Brutally Honest Truths That Give You an Unfair Advantage in Life

Here are brutally honest truths that will give you an unfair advantage.

I'm Alex Hormozi, I'm the founder of acquisition.com.

It's portfolios of companies that generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year in aggregate.

And a lot of my success in business has come from finding and exploiting unfair advantages.

So hopefully this video helps you do the same.

So let's start with number one.

Pain is the price of progress.

The fastest growth periods are often the most miserable. If you want to progress, get used to pain.

If you think about what actually occurs when you grow, you stretch past your point of comfort.

So even if you're growing a muscle, like you stretch, you break it down, it's painful.

If you have growing pains, like as a kid, it's like you grew too fast and your joints are in a lot of pain.

If you're a company and you expand, this is technically supposed to be good stuff, but it doesn't make it any less painful.

Elite athletes don't get stronger during easy workouts.

If we want progress, we must accept the price of pain that's attached to it.

You cannot both want progress and live an easy life.

These two things conflict.

Number two.

Happy, but not satisfied.

So let me explain this.

So, you're allowed to be happy before you hit your goal.

Just not satisfied.

And so there's a very big difference between being content with your life, content with your work, and complacent.

Meaning, you're not going to take any more action.

There's this great Haitian proverb, which is behind mountains are more mountains.

It's kind of like after every peak, you can just see more peaks ahead of you.

The work works on you more than you work on it.

For me, I remember I had a year that I basically went into retirement trying to figure out what I wanted to do.

And the thesis that I came out with was that hard work is the goal.

And so the fact that there's something that happens as a result of hard work is really just a secondary effect.

It's a consequence.

But the goal is the work itself.

I, you know, I had a friend this morning who messaged me and they're like, why do you still work? And I was like, because it's the thing that I enjoy doing most.

And when I looked back on my life, when I didn't work, I was bored and felt depressed.

And when I do work, I am stressed, but I do have moments that I really enjoy as well.

I took this as a kind of a foundational truth for me, not for everyone.

That there is misery on both sides, so I might as well be productive and useful.

And the only way to be productive and useful is to be happy about the process, but not satisfied.

So you can continue to provide value to the world.

Now, number three.

Ignore the critics.

Now, this is probably easy to say.

Hard to do.

So let me, let me break this down a little bit more.

So, friendly reminder that most people are fat, poor, pansies.

Don't listen to them when they try to deter you from doing whatever it takes to succeed.

So, the average person will always try to keep you average.

It makes sense that if you want to be extraordinary, you will do things that an ordinary person would see as extra.

Right?

And so a lot of people, and this is, this is the really hard part that I had to come to terms with.

Is that a lot of people want to see you fail because it justifies the risk that they chose not to take.

We always have to think about listening to the people who are closest to our goals, not closest to us.

And if you want a more violent version of this, your critics are going to eventually die.

And their opinion isn't going to matter then, which means it probably also doesn't matter now.

So I might as well do what you wanted to do originally.

Number four.

Selective productivity.

Productivity comes from all the things that you choose not to do.

I'm going to define two more terms for you because I think it's important.

I see commitment as the elimination of alternatives.

So, if I get married, then I eliminate all alternatives to the person that I'm married to.

Right?

That is commitment.

Right?

Which is very similar to focus.

Focus, if you think about the hypothetical extreme of focus, is that somebody does literally nothing but one thing.

So they don't eat, they don't sleep.

They would eventually die.

But they would be 100% focused during the time that they were alive.

Right?

Obviously, we have to put a couple of things in, you have to eat food, you have to sleep.

Right, but the most focused person does the fewest things outside of the thing they're focused on.

Focus is about the number of things that you say no to.

Having this framework is, in my opinion, more powerful for productivity than just about anything else.

Right, people are always trying to figure out like productivity hacks, but they want to add things to their lives to become more productive.

Which is completely counter to what focus even means.

It's getting rid of everything that's not the thing is how you focus.

Now, part of that also means environmentally.

Right, so if you like have a window that you look outside of and you've got people who walk past your office and people can knock on the doors, you've got stock notifications.

Of course you're not focused because all of those things are not the work.

So I'm going to give you an analogy here.

So imagine there's a wall that you have to get over.

All right, in order to you have to get a critical mass to get above this wall.

Right?

And so you start putting up, you know, these ladders against the wall to try and climb over the wall.

All right?

This should make some sense.

But as you try to build up the, the little rungs of the ladder.

So you put four rungs up.

Well, you're not going to get the critical mass required to get over the hump to actually get the success you want.

