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The reason that I m going to go from 100 to a billion and 10 billion and beyond is because I am working harder now than I worked to get here.
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And it s because I ve learned a better way to work.
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And so this is me sharing that better way to work.
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Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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We both know a lot of wealthy people.
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People have made a lot of money.
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People have huge exits.
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People that have private jets and multiple homes and massive bank account.
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Do you think the people that you know who have a lot of money are typically happier?
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Or do you know more people who are wealthy who are unhappy than happy?
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I think it depends on how they got their wealth.
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So I think if they were given their wealth, absolutely, I would say bar none, they are not as happy.
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And I think, I won t even get into the why, I ll say that s just my observation.
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For the people who earned their wealth, I would say many of them are, I would probably say the same smorgasbord as the rest of society, maybe with like one movement upwards.
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Because money cannot buy happiness, but it can help you avoid pain.
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And so I think that s the hard part that is difficult.
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It s the same thing as health, where like,
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You can you know money can help get the hospital, but you know get you out of the hospital hypothetically But it s not gonna get you into super super fitness status.
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They re completely different continuums that people see is one straight line and I Removing pain versus gaining joy.
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I think are two completely different journeys.
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And so I think money helps absolutely Decrease the punishment that we experience in life and the pains that we have to deal with our inconveniences for sure
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Why do you think some people, I agree with that, and there s also some outliers where it seems like people with a lot of money almost have more problems, more pain, more stress, more overwhelm.
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Maybe it s too much to handle or everyone wanting something from them or everyone s expecting something now from them.
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How do you learn to manage the approval or people pleasing of others once you have more money, especially your own family, your own friends who are now saying, oh, you ve gone beyond where the rest of us are financially.
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And I want some of that, or I have an expectation.
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How do we overcome that, navigate it?
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I wholeheartedly reject all of it.
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Reject what?
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All of it, any expectations of me.
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And so my litmus test for doing deals, for giving jobs, any of those things for people that I know is that you have to, it s actually the first conversation I had with Layla when we were, it was our first date.
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So our first date, I pitched Layla on quitting her job and working for me.
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Because I was like, this might not work out, but you should totally work for me.
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We ll make a bunch of money together.
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And I said, this compensation has to make sense for you independent of our relationship.
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So if we re not together, does this still make sense?
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If it makes sense, then we re cool.
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It s on your first day of dating.
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Yeah.
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If we re not together in a week or two months, would this still work for you?
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Yeah.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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It s clear.
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It s all talent.
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And I think that litmus test has served incredibly well for me.
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It s like, if you want to hire your mom, would you give somebody with your mom s experience the bookkeeping job?
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Now, if she s a 20-year bookkeeper.
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Then yeah, maybe.
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Maybe.
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And to be fair, but would you pay the bookkeeper $200,000 a year?
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I don t know.
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You probably wouldn t.
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So I believe in making all deals as though you weren t friends or you have no relationship.
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And if it still makes sense, then all of the relational benefit becomes as a bonus.
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Yes.
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Rather than I m going to amend the terms of the deal because of this amorphous value that we have, which can change.
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But if the deal is made logically, then conditions can change, and you will still both always feel good about the deal, because it was made without the relational component.
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Because sometimes you have good days with your mom, sometimes you have bad days with your mom, and all of a sudden you re like, I can t believe I m paying her 200 grand a year, right?
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She messed up the books, she took a course online, you know, whatever, right?
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But people make that mistake all the time.
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And so I think that it has been significantly easier for me to just say, would I give you the role, or would I give you the thing, if you were a stranger?
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And if the answer s no, then the answer s no.
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And if that person really wants it, then I d be like, then do the same things a stranger would do.
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And then I ll have a reason beyond.
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Now, if I have two candidates and they re identical, which would be impossible, but if they re identical, then yeah, maybe I would give it, but like they have to still meet all the standards.
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And then that way you give objective quantitative, you know, like do these things and then we can have this outcome.
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Seems like a lot of young people want to make a lot of money.
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People want to make a lot of money.
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People want to make a lot of money.
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But it seems like, you know, at least if I m thinking of social media context, you see a lot of young people in their 20s, early 30s that are striving for that.
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And they re striving for it fast.
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They re striving for it, you know, I just graduated college and I want to get there in the next couple of years.
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What do people in their 20s
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not understand about making money or reaching millionaire status that they really need to know before they hit that.
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So I will probably answer this differently than you expect.
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I believe that sex is colorblind, age blind, everything blind, because there are certain activities that you have to do.
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If you do the activities, you can get the outcome.
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Now if you re in your twenties, it s very difficult to do the amount of activities for a long enough period of time in order to get that.
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Now, you know, you ve got Ben Francis who started Gymshark when he was whatever, 16 or 17 years old.
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And he s, when he s 28, it was worth over a billion.
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So he was in his twenties and it was, you know, he made a billion dollar company.
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Is that the exception for the most part?
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Yeah.
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That s not as common.
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Um, you know, I made my, I became a millionaire when I was 26, 26 or 27.
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I can t remember.
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Between 26 and 27 is when I became, when I had my first million dollars in my bank account.
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And so, but I started business when I was 22.
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And so I still had had five years in, and now that s still fast.
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Don t get me wrong, it s still fast.
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But the accumulation of knowledge, because I spent almost all of my excess income on education.
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And so I wanted to pay down my ignorance tax as fast as I possibly could.
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And so rather than buy the Bentley or buy the watch so that I could flex on it, I still split a room in a house with six other people while I was making 20,000 a month take home.
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because I wanted to have all that money so I could go on the offense if I wanted to go to a seminar or buy a course or go to a workshop or whatever it was so that I could up-level my skills and get there faster.
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And so I think the idea that you want to get there fast is fine.
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It s just having a realistic expectation of how many skills you need to acquire to get there.
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Because if you have all the skills, because I think we ll have continuously younger and younger and younger millionaires and billionaires that are going to continue to happen because now a viral idea, I mean, Taylor Swift was 16 when she started reporting music.
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That was a long time ago, right?
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She s 33 now.
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Now, she s a billionaire.
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You keep showing up consistently and building it.
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Mr. B is a billionaire.
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He s 24.
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Crazy.
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So, like, it s gonna continue to go down as the access to education increasingly gets democratized so more people can access it for free.
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And so, a nine-year-old can watch.
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Like, there s nothing that stops a nine-year-old from making and running a Facebook ad.
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There s nothing.
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And usually they re more tech-savvy anyways.
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Maybe they just gotta get a credit card or something.
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Sure, yeah, yeah.
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But if we break it down to the physics or the actions, it s not that hard.
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There s nothing that prevents people.
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And so I think that the level of competition will continue to rise.
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I think young people are more tech-savvy and so will, in general, have a continuously improving competitive advantage over older people because the rate of technological change hastens, goes faster.
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And so the advantage of being young versus old is actually, I think, going to continue to expand because tech moves so fast now.
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that I think there will be more.
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What do you think about, I mean, I had a mentor once told me when I was 24, when I was broke on my sister s couch, and I was living for free.
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I was not paying rent.
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I was, you know, eating leftovers.
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Good life, man.
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And I remember saying to a mentor, I was like, man, I could really use some money right now.
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Like I could really figure out how to make some more money.
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And he said, money comes to you when you re ready for it.
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I was like, I feel pretty ready.
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And he goes, yeah, it could come, you know, maybe you get it and you re not ready and you, you lose it all because you re not emotionally ready.
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So what advice do you have to people in their twenties who want to make a lot of money, but if they re not emotionally ready,
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what might happen to them.
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It s usually because you don t have the skill of sticking with something.
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You haven t been rewarded enough in the past for staying with something, or you haven t been burned enough from starting over.
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Like on your fifth time of starting yet another thing and not getting deep enough on it, you have to think to yourself, maybe this isn t the right way to do it.
