My companies did over $250 million in revenue last year.
I broke a Guinness World Record for the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time.
I did $106 million in sales in under three days.
My mother also died last year.
And I wanna compress everything that I learned this last year into this video for you.
For eight years I've had the habit of texting myself lessons as they came up, so I wouldn't forget them.
And every year I make one video like this.
And every year it is my most listened to podcast that I have.
And so this is 2025 Lessons in Failures.
The first is that fear exists in the vague.
And so, if you're afraid to take the risk, write it down in excruciating detail where you're actually afraid of having happened.
Like really step by step, what happens next when you fail?
You'll often find it's not that bad when you spell it out.
Because it only exists when it's hazy, not when it's crisp.
Because when you actually play it out, okay, maybe you do go back home.
And what does going back home really mean?
It means that you go back in your old room, or maybe you sleep on a couch, or maybe you sleep on a friend's couch.
And so besides, the rules that you believe other people have on your life, that you think you're breaking, That is all made up.
Because they don't really care that much.
Because no one really cares that much about anyone besides themselves.
It's all make-believe.
And I think that when you get as specific as humanly possible but like oh, I don't want to post this content,
What?
Because you're afraid that some unnamed account or some named account will write words on a screen that you'll read.
That will make your feelings go wah.
Like that is what will stop you from achieving your goal.
Having a stranger tell you to fuck off because you reached out is the reason.
That's it.
Like you're like, I didn't achieve my goals because I was afraid that somebody I don't know would tell me that I suck.
When you say it like that, you're like, shit.
Now let's say a different version.
I didn't achieve my potential.
I never pursued any of my goals because someone I know.
I was afraid that they would say that they didn't approve of my behavior anymore.
Maybe you shouldn't, A, care what they think, or B, have them in your life.
And so when I decided to launch this book, 100 Million Money Models, the goal was to do 100 million in the weekend.
And I made that goal public within the company so everybody knew.
And one of the people on my team said, well, what if we don't hit it?
And I remember almost being like disgusted.
Like that was like my physical reaction to when that person said that.
And I remember just looking at him and I was like, dare greatly, motherfucker.
Like, what's the point?
Like if we fuck up, we die trying.
You know what I mean?
Like, so what?
Like we're gonna still fight like hell to try and make it happen.
And so the fact that he asked that really just made me think like what does he think i'm afraid of if i, if i said, hey guys, we're gonna hit, we're gonna try 100 million, we hit 80 or we hit 70, whatever.
I'm like okay, boo hoo, we made a bunch of money, we got a ton of people books in their hands that can help them.
What are we gonna do?
We'll try again next year.
Like well, what if people don't take you seriously?
I don't think people are gonna not take me seriously, Because people will take you as serious as you take yourself.
And if you are serious about your goals and your commitment to those goals, people can visibly observe.
There is no one that will fault you for daring greatly.
Period.
And anyone who does, doesn't matter.
And one of my favorite quotes like man, it's probably like a top 10 quote for me all time which I have a lot of quotes is from Marcus Aurelius.
He said, what are you so afraid of losing when nothing in this world belongs to you?
And so it's like, we're here on borrowed time to acquire borrowed assets and borrowed resources.
And at the end of the game you're just gonna push your chips to the middle and somebody else is gonna take your chair.
That's it, out of coins.
And so it's like, we're just in the game.
Like we're just here, we're renting, we're leasers, right?
None of this is permanent.
And so the idea that we'd fear some permanent outcome from an impermanent existence.
The longer I've been in the game, the more disgusted I am by that feeling and by someone questioning that.
And so I share that with you, because when that young man said that to me, it was just a great reminder of like we ended up hitting the 100 million.
We did 106.
But you have to believe on some level that you can hit it.
And you also have to believe even more that you will die trying.
And I think that your commitment has to be to the effort that you're willing to put forth and completely divorced of the outcome.
I believe that we could hit it because all the math made sense.
But could I ultimately control whether ads got delivered or an account gets shut down, or the internet doesn't work or there's a storm that day and all the power generators?
Of course, there's things that could happen.
So in no way, I just wanna make sure that I put 100% effort on all the things that I can control.
And then after that you roll the fucking dice and you stack as many chips as you can in your favor, And then after that you let the cards fall where they will.
And so that was a very big reminder for me this year was that, like nothing great was ever accomplished by someone who was afraid to try because of what they thought other people would think or say about them.
So that was number one.
The second one is that I feel like the longer that I've been in this game, the more I feel like mental toughness matters more than motivation.
And so mental toughness comes down to four things which obviously, when my mother died, I had to think through like how am I going to respond to this obviously negative event in my life?
And she died all of a sudden.
No one thought it was going to happen.
It was just very fast.
Which in some ways I can be very grateful for.
She didn't have a long suffering period.
And so there are four things that I think happen when any negative event occurs.
Something against your preferences.
Something bad.
Is that.
The first level is how much bad stuff can happen before you force it to change the way you live.
The second component is okay, something rattles you enough that you start, you change the way you behave.
Once you change the way you behave basically, how upset do you get, how low do you go?
Somebody who's more mentally tough would take longer to get upset.
And then, if they do get, do get upset, they do snap.
They only change their behavior a tiny bit, that's it.
So they're not like oh, i'm gonna go start taking heroin and i'm gonna go cheat on my wife and i'm gonna go, you know, drive drunk.
They're like I might have some ice cream tonight right,
And then, once they're on that negative path, the next level of our element of mental toughness is how fast do you come back, which is resiliency.
How fast do you rebound back to where you were?
Are you somebody who you know?
Someone says a crossword to you, old school cross something mean to you and then you let it bother you for a week.
You let it bother you for two weeks a month before you rebound.
Even if it was a small thing and a small change of behavior.
If you have low resiliency, it just takes you a long time to get to baseline.
And then the fourth element is when you do rebound, How much do you rebound?
Do you just rebound below where you were?
By the way, that's a traumatic event.
It permanently changed you, your behavior.
Do you get back to baseline, so it didn't permanently change you, was not traumatic?
Or you go above baseline, you adapt, you're better than you were before the bad thing happened which, by the way, also traumatizes you.
Because, for those of you who hear this all over social media, translate the word trauma into a permanent change in behavior from an aversive bad, stimulus thing that happened.
So trauma means that you just change you permanently, change the way you act when something bad happens.
Is there a world where you can change how you act permanently, where you behave better than you did before?
Yeah, many of you, many humans not the current generation, let's say a generation or two back were traumatized by your parents many times.
Sometimes with a belt, sometimes with a hanger, sometimes with a spoon, sometimes with a hand, sometimes with a shoe or a slipper, sometimes with your head.
Who knows?
The point is is that you did something, you got smacked and then you permanently stopped doing that?
They traumatized you.
Was trauma bad in that situation?
No.
It's only bad if it permanently changes your behavior in a way that is against the type of person that you wanna be or the types of behaviors that you prefer to act in or do.
And so when I thought about those things and I was forced this year to actually define what is mental toughness people throw this out a lot
How can I measure this?
And then if I can measure it, then it means that I can improve it.
And so when someone says hey man, toughen up or get mentally tougher, now at least you have four variables that you can think of in your mind.
I want to take longer for something to change the way I act.
If it does change the way I act, I want it to change it as little as possible.
And if I notice that my behavior has changed, I want to rebound as quickly as I can as soon as I notice that it changes.
And then not only that, I want to be better for it, not worse.
And then that's what happens.
And the shift that occurs is that life starts happening faster. for you, not to you.
You become the victor of your circumstances rather than the victim.
You become the person who's in the driver's seat.
And the reason that so many people are aversive to that concept is because it is so much easier to cast blame outwards.
Your power follows the direction of where you point blame.
So if you say I'm this way because my mom didn't hug me enough, I'm this way because my dad didn't hug me enough, then guess who actually has complete control over your life.
Them, or your perception of them.
But if you said I am this way because I am not resilient enough, I was not adaptive enough, I was not.
I didn't have enough tolerance to be able to handle that level of stress.
Well, then guess what you can now do?
You can do something about it because you admitted at least you were in charge.
You were the one in control or you have some control, some influence over the outcome of how you act.
And so defining this was really helpful for me.
Obviously, going through my mother's my mother's death and accident and thinking like, What kind of man do I want to be?
How do I want to show up to my family?
How do I want to be there for everyone else who's going to be at this funeral extended family, the people from my mom's church who are going to be there?
How do I want to present myself?
And to be clear, I'm not saying that you shouldn't suffer, that you shouldn't mourn.
I think that people mourn in 100% unique ways that are entirely of their own.
And for anybody to say that you somehow think someone should mourn the way you think they should mourn, fuck you.
Real talk.
People can mourn however they want to mourn.
And your choices in those harder times can serve as evidence of the type of person that you want to be, so that when hard times come again you can look back and say I know I can get through this because I got through that.
And then it becomes the stack of undeniable proof that you're not just saying you are this way.
You can prove that you are this way.
And it's not that you do this to the external world, because the external world doesn't give shit and they're not taking track anyways, but it's for you, because you're the one with the tally marks.
You're the one who's got the scars to show for it.
You're the one who gets to say, I know I can get through this because I have been through worse.
And what's really interesting that I'll share is that the younger you are, in my opinion, the harder life is, because you have the same hard things that occur to you.
10 out of 10 bad thing is a 10 out of 10 bad thing.
Maybe your 10 out of 10 is different than somebody else's, but everyone has a maxed out pain scale.
The difference is that when you're younger, you don't have the tools to protect yourself, you don't have the tools to respond and you don't know how to make sense of the world.
Yet
And so, no matter what you go through now as an adult, I always think to myself there is something for sure that I went through when I was younger that was harder than this.
And every time I look for it, I find it.
And it reminds me that one, this too shall pass.
And two, I'm still fucking here.
And so this year had a lot of hardship, not just my mother's death, but it served as a reminder of the things that I can put in my backpack, on my checklist of things that I can say I have also survived this.
So the third thing that I wrote down for myself was record breaking outcomes.
Take record breaking work.
And so, when I was kind of in the thick of preparing for the book launch, this launch, the Guinness World Record breaking, launch right.
The guy who owned the record before that.
Prince Harry had almost doubled the guy who owned the record before that, which is President Obama, right.
So Obama was at 800 something thousand, Prince Harry was at 1.4 million.
And I'm thinking, these guys have tremendous resources at their advantage.
And they wanted to have tons of book sales and show that they had lots of people who love them and all that stuff.
And I was like, how am I gonna try and outsell these monarchs, literally?
Right.
And it's like, well, what are the things that are controllable?
Is the work that we put into it?
And I was like, well, I don't know how hard Prince Harry works.
I have no idea.
I've never met him.
But I was like I know that I can work for years on something without anyone knowing about it before revealing it.
And I think about it a lot like the Olympics.
So people will train for four years to have 10 seconds where the world sees them.
And what's interesting is that people see those 10 seconds and assume okay, 10 seconds when they ran, maybe it's you know 100 times that for how much they worked.
It's just not really fathomable for somebody who doesn't even know how to work long and hard to think about how much effort that really takes.
