24 Controversial Truths About Success & Failure - Alex Hormozi - #830

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Alex Hormozi. He's a founder, investor and an author. Alex's Twitter has been one of my favorite sources of insights over the last few years. And today we get to go through some of his best lessons about life, human behavior, psychology, business and resilience. Yet again, this is so, so good. Expect to learn how to stop being indecisive and actually take action, how to persevere when things get rough, why overnight successes don't happen overnight, why Alex hates being around negative people, if there is a wrong way to live your 20s, the single most important habit to cultivate in life, and much more. I love these episodes with Alex. I'm going to keep doing them because I keep learning stuff, and I think he's got a lot to teach us. And the episodes move at this really sort of quick pace. It's fast enough to be interesting and slow enough for the points to have time to marinate. It's perfect. I really, really hope that there's tons you take away from this one. Don't forget that if you are new here or a long time listener, you might be listening, but not subscribed. And the next couple of weeks have got the biggest guests we've ever had coming on the show. Dr. Andrew Huberman, Eric Weinstein, Robert Greene and a ton more. So if you don't want to miss those episodes, just press subscribe. It helps to support the show and it makes me very happy. And it ensures you don't miss episodes when they go up. So go and do it for me. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Hormozi.
Here we are again, hard things are hard, that's why they're hard. Another episode. The biggest risk to your future isn't your competition, it's the distractions you insist on keeping in your life rather than doing the things you know you should be doing but aren't. People delay doing things they don't like for longer than it takes to do them.

**Alex Hormozi** (2:13)
There have been so many times in my life where I knew I needed to do something, and then I filled all this extra time not doing that thing. And then the moment I did it, I was like, wow, that took way less time than I thought it was going to take. And not only that, it took way less time than it took me to delay to actually get to this point. And if I had only started with just doing what I was supposed to do, I could have done four or five other things that I was also supposed to do by this exact same point. And so thinking about it from that perspective, I've tried to eliminate as much time between I think I should do this thing and beginning doing it. And I think you get this positive reinforcement cycle that occurs every time you start, I call it pulling the thread. It's like, I just need to start pulling the thread. And then all of a sudden, what feels really unknown becomes very tangible. And you're like, oh, I understand the six problems I have to solve to do this big thing, but now I know the problems. And then it feels like you can, you can wrap your arms around it and then you can start taking it one bite at a time.

**Chris Williamson** (3:12)
So this same thing works in reverse as well, that when you put something off, it makes putting it off more, manana, manana, manana.

**Alex Hormozi** (3:19)
I used to define power by the distance between thoughts and reality.
Meaning if you think about somebody who's omnipotent, so if God or the God figure would be omnipotent as he thinks, things are. So there's zero space between thoughts and reality. And so if we want to be more godlike in our lives, the distance that we can shrink between wanting to do something or thinking something should be done and it being done is a direct indication of our personal power in our lives. And so that has helped me basically think, don't be a powerless bitch. Like just shrink the gap. And I think that's why a lot of my little like personal hacks of waking up and then trying to shrink the time between when I wake up and when I start working and shrinking the time between one task and the next task. Like you don't need to take 30 minutes of getting ready to start working. Like you can just start working because as soon as you get into it, you start pulling the thread and you're like, oh, here it is. And all of the time that I was getting ready to work, I was just using up my best brain power time on things that truly don't move the needle at all.