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I love giving this kind of like S curve analogy, which hopefully your audience will enjoy, but there s five stages I see it as somebody goes through the entrepreneurial journey when they re starting out.
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you ve got the midline right where they start.
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Step one is they go above the midline, and they go to uninformed optimism.
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They see the grass on the other side, it looks greener, and they re like, my buddy s doing drop shipping, and he s making all this money, and that s going to be me.
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And then they buy the course, they start watching videos, they start to connect things, things break, they buy some inventory, they don t know how much to buy, and all of a sudden, they go to the point two, which is now below the line, which is informed pessimism.
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So it s hard.
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Yeah, they find out all the things that they didn t know in the beginning.
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They paid down some ignorance debt, but there s still more to pay.
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They re like, okay, wow.
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So they keep going because they re like, I got to figure this out.
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And then they go to point three, which is the value of despair, right?
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Which is where they re like, this isn t going to work.
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This is never going to work.
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And one of the hardest costs, and this is like what entrepreneurship feels like, if I can give it to anyone who s new to this, is the feeling of uncertainty that you don t know if all of the work that you ve been spending all of your nights and weekends and off time investing in will ever pay off.
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And so it s this fear that you re wasting your time.
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But the reality is that the outcome isn t the thing that you re building, the person you are is the person that you re building, and that continues to work.
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And so there s a proverb in the Bible, I m gonna butcher it, but I think it s, in all labor there is profit.
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And you can rephrase that as, I like, as the work works on you more than you work on it.
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Say it again.
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The work works on you more than you work on it.
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And so it s about who we become while doing the work more than the outcome from the work itself.
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Because I lost everything five years into my entrepreneurial journey, but I still had all the skills and beliefs that I had from before that.
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And then I was able to reapply those and then have a really big outcome in what we have today.
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And so I remember when I lost everything the first time, I thought, did I just lose five years of my life?
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I just moved back.
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I m at ground zero again.
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But I wasn t, because I had all these skills that I had learned owning and scaling six gyms at that point.
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And so, point one, uninformed optimism.
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Point two, informed pessimism.
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Point three, value to spare.
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And then, we go to point four, which is informed optimism.
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So now, you do have a lay of the land.
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You understand that there s some skeletons.
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You do have to understand how you, you know, manage some inventory.
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You got to get ahead of some of the stuff.
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But you start, you learn how to forecast.
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You can know that weekends you tend to do better and weekdays you tend to do less.
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And so you can dial back support on those days and dial it up on the other days.
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You start to recognize patterns.
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And so you start to know what you re doing, right?
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You re paying down all the ignorance debt.
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And then finally, step five is you achieve whatever the original goal was.
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But the problem is that most people go step one, two, three, and then they jump back to step one.
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With something new.
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Right.
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And so they go to, yet again, the grass is greener on the other side, but what they don t know is that it s still fertilized with manure.
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They re still on the other side too.
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And so there s always everywhere.
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Let me get into real estate now.
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Let me get into this.
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Investing and selling and day trading.
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Of course, there s all these quick make money things.
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But if you look at the people who are making the most money in it, they spent usually a significant amount of time.
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And I m saying this again, but I m bearing it for repetition, is that the rocky cut scene last two minutes in movies, it might last five years for most people or 10.
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And I remember my, so my neighbor, I met him when he was 15 years old.
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He now works for us at acquisition.com.
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Um, but he, uh, this is a, this is a cool story.
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So he s 15 years old and he s like, I want to be an entrepreneur.
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And so I, you know, he worked out with me every day for a couple of years, um, at my home gym.
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And so he, is he jacked now?
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Never, never more jacked than me.
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Um, and so he then goes to college.
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And after his first semester, he s like, I don t know, like this is, you know, I m studying business.
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And I was like, dude, are you willing in this or not?
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Are you really doing this?
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And he was like, well, you know, I just, I m not, school s not really blah, blah, blah.
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And I said, the world doesn t need another 3-1 business degree.
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Either crush school or don t go if your goal is entrepreneurship.
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He s like, well, I want to be an entrepreneur.
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And so I apparently told him this, that he remembers, cause he s, he brings it up all the time, but I said, you are afraid of going all in on entrepreneurship because staying in college is safe from an approval perspective.
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So you re doing all these side things, but you don t have to bear the brunt of not failing because you re still in school.
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It s like, so you need to get rid of that.
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And so he quit school.
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And then he started on the call floor of my of gym lunch now, that s not glorious and to be fair to the point We re making earlier.
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I said I can t get you the job.
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I won t give you it up So I can get you an interview.
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I was like, it s gonna be up the sales manager.
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I m not gonna tell him that I know you He was like, okay.
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I was like you better be prepared and so he did get the job to be fair the qualifications for frontline caller is not not super high and
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And the reason that I started him there was because I actually walked in on him one day when he was waiting for me to go work out.
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And I heard him on the phone trying to do one of these wholesaling, you know, real estate deals.
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And I said, you know, did you close the deal?
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And he said, ah, no.
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And he said, I m not sure if real estate, you know, the wholesaling thing s for me.
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And I said, well, have you heard you on the phone?
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And he was like, what do you mean?
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I was like, you sound horrible.
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You can t sell anything.
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You know, I m the skill.
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Of course.
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He said, well, how do I get good at sales?
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I was like, you work on a sales team with somebody who s been there before and can tell you what to do.
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And so I got him the interview.
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He took the job.
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He became the top salesman on the setting team.
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And then he became, sorry, the outbound team.
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Then he went to the setting team, which is the second rung of salesmen.
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They qualify the leads.
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Then he became the top one there.
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And then he got to the top of the Christmas tree, which is closers, and he became the top closer.
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He learned skills.
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I have 26 guys.
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Wow.
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Big team.
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And a lot of these are men.
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I have families, kids.
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Wow.
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And how much can you make as a top closer?
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$250.
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$250 a year?
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Yeah.
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That s pretty good money.
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Yeah, it is good money.
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For a 21-year-old, 22-year-old?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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19 at the time.
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19, making $250?
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Yeah.
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That s life-changing.
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Of course, and he had to learn how to talk to men, talking to gym owners, four-year-old gym owners, telling them how he can help them with their business.
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Wow.
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Right?
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It takes balls.
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And so, I bring that up to say is that when you re starting out, you need to focus on learning rather than earning.
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Now, he obviously earned, but it was because he quickly fast-tracked his learning process.
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And so, I think one of the biggest hacks in the world is getting paid to learn.
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Like right now we have this big societal context of like you pay in order to learn, but what if there were a world where you could get paid to learn?
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Well, that is what working at a company is if you re mindful of what career path you want to get into.
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Now, if you re like, I don t know what I want to do, then I would recommend starting with a meta skill.
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So sales is going to, like, if you learn how to sell, it ll work in any company.
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If you learn how to market, it ll work in any company.
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I mean, to be fair, if you get into HR, a zillion businesses need HR stuff, if that s what you like.
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And if you re like, I don t know what I like,
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Well, you also aren t going to like anything unless you start, because we usually only like things that we re good at.
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And we usually aren t good at things that we start.
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Right?
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And so the only way to get good at something is to do a lot of it.
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And when you start, you suck.
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And so a lot of the time, there s this fallacy of finding the right thing or the perfect fit.
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But one, almost every entrepreneur that I know has had many, many, many businesses, and mostly many failures before they had their success.
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It s because each one of them stair-stepped.
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And so there s this paralysis around, like, I got to pick the right thing.
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And it s really, you got to pick something.
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And then you ll learn all the inadequacies that you have no idea about once you get into it.
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Like, I started a gym when I was 22 years old.
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Like, brick and mortar, signed a lease, saved $50,000.
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It was stupid.
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I had no idea what I was doing.
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But I did have, I did sign, I was, you know, kudos to younger me.