But the idea, the fallacy is that, oh, I'll just do all three or four of these things.

And I'll see which one works.

When the reality is that any of them work, but none of them will work unless you work on one.

And so we have to take these four rungs that we're able to build and say, you know what?

We're not going to do that, we're going to put that rung here because I'm going to take that time that I'm putting from my second opportunity, put it here.

I'm going to take this rung and what do you know?

I can get over this hump on top.

And I can get to the other side of the wall, which of course is where all the money.

And all the happiness and all the, you know, the girls.

Uh, with, you know, beautiful, beautiful hair.

Look at this beautiful hair.

Right?

This beautiful hair.

Now she looks like a bug.

Anyways.

There you go.

What's crazy is that this literally happens at all levels of business.

Like people were starting out trying to start five things.

People who are at like their second or fifth year.

I talked to a guy last night who has a really good business, really good margins.

50% margins has great revenue retention.

He was in cyber security.

People stay with him, people pay.

He has no problem getting customers.

He has no problem delivering on them.

I was like, what's the problem?

He's like, me.

He said, I just, I get bored.

He's like, I just want to start more things.

And I'm like, yeah, you got to stop that.

Like.

It's like the thing is is think about how much more successful you'd be.

So zoom all the way out, think of somebody who gets better every single year.

And works on the same project for 20 years.

You'd be like, my God, that guy's probably really fucking good.

And what's interesting about this is that it doesn't matter what project the person works on.

You do 20 years of reps and you do nothing else, you're going to be good.

And so if you know that that's a, that's a fact, that's a certainty that you're going to be good with 20 years of practice.

Then the objective is to just get 20 years of practice in one thing and stick with it.

So like, your plans aren't working because the plans are wrong.

The plans aren't working because you're not working on the plan.

The hard part about the plan is not creating the plan.

Or even following the plan, it's sticking with the plan.

That's the hard part.

All right.

Number five.

Fear versus regret.

So, change is scary, but so is regret.

And so the life you live depends on the one you fear most.

The more successful version of yourself also has fear.

It's just that your fear of regret is greater than your fear of rejection.

Think about that for a second.

I'm going to say it one more time.

Your fear of regret must supersede, must be bigger, must be greater than your fear of rejection.

And so I remember when I, when I, when I quit my management consulting job, which took me six months.

So I'm not saying this from a pedestal.

It took me six months of, I decided I wanted to quit, it took me six months before I actually quit.

By the way, you can measure how powerful someone is by the distance between when they make a decision and when it happens in reality.

So if you want to feel impotent, then take as long as you possibly can between when you make a decision and when you act on that decision.

Now, for me, it was six months.

And all I did was I called my friends up every night and I was like, I'm going to quit my job, I'm going to start a business.

And I, you know, we talk every night.

Literally, every night and I would be pacing in my condo, like, I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it.

And I wouldn't do it.

I was too afraid.

I was too much of a scaredy cat.

But the thing that got me over the hump was this.

Number one.

I knew that when I looked back on my life, if I never took the jump, I would have been ashamed of myself.

And I would have felt like I was a pansy.

And I was like, I can't die a pansy.

I have to be able to make a jump.

Number two.

I played out plan B.

Which is, okay, let's say I actually completely fail.

What happens?

I was like, well, I'm not really going to be homeless.

I know enough people that I can get food.

Right?

I was like, okay.

So I would probably just couch surf.

I'd have a little bit of shame.

But at the end of the day, what would I really do?

Well, I could always apply to get the job that I had back.

Or I could just go to another place with an experience or a story.

That would set me up for something cooler later.

And so all of a sudden I was like, wait, so my plan B is that I just have a cool experience that I could talk about at a job interview or to go to business school.

Okay, that's, that doesn't actually sound that bad.

And so there was this huge amorphous fear, but I've just noticed in my life that fear only exists in the vague.

It doesn't exist in the specific.

If you're afraid of something, try and break it into pieces and spell it out.

Play out the next two or three steps.

Because all of a sudden, if you're in the developed Western world, the downside risk is not really real.

Like the only real downside risk is the opinions of other people who will say that you failed, who you don't care about anyways.

Like you think you're going to die, but you're not.

You're just going to learn some stuff and you'll be like, oh, maybe next time I'm not going to make that mistake.

And that's it.

And I say this and it's easy for me to say, but it took me six months to figure this out.

But I do remember my final straw was the realization that I had at the time, no girlfriend, no kids.

And I had no real, you know, financial responsibilities besides like eating and having a place to live.

I said, if I can't make the decision now because it feels too risky, I will never be able to make the decision.

