as we get cracking and lacking, um, I thought I would, uh, I had, I had this little little video that I put some
Speaker A
notes together for you that I think you might like. Um, I think the goal of youth is optionality and the goal of adulthood is commitment.
Speaker A
And these two things are at odds and I think that at some point, um, you have to reconcile which one you are.
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Are you still stuck, uh, to your youth or have you decided to become an adult?
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An adult means you, you eliminate alternatives. You, you walk through one-way doors where you know you can't walk back. Um, it's difficult to undo a marriage.
Speaker A
It's difficult to, uh, to impossible, uh, possible but not really, uh, to undo a child, right?
Speaker A
Um, there are some one-way doors and I think that, um, a lot of the best things in life come on the other side of commitments and I think that we have a society that overemphasizes the value of optionality
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and the reason that I said what I said earlier, which is that if you delayed your gratification, optionality in a lot of ways is delaying gratification. It's this idea that I'll keep my options open.
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But the thing is is that options only have value when they are exercised. And until you exercise them, they are valueless. It's like dying at the end of your life as an ant that put a big pile of crumbs that you never ate.
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Right, at some point you have to pull the trigger, you have to make the call, you have to make the decision, you have to cut off one future.
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And so I think what's interesting is that when you make that decision, it means that you're going to decide that one thing is more important than another, which means that you also open yourself up for criticism, which I think
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a lot of people have a lot of difficulty with. And so, I want to give you 10 priorities, which make no sense at all, because priority, uh, only recently in the English vernacular, uh, was ever even used in the plural. Until about 1950, it was
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only priority. There's only one, because only one thing can come first, right? That's how it works.
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But, here's our 10 things that most people say are incredibly important. And so, how, how do we make sense of them?
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So, number one, we have community, giving back to your community. We have romance, marriage, or partner.
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We have parenting, for your children. We have family, so to your siblings and to your parents and your cousins, et cetera.
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We have recreation, so having fun, relaxing. We have friends, spending time, et cetera. We have your career, your career aspirations, professional aspirations.
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Your physical health. You have your spiritual health, and then you've got your personal growth.
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And so, that's 10 different elements of life. And if I were to ask you to prioritize them, you will have a different priority than the person next to you.
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And so, the reason this is really interesting is that if somebody looks at your list and it is different than theirs, they will call you as wrong, because you do not live your life the way that they would prefer.
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And that is why they are [ __ ] [ __ ]. All right? Like, we don't have to, like, we don't have to live according to anyone else's preferences. You have to follow the law, but besides that, you're
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pretty much free to do whatever you want. And we are so shackled by the idea that other people don't like what we're doing. It's like, great, that's why they have their life to do what they want to do with.
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And so, what's interesting is that you get to pick your regrets, or they will be chosen for you.
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Real. And so, whenever you invest in any of those 10 things, you pull away from others, right? If you add an hour here, you take an hour from here. We have a zero-sum life when it comes to time, right? And I do have
Speaker A
one interesting tactical strategy that has helped me, uh, navigate these, but I think the biggest one is just in understanding that you will live an imperfect life.
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Period. Like, you cannot have a house by the mountains in isolation, and then also be walking distance from restaurants, and then also be on the beach, and also be ski and ski out.
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It doesn't work. And you can't have a rich neighborhood if you want to be in isolation. Now, all of these things are okay to want. It's just that they will not, they literally sit in it, they're, they're, they're conflicting. They're
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conflicting priorities. And so, whenever you say and you make a decision in your life, people will take the equal opposite extreme. So, if it's literally the upset spouse, right?
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You, your wife comes in and says, "Hey, do I look good? You know, do you look good in this dress?" You say, "Yeah, this, you look great in this dress." She's like, "Oh, so I don't look good whenever I'm not wearing this dress?"
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That is what people will do to whatever decisions you make because they're too cowardly to make them themselves. And I really mean this. Like, people are [ __ ] cowards.
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They're, they're, they walk around afraid. They, they, they, they don't want consequences. They don't want conflict because they think that other people's opinions about their lives matter more than their own.
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And it's ridiculous. You must make trades. You have to make a trade. And I love the definition of the word decidere because it's Latin, but it, the root of it means to cut off. And it's just, "What, what future are we cutting off
Speaker A
today?" And I think that that is, and I think I, as I'm, you know,
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Um and I think that your maturity level is directly related to the amount of commitments that you have made, the number of people who rely on you.