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I had a mentor early on who was in the gym world.
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That s correct.
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Right?
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So you could get advice to learn from.
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Yes.
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I mean, still, it was still incredibly hard.
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But I got, I was able to just get, you know, suck everything like a, you know,
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Firehouse?
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Like a vacuum cleaner.
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To get all the information I needed to just barely keep my head above water until, and then things started to work out because I just, every weekend I d go and drive over to a gym owner and say, why do you do this?
1
SPEAKER_01
Why is your lobby like this?
1
SPEAKER_01
How many leads do you convert?
1
SPEAKER_01
How do you call it?
1
SPEAKER_01
Like whatever.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I just kept doing that every single weekend because I was such a young guy.
1
SPEAKER_01
Everyone was, yeah, of course, exactly.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I have a lot to, I owe a lot to those older entrepreneurs who helped me out.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so in some ways, a lot of what I do at acquisition.com is kind of my, my small way of paying it forward.
1
SPEAKER_00
And one of the cool things is when you re someone who s getting started and you re going out and humbly asking for advice, but you re taking the actions.
1
SPEAKER_00
Hey, I m launching this thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m taking the steps.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m just trying to figure it out, but I m taking the actions and I m in the process.
1
SPEAKER_00
People usually want to give advice and support and say, hey, why don t you come check out and we ll go out for lunch or whatever it is.
1
SPEAKER_00
But if you re just saying, I want to do this, but I m not taking any action,
1
SPEAKER_00
people are less likely to help you.
1
SPEAKER_00
Maybe they ll help you a little bit, but they see you struggling and trying and like leaping before you re ready.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like, all right, cool, let s help you get it going.
1
SPEAKER_01
I love the saying luck favors the prepared.
1
SPEAKER_01
So like if you want to go ask Louis to have you on or to get Louis on your show, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, what do you do?
1
SPEAKER_01
You don t just ask Louis.
1
SPEAKER_01
You show how much you ve prepared.
1
SPEAKER_01
You say, hey, I went through 50 hours of your content.
1
SPEAKER_01
These are nine questions that have never been asked to you before that I think would be really good.
1
SPEAKER_01
I ve got two guys, two buddies of mine from college who are going to also video it.
1
SPEAKER_01
I ve got this church basement that I can get the lighting to look really cool so we can be cinematic.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because to be real, I know I don t have the audience that you have, but I can help at least give you clips that will distribute and actually convert for you.
1
SPEAKER_01
And hopefully that s enough of a value add.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, Louis might not say yes.
1
SPEAKER_01
But if you do that a hundred times, counting hundreds, one Louis will say yes.
1
SPEAKER_01
And everyone loves to help people who help themselves, always.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because the biggest fear that anyone who gives advice has is that someone takes the advice
2
SPEAKER_00
and does nothing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because they didn t learn.
2
SPEAKER_00
They didn t change their behavior.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s true.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a waste of the time.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you don t feel like you re teaching.
2
SPEAKER_00
You only teach if they change their behavior.
2
SPEAKER_00
If they change their behavior, they learned.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so everyone, many people, like being a teacher.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think a teaching role is nice.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think most people feel good about it.
2
SPEAKER_00
But you only feel like you have a teaching role if you see a change.
2
SPEAKER_01
Someone takes action.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you can hack the whole system if you just show people that you ll take initiative.
2
100%.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you take, I mean, that s what happened for me early on.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was just taking a lot of action and people were like, they wanted to add me in the room.
2
SPEAKER_01
They wanted me at the table because I was willing to take action.
2
SPEAKER_01
Even though I was young and broke and struggling, they were like, hey, this guy s showing up.
2
SPEAKER_01
I would go to every conference that I could in kind of the social media blogging world early on.
2
SPEAKER_01
And somehow get to the late night dinners at 2 a.m.
2
SPEAKER_01
with all the speakers, and they d be like, hey, why don t you come tag along, young guy?
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, you re bringing us a lot of joy, at least.
2
SPEAKER_01
Even though you have no clue what you re doing, you can t offer anything else but joy.
2
SPEAKER_01
But you re asking me some interesting questions that people don t.
2
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, I m happy to talk about myself for another 20 minutes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Totally.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you get in the room, you get access, and you take action.
2
SPEAKER_01
People will want to keep supporting you.
2
SPEAKER_01
Totally.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because you re applying their teachings.
2
SPEAKER_01
And people like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Makes them feel important.
2
SPEAKER_01
It does.
2
SPEAKER_01
It validates, oh, I know something about what I m doing.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s good.
2
SPEAKER_01
You want to keep helping this person grow.
2
SPEAKER_01
What do you think your 85-year-old self needs to tell you now to get to where you want to be faster?
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, it s funny that that was the question.
2
SPEAKER_00
Um, I mean he would tell me of the mentors.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, I mean he would tell me, why do you want to go faster?
2
SPEAKER_00
Be like, why, why can t it take 10 times as long from 200 to a billion?
2
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
Why not?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like why?
2
SPEAKER_00
Why does it need to be five years or 10 years?
2
SPEAKER_00
Why can t it be 50 years?
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you, if it took 50 years, but then it all happened at once at the end, would you like that?
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of like the man who lives an amazing life, and the last day everyone finds out he s a fraud.
2
SPEAKER_00
Or the man who lives his entire life with everyone thinking he s a fraud, and then in the last day of his life, he s proven right.
2
SPEAKER_01
Which one would you rather be?
2
SPEAKER_01
If you re gone, you re not gonna get to experience the fruit of it all.
2
SPEAKER_01
Interesting question, though.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like the painters that become famous once they re dead.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so I think, I mean, 85-year-old me, I ll tell you the recurring themes that he works on with me.
2
SPEAKER_00
Patience is a big one.
2
SPEAKER_00
Focus is a big one.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sticking with what I committed to.
2
SPEAKER_00
focusing on the controllables of like, what are the activities?
2
SPEAKER_00
What are the actions that I have to take?
2
SPEAKER_00
And being okay with potentially varied outcomes.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes it s good, sometimes it s bad, but being consistently divorced from the outcome, but trying my absolute damnedest to make sure that everything that is in my control was done to the utmost.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I like, we started there, but I just like,
2
SPEAKER_00
It s hard to understand the context like you hear this you hear people say this like it s about the journey It s not about the destination and you hear people say like, you know, it s it s it s about it s about doing the stuff It s not about the outcome and you re like, yeah, it s easy for you to say when you have the outcome Right when they ve already made the money.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, of course, I get it but
2
SPEAKER_00
If you can make that flip, like it s just, the hard part is the action is so much greater.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you really measured yourself by the actions you take, then you might be embarrassed.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you really hope to measure yourself on the outcome because you can get by on sometimes winning when you don t deserve it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so, 85-year-old me never lets me win when I don t deserve it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Ooh.
2
SPEAKER_01
Man, I would rather lose, but know I gave my all, than win and be like, I just kind of just barely showed up today.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
You wouldn t know.
2
SPEAKER_01
I won, but it s because I had an inferior opponent.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s not because I played my best.
2
SPEAKER_01
It sucks to lose, to know, man, I was freaking gave everything, every ounce of my energy and every trick and skill that I had to play this game and win it.
2
SPEAKER_01
I came short.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s going to sting.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s going to hurt.
2
SPEAKER_01
But at least I know I don t regret the effort that I put in.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I can be like, here s a great example.
2
SPEAKER_01
This still haunts me today. 2002.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was October, so it s 21 years ago, is that right?
2
SPEAKER_01
October, 2002.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, almost 21 years ago, is that what it was?
2
2002.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m playing football at Principia College, small school in Illinois.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s my sophomore year there.
2
SPEAKER_01
My freshman year, I went to another school, so I transferred into this school.
2
SPEAKER_01
We re playing, and it s a tight, tight game at home, back and forth.