Because if other people rely on me, now some of you are in a position where people do rely on you.

And you're like, well, Alex, you know, I've got people who rely on me.

Yeah.

I would say that it makes it harder.

And what now?

Harder and so what?

But for me, that was the thing that got me over the hump.

I was like, if I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it.

I'm never going to have fewer responsibilities.

And to, to play this out a little bit more, if you have people who depend on you, their dependencies on you might increase.

And so if you can't do it now, you still might as well do it.

Right?

Because it's only going to go one way.

Number six.

Persistence creates timing.

So, you can time everything perfectly.

If your intention is to never stop.

I want to say this one more time.

You can time everything perfectly if your intention is to never stop.

So think about this visually.

So let's imagine that this line right here is, is the, is your lifeline.

It's life as time passes.

Right?

Now, let's say that you have some special thing that's going to happen here.

And some special opportunity that happens here.

And some special opportunity that happens here.

What most people try and do is they don't want to take, they don't want to work at all.

And then they're like, oh, I'm just going to work here.

And then I'm going to work here.

And then I'm going to work here.

But the likelihood that you're there in these three moments is very low if you're trying to time it.

But if you work the whole time, then the timing will always be perfect because you will be ready.

And so perfect timing is a complete myth.

But perfect preparation isn't.

And that on a long enough time horizon, your opportunity will come.

People think that they need perfect conditions to start when in reality, starting is the perfect condition.

It creates the perfect condition for opportunity to be capitalized on.

And I can tell you this from firsthand experience with me.

Like, the more you do, the more you see you can do.

And so opportunities multiply with skill.

And so the better you get at doing stuff, the more things you know you would be able to do and win at.

And so the goal is to gain as many skills as possible so that you have access to the maximum number of potential opportunities.

A lot of people are thinking that, oh, I'm going to wait for the right moment.

But when you have unlimited skills, like Elon can go do whatever he wants.

He could build a city in the middle of the ocean.

And so he could do that, he has the skills because the world of opportunity is open to him.

He also spent all of his younger years just developing all these different skills and becoming a polymath across these different things.

Independent of the little stuff.

Put it away.

The point is, the guy is good.

All right?

And so the goal is to get good and then you will never have a shortage of opportunities.

Number seven.

Envy versus effort.

If people worked for their goals as hard as they envy others for achieving them, they would already have achieved them themselves.

So think about the amount of mental effort that goes into the hate that people spew out, the envy.

For wanting other people's stuff.

I'll give you a couple hard truths about this.

Number one, no one is doing as well as you think they are.

So by comparison, you're actually better off than you think.

Number two.

You don't win by beating people.

You win by growing into your potential and then allowing them to shrink into irrelevance by consequence.

Three.

And guess what, your biggest threat is not your competition.

It's a mediocre version of you that never realized what you could become.

And as pithy as that may sound, it's also true.

Right, a lot of people think it's like, oh, you know, that guy's doing really well.

It's like, his doing well changes nothing about your reality.

Something really ironic that I noticed is that.

The people who get copied the most by their competition are the people who ignore the competition who are copying them.

Fundamentally, you start by focusing on the customer.

And if you always put the customer first, everyone will copy you because you're actually doing the thing that will work.

Which is focusing on the customer.

And there's a lot of weird things in life like that.

Like, it's the opposite of what you think.

Like, oh, I'm going to look at what everyone else is.

It's like, no, just do what matters most and then people who don't know how to think will just copy you.

The real threat is that no one copies you at all because you're doing nothing.

If you take all this effort that you look, that you put into comparing yourself to other people.

That you look to kind of like tearing them down sometimes, even in your mind, let's be real.

Maybe don't say it to other people, but in your mind you're like, that.

Whatever that is.

Whatever that feeling is.

That, just do that towards you not being good enough.

What happens is that when you do that, all of that effort, all that energy.

Goes into proving yourself rather than tearing down somebody else.

And only one of those things will help you.

Number eight.

Hard conversations create opportunities.

Hard truth, everything you want is on the other side of a few hard conversations that you have been putting off.

People either grow into their potential or they keep living the same six months of their life over and over again.

And the difference is how many hard conversations you're willing to have and how fast you have them once you realize you need to.

If you shirk away from this, and I get it, I'm somebody who like, it, for a very long time had a hard time having hard conversations.

Right, like I literally traveled across the country before I told my dad that I left.

All right, like I get it.

So if you think having uncomfortable conversations is hard, just wait until you see the result of not having them.

It will be harder.

Basically, the, the struggle is that you have short-term pain versus long-term pain.