And so when I was in the thick of it, I just kept thinking to myself like man, this is so much work.
And then I thought to myself like, yeah, no one has ever done this before.
So no one has ever done this before.
Of course it will take that much work.
Did I expect to do something that no one had ever done before, with a level of effort that had been repeated many, many times?
Of course not.
The amount of times I had to double check.
Every single email flow from.
Every single potential combination is 400 pages of copy.
There was more copy written just in the emails than words in the book.
And then every single VSL, so video sales letter.
I had six of them, every single one of them painstakingly crafted, where I have to say I gotta get it shorter, I gotta get it shorter, but I have to stuff more in here, I gotta get it shorter.
How can I put more visuals?
How can I put more narrative in it?
How can I minimize the downside?
How can I express more of the upside potential of this particular thing?
And then as I was creating the slides, right, for the webinar.
I wrote out every single word first and then went through multiple passes of editing.
And then after editing the actual words, every single word that was said was prepared.
And then those words had to get on the slides.
How many?
1,700 slides.
How much AI was used in the making of those slides?
Zero.
Me, because as of right now, there's nothing that makes slides like me, as of yet.
Maybe there will be.
Currently, it doesn't.
Not the style I like.
And so I'm there pasting these things like, holy shit.
And then I was like, OK, well, I also have to have a visual on every single slide.
I did use AI for the visuals.
But I had to go through that.
And you're like 300 slides in and you're like, oh, my God, this was two days.
And you're like, I have another 1,400 slides to make.
And that's just for the webinar.
That's just for the first part of day one.
And then I've got the prep that I have to do for every one of the interviews.
And then I got to talk to every one of those guys and tell them what I'm going to say.
And then make sure that I can steer the conversation in a way that's interesting to the audience.
And then also still promotes the book and the other stuff.
And so with each of these things, and even when I had the playbooks, right?
When I explained those, I practiced being able to walk, say the slide, and position the props at the same time.
You think, oh, well, that just looked normal.
It's like I had to do it 50 times, 100 times, so that I knew that when the screen would come on, I would reverse order.
So I'd put the letter in my pocket, I'd take my hat from underneath my arm, I'd pull it back up and then I would say business owners moneymakers, ballers I can't remember what it was, I made this for you.
And then I'll transition to the second part, right?
And so at every single one of these points, I had to practice all of it over and over again.
And I was just like, I just kept thinking, I was like, no one will do this.
I was like, no one will do this.
And the reality is that you will not get credit for the work you do.
We have this desire at least I do, maybe on some level that I want someone to stand next to me when I'm working and just be like great job.
Great job today, Alex.
You worked super hard.
No, you don't get that.
Like you have to be that person.
And so it comes down to it.
And I say this a lot, but it's because it's like it's what gets me through this is I always ask myself I'm like, what kind of man do I want to be?
And so when I'm in that, I'm like, am I the man who will cut the corner?
And I'm like, no, I'm going to fucking do it right.
And it's like, right.
Get back to it.
That's it.
There's no parade.
There's no applause.
There's no confetti.
It's like the work needs doing.
And it's either me or somebody else.
And this was a project of love.
I was like, this is something that I had worked.
I mean, the first, all three of my books were actually written at once.
So you want to talk about a long-term plan.
I began writing these four plus years ago and it was one Mondo book.
And then I thought wouldn't it be amazing if I could culminate the 100 million series with a 100 million launch?
But each of the three books had to represent what the concept of the book was about.
And so I've had this waiting for four years before I could share it.
And so I think, like telling yourself in your mind the story that you're going to be able to someday tell when you're going through the Rocky cut scene, allows you to take the licks that you're gonna take during that period where no one is watching.
Because the winning always happens when you're alone.
People only get to see it when you demonstrate it.
But the demonstration, the 10 second race, the one fight the me getting on stage and doing the presentation.
That is a microcosm of what it actually takes.
And it is one of those unfortunate things that no one will ever be able to observe it, because the amount of time it would take to observe it would be the amount of time it took to do it.
And unless someone else is going to wait for four years just to see that, you just have to guess.
And so no one will ever know how hard you worked and no one will ever care.
And so you have to create another game or another story that allows you to succeed even when no one else cares, which is why you have to be the one who cheers for you when no one else is watching.
Just know that no one will understand, and that's okay, because you know and you're the only person whose respect you need to earn.
And you're also the hardest person's respect to earn because you know when you're bullshitting you.
And so this is also me talking to the winners right now.
You being the best one in your state, the best one in your high school, the best one in your company, in your division, in your apartment.
That's a low bar.
I can't remember where this quote is, but I think Leonardo da Vinci said this actually.
I think he said something to the degree of like the curse of the winner is not that he aims too high and misses, but that he shoots too low and he achieves his goal.
And I think that you can't have your own respect if you know that you left some in the tank, which is why going bigger and asking yourself am I capable of this is the only way that you can ever truly see.
And you can only do that if you're willing to fail.
And real quick.
I spent 200 hours this year just making this one project for you, which is the 100 million scaling roadmap.
And I broke up the stages of business into 10 stages.
And you can identify where you're at by simply just putting in your business information.
You go to acquisitioncom forward slash roadmap and it'll spit out this custom report that tells you what the constraints are at that current level and what you need to do to graduate and get to the next level.
This is our gift to you, absolutely free.
On the thank you page, you can book a call with our team and we'd love to help you figure that out and ideally, get past it.
So, number four, you have to take care of people who work in your company's personal life so that they can succeed in their professional life.
So I'll tell you how this manifests in reality.
The biggest one is if someone's spouse or significant other is not a fan or supportive of the job or the work that they have, they will never achieve their potential.
And it's sad, it's unfortunate and it may be controversial for some of you, but I have yet to see it.
If you have a spouse or a significant other, somebody you live with someone who's like your other person, and even if they're neutral, you will not achieve your potential.
Honestly, I don't even think close, not even close to your potential, because I think at least I'll just speak for men.
Being good on the home front allows you to have full access to your brain so that you can go after the hunt right.
If you're worried about what's happening at home because you know that when you come back there's gonna be bitching and moaning or like why are you working?
Oh, it's just, it's always another tough season.
It's always gonna be busy.
If you have that in the back of your mind or in your ear, it's like you start pulling your punches.
You start cutting out early.
You start avoiding taking on the bigger projects to take the slightly smaller project.
You don't set the bigger goal because you know the effort that it's gonna take to hit it.
And so you just say, well, this is an adequate goal.
And I wanna be clear, nothing wrong with that if you don't wanna see how far you can go.
And not everyone does, and that's fine.
But when I think about the people in this organization, I have taken more and more attention to making sure that their personal lives are supportive.
Their environment is conducive to them doing the best work they possibly can.
Because I want people to be able to do their life's work at Equalization.com.
Think about the record I just talked about.
When someone is 85 years old and looking back on their life, there are very few moments that you actually remember, right?
Like you don't remember the vast majority of life.
You just have a couple moments that spit out.
Like when you get.
I'm sure when you're much older you might only remember like one moment from a year.
Think how crazy that is, right?
And so I got to say truthfully to the team When you're looking back on this part of your life, you will be able to say that you made history.
And there's not that many days that you get to do that.
And so making history, though, only happens when you've got every single thing aligned and luck.
And so to think, to be arrogant enough to believe that you're going to overcome your conditions that you've set up for yourself, and that you've got somebody who's not supportive versus somebody who does.
Good luck.
But that was just, it was a big lesson for me.
And then I'm paying attention to that from a team perspective of who's got supportive environments at home, who's got supportive spouses, and is there ways that I can help them get the support of their spouse so that I can unlock their discretionary effort towards the goal?
And I will say that making sure that if you do have super hard workers in your team, hard workers will run themselves into the ground when the goal is big enough.
And so they will usually look to you to see when to rest.
And so you have to be willing to be like, take the day dude, take the weekend, unplug.
And then usually I've just seen this is me personally saying this I think that when they see it from above, or see it from the person who they're quote, rolling into or responsible for, or getting managed by getting led by, they can actually unplug for a couple of days.
Cause they're like, hey, He asked me to chill out, I'm gonna chill out, right?
And I think that it's your responsibility to have a gauge on where people are getting close to cracking and doling those out.
Number five, think for yourself or the world will think for you.
So this is what I thought a lot about, which is to be unique, you need to have high agency.
And so agency is essentially being able to reason for yourself from the things that you can observe or have observed.
And so, at the lowest levels, it's being able to say that you like a person, a show, a movie that most people don't like.
It's thinking for yourself.
Most people and here's where it gets really interesting most people pick their identities off the shelf right.
They come with pre-canned beliefs.
They have a set of apparel that they wear that's the fashion of this guy.
Oh, I'm a hipster, which means I have to have gauges.
I have to have one of those beanie hats that's a small thing.
I wear black combat boots, you know, black thing for the chain, whatever, because I'm a hipster.
And all my beliefs are going to be what hipsters believe.
And or I'm a redneck.
And so I'm going to have flannel and I'm going to wear a trucker hat and I'm going to have jeans and I'm going to have super conservative views on X, Y and Z and whatever.
I'm going to live in the country and I want a ranch.
All right.
There's nothing wrong with doing that.
It's just that most of the time, when you pick your belief set and you pick your personality off the shelf, the reason that you do that is because you didn't actually reason for yourself.
Meaning there's probably not 100% of hipster worldviews that you agree with.
There's not 100% of redneck worldviews that you believe in if that's you, right?
And so, if you actively think about all the components of your life, which is like what shoes will I wear?
Why do I pick these shoes?
What makes a good shoe for me?
Why do I wear these shorts?
What makes a good short for me?
Why do I wear this shirt?
As silly as that may sound, you choose every single component of your life and you either choose to live it by default or live it deliberately.
And the people that are interesting typically have multiple components that they reasoned for themselves that get put into one box.
And so then when people see them, they double take because they're like wait a second, these pieces don't go together.
And what does that do?
It makes you interested.
And so let's say that you have the body of a meathead and you dress like a redneck, but you quote ancient philosophers and you're also extraordinarily wealthy.
That's weird.
Right?
That's odd.
And so if that's you, then you will probably attract attention.
And so a lot of people want to live a unique life, but they take all their decisions from pre-canned boxes off the shelf, out of the box.
And so I think that asking yourself, what do I want?
And does this thing help me get it?
Are the questions that begin to lead down the path of agency.
Because if you approach every component of your life with that lens, you'll often find that the things that you took off the shelf don't the politics you vote for, the people that you, the sports teams that you root for, all of this stuff that you've built your life around not at all.
And so having high agency is higher cost in the short term, because you actually have to make these decisions and also suffer the rejection of decisions that other people who might all dress like hipster not agree with because you didn't take the same belief out of the box or off the shelf as they did.
But it's lower cost long-term because you don't find yourself 10 years down the road wondering how you got here.
How did I marry this person?
How did I start this business?
Why am I dressed this way?
Do I even care about this stuff?
Why do I vote like that?
You got here because you never questioned your decisions and just went with the flow.