2
SPEAKER_01
Can t remember the final score, but we lose by a touchdown.
2
SPEAKER_01
I score three or four touchdowns.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think I got an extra point.
2
SPEAKER_01
I got a two-point conversion, and I had 17 catches for 418 yards, and we lost.
2
SPEAKER_01
In the last couple plays, we didn t score to go and win.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I remember being the last one out of the locker room.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was in the shower.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was so upset that we lost.
2
SPEAKER_01
And my coach comes in.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of an awkward moment because I m in the shower, you know, an exposed open shower, you know, I m just like kind of pouting and like sad and depressed or whatever.
2
SPEAKER_01
And just like in there, everyone s gone.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m sad we lost the game.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he kind of comes around the corner and says, Hey Lewis,
2
SPEAKER_01
good game, just to let you know you broke a world record today. 
2
SPEAKER_01
And I go, what?
2
SPEAKER_01
And I go, what do you mean?
2
SPEAKER_01
And he goes, yeah, you had 17 catches from 418 yards.
2
SPEAKER_01
No one s ever done that in the history of a football game.
2
SPEAKER_01
your new NCAA all-record holder. 
2
SPEAKER_01
And I go, I m sad and depressed and angry because I didn t do more to help us win, and we lost.
2
SPEAKER_01
And at the same time, I hear that I did something that no one in the history of the world had ever done in a football game.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it was, it was tough because I felt like, man, we lost, but I gave it everything.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I was like, but could I still give it more?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like, I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I feel like, you know, at least we didn t win and I played to a lower level and didn t create that result.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
At least I created something that for me, I can be proud of, even if we lost.
2
SPEAKER_01
It still haunts me that we lost.
2
SPEAKER_01
Interesting.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it s, but I know because we were behind, I had to give so much more than I was capable of.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if we were winning, I wouldn t have gotten that effort out of myself.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, it s an interesting dynamic.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is, because I would wonder if you had that same exact experience, but you didn t break the world record, or no one ever told you, whatever.
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, right.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you would still... Because you said that you had the sting of the loss, and I wonder if Lewis today would feel that way.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because you said, like, I don t know if I could have given more, but I feel like on some levels, like at least for me, like, sure, we can get into the hypotheticals of like, you can always give more, okay?
2
SPEAKER_01
Of course, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
But there are certain times from like, I know I could sprint after the guy, even though I m probably not going to get... But I could give it the last 20 yards.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think that this is where 85-year-old me is the one that he is ruthless.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I love this David Goggins saying, I don t know if it s a saying of his, I heard it in one of his videos, but he said, there s no shortcuts for you, Goggins.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I just really love that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like he doesn t even look for them because he s like, you don t get those.
2
SPEAKER_00
You don t get shortcuts.
2
SPEAKER_00
There are no corners to cut.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that to me is like the embodiment of that 85 year old self, because he knows if I could have spread it or not.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so it s if I can appeal to that man s incredibly high standards, which is why like commit to the journey is not the easier path.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think it is the harder path because the standard is higher.
2
SPEAKER_00
And when you really do that, the winning does happen by default.
2
SPEAKER_00
But even saying that still makes winning the objective, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And you re just saying this is a different pathway of getting to winning, but winning still kind of matters.
2
SPEAKER_01
It does matter.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think it s a boat.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a, the journey matters and the outcomes matter.
2
SPEAKER_01
The more, the more.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because the outcomes also give credibility.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
They give more context.
2
SPEAKER_01
They give more experience.
2
SPEAKER_01
They give more wisdom.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
To the teacher.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
I, I really.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you had no outcomes, but you said, look at all the efforts I put in though.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I put in 10,000 hours.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I haven t sold a company.
2
SPEAKER_01
I haven t built anything because.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is really interesting.
2
SPEAKER_01
It didn t work.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
You need a both ends.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, this is really interesting because on some, so I think from a, this is, I m like really liking this.
2
SPEAKER_00
So from a, yeah, from a fulfillment perspective, I believe that truly giving your all actually, not like try your best.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s just like, it s such a, it s repeated so many times that it s lost its meaning.
2
SPEAKER_00
But leaving everything on the field, having the tank on zero or empty when you walk off and truly knowing and looking at yourself and being like, I could not have done anything more.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s tough to do that because we re naturally built to conserve effort, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And so you really have to push and overcome the internal mechanisms that you have that say, don t spread the last 20 yards.
2
SPEAKER_01
Could I put a little more?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s why when I walked on stage for the presentation, I was like, I have done this before.
2
SPEAKER_00
I am prepared, I could not have prepared more for this in any way that would have been reasonable.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so to that degree, I can still define success.
3
SPEAKER_01
success that way, the outcomes will happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s still that little thing where it s like, do this in order to, you have to cut off the in order to.
3
SPEAKER_01
I really genuinely believe that because I remember when I was in my retirement year, which is, I still own the company, but we were in the process of selling.
3
SPEAKER_01
I had nothing to do.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was an incredibly depressing year for me, which is why I ve oriented my whole life around work, because I really enjoy it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I remember getting really angry about this and thinking like, it s not you work hard so that you can.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like the hard work is the point.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like the point is how hard you learn to work.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s the whole point where you re like, what has changed from last year to this year?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like my understanding of my capacity to work continues to grow.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I am able to work harder and therefore am more proud of the effort that I put into it because at least for me, I feel like I am, I know in the mirror
3
SPEAKER_01
Did I give it my all?
3
SPEAKER_01
And if... I try to play out, this is a stoic frame, but, like, if I had had, like, a hurricane go through, and we had not been able to launch, because all the energy would have been gone.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s just say hypothetical.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we did all this prep.
3
SPEAKER_00
Fear of virtual event.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
Would I have been proud of the effort that I put in?
3
SPEAKER_01
The answer would have been yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
You d still be let down and disappointed that you didn t get to do the thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I think that it would have been short-lived
3
SPEAKER_01
because I think that is like, you asked like early on, what has been the biggest difference for you specifically?
3
SPEAKER_01
And this has been, whatever you want to call it, super-secret, whatever, like this is what has been, allowed me to keep my internal temperature separate from the external temperature to the greatest degree possible, is knowing that I m using my internal thermometer to gauge my success.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I m not perfect by any, obviously.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the more I do that,
3
SPEAKER_01
To use your example, if I had worked my absolute hardest for 10,000 hours, and I knew that I d give it my all, and I had nothing to show for it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, I ve actually had that instance, because five years ago, I lost everything.
3
SPEAKER_01
No external results to show for it.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, I do know what that s like.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think at the end of your life, you d still be more proud of the man that did his everything, gave it his all, left it all on the field, even if he didn t win.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think that would be the man that I d be more proud to be.
3
SPEAKER_00
I hear that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m also like, if I reflect back, if we lost every football game.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think winning matters also.
3
SPEAKER_00
You ve got to have some wins.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know what I mean?
3
SPEAKER_00
You got to have, if I d have lost every game for four years, I probably been like, this is not fun.
3
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m becoming a better athlete and I m competing against great people, but.
3
SPEAKER_00
Just always losing would be a challenge.
3
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because you d be like, this is not fun.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s fun to win.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s not fun to lose.
3
SPEAKER_00
Consistently.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
You learn more in your losses probably.
3
SPEAKER_00
Totally.
3
SPEAKER_00
You learn more from the bigger breakdowns and the challenges you face than always winning.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
The difficulties, the challenges develop us.
3
SPEAKER_00
Having easy wins doesn t make us stronger and better.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I think having all losses may just say that, okay, maybe this is the wrong thing you re in.
3
SPEAKER_00
You should be in something else.
3
SPEAKER_00
Use this energy and effort and attitude towards a different thing and different purpose and different sport and different mission and different art.
