Brutally Honest Truths That Give You an Unfair Advantage in Life

Summary

Highlights

• Brutal honesty helps identify life advantages. 🔍
• Pain is a necessary part of the growth process. 💔
• The importance of being happy but not complacent. 😌
• Ignoring critics and prioritizing selective advice. 🧏
• Mastering focus by eliminating distractions. 🎯
• Confronting and breaking fears down into steps. 🏃
• Consistency beats talent; persistent effort leads to success. 🚀
• Tackling envy with constructive self-effort. 🎨
• Initiating opportunity through hard conversations. 💬
• Learning that endurance fuels personal and professional growth. 💪
• Owning results instead of making excuses. 🙅‍♂️
• Understanding the true path of persistence over shortcuts. 🚧
• Empowerment comes from self-control rather than external validation. 🌟

Key Takeaways

• Pain is a part of progress, and growth comes with discomfort. 💪
• Embrace happiness without complacency; always strive for more. 😊
• Ignore critics and focus on those aligned with your goals. 🚀
• Productivity is saying no to distractions and honing focus. 📈
• Face fear by breaking it into actionable steps. 👟
• Consistency and persistence are keys to timing opportunities perfectly. ⏳
• Envy wastes energy; focus on personal effort instead. 🤔
• Opportunity lies on the other side of hard conversations. 🗣️
• Enduring hardship propels you toward growth. 🚴
• Results matter more than excuses; own your path. 🎯
• The hard path is often the easiest in the long run. 🏞️
• Redefine shame by following your own rules, not others'. 🌟

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Brutally Honest Truths The chapter introduces the concept of 'Brutally Honest Truths' that are essential for gaining an unfair advantage in business. Alex Shamoszi, the founder of acquisitions.com, shares insights from his experiences running a company that generates significant revenue. He emphasizes that much of his success stems from finding and exploiting these advantages. The first truth he discusses is that 'pain is the price of progress.' Shamoszi explains that growth often comes during the most challenging and uncomfortable times, suggesting that one must become accustomed to discomfort if they wish to achieve progress.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Pain is the Price of Progress The chapter discusses the connection between pain and progress, using various analogies to illustrate that growth often involves discomfort. It highlights how muscles grow by being stretched beyond comfort, causing pain but ultimately leading to strength. Similarly, children experience growing pains due to rapid growth, and companies face challenges when expanding, despite it being a positive step. Elite athletes also don't gain strength from easy workouts. The key message is that embracing pain is necessary for progress, and it's unrealistic to expect progress without difficulty.
• 02:00 - 04:00: Happy but Not Satisfied The concept of being happy but not satisfied is explored, emphasizing that one can be content without becoming complacent. It highlights the importance of maintaining momentum even after achieving certain goals, drawing on the Haitian proverb 'behind mountains are more mountains' to illustrate that achievements are not ends but stages in ongoing journeys. The chapter encourages individuals to appreciate their current achievements while staying motivated to pursue further success.
• 04:00 - 06:00: Ignore Critics The chapter 'Ignore Critics' focuses on the intrinsic value of hard work rather than its outcomes. The author shares a personal reflection on their retirement, realizing that the essence of life lies in being engaged in meaningful work. A conversation with a friend highlights this belief, as they express that work brings them joy and purpose, contrasting the boredom and depression felt during periods of inactivity. The author acknowledges the stress associated with work but values the fulfillment it provides.
• 06:00 - 10:00: Selective Productivity This chapter explores the concept of selective productivity. It highlights the idea that there is misery on both sides of any situation, so it is better to choose to be productive and useful. The key to productivity is being happy with the process yet never fully satisfied, to continually provide value. Another point made is the importance of ignoring critics, which is acknowledged as easier said than done, and encourages focusing on self-improvement rather than external criticism.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Fear vs Regret In the chapter titled 'Fear vs Regret,' the author discusses the importance of disregarding naysayers and those who try to keep you from pursuing success. The main idea is that to be extraordinary, one must be willing to take actions that ordinary people might find excessive. The chapter highlights a significant insight: there are individuals who secretly wish for your failure as it justifies their choice to avoid taking risks. Therefore, it is crucial to heed advice from those aligned with your goals rather than just those physically close to you.