You went with what everyone else was doing.
But everyone else is unhappy, mediocre, overweight, in debt, and divorced.
Why would you be like them?
And so the only way out is by turning in words and saying what do i want and does this thing help me get it?
And if the conclusion that you come to is different than everyone else's great, because you don't want to be like them.
So you should hope to find discrepancies between what you decide and what other people decide, because it means you have begun the path of thinking for yourself.
Maybe you like a movie that your friends don't like, instead of saying, i mean, it's okay, Don't hold back.
Be like, I think it's a great movie.
They're like, well, you're an idiot.
You're like, okay, I like that show.
That show's trash.
Okay, don't watch it.
That's it, right?
Oh, why do you wear such lame shoes?
Why do you wear jean shorts?
Alex, why did you wear the little sandals for two years that I wore that were really weird?
Because at the time, those shoes served what I wanted.
I wanted, because I was at the beach a lot, because Layla and I were traveling.
And so I was like, I wanted somebody to go to the gym.
I want somebody to go to the pool.
I want somebody to go to the beach.
I want somebody that can climb.
I want somebody to go to a restaurant.
That's why I was close to it.
Close to her shoes.
It gets me everything I want.
Great.
Alex, it doesn't look cool.
To who?
Who does that look not cool to?
Girls?
I'm married.
I don't give a shit.
Who does that not look cool to?
Guys?
Why do I care what they think?
Right?
I don't even know how to say it any different.
Like, why would I care about any of that?
They're not walking in my shoes, quite literally.
These are comfortable.
And if you don't like them, wear whatever shoes you want, right?
And so I think that when and this actually has a tie into marketing, which I think is important which is like, if you want to make content, you want to build a brand of some kind, the brand has to get built from the bottom up.
You have to reason from that perspective.
What do I want?
Does this help me get it?
And when you think that way, you'll actually be able to build a unique brand, because no one will have the same exact life experience as you.
And when you do that, that is what creates the unique combination, and you'll be able to defend why you believe what you believe.
Because if you cannot explain why you believe what you believe, you believe what someone else told you to believe and you never questioned it.
Number six, a hard conversation upfront can save you millions of dollars and years of life.
So Rockefeller said this which is a friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.
So the big thing here is I used to say, I used to hear people say I only can do business with people via Handshake.
And people that I just met when I was really young were like oh, if we have to draw a contract, I don't want to do a deal.
And I was pressured into doing handshake deals when I was younger with people that were quote more experienced, because I didn't want to seem, you know, disintegrous or unintegrous right.
A dishonest person.
Oh, I need a contract.
And then I just realized they were complete scoundrels and full of shit.
And so then I went the other extreme, which was like everything has to be in contracts, which I think, by and large, would serve you really well for anybody who's starting out your first 10 years in business.
If you do 10 years of business with someone, you will be able to get to the point where you can have handshake agreements, but you do not extend trust to someone who has not earned it.
And I think that there's different levels of this.
If an employee comes to the business, of course, like you have to extend trust, right?
But if we're talking a business partnership, well then like we should have a track record here.
We should have a large data set of behavior that I can look at in different circumstances where I know that you will behave in this way.
And so, for me, trust is believing that the person will act in ways that are similar to the way they have continued to act in the past.
Right,
They're consistent.
And I want to be real with you for a second.
So I said this year was a tough year.
I had eight lawsuits this year.
Right.
And most of them were at the very beginning of the year.
And I dealt with almost all of them.
And here's the part that people won't tell you.
All my lawsuits have been with people who are friends of mine or friendly, and if you're like huh well, I can't believe that he would get in arguments over his friend.
What do you think divorces are right?
Like we humans think that we're somehow immune of like.
No, I'm really cool with this guy.
We're best friends.
I don't think we're ever gonna get in an argument.
Okay, well, consider this.
People who sleep with each other for extended periods of time make life commitments to each other.
Half the time end it.
So if you think the most important relationship in your life, where you're sharing everything with this person you're committing to forever, half the time it ends maybe, just maybe, write down a fucking contract.
And the reason that I honestly had a lot of these lawsuits is because and the thing is is it takes years for these things to come due right.
Like you have a business thing that was six years ago and then the thing finally really starts to make money and then you have a conflict right, and so you have to deal with all the uncomfortable stuff up front.
And i just so strongly encourage you to like those contracts.
I avoided hard conversations and was like i will figure it out when it gets to that, and we both didn't want to talk about those things.
We didn't want to, we didn't want to mess up the friendship.
It's like bro, if you think you can't have a hard conversation when there's no money on the line, just just assume that you will be in a lawsuit for many years.
Just assume it.
And if you're not willing to have that hard conversation up front and you willingly will go into having multiple years of lawsuits on the back end, then you deserve it.
And it's so avoidable and it's likely that it's not going to work out, because one or both of you can't have hard conversations, which is required for success.
And so I unfortunately have the scars for this one.
The contracts that I've done in the last couple of years are significantly better than the ones that I did six, seven years ago.
But those are the ones that are coming due now.
And so the time that you should have great agreements was 20 years ago.
The second best time is today.
Just start with the frame of like hey, I want everything in writing, just so we have no misunderstanding.
So there's no unspoken expectations.
Because the last thing in the world that I would want is that I would disappoint you because you expect me to do something that I was unwilling to do or that I didn't know you wanted me to do.
And so you can approach from that perspective, and then you just have to say hey, what happens if you don't wanna be a partner with me anymore?
What happens if I don't wanna be a partner with you anymore?
What happens if you die?
What happens if I die, right?
What happens if we disagree on where we're gonna put the money, right?
What happens if we disagree if we're gonna sell?
These are all things that you have to talk about.
And so you either do it now, when there's low stakes, or you do it at the end, when you both have high stakes.
And I can promise you it's much better when there's low stakes.
So it's a really cool concept.
I think Charan said this and I really like it.
He said you can see what level of friend you have by... the things that you talk about with them.
So he had five levels of friends.
I really love this.
And I would use this as a litmus test for thinking through the quality of the friendships that you have in your life.
The lowest level of friend is someone that you can only talk about the past with.
Oh, the good times we used to have.
Oh, I remember high school.
Past, right?
The next level friend is somebody you just talk about other people with.
Oh, how's so-and-so doing?
Let's talk about that person.
Let's talk about that person.
AKA kind of gossiping, but that's what it is.
Level two.
Level three friend is someone that you can talk about ideas with.
Oh, wouldn't it be cool if... Oh, isn't it amazing?
You can dream, right?
Ideas, concepts.
The fourth level of friend is somebody you can do stuff with.
You can talk to those ideas and actually execute.
You can take action.
You can do things together, etc.
Fourth.
And then fifth is friends that you can make, lose, and spend money with.
And I believe that because...
For whatever reason, money is just one of those subjects that I think it just shows how I mean.
It shows how someone behaves around a reinforcer and what someone values.
It just kind of cuts through the crap of everything.
And so like Sharon, for example, is our president.
Sharon and I have done deals together for like five plus years.
And we really started almost as to use the Rockefeller quote.
Like we are a friendship founded on business.
And it has worked out great compared to most of the businesses I founded on friendship.
And so we've just done lots and lots of deals together.
We've had ups, we've had downs, we've made big calls.
And I just have seen him in all the ups and downs of those years.
And he's seen me and we've been like, let's do more stuff together because it's so rare.
And so at this point, could I have a handshake agreement with Sharon?
Yes, totally.
And we do have them on lots of different deals.
On the really big stuff, we still write it out.
Why?
Just so we're on this literally the same page.
And so I was just reminded of that this year.
I'd be remiss to not say what I learned from the eight lawsuits that I got in this year.
Those are my big takeaways is that know what level of friends you're with.
Make sure that you put everything in writing and you want to front load the discomfort.
Number seven, do more than what is required.
So I said this was a legal year.
And so part of this was looking into compliance and other things that are kind of risks for any businesses as you get over a certain size.
Because the bigger you are, the bigger the target that's on your back.
And so if you wish for success, you also wish for the pains that come with success.
And as much as many people want to say like ah, champagne problems or rich people problems, they are problems nonetheless.
And I promise you they are still painful.
And so I would say you want to go above and beyond.
So what's interesting is you also want to become educated, right?
Ignorance is not defense.
Real.
If you don't know a law exists, it does not exclude you from the consequences of it.
And so in realizing that You have to be proactive in learning the laws of everything that applies to you, which is there are a lot of them.
And now with AI, they can summarize some of these things.
But like I almost I got like a law degree this year on public private.
I just had a lot of law that I had to go through.
And what I will say is that, as much as people might, you know poo, poo it.
I think by and large most laws are written with one good intent and two, when you really follow the letter of the law, it kind of makes sense.
And so i want to crush everyone and play by the rules.
And so once you know the rules, then you can, you can almost play with more freedom, because you just know where to avoid right or what to what to.
Basically, you have to know what the rules are.
I don't want to say so you can bend them or break them, because obviously that's we're talking about law, so Just leave it there.
But you got to know the rules of the game that you're playing.
And the law, as far as we're talking about business, those are the rules of the game.
And so how can we get into the game and try and win?
We don't even know the rules we're playing by.
And so that would say to me it was like a big thing that happened this year that I would encourage you to just look at the laws that apply to your specific business or industry or partnerships and be very well acquainted with them.
To the same degree, also rereading the contracts that you have in, like your employment agreements, your partnership agreements.
It's just good to know like, what tools do I have at my disposal right now?
And what expectations do other people have of me that I'm unaware of?
And that was hugely enlightening and also that has just allowed me to sleep so much better.
And knowing these things has allowed me to take what would otherwise be very stressful.
I mean, imagine eight lawsuits, a lot of lawsuits, right?
Something that would have otherwise been very stressful and say, okay, I understand the variables.
We will take these actions.
I don't need to have any more cycles on this.
Next thing.
Because that's where the lawyer stuff will eat up your bandwidth.
It eats up your shower time.
It eats up your dinner time.
It eats up when you're staring out the window, when you're driving in the car.
That's the cost of being in legal battles.
But if you can minimize the cost of that by saying I understand where the conflict is and I know what steps I'm going to take and I have documentation to provide these things, you can actually circumvent the vast majority of the pain and suffering that goes along with it, which gives you a significant strategic advantage when you're in extended conflicts.
All right, so next one.
This one is probably a little bit more around my current stage of life, but this is, I mean, that's what this is about.
Right now, I'm shifting the way that I'm doing work which is pretty significant.
And so I will first put the disclaimer out there that you want to model the rise, not the peak part.
So to use an example that people can understand.
You're not like, oh, I want to get rich, so I should fly private.
Don't fly private to get rich.
It's something that people do once they are rich, right?
If you want to get tall, don't play basketball.
It's just that tall people play basketball.
Very big difference, all right?
And so...
This is the first year in my life where I hit my financial goals.
Acquisition.com crushed it.
Portfolio companies crushed it.
Launch crushed it.
We did really well this year.
This was the biggest financial year that I've had in my career, including the years I've had exits.