3
SPEAKER_00
after a period of time.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s always so much blues in you.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I could jam on this forever.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think the confidence comes in the effort and the journey, but also you ve got to back it with some external results, I think.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Or some type of credibility somewhere.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
It depends if... So, the credibility is if you re trying to be an expert and give advice.
3
SPEAKER_00
The credibility to yourself.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you have no external results... If you were broke today,
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no one would listen to me.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
But how would you feel about you?
3
SPEAKER_00
After 10 years?
3
SPEAKER_00
Totally.
3
SPEAKER_00
15 years of busting it out.
3
SPEAKER_00
Dude, I did it for five years.
3
SPEAKER_00
I get it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, but 10 years though.
3
SPEAKER_01
50 years, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think, but that s where I m saying like, what has changed about me that has made me better, stronger, faster?
3
SPEAKER_01
Is because I genuinely believe that the more I can divorce that win, even when you say like, you know, you got to win sometimes.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like even that small statement still makes it king.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, easy for you to say with a couple hundred million.
3
SPEAKER_00
All the wins.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, easy for you to say at this stage.
3
SPEAKER_00
I know.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like you said to others.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I think that the reason that I m going to go from 100 to a billion and 10 billion and beyond is because I do genuinely, like I am working harder now than I worked to get here.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s because I ve learned a better way to work.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so this is me sharing that better way to work.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, to be fair, maybe I have certain skills that if I don t work as hard, I can still win, but I would still know.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I think that if you can, like, if the whole point of anyone who s listening to this is that you can open up another level of effort, I think that is the next level of effort because
3
SPEAKER_01
If I had thought the way I think about business now and work now, I would have been here faster.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s me catering to the audience who wants to win.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I m saying I would have become who I am faster.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think that as a result, I would have evidence that would support that for every, for the court of public opinion, but for the court of Alex,
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just, I know what it s like for me to give it my all, and it s the absolute proudest I am of myself, and there s nothing anyone can do to take that from me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s when I feel bulletproof.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there s not many times I can do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so when I have realized how much work it takes to do something well, to gain the approval of my 85-year-old self, I also realized hand in hand that there s only a few amount of things that I can do.
3
SPEAKER_01
because I have to be dramatically more focused because the amount of work it takes to do something well is so much greater than I used to think that I can t do 20 things if I m going to do it well.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it goes back to like one of my favorite sayings, which is if it s worth doing, it s worth doing well.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the thing is, is that most people focus on the back half, but I think it s focusing on the first, like most things aren t worth doing.
3
SPEAKER_01
If it is worth doing, then it is worth doing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Cut out the things that aren t worth doing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that you have all of the energy to actually give your all to something.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I would say this is that most things aren t that hard if you really try.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s that most people don t know how to try hard.
3
SPEAKER_01
They just don t have the skill to try hard.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so the number, I mean, you probably know the stat from the podcast world, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Which is, it s 90% of people only upload one podcast.
3
SPEAKER_01
Of the remaining 10%, 90% of them don t make it past 20 uploads.
3
SPEAKER_01
So to be in the top 1% of podcasters, you have to upload 20 podcasts.
3
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
It still may not be successful.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
You still may get downloads, but you re doing a lot better than the other 90%, 99%.
3
SPEAKER_00
The price for excellence has never been so cheap.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s showing up consistently.
3
SPEAKER_01
Everyone is so soft now that to win, you just have to not be made of glass and be willing to have someone tell you, I don t approve of your life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you say, that s okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why do you think so many people are soft in our society today?
3
SPEAKER_01
Uh, well, I think we ve put a lot of guardrails up that prevent people from getting hurt.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think that ends up resulting in people who don t know what getting hurt feels like.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they feel like it s death, but it s not death.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, I think that s just, I mean, at its absolute core, no one knows how to have hurt feelings.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think people think their feelings matter a lot more now than they used to.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t think they matter that much.
3
SPEAKER_00
Why would people s feelings matter that much?
3
SPEAKER_00
Why should their feelings matter?
3
SPEAKER_00
Why should my feelings matter?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like if I hurt someone and I say, well, it makes me feel good, why does that matter?
3
SPEAKER_01
You hurt somebody.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s just looking at the actions.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s, I mean, to be fair, I m very extreme in that manner, but I think that if we can, for me, the more I can ignore my feelings and simply do the things that are required, the more I tend to see the results that I want.
3
SPEAKER_01
And one of my favorite internal sayings, like the things that you repeat yourself, I m sure everybody has like a couple of things that like you say to you.
3
SPEAKER_01
Um, whenever I have something that I m like, God, I want it like the next rewrite of the book or, Hey man, we got to reshoot that whole thing because the mic was off or, you know, the worst, the worst man is, um, I have this, I have this refrain that s been trained faster and faster, which is, I will do what is required.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not what I want.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not what I feel like it s, I will do what is required.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m enjoyable.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ll do what is required.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so like, there s not, there s not a question.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s not an if it s just, I will do what is required.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that has helped me a ton.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you try to learn from the pain or the challenge that occurred.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it doesn t happen again, but you got to do what s required.
3
SPEAKER_00
I saw this, um, slip recently of this podcast called the all in podcast, which I saw the, I see these clips a lot online.
3
SPEAKER_00
I want to start actually listening to this whole show, but I think they go too long.
3
SPEAKER_00
Um, but they have a lot of great insights.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like these four like venture capitalists and they re all billionaires and they all like are puppet masters in their own world.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
And one of the cliffs was of a
4
SPEAKER_01
I can t remember his name, but one of the guys who said he was spending a lot of time in Italy over the last month or a couple of months.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he was saying, you know, I really like spending time over here because my friends in Italy know how to relax, they know how to have great conversations, they know how to talk about life and art and magic and wonder and music and not just focus on more money, because this guy s a billionaire, a multi-billionaire.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he was like, there s more to life than just making lots more money when you already have a lot of money.
4
SPEAKER_01
What do you think about a point like that or a conversation like that where it s like, you know,
4
SPEAKER_01
live in Europe and take three months and relax and travel.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think there s an overarching assumption, which is that life should be a certain way.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that I would reject that notion.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so it s like, we should, because implied in that statement, I think, is we should be more like them.
4
SPEAKER_00
And whenever I see a should, I kind of don t really accept any should frames.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like, why?
4
SPEAKER_00
Why should we?
4
SPEAKER_00
because you prefer that, which is fine.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can say, I prefer to live the same.
4
SPEAKER_00
Why don t you guys go live that way?
4
SPEAKER_00
But to then say, everyone should live that way, or, you know, then now you re casting your personal preference on everyone else.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I reject that wholeheartedly.
4
SPEAKER_00
So if you want to play video games all day and be the absolute best in the world at it, and you are the best in the world at it, and you get Twitch sponsorships, and you have all that stuff, and you learn to eat because you re so good at it and you re so obsessed with it, who am I to stop you from doing that?
4
SPEAKER_00
You re going to die, and I m going to die.
4
SPEAKER_00
And at the end of your life, would you rather just go, you know, be a foreman at a factory?
4
SPEAKER_00
That s not a disrespectful thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m saying more so that if you love doing what you were doing, choose to not do what you love because you now are legitimate in the eyes of people who you don t care about.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, if there was one rule for me is do you.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
I wanted to ask you about this.
4
SPEAKER_01
This book launch just happened, and I know you did a vlog on this recently, which I want to dive in deeper, but can you give big context?
4
SPEAKER_01
Why this book?
4
SPEAKER_01
Why the launch style that you did?
4
SPEAKER_01
How many people showed up?
4
SPEAKER_01
How many people bought?
4
SPEAKER_01
upsells everything, and how did you get that result to happen?
4
SPEAKER_01
Not that we focus on results here, but the efforts.
4
SPEAKER_01
How did you get it all to come to fruition?
4
SPEAKER_00
So my first book, 100 Million Dollar Offers, was a book that answered one question, which is, what do I sell?