• 15:00 - 19:00: Persistence Creates Timing The chapter "Persistence Creates Timing" discusses the irrelevance of critics' opinions over time, encouraging individuals to pursue their original desires without being hindered by others' negative judgments. It emphasizes that productivity is rooted in what one chooses not to do, focusing on selectivity in actions. Additionally, the chapter defines commitment as the act of eliminating alternatives, using the example of marriage to illustrate this concept.
• 19:00 - 23:00: Envy vs Effort The chapter discusses the concept of 'focus' and its relation to commitment, using an analogy of extreme dedication. It emphasizes that focus means doing fewer things aside from what one is concentrated on, highlighting the power of saying 'no' to distractions and unnecessary activities. The idea is likened to marriage as a metaphor for commitment.
• 23:00 - 27:00: Hard Conversations Create Opportunities The chapter "Hard Conversations Create Opportunities" discusses the common misconception about productivity. It emphasizes that productivity isn't about adding more tasks to one's life, but rather about removing distractions to focus better. The text mentions that environmental factors, such as distractions from windows, people, or notifications, hinder focus. An analogy is introduced to illustrate these ideas further.
• 27:00 - 31:00: Endure The chapter titled 'Endure' discusses the concept of overcoming challenges depicted metaphorically as a wall that one needs to climb over. It explains the necessity of achieving a critical mass in efforts to surpass obstacles. The narrative illustrates this by describing how simply putting a few ladders or steps against the wall won't suffice to get over it. It highlights the fallacy of thinking small scale actions will achieve the desired success, emphasizing the need for adequate preparation and persistence to reach the summit of goals.
• 31:00 - 37:00: Results vs Excuses The chapter discusses the importance of focus and dedication to a single goal or opportunity in order to achieve success, instead of spreading efforts across multiple endeavors. It uses a metaphor of building rungs to climb over a wall, symbolizing the idea that concentrating resources and efforts on one path can lead to the desired results, as opposed to excuses and divided focus.
• 37:00 - 45:00: The Hard Way is the Easy Way The chapter titled 'The Hard Way is the Easy Way' begins with an anecdote about 'beautiful hair'. The speaker moves on to discuss a common challenge faced at all levels of business, which involves trying to handle too many things at once. The speaker recalls a conversation with a successful business owner in the cybersecurity sector. Despite having a business with a 50% profit margin and satisfactory customer retention and acquisition, the business owner identifies himself as the main problem.
• 45:00 - 54:00: Don't Give Away Your Power This chapter emphasizes the importance of focusing on a single project over an extended period to achieve success. It suggests that constantly starting new projects can hinder one's progress and mastery in a particular area. Instead, dedicating 20 years to a single endeavor can lead to significant expertise and success, regardless of the project type. The key message is to avoid dilution of effort across multiple ventures and concentrate on one to harness better outcomes.
• 54:00 - 59:00: Rejection vs Regret The chapter discusses the importance of committing to a single plan for success and the challenges people face in sticking to their plans. It argues that plans often fail not because they are flawed but because people don't stick with them long enough to see them through. Additionally, the author contrasts the fears associated with change against the feeling of regret, suggesting that while change can be daunting, living with regret is often worse.
• 59:00 - 66:00: Consistency Beats Talent The chapter emphasizes the importance of consistency over talent in achieving success. It explores the concept of fear, highlighting that even more successful versions of oneself experience fear. The key takeaway is that fear of regret should be greater than the fear of rejection. It shares a personal anecdote about the author's six-month journey to leave a management consulting job, emphasizing that overcoming fear and making pivotal decisions is a struggle common to many.
• 66:00 - 76:00: Have No Shame The chapter 'Have No Shame' discusses the author's struggle with decision-making and action-taking. They emphasize that the measure of one's power can be seen in the time it takes to act on decisions. The author shares a personal anecdote about repeatedly telling friends they plan to quit their job and start a business, yet hesitating for six months out of fear. The chapter highlights overcoming such hesitations and fears.