And in light of that, I actually feel for the first time in my life that I have enough.
And I know that sounds ridiculous to some people.
How could this now be the enough number?
But I would say that I have always had bigger goals than most people.
But I also feel like I know when enough is enough for me.
They just happen to be bigger than most people's goals.
I do not have a permanently moving goal post.
Like, for example, I tend to be a little bit more muscular than most people are.
But I got to a point where I was at 245 and I was like, this is a bit much. this is pretty big.
I don't need to do more than this.
Now, some people are like, I always got to get bigger.
I always got to get bigger.
I don't have that.
I was like, there, this is enough.
This is, I'm more muscular than most people even want to be, but I am muscular enough.
And so, to the same degree, I probably have bigger financial goals than most people have, but I have finally achieved the things that I wanted to.
Now, what am I going to do with the business?
It's not like I'm going to end them.
It's just that the way that I'm playing the game is changing.
And so I'm relaying this.
So this may seem like flashing news, But I am now shifting to planning my personal life first and allowing business to fill in the cracks.
And I have such strong reinforcement cycles of having worked for so long, so many hours, that I just I have to unlearn how to work all the hours of the day.
I wish I could say it's discipline and all that stuff.
It's like I've been rewarded and reinforced for doing this for so long, but it really is less effort for me to work all day than it is to stop working.
And so that's kind of the path that I'm in right now.
And when I observe the people who are going from a billion to 10 billion, or 10 billion and beyond, you get past a point where you will be compensated for the quality of your judgment, not the quantity of your work, and so i feel like, for the first time in my life, i have crossed that threshold.
For me is that there there is significantly higher leverage in my ability to pick and make correct bets, and if that becomes the highest leverage work that i have, then i have to reorient my life in a way that maximizes the quality of my decision making, which means that I probably will travel more.
Why would traveling help the quality of my decision making?
Well, I'll gain more perspectives, more filters, more positions to consider a decision through.
I will probably see more people than I have seen in the past, because their perspectives will also help color and shade in the edges, give more dimension to the decisions that I'm trying to make.
Me, I'll probably try and... I'm trying to prioritize sleep a little bit more.
Now, I've never not prioritized sleep.
I just like...
I sleep until I can't and then I work, right?
But I will probably be more proactive in doing some of those sleep hygiene things that are a little bit of a pain in the ass.
That can get you that 10 or 20 more.
I'm going to be doing that now.
I will probably have more time, that I will unplug on the weekend so that I can let my mind wander, so that I can think of kind of out of the box ideas.
And this happened just recently, like two weeks ago.
I had my EA team.
They've changed my schedule a little bit so that there's even more free time than there was before, which there was already a lot of free time.
But free time for me does not mean that nothing's happening.
It just means there's nothing planned.
And so, because I had two days like back to back, I believe having an empty schedule allows me to do that which matters most.
And I believe that the time of the CEO, or the time of the founder, is the most valuable asset or resource in the business.
Thank you.
And so why would I not want the best allocator of the most expensive asset to be me?
And so that's how they have blocked for me so that I maximize my free time.
Now, in that free time, put together a deal that will make us more than we probably did entire revenue this year.
And I did it in basically one day, with six and a half hours on the phone calling different people, just because I had slept well, I had the height, I had the lowest resting heart rate ever had and I had the best sleep score I'd gotten in.
It was a record in my entire life.
It was the best.
Well, the score would only go to 100 but like, my resting heart rate and my HRV were the highest and lowest respectively they'd ever been.
And I was like, I feel like I can see color today.
And that quality of decision making at this point is incredible, the best strategic decision for me, and so in some ways, maybe i still have the same objectives and i'm now just orienting my life to now do the next version of what success looks like, or what i have to change in order to become the person who can lead this company to where, where i think it can be, to help the most people, and so that is what you will see, kind of going forward, and i have not.
I have been in the stage that i was at from how i worked for the last 14 years, so this is a pretty significant change for me, but i'll be putting my, i'll be planning my life first, and then business will fill in the cracks.
So really powerful frame that I've been thinking about a lot has been what do you want to have happen?
And what increases the chances of that happening?
So here's the next lesson.
Two frames for reconsidering the hard decisions and conversations that you have to have.
So let's say someone does something that you don't want them to do.
They say something bad, something happens, right?
Something that I, you have an innate reaction, which is that typically it's something called, it's a countermeasure, right?
So if someone punishes you in some way, you want to counter, punch them back, you want to counter control.
You want to punish them, so that you want to punish them even more, so that they dare not punish you, right.
But when we think about these two questions which is what I want to have happen, what do I want to have happen?
And number two, what increases the odds of that happening oftentimes, your initial reaction to what you want to do is almost antithetical to what you want to occur.
And what increases the chances of that happening?
And so, for example, if someone says something bad to me online, I might have the immediate desire to go punish them publicly, right?
What do I want to have happen?
I would like this person to move on with their lives and forget that I exist.
That would be what I would want to have happen, right?
Realistically, what increases the odds of that happening?
Does me interacting with them, reinforcing the fact that they said that, increase those odds?
No.
I increase the likelihood that that person hates me even more and does even more to try and damage me.
So that would make my problem worse, not better.
And so that is just a two-step decision frame that I continue to use more and more and more, especially with interpersonal relationships.
Hey, this employee is doing a bad job.
I want to yell at them.
What do I want to have happen?
I want them to do a good job.
Do I think yelling at them will increase the likelihood of that happening?
No, I think they'll have more anxiety and they'll probably decrease their performance.
Okay, so that's not going to work.
What do I want to have happen?
Okay, can I reward or publicly give them status for the one thing they've done well, so that they can see some positive loop and then maybe they will do more of that thing.
That probably does increase those odds.
So I'll do that instead, even though I want to punish them for being a fuck ass, right?
And so what's interesting is that when I ask myself those questions, the thing that increased the odds of me getting what I ultimately want rarely is what I want to do, or at least is rarely my initial gut reaction.
And when I look at how most people live their lives, they live their lives from gut reaction to gut reaction to gut reaction, and then counter reaction, and they're just responsive.
All they're doing is just like, they're like seaweed in the ocean.
They're just moving and they have no direction.
They're just constantly going back and forth, right?
And they're never getting what they want. and they think that life is chaotic.
But when you actually ask yourself those questions, you typically can guess no.
I don't think that's actually gonna increase the likelihood that happens.
I think that person's going to hate me more if I do that.
Right, then why will you do it, right?
And so oftentimes, when you have those, when you use those two razors, one of the most common things that comes up and it's now become an inside joke for me and some of my friends is, doing nothing at all is often the most productive thing to do in those situations.
And so it has now taken on this inside joke of the heavyweight champion of the world, which is that there's all these different potential actions and the heavyweight champion of the world is do nothing.
That one almost always wins.
Because what should i probably do?
Keep doing what i'm doing, keep on my business, focus on my marriage, focus on doing good work and ignore the rest.
And what's interesting is that it is physically efficient but emotionally painful, and so that is one of the i'd say one of the one of the artifacts that i've collected this year.
So number 10 more better new.
Now this isn't going to be a new concept for anyone who's listening to my stuff, but i will have a slightly different take on this.
New is incredibly risky, and so this is the best analogy that i've i visualized this year that i'm probably going to take with me for the rest of my life, which is, i want you to imagine, here we go actually, look at this if i have these, these candies, all right, and i throw them all over the place, if i keep doing this, how likely is it that all of them are going to end up in the exact position, separated by color and stacked together?
Very unlikely.
I would have to hit refresh and keep doing that many, many times until eventually All of these are lined up, stacked up on each other super nicely, in a way that's organized right.
This would take a lot.
Like, could it happen?
Of course it could.
It is statistically possible.
Is it likely?
No.
And so when you think about this, this is six pieces of candy, right?
There are variables within your business that create the business that works, right?
And so when you have your business and it is stacked, it is working, it is generating revenue.
The likelihood that you changing one of these variables makes the building or makes the stack or the business better goes down.
And the taller the stack is, the more evolved your business is, the more bricks in that building have been properly placed.
And so the higher the likelihood, the next move is the wrong move if it's something different.
So I'll give you a marketing version of this.
If you have something called a control and you have a variant when you run a split test AB split test If you have a control that you've run 36 split tests on and it has won 36 of those, it is the number one control.
The likelihood that you changing that, resulting in an improvement, is low.
And so, if you think about your business as it currently stands, there's many different ways to align these variables.
Almost all of them are not profitable businesses.
You happen to have one that actually works.
And so, if you have that, then the highest risk-adjusted move that you can make is that you do more of the thing that already works.
I will keep doing more bricks in this order because that has worked before, right?
You might try and do better, which is a tiny variation of what you're currently doing.
But something truly new rarely works.
And it also usually takes the most resources.
And so for us, if we're going to do something new, I give myself one new thing a year, one.
So what was the one new thing this year?
It was the book launch.
That was this year.
Next year you'll find out what it is right, but i get one, and it's because i know what the tremendous drain of resource.
It is one big thing, one new thing.
And so i would say that the bigger the companies that we have, the more resources we have, the fewer new things we're doing, because when you, when nothing works, you want to hit refresh as many times as you can.
You want to do lots of new shit because nothing's working.
But as soon as something works, then you start to have direction.
You want to have less and less deviation from that, unless you really believe there's an existential risk that would require you to change everything, which is significantly less likely than you really think it is.
In fact, I would say many business owners will destroy their businesses in reality for problems that they have manufactured artificially.
Problems that have not even yet occurred because they are afraid of them happening.
When, in reality, when that problem happens, it's not gonna happen overnight and you're gonna have some heads up probably.
And for those of you who are old enough to have businesses during COVID.
So if you had business at least for five years, right or six years, you know that you'll survive.
You'll adapt, just like you always have.
And so do not try and change the business to solve problems that do not exist, because there's more than enough problems that absolutely do exist today that you should be solving.
And so, going back to more and this has been something that's been just I feel like I've got another layer of paint on the more better.
New is that oftentimes the highest return question is why can't i do more of the thing that's working now?
There's usually a much deeper, harder problem that you have to solve once you do the easy mores, but there's always a way to do more than you currently are, and it's just that once you realize that the level of difficulty of what it takes to do the next more is harder than doing something better or new.
So instead of you bucking up and and and saying i'm going to focus on this very hard problem, you then distract yourself with reasonable problems that no one will blame you for solving.
Because the biggest risk to the business is not like a stupid decision, because those are unlikely to actually occur.
The real risk to your business is the second, third and fourth most profitable things that you could do, rather than the most valuable thing that you can do.
This is a very important lesson for me this year.
And so when you get clear on what the harder question is that you need to ask of why can't I do more, and now it's getting hard for me to do it Then we have to remove every distraction that you have that makes you think about anything besides solving that problem.
That's it.
And sometimes the answer to that hard problem isn't a one week, a four week or a four month solution.
Sometimes you realize that your culture is fucked.
And you have to fix the culture.
And that's going to take you 18 months.
And when you're six months into it, things will feel worse than they did when you started.
But it doesn't make it any less of the correct decision for the business.
