21 Brutally Honest Lessons About Life - Alex Hormozi - #738

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Alex Hormozi. He's a founder, investor and an author. Alex's Twitter continually seems to be one of my favorite sources of great insights over the last few years. And today we get to go through some of my favorite lessons from him about life, human behavior, psychology, business and resilience. Expect to learn why being called a control freak isn't an insult, how to stop making the same mistakes over and over again, why being at the top will always require you becoming uncomfortable, Alex's guide to surviving cancellation, how to get more comfortable telling the truth, why it's good to remember that all of your critics are going to die and much more. I love these episodes, these listicle style episodes where we move quickly through a bunch of different insights and aphorisms and riff on them and stuff. I really value them. They're super, super dense. And if you are new here or a long time listener, don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed. The next few months has some of the most insane guests that I've ever had on the podcast. Some huge returning guests and some massive long time requested ones. So if you don't want to miss episodes when they go live, and if you want to make me very happy, and if you want to support the show, just press subscribe on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever else you are listening. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Hormozi.
What did you call this, the podcasting booty call? We come together for a very intense three hours, don't see each other for six months until I text you again and say what you're doing.

**Alex Hormozi** (1:50)
It's exactly that.

**Chris Williamson** (1:52)
All right, so we're gonna go through some of the best lessons I've learned from you over the last couple of months. First one, control freak is a word people with low standards use to describe people with high standards. You're not a control freak, you just want it done right the first time. You're not anxious, you care. Do not expect mediocre people to support world-class goals.

**Alex Hormozi** (2:18)
I think most people feel really lonely when you want something that doesn't currently exist. And so some people call that dream, some people call that goals, whatever it is, you're trying to pull something from your mind into reality and you want it done a certain way. And if it's not done that way, it's not what you imagined. And so people on the outside will throw stones and call you names that they think will change your behavior and get you to stop. And the more I have been the person trying to pull things into reality, the more I've tried to weather and build kind of defenses against those things. So that when those stones get hurled at you by being called a control freak or by saying you micromanage things or that you have incredibly high standards, the answer is yes, because I want it done right the first time. Because either way we're going to, if you have enough will, it's going to get done the way that I want it to get done regardless and it will be less painful if we just do it right the first time, because we will still have to do it and you may have to do it three or four more times, but eventually it will just succumb to the fact that we're going to do it this way. And I think all of the great things that have happened for humanity have been from one man or woman who had an idea and just wouldn't let people shake it from them.

**Chris Williamson** (3:30)
The standard of right isn't actually that insane when you think about it. It's just right. It's just done without error. And I guess that the margin that some people consider to be right and other people consider to be right just changes.

**Alex Hormozi** (3:49)
I'm trying to think of a really good example for this. But like the level of detail, I mean, it's the difference between a book that gets 10 or 100 five star reviews and a book that gets 100,000 five star reviews. And everyone wants a silver bullet. But most of the things that make great products is 100 golden BBs. And so that's one of the things we have is there's no silver bullets, only hundreds of golden BBs. There's just hundreds of tiny little improvements. It's like, how can we look at the can? How can we improve the way it ships? What about the weight? What about the color scheme? How does it sit on the shelves? How are people going to look at it in this market versus this market? How does this name appear on hats and on shirts and on sites? What's the RGB, whatever the color scope is here versus there? It's just a thousand details that someone who does not care will not put the work to look into because they're trying to check a box rather than to make something that people will love.