Brutally Honest Truths That Give You an Unfair Advantage in Life Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 here are brutally honest truths that will give you an unfair advantage i'm Alex Shamoszi and the founder of acquisitions.com it's a portfolio 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
• 00:30 - 01:00 you stretch past your point of comfort so even if you're growing a muscle like you stretch it 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
• 01:00 - 01:30 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
• 01:30 - 02:00 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 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
• 02:00 - 02:30 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 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
• 02:30 - 03:00 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
• 03:00 - 03:30 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 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
• 03:30 - 04:00 that I'm married to right that is commitment right which is very similar to focus focus if you think of 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 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
• 04:00 - 04:30 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 door and you've got Slack 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
• 04:30 - 05:00 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
• 05:00 - 05:30 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 for my second opportunity put it here i'm gonna take this rugg and put it right here and then I'm gonna take this rug 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
• 05:30 - 06:00 beautiful hair look at this beautiful hair right this beautiful hair now she's looks like a bug anyways uh there you [Music] go what's crazy is that this literally happens at all levels of business like people who are 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 margin 50% margins has great revenue retention he was in cyber uh 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
• 06:00 - 06:30 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 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
• 06:30 - 07:00 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
• 07:00 - 07:30 live depends on the one you fear most the more successful version of yourself also has fear is that 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
• 07:30 - 08:00 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 6 months and all I did was I called my friends up every night 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 gonna 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
• 08:00 - 08:30 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 and 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
• 08:30 - 09:00 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 can 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's 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
• 09:00 - 09:30 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 but 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
• 09:30 - 10:00 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 was like if I don't do it now
• 10:00 - 10:30 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'm going to say this one more time you can time everything perfectly if your
• 10:30 - 11:00 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
• 11:00 - 11:30 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
• 11:30 - 12:00 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 were 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 opportunities open to him he also spent all of his younger years
• 12:00 - 12:30 just developing all these different skills and becoming a polymath across all these different things independence political stuff put it away the point is the guy's 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 all right let me break this down 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
• 12:30 - 13:00 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
• 13:00 - 13:30 as pathy 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
• 13:30 - 14:00 things in life like that where like it's the opposite is what you what you you'd 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 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 you don't say it to other people but in your mind you're like me that whatever that is whatever that feeling is that just do that towards you not being good enough what happens is
• 14:00 - 14:30 that when you do that all of that effort all that energy goes into improving 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 sherk away from this
• 14:30 - 15:00 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
• 15:00 - 15:30 long gain you want to trade short pains for long gains not short gains for long pains it's not the safe bet it's a guaranteed loss just later all right so I'm I'm going to spell this out this is short pain this is long pain this is short gain this is
• 15:30 - 16:00 long gain you want to trade short pain for long gain 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
• 16:00 - 16:30 to become them you'd be amazed at 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
• 16:30 - 17:00 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 were going through our heart but they're certainly much easier than the 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 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
• 17:00 - 17:30 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 Ila 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 like is that
• 17:30 - 18:00 what you really want is that people were like "Yeah he had an excuse." Like that's it like 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 extenduating circumstances and the thing is is there's a ton of allure but the only person who actually believes that is you people might not
• 18:00 - 18:30 along 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 cuz 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
• 18:30 - 19:00 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
• 19:00 - 19:30 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
• 19:30 - 20:00 people don't have don't have shortcuts but 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 a hundred small things that make days weeks and months hard it's the neverending onslaught of and then you remember after going through that onslaught of that you signed up for this but then again you figured that it would be hard and then you're reminded