It just means that your reinforcing event or the reward for the work that you're going to have is far in the future.
And it doesn't mean that, six months in, you should now change course because it hasn't started working yet.
Because you knew when you started and you realized that this was the true constraint of the business, that this was going to be a long and painful road ahead of you.
And so you do not want to then solve.
Try and come up with a new solution when the first solution never had time to bear fruit.
Because sometimes the most productive thing you can do in the business is give time time.
Let the solution actually work.
This has been a very hard lesson for me many times as an entrepreneur and I just wanna pass it to you, because many of you guys have many half-built bridges.
You had a way to get across, But you knew it would take four months.
But one month in, you were still suffering.
You thought, well, maybe I'll do this.
But it's like you never let the first bridge get finished.
And so in a real way for me, I realized that I needed to build a brand.
I'll give you two examples of this.
So one early days of Gym Launch, Layla and I realized that we had an entire tier of directors that were not competent enough.
And so over the next 12 months, we had to turn 11 out of 11 directors, very painful.
And when you turn directors, what do you think you also have to do?
Sometimes you have to turn the teams underneath because they had a low bar.
And so they brought in a lot of low bar people.
There was obviously some good people they brought in too, but like very, very painful process kind of killed morale for that whole year.
But we knew that we were gonna be able to grow the business, because the level of skill of that team was not sufficient.
And our bar was too low.
And unfortunately we can't fire ourselves.
So we had to do the next natural thing.
That was very painful.
Six months into that, the culture is worse and we haven't turned the whole leadership team.
Was it the wrong course of action?
No.
Should we change course?
No, but it means that you have to learn to suffer, because sometimes the correct course is the most painful path, because the highest leverage move often is the hardest problem that you're not choosing to allocate attention towards solving.
In a more recent one, i was at 30 to 40 million a year for three years gym watch and the big aha that i had was that i needed to build a brand, and that took years, and so when i went into it, i was like this i will have to keep doing this for many years before i'm going to bear any fruit from this, and my income when i made that call went down for the first two years by a lot.
And so I think you have to be willing to stomach that period of time or you will never be able to do the real solutions that are really gonna move the needle, because most business owners will do the second third, fourth thing, the incremental improvements, rather than the order of magnitude change that typically take order of magnitudes in terms of time and effort.
Number 11, it's okay to just make money.
So hear me out.
There's something that I like to call the third marshmallow fallacy.
And so it goes like this.
So many of you guys probably heard about the research study of like okay, they videotaped kids and they said we'll put one marshmallow in front of you.
And then if you wait, you know, whatever, 10 minutes, we'll give you a second marshmallow.
And the kids that wait you know 10 minutes.
They're more successful in life because it's, you know, proxy for your ability to delay gratification.
Okay.
What's interesting about that is that people then assume that delaying gratification is always the best course of action.
And this is why this is a very interesting lesson.
If you delay gratification indefinitely, then you will work your entire life for nothing because you have delayed gratification, and then you will die.
Said differently if you were the ant that always saves up your money for the winter and you keep saving, and keep saving, and keep saving, and then you die.
You have a big stack of crumbs that you will never have done anything with.
And so the question is no longer like once.
You have learned to delay gratification.
So this will be me talking a little bit more to the winners in the room.
Once you have learned to delay gratification, you then have to learn the even harder task of the appropriate time to accept gratification real.
So this is incredibly difficult, especially for winners, because in the earlier part of your career you get reinforced, you get rewarded for delaying gratification.
And oftentimes it is, there is a dose relationship.
As in the longer you delay, the bigger the outcome.
So you just continue to learn to delay more and more and more.
But there is a time where it comes to reap because you cannot sow forever.
And so I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who was like hey, I don't want to do this thing because it's not going to add enterprise value.
But the amount of money that we were talking about for this particular deal was like hundreds of millions of dollars.
And I wasn't even that confident that the other thing was going to happen and it would be like 10 years in the future from now.
And so we need to allow some risk adjustment for outcomes to make their way into the decision.
If you can get paid today versus getting paid in five years, there is a value to that money because you have five more years of being able to use those resources to acquire more resources.
And so I would say that something that has shifted in me particularly was that it's okay to make money.
Like you can also just make money for the sake of making money.
And I think that's fine.
And I'll say this differently which is like in a business perspective, let's say that you have a service-based business or you have a software business whatever, and you don't want to sell your own time one-on-one, totally okay.
And you, you don't want to do it because you do not want to get any revenue that doesn't have a high multiple.
Okay, that's fine.
Well, let me tell you the story.
So when I started my first gym, I had one personal training client who paid me in cash every month.
He paid me about $4,000 a month in cash for personal training.
It was like 90 minutes a day, five days a week.
So it was a lot of personal training.
But that guy giving me that cash every single month even though it was not scalable, it was not something that I could sell someday.
That money paid for me to eat right.
And it allowed me to delay gratification on the rest of the business.
But somebody who would be a purist of like, well, you should eat even more shit.
You should suffer even more during that period of time, would have said you shouldn't have taken that distraction.
You should have just worked even more in the business.
But I just, I don't think that's true.
And so-
I say this only to the winners.
If you're somebody who's never learned to delay gratification, you've never learned to save up for the winner.
You still overspend your income.
Ignore this entirely.
But for those of you who are the savers, who do always live under a myth of your means, who are willing to delay thing one year, five years, 10 years, you have to then also be able to make the decision.
When do I ask?
When do I reap?
And I'll give you one more example, and then I'll move to the next point, which is this is super common in content creators
And I think this is why I ended up writing this.
I've seen a number of creators.
I remember I had a conversation with a guy who said hey, I have this Twitter following that I've built over the last how many years.
And I said, okay.
And he said, I would like to better monetize my following.
And I said, all right, well, how many times do you, like, what CTAs do you have?
What do you tell them to do?
And he's like, oh, nothing.
I never want to sacrifice the goodwill I have with my audience.
And I was like, okay, why did you build this brand to begin with?
He said, well, I wanted to make money.
And I said, okay, how do you expect to make money if you never ask for it?
Because he had been taught, I have to delay, I have to delay.
And to be fair, of course you have to delay.
But at some point, you have to make the decision, now is the time.
And to be clear, it doesn't mean that like now he has to ask every single day.
It just means we have to begin the process of reaping.
And so for you, forever sowers and I put myself in that bucket of always wanting to underspend and always delay to the future there is a line that you need to be able to draw for yourself.
For today's the day,
I will begin reaping now.
And I think that it is an entirely personal question, because it's also fundamentally answering the question how much do I invest versus how much do I consume?
I think the answer to that question is entirely individual.
But I think most of us can agree that invest forever, consume nothing is probably not the way.
And consume everything, invest nothing is also probably not the way.
And so it's somewhere in the middle where you will have to pick what's right for you.
But it is in the middle somewhere, which means you will have to consume at some point.
You will have to reap.
And you need to know that it is okay.
You might also die.
And so, you know, there's that too.
Lesson 12.
This is a small tactical one, just a great reminder for me from business, which is the book launch clear beats, clever in all things right.
You will need to repeat yourself until you die.
No one cares.
No one is listening.
And so I had so many people were like asking like, what was the secret behind the launch?
It's like, I made 5,000 ads that pretty much said the same thing.
Like that was it.
And still most people didn't attend the launch. right of the book and we still broke the records and and and did all the sales and donated all the book we did all that stuff and still the vast majority of the people that i have my audience one didn't even find out about it and two even if they did find out about it didn't come didn't even register and the few that registered still most of them didn't come so like you have to think about this in terms of percentages if i have 100 people who register for something less than half will show up if i have a thousand people who find out of something on an ad less than two percent of them will even click So you're dealing with such small percentages that the idea that you want to be clever in any way is ridiculous.
And I would say that the longer I've been in business, the more I emphasize clarity over cleverness.
I emphasize simplicity over complexity.
How do I make this as simple and as clear as humanly possible?
And I think that is that effort of continuing to compress what you're saying and get it simpler and simpler.
And that is where it becomes elegant.
And that is where it becomes effective.
And I would say like that, that is just a great, it was a lesson that I was reminded of.
I had a friend of mine, we were talking, we were jamming back and forth.
He had a massive campaign for his company.
He spent a day out here with me and we were going through everything.
And his team had this really complex marketing structure.
He's a phenomenal marketer.
And uh, he's like you know alex, what do you think?
And i was like i think, instead of having 10 things you're selling, i think you should have one thing and give 10 reasons for it.
And he was like Yeah, I agree.
And so he simplified everything down to one big benefit and 10 reasons for that thing and had the highest converting campaign he'd ever done in the history of his company.
And he has a very successful company.
It's been very big.
He's done it for a very long time.
And after the day he came up to me and was like he's like listen, I wanted to bring.
He's like.
My team has heard me say this so many times, they needed somebody from the outside to say it.
He's like, and I didn't want, he's like, you got to be the bearer of bad news instead of me.
And so, just as a little moniker that you can remember for yourself, in terms of writing copy, in terms of making sales pitches, in terms of writing emails, making content whatever, it is one big idea with 10 reasons rather than 10 big idea with one reason each.
I'll leave it at that.
Which this segues naturally in to lesson 13, which is this year.
The offer is still king, just like it was last year, just like it was the year before that.
The offer still matters more than everything.
And so we have begun the process of donating a lot of the books from the launch.
And we basically made the offer pretty simple.
One of the variations that we've tested.
We're testing a bunch of different variations, but one of the variations was like Hey, just pay for the shipping of three books and you'll get all three books and just pay for the shipping of them.
And so right now now, I actually lose money, like literally lose money on that, even with the books being prepaid and still, and what's what's crazy though, is that the metrics that I've seen from that offer, that funnel, are better than any that I've ever seen in my entire career in marketing, and the reason I find that to be so interesting is that, like we, we whip that together so quickly and it's working because it's the offer.
Stupid like, How do you make an offer so good people feel stupid saying no?
It's in the fucking sub headline, right?
And so I'll give you a couple more tidbits that I've kind of like gathered together for myself.
The reason we're able to break the record is because the bundle for donating 200 books were so strong and so compelling, which I spent two years building.
The next thing is that whenever you have components of an offer or bonuses that you're going to include in any kind of offer, any service any, anything right,
Each bonus should be worth more than the entire value of the thing you sell.
I believe that most buyers are single issue buyers, like single issue voters, is that they keep listening until they have that one light, that one key, that one unlock, that one reason why that say that was worth it.
And so if you ever try and put an offer together where you think oh, the aggregate of these things is worth more, you have already lost.
And if the bonus itself is complex enough that you have to explain it, delete it.
Because the most expensive part about you explaining different components of the offer is the mental real estate it takes up to actually explain it.
And so if something is worth saying, make sure that it's worth saying.
And when you also build offers in this way, it forces you to think even more about how can i make this more compelling, how can i make it simpler, how can i make it more compelling?
And each one of them has to has to carry their weight, and by doing that you'll create a more operationally efficient business.
Number one and your offer.
I like to use this as my kind of um, my like razor for making a good offer is that the offer should be textable.