4
SPEAKER_00
And so now that has 17,000 five stars.
4
SPEAKER_00
Incredible.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s a great book.
4
SPEAKER_00
Actually, it s still on Amazon Charge, top 20 of all Amazon, and so is that one.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s two of the 20.
4
SPEAKER_01
Not that we re calculating results or success here.
4
SPEAKER_00
Of course, of course.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I didn t even sell it on Amazon, I sold it on Shopify.
4
SPEAKER_00
So all those sales didn t count.
4
SPEAKER_00
But anyways, this book, the purpose of this book was to, once someone knows what they re going to sell, they ask the next question, which is, who do I sell it to?
4
SPEAKER_00
You need leads, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And so this book is about advertising.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, I split test the title four times to figure out what people like.
4
SPEAKER_00
I tried marketing versus advertising.
4
SPEAKER_00
I tried advertising versus leads.
4
SPEAKER_00
I tried leads versus promotion.
4
SPEAKER_00
And leads won as the categorical leader for what to name the book.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so that s why I called it 100 Million Dollar Leads.
4
SPEAKER_00
But advertising in and of itself is the process of making known.
4
SPEAKER_00
If no one knows about your stuff, no one can buy it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Say that one more time.
4
SPEAKER_00
If no one knows about your stuff.
4
SPEAKER_00
Sorry, the first part.
4
SPEAKER_01
Advertising what?
4
SPEAKER_01
Is the process of making known.
4
SPEAKER_01
is advertising the process of making known.
4
SPEAKER_01
Period.
4
SPEAKER_01
If no one knows about your stuff, no one buys it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so what happens is most people have an offer and no one knows about it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so you have to make it known.
4
SPEAKER_00
You have to advertise it.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so this book, so the first book all hinged on something called the value equation, which is people talk about, hey, provide value, provide value.
4
SPEAKER_00
How do you mechanize that?
4
SPEAKER_00
How do you operationalize value?
4
SPEAKER_00
And so it was actually solving a problem that people want, increasing the likelihood that they think it s going to happen, in other words, decreasing the risk that when they buy, they re not going to get the thing that they want, decreasing the time it takes them to get whatever the outcome is, and decreasing the effort and sacrifice that s associated with the work that they have to do in order to get the outcome.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there s the four variables.
4
SPEAKER_00
You decrease the last two, you increase the first two, and you have a more valuable thing, which we covered in a different video, so you can watch that one.
4
SPEAKER_00
With 100 million dollar leads.
4
SPEAKER_00
I talked about the advertising cycle.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so there s eight pieces to this So it has a little bit more pieces to it, but I think it s simpler to understand in some ways So the first four is a core four is the only four ways any person can let other people know about their stuff Advertise and so it s just a four box.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s 101 and one too many and you ve got people who know you people who don t and
4
SPEAKER_00
So if you re letting people who know you one-on-one, you re doing warm outreach.
4
SPEAKER_00
You reach out to your friends and say, hey, come to my book event.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you re letting people know one-on-one who don t know you, that s cold outreach.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s reaching out to strangers.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you re letting people know one-to-many, two people who know you, that s posting content.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you re letting people one-to-many know who don t know you, that s running ads.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there s only four things that you can do to let other people know about your stuff.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, the natural question is, are there other things that you can do?
4
SPEAKER_00
The answer is yes and no.
4
SPEAKER_00
know in that you can t do anything else.
4
SPEAKER_00
But yes, there are other people who can let people know about our stuff.
4
SPEAKER_01
Referrals, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so there s four, which I call the lead getters.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you ve got customers who can send you referrals.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, in order for them to send you referrals, they use the core four.
4
SPEAKER_00
They either reach out to friends, they post content, they do the same four things.
4
SPEAKER_00
Those are the only four ways a person could let other people know about stuff.
4
SPEAKER_00
The second is you ve got employees, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So when I was making content for the book, I didn t actually make the content.
4
SPEAKER_00
My team made the content, and then they posted it on my behalf.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I got leverage on the amount of content I could put out because other people helped me.
4
SPEAKER_00
From the paid ads, sorry, from the lead getter number three is agencies.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you can pay agencies to help you make content.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can pay agencies to help you run ads.
4
SPEAKER_00
And for me, for this book launch, I had agencies
4
SPEAKER_00
run the actual ads for the book, because we re a holding company, we don t actually transact, so it made sense to contract that out.
4
SPEAKER_00
But my team made the ads, their team ran the ads, but it was still leverage.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then finally, we had affiliates.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that s another business who refers you business, just to fight for the audience.
4
SPEAKER_00
Negative commission.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
They get paid in money, free stuff, or both.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so we had 27,000 affiliates.
4
27,000?
4
SPEAKER_00
And we had 104,000 people who attended from affiliates.
4
SPEAKER_00
We had 137,000 people.
4
SPEAKER_00
Holy cow.
4
SPEAKER_00
137,000 people came in from paid ads.
4
SPEAKER_00
We had just probably just like 210,000 people came in from content.
4
SPEAKER_00
Organic.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then the outreach.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then I would say that employees kind of factored into that piece, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I used all eight methods in the book
4
SPEAKER_00
to advertise the book itself.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I could have just emailed my list and just done a presentation or just released it and I probably would have sold a lot of copies.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I wanted to use everything in the book to advertise the book to demonstrate that everything... Proof.
4
SPEAKER_00
Proof that everything that I do here works and that it ll work for them too if they just follow the steps in the book.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I purposely followed the scripts that I have in the book for making ads.
4
SPEAKER_00
I followed the scripts that we had for making content throughout the whole thing
4
SPEAKER_00
so that people could look back at my ads, they could look back at the content that I made and be like, he followed this to a T and resulted in a world record-breaking event.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so... How much did you spend on the ads to get the leads?
4
$275.
4
SPEAKER_00
$275.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Which is not for anybody s... That sounds like a lot of money, but for the context of how big of an event this is, it s nothing.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then how much did you pay out affiliates, which is another form of advertising?
4
SPEAKER_01
How much does that pay out, I guess?
4
SPEAKER_01
Zero.
4
SPEAKER_01
Zero?
4
SPEAKER_01
They got free stuff.
4
SPEAKER_01
How many people?
4
20,000?
4
SPEAKER_01
27,000 affiliates.
4
SPEAKER_01
They didn t get any commissions?
4
SPEAKER_01
Correct.
4
SPEAKER_01
On nothing?
4
SPEAKER_01
Really?
4
SPEAKER_01
Why did they promote it then?
4
SPEAKER_01
What was the leverage or the value add for them?
4
SPEAKER_00
I think it was goodwill.
4
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_00
And they also knew that the last book was good.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I ll give you the tactical piece of this is that most people require money to advertise to their audience because it s extracting goodwill to a degree.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so what I made, rather than saying, hey, the top 10 affiliates get Lamborghinis, which only benefits the affiliate, not their audience, I said, the top 10 affiliates, I ll do a live Q&A with your entire audience.
4
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so it benefits the audience to have the person who s promoting it win.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it doesn t extract any goodwill.
4
SPEAKER_00
In fact, it builds goodwill because he s like, hey, I ve got this amazing event.
4
SPEAKER_00
This book, I know Alex.
4
SPEAKER_00
I ve been following his stuff forever.
4
SPEAKER_00
It ll help you out.
4
SPEAKER_00
So go do this thing.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if we re in the top 10, we ll also get time with Alex and we can answer questions and do this stuff so it can apply to us.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s a win-win for everyone.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so trying to find, in my opinion, I talk about this in the book, the best way to use affiliates is to find a win-win-win, which is it wins for me, it wins for them, and it wins for their customers.