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And if those commitments are the elimination alternative, it means that you've cashed in optionality, right?
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You've chosen to do things in lieu of others. And so, even if you were to divide your life into 12 hours per day. So, let's assume that you've got 4 hours for eating, showering, you know, hygiene, all the you living, right? And let's say
Speaker A
12 hours is your the hours that you can just be focused, right? On anything.
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If you were to divide those, we've got those 10 things that I outlined. If you were to give an hour and, you know, 10 minutes per day to each of those things, it's like, okay, you're going to do an
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hour and 10 minutes to your career, an hour and 10 minutes to your spirituality, an hour and 10 minutes to your your your family, an hour and 10 minutes to your kids, an hour and 10 minutes to your uh relaxation time, an
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hour and 10 minutes to your physical health. Like, you go through it and it's just like, I can't I can't do it all.
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It's like, right, you have to make [ __ ] trade-offs. It's what it is.
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And so, I'll just say as somebody who has, I would say, min-maxed to a degree on some of those traits, um really helpful to just order them for yourself. Which of these is most important for you?
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And, and here's the here's the bu- This is the one tactical tip I've got. This is this is it. This is my one tactical tip.
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Try to do things that check multiple boxes. So, for example, the reason that lifting with friends is so viable to me, um is that I lift with people I work with who I'm also friends with. And so, it checks
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off recreation, it checks off a degree of of of career growth, it checks off physical health. Um and so, I get three or four boxes checked from this one one activity. And so, I'm able to block more time with it. And there's probably
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some version of that for you that you can do for two or three things. And I'm not saying you're going to get everything, but every once in a while you can get lucky and you can just do you can check a few boxes with one
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action, right? No extra time. So, I think that's a big W. Now, I think that you will do the best that you can to manage these things. And at the end of your life, uh you will think to yourself, it would have been nice
Speaker A
to do these other things. But when you say that, you do that from the position of having already earned the benefit of your existing trade. And so, what we want is the benefits of the trades that we did not make and the the
Speaker A
of the ones that we did. And so, we look at the benefits of a different priority being first and then saying, "Man, it would be nice if I was also hyper-spiritual. It would also be nice if I was in the best shape. It would
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also be nice if I had the best marriage. It would also be nice if I was a great parent. It would also be nice." etc. etc.
Speaker A
But you can't you can't trade everything in. And so, basically like you get to pick your regrets. You get to pick the things that you say were less important.
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Otherwise, they will be chosen for you. And I think what's really interesting is whenever I think this to its natural end, I think to myself, "I am the problem." So, let me explain.
Speaker A
Um I think we always want what we can't have. And I think this is an inherently human trait, right? Single people want to be married, married people want, you know, uh to be single. Uh Uh people with no kids want kids, people
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who have kids want a night off, employees want to start their own business someday, employers are jealous of how their employees can clock out and not take their work home with them. Um there's just countless examples of whatever you don't have is what you
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want. Because right now, everyone who's listening to this, you have accomplished things that you said would make you happy.
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Like there's something in your life right now that earlier on in your life you said, "If I had this, I would be happy." And yet here we are.
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And so, whenever I think this, I just think like I am the problem. Like I am the constant. Like the the constant source of dissatisfaction is me.
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Um and it's just cuz we want it all. But you you you go to a store where there's 10 amazing shoes and each shoe is $100.
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And you have $100 in your wallet. And in order to justify our decision, we make everyone else feel bad about buying a different set of shoes than us.
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And it was just a choice. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
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Cuz a lot of people I think look at um you know, the life that we have, which I think is, you know, super blessed, etc.
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Um But we've traded other things, you know, we've traded other things. And I think that if those things are more important to you then like, good for you.
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Seriously, like I to the degree that you can possibly believe a stranger on the internet, I mean this from the bottom of my heart.
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If you like the priorities that you have, then [ __ ] you won, dude. You won.
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I got you won. You've already got it. Like like, you know, like you're there.
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Um I think where people get in trouble is where they allow life to make these priorities for them, right? They make the They don't get to make the choices.
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They they sit passively by and let options expire. And I think that's if there's anything that that I can hopefully, you know, transfer, it's uh you can be a master of your own life to a degree if you can just say I'm willing
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to give up these other things for the things that I care about most. And so, um that's my that's my my two cents's. Take those 10 things, rank them 1 to 10, and then of those, see which one you think is off as in
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like, okay, I said this is number two, but I don't think I'm really putting number two out of 10 effort into this. And I'll tell you two for me.