Can i text to someone and then then say yeah, i'm in, And that's just a great way.
You've got this much screen and that many words to say the essence of the entire offer.
And if you can't fit it there, it needs to be better or it's too long.
And so that has just been really valuable for me.
And I've had that reinforced this year several times.
Obviously, we had the offer at the launch.
We were donating the books on the back end.
But even within the portfolio companies.
I mean the reason I think that the offers book will always outsell the other books in general.
I think Money Models is outselling now because it's new, but I think long, long-term offers will outsell is because if you nail the offer in a lot of ways, nothing else matters.
It's just getting it right is so hard.
But there's nothing that you can do that can make your business have a bigger step change in your business's revenue and profit than really making the offer better.
And it's like, again, I think on some level, people have an understanding of like what things cost.
And the reason that I think that book bundle works so well was because they know it costs me.
They know I'm losing money.
Like people can, they know that three hardbacks cost more than $15.
They know that.
And so shipped, right?
Like even one of $15 is crazy.
Three is absurd, right?
And so they know that.
And so it's like people assume that, like I think Ogilvy said this, he said people think they're you know the prospect is an idiot, but she's your wife.
And It's like we talk to these amorphous masses, but it's like they're real people who are intelligent, who can make decisions, and they know when something smells off and they know when something's a good deal.
And so, like you can only do so much dressing up with the copy and the words and the persuasive elements, because at the end of the day, you should be able to make the pitch by just stating the offer and shutting the fuck up and pointing to how to pay and people should buy.
The rest of it is just is dressing. right?
It's just tweaks.
It's just improvements.
But the biggest improvement overall is going to be what the thing you sell is.
So sometimes we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught.
And this year was a wonderful reminder for me of like, it's the offer, stupid.
Like, make it better.
Nice little reminder for me for how to make ads work.
So this is a little bit more tactical artifact.
Right now, it's about volume of different creative.
We did 1,000 or 2,000 ads, I think, before we even started.
I think it was 3,000 by the time the launch happened.
I can't remember.
It was in the thousands.
And the way that advertising is moving in general, it's going to be about hyper-personalization.
So with AI, you can create way more permutations much faster.
And so I think we're going to have personalization at scale.
And that's 2026.
I mean, right now it's the end of 25, but I'm just calling this right now.
I've already seen crazy returns that we're seeing in the portfolio with this across all the companies.
This is the future.
You need to be able to create lots of creative.
And what's more important is you need to be able to create the machine that consistently self proliferates.
The creative
So it's like how do I get the customers to make creative that gets us more customers that make more creative.
That's the process you wanna install in the business, rather than think oh, I have to just keep building the team.
I mean, there's elements of that for sure.
But this is like there's a great lesson for me this year and what I'm taking to next year is like We have to build the self-licking ice cream cone and hyper-personalization is gonna be.
I mean, I'm saying 2026, but I don't think it's gonna go back.
So I think that's gonna be the future.
So Less15, side quests can make the main quests.
So what do I mean by that?
So if you were a very like I hate even using this term, but like visionary founder, if you're somebody who like, has lots of big ideas, big dreams, you're always like thinking shiny objects.
You have a little bit of ADD, a little touch of the ad right.
Sometimes you have to find things for yourself to keep distracted, to not break your main business.
And because sometimes, especially the bigger your business gets when you're smaller, literally ignore this advice.
But if you're bigger it just takes like it might take a year for a big initiative to happen, because it's turning the Titanic versus turning a rowboat, right.
And so I have found it useful for me.
Like the books for me are obviously there.
I find a way to make them additive to my overall business at acquisition.com.
But they take time from me.
But that time, I think, gives me thinking space and also allows my team to just continue to get better without me blowing things up.
And so I tend to prefer large change from an emotional level.
From a logical level, I prefer incremental, et cetera.
But it's like, how can I scratch my new itch?
Well, I have to do things that don't drain and this is key that cannot drain resources from the main thing.
The side quest only helps if it allows the main quest to succeed even more, not if it distracts the main quest or pulls any resources from it.
And so for me, writing books is that thing.
For you, it might be something else.
But I think I've grown more and more okay with the idea that, like some things will take time within the business and me having something to do in the meantime can actually increase the likelihood that those things succeed.
And in some ways, it's a way of passing the time while things are painful and uncomfortable.
So the next one which was a great lesson for me this year was delegation.
Is the price of scaling loss of control right?
And so I believe that the spiritual path of entrepreneurship is a consistent relinquishing of control.
And so we were employees at some time likely for many people.
And then you stop doing that, and then you decide to start a business.
And you typically do that because you want to, quote, have freedom.
And so then you say, I will have complete control.
But in order to have true freedom, you actually can have no control.
You have to accept that's true freedom, right?
And so at every level, in the very beginning, you do everything.
And then you say, I'm gonna have somebody who helps you with this.
So you give them a little control.
And then the next level is like okay well, the doing I've delegated, but the management no one can manage like I can manage.
And then you give the management away and you're like okay well, no one can direct or lead like I can lead, then eventually give the leadership away.
And then it's like well, no one can think of the vision of the future like I can.
And then eventually maybe there is somebody.
Steve Jobs wasn't able to be replaced, but many of us aren't Steve Jobs and are replaceable, and so delegation is the price of scaling, losing that control.
And so hard-working people and this is what's really interesting about this hard-working people have a hard time coming up with non-hard-working solutions, And so this has been particularly difficult for me because, like I, I will get problems to say oh, I wonder if I can outwork this problem.
When Bill Gates talked about this, saying it's really good to have lazy executives because they will try and think of non high energy ways to solve problems.
And so the hard worker won't feel like delegating because they want to feel useful, and it's incredibly difficult.
But if you draw the line, you have to say that you will not do anything in order for it to scale, because otherwise you will absolutely be the limiter of your own growth, and i don't think we are as special as we think we are, and so you might kind of just have to give up some profit in the short term, but you'll make more in the long term.
And so this has been kind of like a thinking process for me, which is, at this point, the razor I have is if it requires me, it doesn't work.
That's how I think about it now.
And so I use the term internally from my head and Leland, I talked about this a bit, scale zero.
Like we have to scale me down to zero so we can scale it up to infinity.
Otherwise I will always be the limiter.
And so this is kind of just like a great reminder or artifact that I've gotten from.
The year is scale zero.
And I've been reminded this at this level now is that nothing can rely on me because the business is just too big.
The other little little tidbit I'll add in there as well is if you are at equilibrium within your business means that, like your supply and your demand are fixed, like i can't, i can't take in more customers because my supplies, like i, my team can't handle it, but i also don't have more demand, right.
So it's like what do you do when you're at equilibrium?
When i was in my earlier part of my career, i would have said increase demand and then force the team to, you know, pull from the cracks and then with the extra cash flow you'll be able to afford, you know the, the next person you need to hire.
That was what i would have said probably the first 10 years of my career, 12 years of my career, And I would say that I have flipped that thinking probably this year, which is that I would say increase supply.
And I'll explain why.
When you're at equilibrium, whatever your next step is, you're going to have to bear a cost.
And the cost will either be your reputation or your profit.
And so if I increase demand, the cost of that increase will be my reputation, because my team will probably not be able to deliver at the same quality they otherwise would have, because they are overextended.
If I increase supply first, then the bandwidth of my team will improve.
And...
In the short term, they will have to train this new person up, which will be a cost in the business.
So I'm going to almost have a double cost.
They have to train this person up and I have to bear the cost of the person to begin as well.
But once that's done I will have dramatically increased the capacity of the business, which will then give bandwidth back, which will then allow us to push to fill up the demand side.
And so the reason that we were even able to do the book launch this year.
We actually originally were going to do it in February couldn't do it because we didn't have the bandwidth.
And then we're able to do it in August because 90 days prior we hired four directors and leaders in the business, which expanded the capacity of the business so that we could do the launch.
So that was just some of the lessons of this year from that.
So next one was just real estate in general.
So Sharron and I have done a lot of real estate deals together for the last five years.
I would say we will buy a few hundred million dollars in real estate this year.
I'll get the exact number probably in a future video, because we have a couple of deals pending as the year ends.
What was very interesting is that i have a much better understanding of the tax laws around it, so this was a big w for us.
I haven't talked about real estate in general, despite having done a lot of deals over the last five years with sharon, because i didn't feel like i had the credibility, and so i will probably and sharon will probably as well next year we'll probably talk more about acq re, so acq real estate, because we have now gathered a significant amount of resources there that I think you guys would probably like that.
And I certainly have enjoyed it because it was something that I felt like was a deficiency in my skillset in terms of investing that I wanted to rectify.
And so I've talked about it in many, you know, many years ago.
I've talked about in some videos of like very tiny deals that I did, 50000 deals that you know didn't work out as well.
And I was like, I don't know what I'm doing.
And so that is when I basically enlisted help.
And I got people who are more experienced than I did what I always do and just try to learn from them.
And it has been incredibly enlightening.
And I've very much understand the appeal of it now.
And so it was a huge deal, huge W for us this year.
And I think will be a compounding vehicle for us in the future.
I mean, this is a lessons video for the year for me.
And so I'm grateful that we took all the steps that we did this year in order to do it.
Next one, best ROI in business.
All right, pay attention to this one.
Best ROI is still talent.
So the cost in return on talent.
So let me get deep on this.
You have, how much does it cost you to get the talent?
And then how much will that talent make you?
And so I had a dentist who came and was like hey, I have the specialty dentist, they're really hard to find.
Blah blah, blah.
And I said, okay, well, how much does a dentist make you in gross profit per year?
And at his facility, he made $700,000 in gross profit per year per special dentist.
And I was like, okay, that's gross profit.
I said, okay, fine.
And I said so, if you just had and I think he was doing four or 5 million a year in profit, something like that.
And I said, okay, so what's the problem?
He said, well, I can't find any of these dentists.
And I said, okay, well, how much money are you spending on recruiting or marketing?
And he was like, I don't know, like 2,500 bucks.
And I was like, okay, so let's hear me out.
I said, if I had an investment that I said would cash flow 700000 a year, what would you be willing to pay one time to buy into that investment?
He was like, I mean, if I knew it was going to be $700,000 a year, I mean, $700,000?
And I was like, right.
So you should be more than happy to spend 50000 on a headhunter or 150000 on a headhunter to get this level of talent.
And if you and he needed four to hit his next goal, which he had, which was like to double the business or something, and so i said, all right, let me ask you this i think he had 46 million.
I think was his profit.
I said this year if, instead of making 46 million in profit, you made 4 million and then you got, you spent the 600 to get four guys at 150 each for headhunter to go get that talent and maybe have relocation bonuses whatever, would that be worth it?
He was like well, when you say it like that, i'm like right.
And so I still, to this day, believe that, especially in the age of AI, where every star employee who can use technology gets even more leverage, the return on talent is even better than it's ever been.
And so when you see Meta paying these hundred million dollar bonuses and stuff for these single individuals, you're like they're crazy.
Or they know something we don't know, which is that they might still get a billion or two billion or five billion in value from this one person if they can unlock it.