4
SPEAKER_00
Usually it s only two wins and one loss.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s how most people do affiliates is why they have to pay an arm and a leg in order to get them.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, a lot of times also they haven t built trust or goodwill with an audience before making an ask.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I spent two years doing hopefully nothing but providing value and everyone expected the launch event itself to be probably a pitch of some sort.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I tried to sprinkle that in because I wanted to build up the anticipation and the tension for the event.
4
SPEAKER_00
Um, but you know, upon the events, we had five.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the official count was we had 542,000 people who, uh, who registered for the event.
4
SPEAKER_00
We had 188,000 click to join live with us.
4
SPEAKER_00
Um, and it was, uh, it was wild, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
How many book sales in that first day?
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you know?
4
SPEAKER_00
We sold a hundred thousand in like 10 minutes or something.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s insane.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s incredible.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that was with no large bundles.
5
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that wasn t like, buy 100, get this.
5
SPEAKER_00
It was like one, two, or three, maybe.
5
SPEAKER_01
Three was the largest one that was incentivized.
5
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I just said, if you buy three, you get a hat.
5
SPEAKER_01
And the main reason that I did that was because the whole mission of acquisitions.com is to make real business education accessible to everyone.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so I was like, if you share my book with two friends, you ve earned this hat.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so this can t be bought, only earned.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so you earn it by giving it.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we had 50% of people.
5
SPEAKER_01
Who chose to get three?
5
SPEAKER_01
That s incredible in and so was there an upsell after that or how s the that was it?
5
SPEAKER_01
That was it Wow, I mean if I if I had wanted to make money, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
I would have been a very if it would have been a very different, you know I would have I would have structured things very differently.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but the objective of the event was to demonstrate that the concepts of this book work and
5
SPEAKER_01
And the objective of my last book was to show that making an amazing offer can grow the sales on its own.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that one I did zero advertising for, and it sold 500,000 copies.
5
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
5
SPEAKER_01
None.
5
SPEAKER_01
No paid ads, no event.
5
SPEAKER_01
I had 10,000 followers on Instagram when I posted that.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was before Alex Ramosi became Alex Ramosi.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was literally an internal SOP that Layla encouraged me to post as a book.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I said, fine.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I added stories in it to make it interesting for my team.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because I was like, if they don t read it, it s not going to matter.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I added stories in it, and I posted it as a book.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then it just continues to sell more month over month.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so that is the hope, obviously with this book too, is that you make the product so exceptional that you get that lean getter bucket of customer telling other customers and affiliates telling other people.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I think that the goal was, if I ask people to promote something and I say that it s going to be worth it, that I have to absolutely deliver on that so that next year or two years from now, if I say, hey, will you promote my next book?
5
SPEAKER_01
They ll do it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now, if I had gone and sold whatever, some coaching thing or something like that, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
That would have been the last time they would have promoted me.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because I would have been- For free.
5
SPEAKER_01
Right.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
I would have been siphoning their audience or whatever.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I wanted to just install even more goodwill at scale by doing something that hopefully would be memorable and that no one else would do.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so I made a huge pitching presentation to stack all the value that I gave with this book.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I price angered it at $12,000.
5
SPEAKER_01
Then I started-
5
SPEAKER_01
We started dropping down.
5
SPEAKER_01
Price dropping down.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then I was like, it s free.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then everyone, you know, it became a much more memorable event.
5
SPEAKER_00
The book was free or what was free?
5
SPEAKER_01
The book s free too.
5
SPEAKER_01
The book s free too.
5
SPEAKER_01
So the course is free.
5
SPEAKER_01
The book s free on my podcast.
5
SPEAKER_01
So on the game, I have, I actually also made my offers book free as well.
5
SPEAKER_01
Just because people are like Alex makes his money on the $2 that the book costs.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I just just to dispel the myths Offers and hundred million dollar leads are both on my podcast in sequence.
5
SPEAKER_01
You can just listen to them straight through But if you want it all together in a physical book, you gotta pay if you want to pay for it Yeah, I mean if you physical books cost money to print and ship so right right, but it was free on your podcast and we have to just and the course is on my site with no opt-in
5
SPEAKER_01
You don t even have to opt in for it.
5
SPEAKER_01
You can just have it.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so what I will say this, you might find this interesting, is that it s always the scariest thing in terms of giving.
5
SPEAKER_01
Giving is always scary, no matter how much you have, whatever it is.
5
SPEAKER_01
If you work really hard on something, there s a part of you that wants to monetize it, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
It s innate to us, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
You want to get something back.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so that s why it s so hard to delay gratification for such a long period of time.
5
SPEAKER_01
But it s also what will make you stand out in a marketplace of takers.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so, um, that was what I have consistently, I mean, I ve preached this message of just give, give, give, and you will be able to grow faster than you can imagine.
5
SPEAKER_01
And... the event was probably the largest demonstration of that that I could do.
5
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And what has now happened since then is, you know, we re number one in business on Spotify.
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We re, you know, we re 19 in all podcasts.
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Um, from doing that, we get, you know, 150,000 unique views a day on my site.
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Wow.
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Because the course is free.
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It s huge.
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And so people share it.
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And that s the thing.
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And people share the podcast because they got value from it.
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And they know that they, you know, it s a $20 book, I think on Audible, Audible fix the prices for that.
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But like it s, but because there s intrinsic value, people will share it.
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And I think it s, that s the thing is people give away free fluff that sucks because they would spend no time on it.
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And then people consume it, realize it s junk, and then associate that junk with the person.
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And then say, you have a junk brand because I ve associated you with the one thing that I ve consumed from you.
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And so despite the fact that your customers are only going to be 1% of the people that you ever advertise to or less, your reputation is made by the 99.
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SPEAKER_01
Wow.
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And so if you want to control the reputation that you have, then you need to give away more stuff.
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And in a world where trust is going to continually decrease and the amount of information and content is going to only increase with AI and things like that, I believe that personal brands and trust and authority are going to be increasingly important.
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I think that more companies will have celebrity partners.
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in order to gain trust because cost to acquire customers on paid ads has gone up 100% in a very short period of time.
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When you have CAC, so cost to acquire a customer, increasing at that rate, you have to have something that is going to counteract that, and that s what brand is.
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And so brand has never been more important than it is today, and I think will only increase in importance.
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And so this was a brand play.
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SPEAKER_01
That s incredible.
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SPEAKER_01
And so, yeah, we sold 190,000 copies so far in just... Oh, the first, what, week and a half, two weeks?
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Yeah, 10 days or 11 days, whatever it s been.
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SPEAKER_01
Wow, man.
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Yeah.
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190,000, that s crazy, man.
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Yeah.
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With no 1,000-pack bundles.
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SPEAKER_00
That s amazing.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
That s inspiring.
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SPEAKER_00
What are the...
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How many pieces of content do you put out a day on all social media platforms right now?
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We put 300 a week out.
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SPEAKER_00
300 a week.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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And if you could go back to two years ago when you only had 10,000 followers to now you have 5 million on all platforms in two years, what would you say to your younger self, two years younger, about the path to getting here?
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The honest truth, I wouldn t say anything because I wouldn t want to mess anything up.
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That s the real, real.
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Do you think you can get there by posting less?
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No, I think the volume, the volume is what, you know, quantity creates quality.
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Like you learn how to do things better by doing more of it.
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And so I ve wholeheartedly embraced that perspective when it comes to making content.
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But I do believe that it s not just like, because there are people who will post every single day and they get zero engagement, et cetera.
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You re not learning from it.
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Right.
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You need feedback.
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You still need feedback.
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You need to take the feedback from the market.
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And ideally, you can also have feedback from people who know more than you.
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And so you use those two feedback mechanisms, and the faster you can make that feedback loop, the faster you ll learn and change your behavior and get better.
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SPEAKER_01
And so you want to do tons of volume with tons of feedback, because quality is better than quantity, but you only get quality through quantity.