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I think that I've been I've been not as good of a husband as I probably should have been. I probably should have spent um more time with Layla and I'm going to prioritize doing that and I've started to do that. Um and I think that I've
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I I have I have a higher desire for friendship than I have in my current life.
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Like I see friends sporadically. I'd say outside of me like lifting, which is basically almost the entirety of the recreational like friend time that I have. Um I had a buddy of mine who was here for my birthday, which was awesome.
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Um that Layla kind of surprised me with, which was super sweet of her. Um and those are very like filling to my soul.
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And I think that um I'm going to make trades in the coming future where I'm going to decrease some of these other stats in order to make some room here where I think that the incremental return that I'll get on losing an hour on call it
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career and adding an hour somewhere else, uh I will have a little bit less but my overall life benefit will be higher. And so I think the the meta of this is the game that you want to play.
Speaker A
And so I'll give you an interesting story on this. So, I can't remember the name of the founder, but he was on um David Senra's podcast and uh really smart guy, sold his company for like $10 million or
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something like that. And he said you always want to look for the most dominant game. And I was like, "Huh, this is a really interesting concept." He said, "So, for example, MySpace lost to Facebook because Facebook had a more
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dominant game that they were playing." And so MySpace, for example, wanted to get uh the most uh users. That was the game they were playing. That was the metric they're optimizing around.
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Facebook was optimizing around monthly active users, MAU, which then became kind of like the social media norm in terms of what so you know, social platforms are measured by. But that one little misstep in terms of what metric
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they were op- optimizing around mean meant that Facebook was literally paying playing a superior game.
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And so in thinking about this concept of like there are there are subset superset games. There are some games that even if you're just playing them, you beat everyone else because the game that you're optimizing for is just a superior
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game. And so I think that um I think this is entirely individual, but if we look at these 10 categories that I outlined. So, I'll repeat them again for those who are just joining.
Speaker A
Let's see if I can get my little list up. So, the list is this. You've got community, you've got romance / partner, parenting for your kids, you've got your family, uh so siblings and your parents, you've got recreation and rest and fun,
Speaker A
uh friends, uh career, physical health, spiritual, and then personal growth, right? Those are kind of like 10 categories of living.
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And I think that some people make their entire game one of them. And I think the I think the larger game is trying to win at life.
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And realizing that each of these are components of it. And I don't know if uh And I think that you will have different And when I say this prioritization thing, I like people also have a hard time allowing
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other people to change. Cuz it just makes them it's just intellectually more uh more work. And so it's like, "How dare you change your mind?" "In [snorts] front of me. How dare you?" Right, "How dare you be really into your
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physical health and then decide that you're your your kids are more important and so you don't work out as much." Right, "How dare you?" And so I think that like people get upset because they're weak.
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Like people are are paths like people people are so small-minded. Self-interested. And the things they will say in no way have complete context on your life.
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And so it's like trying to listen to 100 people that know two sentences about you.
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None of their opinions matter. Cuz the person who has the most context on you is you. You're the only one who has to live with you.
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And I know obviously it's hard because when we're kids we're raised to listen to other people and shame has a very good place in society. You should feel bad if you do things that hurt people and like those things work for enforcing
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social rules. So it's this very odd, you know, dichotomy between, you know, it's good to have other people on the outside telling you, "Hey, maybe you shouldn't be a [ __ ] ass." But at the same time being able to
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differentiate between call it uh rule law-breaking activity and rule-breaking activity, which I see as very different.
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So we have legal laws, right? That have written out consequences that we have determined, like it or not, that you have to abide by to live in whatever area you're in, right? But then there's rule-breaking that's spoken and
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unspoken. And so, many of you get different cultures, different rules, your parents had different rules. And it's realizing that there are no consequences, or the consequences that happen from those rules are not nearly as severe as we think they are. And so,
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the reason that I opened the book with offers with only three words, which is there are no rules. I guess that's four words.
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Um is cuz it's always a reminder myself of like, what rules am I being weighed down by right now that I'm choosing like what box am I living in that I'm unaware of that has invisible walls that is keeping
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me in. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so, I can say with a lot of
Speaker A
confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it
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when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so, the
Speaker A
link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you all free.
Topics:Alex Hormozilife lessonsmaturitycommitmentprioritizationdelayed gratificationdecision makingpersonal growthtime managementcourage