And so I think about this from two angles, like a micro and a macro perspective.
So on a micro level, when you bring someone in, you get time back.
It's work that you don't have to do that you now get back.
Phenomenal.
On the macro level, the higher the level of talent, the more it's impossible for you to have their lifetime of experience.
I can't live in AI coders last 20 years, right?
Or last 10 years.
I can't go do that.
So all I can do is spend money to go buy that lifetime experience and then apply it into my business.
And so fundamentally, the bigger the business gets, the more it's about assembling the talent that then builds the business than it is about building the business.
And your rate of business growth will be limited by your ability to learn, because no one will come work for you who is better than you.
And let me put my caveat on this.
No one will work for you who is better than you at everything.
For sure, many people work for me who are better than me at their specific functions, but they know that I have depth in some things, that my depth is as good or better than their depth in their specific thing.
And so excellence attracts excellence.
And so if you want more A players, you need to become an even deeper A player.
Because, at the most simple level, if you had the five best teammates in the entire world, you would have one of the most valuable businesses in the entire world.
That would be reality.
Elon's superstar skill is that he's so good at engineering that he can attract the best engineers.
And as a result, he can build the best engineering based companies.
That's his secret.
And so he's not actually running six different companies.
I mean, he obviously makes his key decisions in those areas, but a huge amount of decisions I would argue the vast majority of the decisions physically couldn't be made by one man because of the size of all six of the companies.
And so the only way that's accomplished is by having such a strong brand, by being so good at what you do, that the best in the world want to work for you.
The problem is that you're not the best in the world, and so they don't want to work for you, which means, as always, we are the problem.
We are the limit of the business.
Next set of lessons for me from this year.
So A players will make you rich, but here's the downside or the hard part about A player culture.
A players cost more per headcount, but not in actuality.
So let me give you an example.
If you had five eights and five sixes on a team, what really happens is that the sixes pull down the eights and now you just have a bunch of six, sevens.
Anyways, the smart move is to fire all five sixes.
And what happens is your eights become nines and you never needed the sixes to begin with.
And that is something that I've seen over and over and over again.
I had a team of 14 sales guys at one point and we had a cancerous.
There was one guy was stealing.
Some of the other guys knew about it.
It was bad.
And so we ended up cutting, I think, from 14 to six.
And those six guys close more deals than the 14.
Real.
I've also had to do this on the media.
I mean, I've had to do this in a lot of different teams over the years where I have to just massively take an ax because culture runs amok.
There's a bad leader.
They lower those standards.
And then you got eights with sixes.
And then the eights start acting like sixes too.
But then when you get all the bad ones out, then all of a sudden these eights rise to the occasion and they're like we just only want to play with A players.
Because A players will self-manage. but everyone has to be an A player.
Otherwise they'll say, oh, that's accepted and either they'll lower the bar or they'll leave.
And one of the difficulties of this is that your definition of an A player will change as you get better.
What I thought was an A player when I was in, you know, when I owned a gym, was somebody who was making 50000 a year.
And I was like, this is the shit.
This guy is the man.
This is a player.
And then I had my first $75,000 a year employee.
Then my first $100,000 a year.
And then first $200,000.
And my first $400,000.
Then my first million.
Then my first multi-million.
And at each level, I'm like, I didn't even know they made people like this.
Right?
And so your definition of what good looks like will always be better.
And this is a quote from Sharani.
He said, the best talent is always in the future.
And so we always want to make room.
We want to build a business that has a vision that's big enough that their big dreams can also fit inside of it.
And I'll just say on a tactical level, this has now just almost become my razor.
I have yet to find an A player that I don't immediately know is an A player within the first 14 days.
It just hasn't happened.
And so I think what's really happening for me now is that, like my tolerance for not A players has just gone down.
I can just say, like I'm sure they're okay and I'm sure we can give them time and I'm sure they could become a seven and so what?
They're not gonna be an A, why bother?
And that is a hard culture to enforce because people don't want to let other people go.
Hey, this person has changed their jobs, et cetera.
And some people might say, oh, you're not giving them a chance.
I want to be clear.
It depends on the level of who you're hiring.
If you're hiring very low wage employees and the training is really fast, that can be different than maybe somebody who has to ramp up.
There are elements of this.
But you can still see leading indicators in terms of character and work ethic. almost immediately.
And those are the reasons that most people get fired, not because of kind of the day-to-day skill stuff, which leads us to the next one, which is money attracts talent.
Culture keeps talent.
And so hear me out.
You need to be able to pay enough that A players will ride the ride, right?
You must be this tall to ride this ride.
But whether they'll want to keep riding the ride will depend on how good the ride is, right?
And so financial incentives are absolutely important for attracting them but, in my opinion, not very important at all for getting the most out of them.
The non-financial incentives will become significantly stronger than the financial ones, because the financial ones are too infrequent.
So if we think about how behavior works, behavior is reinforced in the moment.
Latency beats intensity every day and twice on Sunday.
The reason that one drug is more addictive than another is purely based on how quickly you feel good after you take it.
That is how addiction works.
Why are inhalants so addictive?
Because it's immediately in your bloodstream.
Why is Facebook or these social media things so addictive?
Because the red light happens immediately.
It's not because a red light is inherently this crazy thing.
And to the same degree, nicotine is not a super strong drug, but it's immediate.
That's why it's so addictive.
And so if we think about addiction as a way of changing behavior, then we think how can I get someone addicted to the right behaviors in my business?
And the way that that addiction would happen is you have to have reinforcers within the way the business works that happen in real time.
And are any of those financial?
And so we have to be this high to ride this ride.
You have to pay well enough that A-level people are there, but you still might not get true A-level performance unless you have an A culture.
And so when you have a team of As, they will self-manage and they will continue to reinforce each other for being As.
And if you've ever been on a winning team, It's more fun than being paid well and on a losing team.
If you have to ask somebody when they're in the Super Bowl, how much do you have to pay to try hard to win this game?
No one, they would do it for free because winners want to win more than they want to make money.
And that's what makes them winners.
Money is what will get them in the door, but winning is what keeps them there.
So next little tactical lesson, decentralization wins.
So we are big advocates of decentralization.
I would say that we've taken this as a Warren Buffett, a feather out of his hat.
I believe that people need to stay focused, shared resources, split resources.
And so our goal, especially in terms of how we're running the company, is that as fast as possible, we wanna allow functions to be self-sustaining, and ideally from day one right, and if not, we need to look at that investment from holdco, something that has to get paid back as fast as possible so they can become independent.
So this is a little bit more of an operational thing, but the way that i think about this is like kind of like revenue lines.
So i do not like centralization.
I want I want independent leaders who own their own PLs so that they can stay completely focused on making that thing win.
And the times in my career where I have quote gotten distracted has actually been I distracted my own team from winning because I took resources from here and said oh, we're going to also pursue this opportunity, but I didn't increase infrastructure.
And so I think this is honestly, this is one of the big reasons why I finally feel like I figured out.
How do we go from a few hundred million to a billion a year in sales, like this is for the more advanced business owners.
This is the big unlock is that you have to think a business of businesses.
You have to think a team of teams, right?
And so it's not like, oh, Amazon is this one business.
Amazon has many revenue lines and they function as basically just many businesses under the brand of Amazon.
They have the same culture, they have the same ideals, they strive for the same ultimate outcome and they're aligned in that way.
But the actual doingness of AWS versus the logistics business versus the private label business of Amazon, all of those are very different.
And so each of them has CEOs in their own right.
And so acquisitioncom.
Now we have two revenue lines outside or three revenue lines outside of the portfolio.
And I guess that's not even true, there's more than that.
Well, each of them, to that point, each of them has their own presidents and leadership team.
And so that is the big mistake that I kept trying to make, because I kept thinking I had to make this business bigger when in reality, like Humans, can only manage so many humans right.
And so things eventually split off and become their own units of business.
And it's very difficult for a CFO of a holding company to know how much frontline customer service person needs to spend at this particular company.
They're too far away.
And so that's why I don't like centralization if you're building a very large business.
And I say that with the exception of software from a shared services perspective, because basically the operations of that scale better than just about any other kind of business.
But the way that revenue lines are imagined within the software world is basically feature sets.
And so you have a team that's in charge of these features and it's kind of like a director, a CEO of this feature, a CEO of this feature.
So still more or less works the same way, even if the revenue is consolidated with one membership or something like that.
But if you have a service business, typically the revenue will not be consolidated in that way.
You'll have different lines of services and different pricing associated with that, different sales teams, different marketing, but it's still.
Brand will still be the same, but the leaders and what they're selling and how they deliver will be different.
And so that is a huge unlock for me.
And it is.
I feel like we're finally I mean, we've been doing this now, but this is me distilling down that crystal so that future me can be like what was I thinking right then?
That's what I was thinking.
And that I think was the big W. I'll give you a couple of tidbits on the leaders to do that.
You need leaders who can drive the revenue lines and are incentivized on bottom line.
And if they need you, they don't deserve the incentive.
If they need you to drive the revenue, then they are not the driver.
You are still the driver.
If you really want to build something big, you have to be able to find people who are exceptional, compensate them well and get out of their way.
Now, you've heard people say that.
I've heard people say that i i want to say this in a way that somehow i can like make it real, because it's real for me now.
It's the.
The thing that i was missing was the was pattern recognition on what high quality talent looks like.
That was what i was missing.
If that person actually here's a different way to think about it.
Here's a good one.
If you have a hundred million dollar business, you might have one or two founders, or three founders who have nine figure founder you know skill sets, but But the people who are going to run within, that is the next tier of people are all call it eight-figure or multi-eight-figure entrepreneurs.
And so, in order to create the 100 million business, you might have two 25 million entrepreneurs and then five 10 million entrepreneurs who run the next tier.
And then underneath of them, you've got many seven-figure entrepreneurs, right?
And so it's almost like the aggregate revenue in the business is the added up potential of all the skill of all the players within it.
And that was just a bit like if you don't think that your head of sales could go do sales and like, if you're, if your person marketing could start a marketing agency, then they're probably not that good at marketing.
Right.
And so that's that's kind of thinking process is like if none of the people that you have could go do it on their own, then you probably don't have good enough people.
And that's the thing is, you have this fear of like, oh what if I, if I bring somebody in who can do it on their own, they'll just steal my stuff.
It's like, or if you don't bring them in, you will literally do it for the rest of your life.
We have to create the vision and the opportunities that are big enough.
And this is where the design, this is your job.
How to get the opportunities are such that it still makes more sense for the person to work here because they can have uncapped earnings.
So there's a difference between, like somebody needs to own the whole business, which is The biggest business in the world.
No one owns the whole business.
Well, I mean, to my knowledge, right?
The biggest, I'm thinking like, okay, publicly traded, whatever.
I'm sure there's some secret Arabian oil factory that I don't know about, right?
That one guy owns.
But like for the vast majority of businesses, many people own them, right?
But what's more key is that someone has unlimited earning capacity.
And I think that's the key.
That's how you can get the A players.
