33 Brutal Truths To Stop Wasting Your Potential - Alex Hormozi - #1117

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Welcome back, man, another speed running podcasting booty call.

**Alex Hormozi** (0:05)
That's the hope.

**Chris Williamson** (0:07)
Do more hard things every day is a great mantra, but it should be less about ice baths and more about making that decision you've been putting off for three months.

**Alex Hormozi** (0:18)
Yeah.
I think that there's been a big misconception around hard stuff, which is just that running a marathon necessarily means that you can have a hard conversation with your wife, by saying, I do hard things, but those hard things don't necessarily generalize. So I think domain specificity is much more narrow, unless you decide to generalize to an identity label of like, I am the type of person who can do hard things because I ran this marathon or because I do these ice baths and then as a result, I can then generalize that label to other behaviors. But if you can make that label and identify with it, then you don't need to run the marathon in order to do the hard thing. You just need to label.

**Chris Williamson** (0:56)
What are the hard things that people should be focusing on more? What are the step change function, hard thing capacity skills that people should focus on more?

**Alex Hormozi** (1:08)
I think it's being cognizant of what outside forces are influencing your behavior in a way that is aversive or against your goals. If you're like, I want to start a business, but I am afraid of what other people will say, then it means that we are allowing those other people to control your behavior. I think when you say it in really plain terms like they're like, wow, I didn't know I was giving them that much power for my life. It's like, I'm not doing this because of them, which means they control me.
To me, the hard thing is in some ways just not allowing that control to persist or keep going.

**Chris Williamson** (1:48)
It is interesting how many people can do hard things physically but can't do hard things decisively.

**Alex Hormozi** (1:54)
I have our security team and whatnot, and this is a discussion that I've had with probably each of them at different times because I've seen combat and death and all that kind of stuff.
And what's funny is that the amount of risk that they are willing to put their physical bodies in, literally their lives at stake, but that's how that doesn't necessarily translate to being able to have a, call it vulnerable conversation with a wife, spouse, lover, et cetera. It's just interesting. This is again back to like, these things don't generalize. They look good, but they do not mean the same thing.

**Chris Williamson** (2:27)
It's weird that we publicly admire the obvious hard thing, even if that isn't the one that actually makes the biggest difference to people's life direction. It's not predictive of being a good friend. It's not predictive of being the best partner. It's not predictive of being a successful business owner, but because it's more obvious, because it's more publicly laudable, you can flex it online and you can tell people, I ran a marathon as opposed to when my partner asked me a difficult question, I didn't shy away from it. I told them the truth.

**Alex Hormozi** (3:00)
To be clear, I think that those things are laudable in and of themselves. You go fight a war, you go run a marathon. I think all of those things are praiseworthy. It's just the generalizable component of that hard being, I can do all hard things is really the misconception. But I do think that if for whatever reason, you tell yourself a narrative that because you did this hard thing, you can do all hard things, then that's amazing. And by all means, if someone's like, I started doing jujitsu and it completely changed my life, it's like, that's awesome. But it probably isn't because you learn how to do guard better.
It's probably because what learning to do guard meant for you changed these other series of behaviors down the line.

**Chris Williamson** (3:36)
How correlative do you think it is people that do hard things physically versus people who develop the capacity to do hard things that matter?

**Alex Hormozi** (3:46)
Can you say that again?

**Chris Williamson** (3:47)
Let's say that doing hard things electively versus doing hard things decisively. The big difference between the two to me seems to be decisions that require emotion and decisions that require effort.
That seems to be one of the big delineations here.

**Alex Hormozi** (4:02)
So it's like the called hard conversation versus hard physical tasks?

**Chris Williamson** (4:06)