• 20:00 - 20:30 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
• 20:30 - 21:00 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 heart of the fact that you might be doing all of the sacrifice for nothing there's lots of different flavors of heart and each one of them presents at different times and for some reason when it gets a new kind of heart it's a new seventh type of snowflake
• 21:00 - 21:30 heart 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
• 21:30 - 22:00 number 12 don't 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 rahrh but I will I will break this down in a little bit less 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
• 22:00 - 22:30 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 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 right by by saying that over and over again all I did was I said "My mother controls how my love life will go." Oo heavy real well i
• 22:30 - 23:00 don't want her to have control over how I choose to love or not love or how 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 i'm the one who's affected by this." 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
• 23:00 - 23:30 but you hurt you more at some point and this is like 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
• 23:30 - 24:00 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
• 24:00 - 24:30 win you are right and so what number 13 rejection versus regret at some point everyone needs to choose whether they'd rather risk rejection now or guarantee regret later and so losers fear rejection winners fear regret and most attempts fail of anything failure is literally a prerequisite for success and one of the one of my favorite quotes of mine is greatness rejects all first-time
• 24:30 - 25:00 applicants and so it's kind of like that person that just is like "Oh I can't get a job." And you're like "Well what have you done?" They're like "Well I applied somewhere." And you're like "What do you mean?" They're like "I applied somewhere." And you're like "And?" And and they're like "Yeah." And I and I didn't I didn't get the job they didn't even call me you're like "You went to one place." And you're like and they're like "Yeah." This is going to be a really good analogy for somebody who's listening to this only for people who don't have a business yet a lot of starting a business is the number of reachouts that you had to do in order to
• 25:00 - 25:30 get the path the job the career that you want right now so think about the amount of interviews think about the amount of outreach think about the amount of job ads think about the amount of resumes that you sent out think about all of that and all of that work got you what I would consider one sale you got one person to say yes to you and they would give you money for work all right now obviously within the context of an employee relationship but fundamentally actually works the same way all you do in a business is the same thing if you can handle that level of rejection then you can handle the same level of
• 25:30 - 26:00 rejection in a business it's not actually that different the question is whether you can handle that level of regret years later for not doing it and I'll say this one of the things that I've noticed between champions and everyone else is that people everyone else is so excited when they win they're so excited you know by the idea of them getting first place but there's a reason that they never get first place it's because they're excited about it the people who always and very consistently hit first place and win the championships are relieved because they tend to hate losing more than they love winning and they expected to win because
• 26:00 - 26:30 of the level of preparation they had compared to everyone else which brings me very magically to number 14 consistency beats talent so listen to this you can beat most people at anything if you just stick with it for a year you can become competent at just about any skill in 20 hours it's just that people will wait 10 years to get the first 20 hours logged right like if you want to learn how to play the first few notes of a guitar you can learn in about 20 hours now are you going to be Jimmyi Hendris which Jenzie
• 26:30 - 27:00 he was a guitarist Purple Haze you can look it up anyways the point is is that people have this huge delay before they begin and what make things hard isn't complexity it's consistency and so as boring as it is you just have to keep doing it before you get anything back so one of my favorite quotes from myself is "The world belongs to those who can keep doing without seeing the result of their doing." You have to delay how quick you get a reward how fast you need a cookie
• 27:00 - 27:30 in order to keep going i've been told that I'm decent at presenting and talking on stage in front of people and what a lot of people don't see is that for years I spoke with a microphone in front of a group of people and I did it like multiple times a day and I did that in the form of a fitness session and so I had to literally stand on a box and shout around and tell people what they had to do and I had to do that for years and I remember when I had to get
• 27:30 - 28:00 on stage for the first time and I had in high school been very nervous to public speak and as I was about to get up on stage I was like why am I not nervous about this like this is weird like I should I was like I should be nervous like why am I not nervous and I was like I've I've done this so many times like so many times and I'm not talking about you know Civil War history and Abraham Lincoln i'm talking about stuff I know outwork your self-doubt through
• 28:00 - 28:30 repetition not affirmations you don't do it through belief you do it through stimuli habituation which is just fancy words for saying you expose yourself to the bad things so many times they get used to and it's no longer a bad thing anymore it's just life if you want to get over a fear the way they do it is habituation so if I wanted to get over you know being afraid of spiders I'm not afraid of spiders but some people are afraid of spiders right if you want to get over that fear you literally lock yourself in a room with a bunch of spiders and all you do is you just have panic attack after panic attack and you