And if they are true A's, they'll fucking light up.
Because the thing is is it makes sense?
Because the return on effort is higher, because of the aggregate infrastructure that has already been built, from the brand recognition, from the reputation, from the delivery mechanisms that you might have in place.
That person, it's like, They're like, I don't even want, like, let me just, let me cook.
Let me crush what I'm really good at and be able to do that at a higher level than I could do if I did it on my own, because I couldn't even use my whole superpower to the greatest degree that I can, because I would get bottlenecked much lower along the line doing something else that I don't want to do.
So huge unlock for me and for the bigger business owners.
That part was probably the most valuable for you.
Lesson 22.
So I'm 0 for 12 on executive assistants, but I'm hoping to be 1 for 13.
Maybe I should be lucky number 13.
I had my first kind of like world-class EA.
And so I will just do my very best to describe it.
I'm early, so I'm almost hesitant to make this because I'm like, this is like, oh, I'm in love. and then you're like you're like how's that girlfriend of yours it's like oh you broke up you know whatever it's terrible so take this with a gigantic grain of salt but i i do think that this will work out and i'll tell you why she's a psychopath and i think i had normal people and i'm not normal and so i needed i needed a psychopath and i realized that the number thing that i mean i said we've said this in the interviews but i still i still wasn't i had never actually experienced on the other side i knew it in theory but but I hadn't experienced it, which is speed over everything.
I needed someone who will always respond to me within 60 seconds, no matter when I message.
And I will go for hours and hours and hours with nothing.
And then the moment I message you, I need full resources, full attention, because in that moment you are my constraint.
And I needed someone who had more competence, general horsepower.
So I will say this for all of you guys who are founders, who... who have schedules and whatnot.
One, I think you should be the one who manages your time.
In terms of who's doing the blocking and tackling, that's separate.
I think you can outsource that.
But who makes decisions on your time?
If your time is your most valuable resource, why would you want anyone but the person who's the best allocator of resources, aka you, to be the person who's choosing how that time gets spent?
So, thing number one.
Two, I think speed above everything.
Now, also above everything is general intelligence.
And I think this is something that I did not appreciate.
I did not screen for as much, and it was a mistake.
And I found this by accident.
Mike Krenge is very intelligent so, as a result, i trust her decision making to a much higher degree and i feel like my ability to actually give true tasks that i do that come up that require horsepower i can actually give them and be like, just do a first draft and i can get 80 of that done and then i can tweak, rather than having to just truly do everything de novo.
So the next piece that i think has been really helpful is, whether you are maker or manager, plan your time accordingly and live and die by that.
I've had some of the most productive weeks of my life by finally, for the first time in so long, I actually feel like I'm ahead, which I haven't felt that in such a long time where I'm actually proactively time blocking my time.
That's all the free time that I have, but blocking it for what project is being worked on each of these time slots?
And she's keeping track of all my ongoing projects and knowing what loops of like hey, when are you going to close the loop on this?
When are you going to, hey, by the way, this followed up.
And so I'm sharing this so that, for those of you who are, like man, I really need executive assistant pay more than you expect.
Look for someone who's more intelligent and say speed is non-negotiable, and have them watch the maker manager video, because I think that will give a huge amount of context to how you work your life.
And so for me, that was a huge learning for this year.
Next one is if there's ever a problem in an organization or department or a line of revenue, look at the leader.
And here's the rule.
The leader is always the problem.
Not sometimes, the leader is always the problem.
So if a function is mediocre, it's because the leader is mediocre, period, full stop, no questions.
So it's either the leader and the team or just the leader, but it's never just the team.
So if the leader is mediocre and then they brought in mediocre people, it's the leader and the team.
If the leader is mediocre and you've got a great team, the leader will turn the great team into a mediocre team.
And so I had a conversation with a business owner the other day and he had four locations.
Two of them were doing well, two of them were doing poorly.
I asked a zillion question to finally get the the the fun fact, which is that he had somebody in the company who was running them, who was a long time friend and also, we'll just say, an addict, i'll just say that.
And every day was coming up to work messed up inebriated, whatever you want to say.
And he was asking me for tactical business advice when I was like there is no tactical business advice.
There is nothing that will matter, because no one will listen to somebody who they're like.
Well, why don't you show up to work, sober?
Why don't we start there?
No one will respect that.
Imagine that guy coming in and being like, hey guys, let's pick up the pace.
What?
Like what are we talking about?
And so it's like all these questions about pricing and sales like dude, none of this matters until we fix the leader problem.
But the thing is that's obviously an extreme example, but it happens at every level.
If your media team's not working well, the leader.
If your sales team isn't good, the leader.
The question is, after you pull the leader out, is the team also screwed?
Got a 50-50 shot there.
If they had a low bar and brought in low bar people, that sucks.
Now, if you have, now it's like well, what happens if you had a bad team and you put a good leader in place?
Have you ever seen a good coach turn around a bad team?
Pretty sure there's a ton of movies about it.
Yes, if you have a great leader, they can turn a mediocre team into a great team.
So I think I spent too much time early on in my career trying to pinpoint problems.
Straight up, there's a problem with a function, leader's the issue.
Just solves it.
This is so much faster.
So there's a razor for you.
Lesson 24.
In the world of AI, your brand is your moat.
All right.
Now, this is not going to be news to some of you.
And for some of you, this hopefully is news to none of you.
But if it is news, welcome to 2026.
So, if that's the case, because services and products can become increasingly commoditized and listed goals and content?
Things like that are easy to reproduce.
How can you build a brand right?
So branding, the act of it, is who and what you associate with.
That is what will matter, and so, in a world of ai, you have to be thinking about this, and so if you're a local business, for example, your brand will be mostly word of mouth and the reviews about you online.
That's what the reality is, but just about every other business, it's that, plus all of the content you're making publicly right, and so this is just the the most to the point version of this that i can give you, which is, as always give away the secrets, sell the implementation.
People do not want to do the work for whatever it is that you're showing.
Whether you're showing how to fix toilets, they'll just call you to do their plumbing.
If you're telling how to fix relationships, they're still going to call you to help them fix their relationship.
You tell them how to fix their business, they'll call you to help them fix their business right.
People do not want to do the work or they don't want to do it alone.
Key myself included.
I will always pay to go faster and decrease risk, so they don't have to do backtracks.
Like, I get the DIY.
I will consume something and be like, this person clearly knows what they're talking about.
I will pay to go faster.
And I will pay to have you take this generic thing.
Make sure it's applied to my business so that it's right, because I don't want to pay the tax of ignorance.
And so, if you know this to be true, then the question is if I want to build a brand in 2026, I want to think about what are the benefits curated associations that I want to make that will reinforce the position that I want to have in my prospects' minds.
What things do they like that I want them to think of me when they think of that?
And so that's what we want to do.
So what do you think we're going to do?
I'm going to do a lot more business fixing next year and I have to build a lot more infrastructure in order to do that, but it's going to be demonstration of skill right.
What's something that very few people can do in your market, that you can demonstrate better than anyone else.
Do that.
Do as much of it as you possibly can do until your eyes bleed, because the market won't even know you exist by the time you're getting tired.
So on the, on the the talk track of brand.
Brand has to be constantly reinforced, so you need to keep pushing the envelope to stay relevant.
Something is only a big deal if you make it one.
No one knew about the launch.
No one.
I have almost 20 million or 17.
I don't even know what it is.
Between 16, 17, between 16 and 20.
I haven't checked in a while.
16, 20 million followers or subscribers across all different channels or whatever.
The vast majority of people did not know about the launch.
Didn't even know about it.
And I tried really, really hard.
And in order to stay relevant, you still have to keep going bigger and bigger.
Like, why would I do the launch?
It's like well, I got to like.
It's like just because, like Chris Bumstead when he won the first Olympia, it doesn't mean he's done.
It's like, we gotta win the Olympia again.
You gotta maintain the title.
You gotta, it's like, that's why it's defending the title, right?
So you have to continue to, and I think this is what's lost in some people.
It's like, man, the climbing, the climb is so tough.
It's like, no, man, holding the top's way harder than climbing it.
And there's always levels to the game.
And so it's like, once you get your title, whatever your title is for you, it's like you have to keep taking on new title bouts, to keep defending the belt.
And maybe the stages keep getting bigger.
In business, the stages can only keep getting bigger.
I'll tell you a failure that I had around the launch.
I think on the PR front, I had planned for a big PR kind of blast off on the back end of that.
And basically that that fell flat, not basically the the PR firm that I had.
I didn't have really any attention to put towards it.
And I saw it as it was a miss.
It was a miss.
Like how many articles did you see about somebody, like some Internet person, doubling the world record?
Not that many.
And that would totally have been fixable if I had just had queued up a bunch of PR and I just didn't.
So that was a miss.
That was a miss for me.
We'll do better next time.
Next one, the greatest risk to the business is that you don't feel like doing it anymore.
This is super real.
So the reason that people, like most businesses, don't actually run out of money the founder runs out of will.
And so like you have to you have to get you have to have the frame shift to it has to be worth suffering for. and i do think that making money is a component of it like i had somebody the other day who was like hey i'm thinking about switching the business and that's how most businesses die right the entrepreneur just switches and says it's not worth it for me anymore i said if this thing made 10 times the money would you keep doing it and they're like hell yeah would you look at this other business they're like no i'm like well then dude let's just fix the business right so making more money can help but i will say kind of like the electroshock therapy if it made 10 times the money it will help in the short term but not forever because plateaus are often the ones that stay in it the longest so what i mean by that like they it's like the shrinking and the growing are the ones that are i think the most painful the plateaus people can just stay in them for years because It's just like not painful enough to quit, but still very painful.
So the ones that grow fast are in lots of pain, and eventually they don't need the money anymore at all.
And so those are very like.
If you've grown a lot and made a lot of money really quickly, you then stop wanting to be in all the pain that this tremendous growth provides you, because you're like I don't need to do this anymore.
And so, on the flip side, the ones who are shrinking or are very volatile deal with the most pain, obviously.
So you have the same volatility and pain of the growth guy, except you also aren't making money.
So that is the most pain that you will be in business.
And so what we're solving for as entrepreneurs is something worth doing, right?
Having something, and I think that the most powerful thing, thing that has helped me, is having something outside of yourself that the business acts as a vehicle that you drive towards, and so some of so.
For some people, that's like some societal impact that you want to make, that's some problem that you want to solve.
For me, it's the person that I want to become but, like that's very easy to say, and I've heard many people say it their actions don't align with that.
So, whatever that thing is for you and it might not be that you want to become this person, but whatever that thing is for you it's like it has to be real, because and you have to you have to fix the business to allow you to achieve that thing, because once you make all the money that you want to make, you have to have another reason to do it, And so that is why entrepreneurs not wanting to do it is the greatest risk to the business.
And I think that like, I have to always keep that front of mind.
Like the thing that, like I have to be willing at this point for acquisitioncom to do some things that I just want to do, even if it's not in the business's best interest, because it's in my best interest.
And if it's in my best interest, I will keep doing the business.