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SPEAKER_01
And the only thing better than that is quantity with quality.
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SPEAKER_00
Correct.
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SPEAKER_00
Then you really start to grow.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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And then you get wild in terms of all the different platform distribution.
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Yeah, it s been a super fun ride.
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I m very proud of the book.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s great, man.
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I know that there s nothing else that I could have done to make the book better at my current level, maybe in two years.
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Right.
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I might have been able to.
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I wrote it.
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I did 19 drafts.
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I had four full rewrites.
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I did six hours a day for two years.
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SPEAKER_01
That s great.
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SPEAKER_01
I work from 6 to noon every day.
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SPEAKER_01
On the book?
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On the book.
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Unless you were here doing an interview with me.
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SPEAKER_00
Of course.
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In the afternoons.
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My afternoons is when I do my meetings and take calls and do the remainder of my actual job.
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Right.
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The only thing that I would add to this conversation right here, I m sure there s a lot more, but the thing that s popping out for me is,
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People could hear that and say, okay, you could keep working on this for another two more years until it s perfect.
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Because you said, I like what you said is you put it out at the current level that you re at.
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You couldn t have done anything else.
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The way you re at right now, maybe in two to four years, you would have been like, ah, I could have changed this a little bit.
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SPEAKER_00
I think a lot of people get hung up on that.
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They wait, wait, wait, wait.
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That s not ready yet.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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And this isn t ready for yourself.
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10 years from now, right?
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It s not as good as it could be in 10 years writing it, but it is as good at where it is right now for your current self.
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And I think people need to learn how to also ship quality with what they can do it now and not just wait forever.
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I think a lot of people hide under the guise of perfectionism when it s really just laziness and fear.
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So the reality is they re like, it s not ready yet, but they re working on it three hours a week.
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They re not going all in obsessing about it.
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No.
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So I mean, like, I think the whole, like, it s tension between two extremes, right?
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You ve got the MVP, which means minimum viable product, ship it as fast as you can.
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If you are proud of your first product, it sucks, right?
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And on the other hand, you have, you know, Apple that ships a new product every like three years or, you know, and they really only have four products and built a $3 trillion company.
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So where on this continuum do you lie?
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And I think it s learning the rights... It s honestly probably matching your personality to the work that you do, but regardless, work has to be done.
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I can say this, it s like, if you work on something for six hours a day, every single day, and you truly work on it, when I say work, I mean like you set a timer, and when you step away or you look at your phone, you stop the timer.
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When you use six hours of actual work on something every single day, you will know the things that you could do to make it better.
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And if you do all of those things, and the difference is, is being very clear on the problem definition.
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So that s, okay, so this might round out this whole conversation.
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You have to be really clear about the problem that the product
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if we re talking about making a product, is supposed to solve.
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And so I could then, of course, write a whole book on sales, and I could write a whole book on monetization.
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So then the scope would then change.
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So you have to be ruthless with the problem definition of the scope of whatever thing that you re trying to solve is.
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But then within that very narrow line is this everything I can do in this tiny little sliver.
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If it s everything that I can do, then you can chip it.
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And so I think you re not going to create the everything solution.
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You re not going to create HubSpot CRM when you re a coder in your basement.
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But you can probably create an autoresponder that works exceptionally well.
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And so do that.
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Just do that.
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Don t add the other.
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Just make that.
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One of my favorite stories about product iteration was Dragon Dictation.
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Do you know Dragon?
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Way back in the day, like 90s.
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And so you got a headset and you would talk and it would type.
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And this was like a CD, the whole thing.
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I remember this now.
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And they got lauded, praised by like Tech Magazine or Crunch or whatever it is for Dragon 2.0.
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And in Dragon 2.0, they literally added zero new features.
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They just made it work better.
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And I think that is like the spirit of true product innovation is that a lot of people think they need more bells and whistles, but if you just fulfilled the first promise that you made and really did it and did it better, then you can make 10 times more money by doing something twice as well.
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Because it s just how much better, like if I said- It s more efficient, yeah.
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If I said, I can get you customers, I don t need to also hire your staff.
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If I can just do that,
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I fulfilled my promise and this book specifically only sits between somebody who doesn t know you exist and someone says they re interested in what you have to sell.
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That s it.
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As soon as someone says, I would like to find out more, that book is done.
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SPEAKER_00
Everything in that 280 pages is to get you from, I don t know who you are, to I m interested to find out more.
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SPEAKER_00
I would like to consider buying your stuff, which is why the sub-headline is, how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff, not to get them to buy your stuff.
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To buy your stuff is sales.
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Yeah, and that s the third book.
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Stay tuned for that.
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Uh, they can get the book for free on your podcast.
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You ve got a course on your site, acquisitions.com, acquisition.com.
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They can follow you everywhere.
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Hormozy.
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If you love hard copies, you can go to shop.acquisition.com and grab a hard copy.
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SPEAKER_00
I would get this.
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SPEAKER_00
Get a few copies for sure.
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SPEAKER_00
Um, uh.
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SPEAKER_00
It s pretty, right?
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SPEAKER_02
Where can they get the hard copy?
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SPEAKER_02
It s on Amazon, too.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s on Amazon.
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SPEAKER_00
I think paperbacks are on Amazon.
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SPEAKER_00
If you like hardbacks, I have them at shop.acquisition.com.
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SPEAKER_00
Shop.acquisition.com.
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SPEAKER_00
I m sure if you just go to the site, you ll see.
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That s where I make all my money.
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SPEAKER_00
All your $2.99 in books.
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SPEAKER_02
Exactly.
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If people are business owners that are looking to be a part of your portfolio, I m sure they can go to acquisition.com and they can learn more and apply and see what s going on there.
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In business owners, it s just for absolute clarity.
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It s really like if you re doing $2 million or more in profit.
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And we have actually narrowed our focus a little bit more to brick and mortar chains.
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So we ve just crushed all the brick and mortar chains that we have invested in.
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And so we are at least for temporary.
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That s also what you know best of.
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You did brick and mortar.
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So you re speaking into it.
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We did gyms, physical location.
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We ve done photography studios.
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We did teeth whitening.
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If you have a health or a beauty, I call them body services, anything like that.
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SPEAKER_00
Tanning salon.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
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SPEAKER_00
Nail salon.
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SPEAKER_00
Tattoo removal, laser skin, hair removal, that kind of stuff.
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SPEAKER_00
That is our jam.
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SPEAKER_02
There you go.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that is our jam.
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They ll reach out to you.
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They can message you.
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They can go on acquisition.com.
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Get a few copies of the book.
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I think this is really inspiring.
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I love this stuff.
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I ve been doing a lot of this for the last 10, 15 years on myself.
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And I went through this, and I was like, oh, there s actually some stuff that I can really start to apply even better.
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Even though I ve mastered to a certain level, there s so many different things that I was pulling out from it.
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I was like, OK, cool.
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I can steal like an artist.
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here, here, here, here.
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Control X. Yeah, I was like, this is really smart.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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So, um, it doesn t matter if you re a beginner or if you re, you know, got a big business, you re going to learn something from this and make sure to get a few copies.
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Give them to friends.
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SPEAKER_02
Uh, I can t wait for the next one.
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SPEAKER_02
I can t wait to have you back on in the, in the future soon.
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SPEAKER_02
Grateful for you, Alex.
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Thank you for being here.
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Is there anything else you want to add before we wrap up?
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You guys are savages.
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SPEAKER_00
I appreciate you all.
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SPEAKER_00
And, uh, man, I was about to curse.
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I hope today s episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness.
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Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today s show with all the important links.
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And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on apple podcast.
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If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend.
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Leave us a review over on Apple podcast and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels at Lewis Howes.
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I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better.
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SPEAKER_01
And if you want more inspiration from our world-class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness Newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.
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And if no one has told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
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And now it s time to go out there and do something great.