And long-term pain, I call regret.

Comfort is short gain, regret is long pain, fear is short pain, fulfillment is long gain.

You want to trade short pains for long gains, not short gains for long pains.

That's the goal.

It's the best trade.

Number nine.

Endure.

There's a reason that when I gave instructions to some of the new business owners who were going to start, you know, putting a community on school.

One of the sole instructions I gave them was learn to endure.

And so the fastest way to become the person you want to be is to put yourself in a situation where you have no choice but to become them.

You'd be amazed what you can endure when you have no choice.

For me, when I signed my lease for my gym, I had $5,000 in my bank account.

The rent was $5,000.

I had never really made money before.

And so I was like, oh, wow, how does this work?

If I made 100% of the money that I had made in my job, I would have been able to pay rent and have no food or anything else.

But one of my favorite flavor texts on magic cards is necessity is the mother of invention.

Right, it's the constraints that create the innovation that is required to get you out of the constraint.

To get you out of the hard time.

And so when I think back on like human history, sometimes we think that things that we're going through are hard.

But they're certainly much easier than things that other humans have endured.

And how did they endure them?

Well, when the only choice they had was die or endure, you tend to endure.

Number 10.

Results over excuses.

This is not going to be a big surprise here.

The thing with excuses that's interesting is that they may be valid.

And I think that's the part that people struggle with.

Is that they're like, yeah, obviously results matter more excuses, but insert special snowflake.

The thing is is that like, you might be right.

And I just like this quote from Leila, she says, it's not your fault.

But it is still your problem.

You still have to do something about it or you can just wait and say, you know what?

I'm going to continue to not live the life that I want until I die.

And everyone will be like, oh yeah, he had an excuse.

That's why.

Right?

Is that what you, like, is that what you really want?

Is that people were like, yeah, he had an excuse.

Like that's it.

Like, it's a weird thing to want a permission slip for mediocrity.

Which is fundamentally what excuses are.

You just want permission from everyone else to still get respect without the outcome.

Because of your extenuating circumstances.

And the thing is, there's a ton of allure, but the only person who actually believes that is you.

People might not love you, the people who love you might say, yeah, you know what?

You are special, you are a special snowflake.

Your mama might still love you.

But like, you're not going to earn anyone's respect.

And I think you certainly won't earn the respect of the person that matters most, which is you.

Because you'll always know that you could have done more.

That you could have done better.

That's the one that keeps me up.

I have a saying that I tell myself a lot when I'm doing something that I don't want to do.

And it's, I will do what is required.

It's not about doing your best, it's about doing what's required.

Because what's required might be better than your best is right now.

But the good news is that your best can get better.

So number 11.

And this is, this one's real.

All right?

The hard way is the easy way.

You're like, how does that work?

The hard way is the easy way because the easy way never gets you there.

So think about it, people always are looking for the shortcut.

But you have to accept a very simple truth, which is that the shortcut never actually takes you to the place that you're trying to go.

And it's because it's rarely one big thing.

And I would postulate, fancy word.

Right, that there are a lot of shortcuts that exist in life.

Wait for it, wait for it.

And everyone already uses those.

And so whenever an actual shortcut gets found, all humans immediately do it.

And it no longer becomes a shortcut, it's just a thing that everyone does and it's not really a thing anymore.

Like we learned how to tie knots.

That was a big breakthrough and then everyone ties their shoes.

And they're like, oh my God, let me show you the shortcut to this.

It's like, oh, you tie.

Like, oh my God.

Everyone does it and it's like not a thing anymore.

Right?

And so all the things that you want to have that most people don't have, don't have shortcuts.

But the thing is is so many people waste so much time, they literally waste longer than it would have taken the hard way or the only way to get there.

In search of the easy way that doesn't exist.

And so the reality of this is that it's usually 100 small things that make days, weeks, and months hard.

It's the never ending onslaught of shit.

And then you remember after going through that onslaught of shit.

That you signed up for this.

But then again, you figured that it would be hard.

And then you reminded that this is what hard feels like.

And so you keep going.

Because it's the only choice you have.

I want to remind you that a lot of times what we imagine hard to be.

Is different than how we experience hard.

Because the nature of hard changes too.

And it's more of a limitation in how we describe hardship than it is.

And I actually think there's a big problem with this.

So just kind of like Eskimos have like seven different words for snow.

I feel like I should have like 25 different words for hard.

Right?

Like the amount of things that you go through.

There's like lifestyle hard, like, okay, so there's sacrifice hard.

Of like you're giving up things that you enjoy.

