3 Stages of Building a Personal Brand | Ep 993

**Alex Hormozi** (0:00)
What makes someone dangerous is not how much they work, but how much work they do. And so, in this video, I'll show you the same process that I use to build our portfolio companies that generate over $250 million a year and recently broke the world record for the fastest selling non-fiction book of all time, doing $106 million in a weekend. And so, there's one main takeaway I want, which is that you don't need to do more, you need to actually get the big stuff done. And so, my favorite question I asked myself at the beginning of the year is, if I could make only one thing happen this year, that if it occurred, would cause the remainder of my goals to become accomplished or relevant by consequence, what would that one thing be? And the answer to that question becomes my priority. And I'll define priority as the thing that comes before. Priori, right? It's from Latin, which means before. And so, it has to come first. And where people make mistakes is that priorities, as a plural, only happened in the 1950s and beyond. So for the rest of human history, priority was only done as a singular word. But because people bastardize things and because no one can make decisions, they made it priorities. But you need a priority. And how you allocate your resources to accomplish your priority becomes your strategy. And so, people fail to succeed at business because they are unwilling to make trade-offs. They are unwilling to make a priority rather than priorities. And as a result, they make the largest trade-off of all, which they never accomplished the most important thing. And so, please do not be like most business owners, and heck, most people, and have another mediocre year ahead of you, because you were unwilling to make trades. And so, this year, my single largest objective is to get more brand credibility across the established legacy media channels, right? And so, if that occurs, the remainder of my goals become accomplished by consequence. And so, for example, my book launch, which doubled the world record, had no real press. We didn't receive a New York Times bestseller, and to be clear, I went in knowing that they wouldn't award it for that. But I use this as an example of what's missing from my brand per se.
And I believe that if I make this change, any of my subgoals would get accomplished by consequence. And so, this is my full focus beyond the regular blocking and tackling of business. And so, what's interesting is I can look back at my career over, I guess, the last 13 years or 14 years since I've been in business, and I actually can tell you what each of my objectives was for each of those years. And I thought it would probably be pretty cool because for those who are either starting or if you're much further along, you can catch up to where I was at at your specific stage and at least see the caliber of the goals and how short they are. So let's start at the beginning, but I want to link each of these goals to the next goal. So my first goal, 2010, when I was in college was to get a good consulting job. And so that was the only goal for the year. All I did was in service to that goal and I ended up getting it. And so once I got the consulting job, my next year's goal, 2011, was to ace the GMAT. Why did I want to ace the GMAT? Because I thought I was going to get into business school, and that's what I wanted to do. And so that was my priority. I did ace the GMAT and then in acing the GMAT, I realized that I didn't want to get into business school to start a business. I just wanted to start a business. And so the next year's goal was to quit my job and start a fitness business. And so that's what I did. And so then once I started my business, it didn't make that much money. And so in 2013, my goal was make the gym make more money. That was it. And so then when I made the gym make more money in 2014, my goal was open a second and third locations. So once I opened my second and third locations in 2014, my goal was get to 10 locations by 2015
So in 2015, I got to 6 and then realized that there was a better version of the model, which was launching other people's gyms. And so that's what I decided to pivot towards. And in 2016, my goal was launch other people's gyms and sell my own. And you might think, wait, isn't that two priorities? No, it wasn't because I had to sell my gym in order to launch other people's gyms. So that's exactly what I did. And then 2017, I now had this gym launching business, but it wasn't making the money that I thought. And I've talked about this story at Life.