• 28:30 - 29:00 pass out and you wake up again the little there you pass out you keep doing eventually eventually your nervous system adjusts and five hours later eight hours later you walk out of the room unafraid because you have habituated and so the point of practice for all of these things is to habituate as fast as you can and so we're trying to microwave that period of time and the thing is let's say it takes let's say it takes this many reps you can have this many reps take you a year or you can have it take you a month depending on how dedicated you are to it number 15
• 29:00 - 29:30 have no shame all right now I have told this before but my plan B was that I would drive Uber and strip now I think part of that was because I wanted to you know thumb my whatever the the Shakespearean saying I bite my thumb at you uh to bite my thumb at my my very respectable parents uh and say like I would take off my clothes for money now of course they would be horrified by that but I think part of the reason I was okay with it was I was like I'm going to I'm going to do it my way i want to be crystal clear here if you have no money and you want to make money
• 29:30 - 30:00 you should have no shame knock call email text DM ask life-changing doors do not open themselves and sometimes I feel like shame was invented by people who have to prevent people who have not from taking action because all of this is just an illusion what are you ashamed of trying like let's play it out remember I said fear only happens in the abstract not in the specific so if you reach out to a stranger no matter what happens you
• 30:00 - 30:30 always come out better than before because you either have a sale or you have an experience both make you better and so the crazy thing about trying is that it has an asymmetric riskreward return so worst case is you get a no and you learn from it you get better life gives you unlimited shots while you're alive and so if you have nothing like you you're just basically cashing in lottery tickets and saying "Oh my god I lost but what you're paying with is time." Fine pay more time get more tickets keep scratching so do you know the difference between shame and guilt guilt is when you break your own
• 30:30 - 31:00 rules shame is when you break other people's rules so if you are gay and you're in a religious community you would probably feel shame if you also share that religious community's rule set you would also feel guilt if let's say you were in a very liberal progressive environment you might feel neither shame nor guilt and so the question is whose rules are
• 31:00 - 31:30 you following if you have this feeling this fear of being ashamed then the question is who's the one who wrote the rules that you're choosing to follow and I can promise you it's not the people who are successful because they're the ones shouting on the rooftops telling you that it's totally different once you get in the pool it's very different it's kind of like you have the lights of the world turn on and like you're living in this mirage when you're not succeeding where there's all this all this uncertainty there's all
• 31:30 - 32:00 this ambiguity there's this fog of the unknown in front of you but as soon as you start taking action things become very crystal clear i think there's there's I'm sure some stoic analogy that said this but basically like if you've ever walked through very dense fog you can only see a couple steps in front of you the only thing that you can do in fog is just start walking and as you walk more steps become available to you and so there's this misconception that you're going to be able to see the entire path ahead of you but it has two
• 32:00 - 32:30 fundamental fallacies in front of it number one is that you have the right vision to be able to see that far with your current skill set and resources which you don't because imagine today all of your conditions changed you had more skills which is hard to imagine because you can't imagine what it's like to have the skill but maybe let's say you have resources that you didn't have before well that would probably change the way you play the game so trying to play out and try and play 17 steps in advance when the game itself is going to change and you as a player are going to
• 32:30 - 33:00 change the only thing that you can boil all of this down to is to take the steps that you can see in front of you one at a time and I would write this down of like what are the things that are stopping me and more specifically whose voice do I hear whose voice or judgment am I afraid of because usually it's people it's society is what we say but it's usually like two people and I remember when I had this big decision that I had to make when I was
• 33:00 - 33:30 considering selling gym lunch i thought that $46 million was not a lot of money for the business now some of you may hear this and be like "Oh my god that's amazing." But believe it or not at before we before COVID happened uh gym lunch was valid 150 million and so for me going from 150 to 50 or you know 46 it felt small right it felt like a really small number and I remember there was a particular person we'll call it a friend of me if you will that I thought would think that they were better than me if I sold for this small number
• 33:30 - 34:00 and when I was able to narrow it down to just that one person's voice I thought to myself am I going to give that person power over my entire life which is literally what it was i was choosing not to make a decision because of someone else that person has complete power over me and I was like well that's a terrible reason not to do this and the crazier part is that even if you're right and that person does say that you
• 34:00 - 34:30 suck so what most people don't want you to win and even if you do win they will try and do a reverse excuse which is called a justification for why you should be excused of the respect that you should earn for having won he just has good genetics he has great parents he uh you know inherited his wealth he had connect good connections she was born in America he speaks English he's a man he's white he's whatever you
• 34:30 - 35:00 want but giving the person justifications in no way helps you you might be 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 thing 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
• 35:00 - 35:30 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 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 7 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
• 35:30 - 36:00 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 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 too you know I'm a
• 36:00 - 36:30 few months behind from 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 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