There's also like effort hard of like starting to do things that you hate doing that you're not good at.

There's risk hard of the, the fact that you could lose something that you currently have.

Right, that you have the chance of losing what you currently have.

You have the uncertainty hard of the fact that you might be doing all of the sacrifice for nothing.

There's lots of different flavors of hard and each one of them presents at different times.

And for some reason, when it gets a new kind of hard, it's a new seventh type of snowflake hard.

Then you're like, oh, this is different.

But it's not.

It's just that the thing that you grow comfortable with, then you conquer and then you're exposed to a new level.

And so I love this quote from Paul Graham, he said, if you want to make a million dollars.

You have to endure a million dollars worth of pain.

Fundamentally, in my opinion, the people who, who, who end up building, building, not inheriting, building, tremendous wealth.

Just have massive concentrations of pain.

So don't go looking for the easy way because it will never get you there.

Number 12.

Don't.

And this is a big one.

Don't give away your power.

Now, this sounds very like, you know, girl power or a little, uh, little like raw, raw.

But I will, I will break this down into a little bit less raw, raw way.

So, what offends you, controls you.

Whatever you point your finger of blame towards is what also you point your power towards.

Meaning.

We talked about excuses earlier, I can't do it because insert X.

Insert X is the thing that has power over your life.

And I remember when I realized this was that I had this belief that I would never be able to be in a long-term committed relationship.

Because my mother had hurt me as a child.

I didn't get enough hugs.

Who gives a shit?

Whatever.

But I realized that by using that excuse and by saying it's her fault, I'm broken.

It's her fault, I can't trust people.

It's her fault, I can't love anybody.

By, by saying that over and over again.

All I did was I said, my mother controls how my love life will go.

Whoa.

Heavy.

Real.

Well, I don't want her to have control over how I choose to love or not love.

Or how I, how I, how content I get in a relationship or anything like that.

So I actively had to say, maybe all these things happened.

Maybe they didn't.

Also, who cares?

Me.

I care.

And what's crazy about this, it's kind of a weird thing with like parents.

Is that you think by hurting yourself, you get back at them for hurting you.

And you do hurt them when you hurt yourself.

But you hurt you more.

At some point, and this is, this is like super real.

Let's say that you were parented tough.

Whatever that means for you.

You had lots of bad things happen.

Okay, and it was probably because you were a child trying to deal with the world without the skills of dealing with the world as an adult.

But you had these things happen.

Right?

And on some level, you might believe that you becoming successful.

You making it work, validates the way that you were parented.

And so you have this conflict where you're like, well, I don't want them to think that they did a good job by me being successful.

And so then you want to keep not being successful to prove to them and to hurt them for hurting you.

And you stay there.

As long as you want them to control you.

And so the day that you choose to control yourself is the day that you choose to divorce.

Your results from the very viable reasons that you have to not win.

You are right.

And so what?

Like it's, it's so funny, it's like, let's say you have some advantage.

Whatever it is, right?

Whatever, whatever advantage you're born with, right?

You might have one.

It's kind of the same thing as the parent thing.

It's like, well, I don't want to be successful because I don't want to prove that I had this advantage.

It's like, would you prefer to prove everyone wrong by saying I had this advantage and I also wasted it?

I remember, I'll tell you a story.

And I think it'll probably, that'll, that'll round this off well.

So, when I was younger, I didn't want to be a doctor, but that was pretty much the path that was laid out in front of me.

And so my father's a successful doctor.

And I, I was like, it's, it's cheating, you know, to, to, you know.

Just assume your practice and just like immediately have a practice that makes a lot of money.

And he said, do you think Shaq, when he was seven feet tall, was like, it wouldn't be fair for me to play basketball?

Other people aren't as tall as me.

And I always remembered that.

He's like, you play the cards you're dealt.

These are the cards you have.

Play them.

And I remember thinking that as, now obviously I didn't decide to be a doctor.

But the reason that I didn't want to do it was because I thought other people would say that I would, they would disqualify away my success as not earned by me.

When the reality is that they're all going to disqualify your sex no matter what.

Because it makes them feel bad.

And so fuck them.

But if you have some cards, for the love of God, play them.

Hey, if any of these messages resonated with you and you're like, man, I'm, you know, a few months behind for my goals.

I made what I would consider a counterintuitive video on goal setting, which sounds so overused.

But I don't know, it's got like a couple million views or whatever it is.

It's so people seem to have liked it.

Uh, and so if you want that, you can check this video out.

Um, so far, it's, I think it's the top video viewed this year.

So, enjoy.