A Video to Watch if You're Ambitious and in Your 20s or 30s | Ep 1003

Alex Hormozi (0:00)

Just got off the phone with a friend of mine who's competing in a fitness thing, and she didn't win this fitness thing, and she looked at the winner of that fitness thing, and was like, I don't know if I would want to look that way in order to win this prize. And so it created a really good conversation that I think I'll share with you, which is that if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. I'll say that again, play dumb games, win dumb prizes. And so I think one of the most tragic things that can happen to us throughout our lives is that we work very hard, we sacrifice a lot, we get to the top of the podium, and we're given a trophy that we realize, this is not where we want to be, and this is not what I wanted to win. And this game really didn't matter. And it was only to win in the eyes of people that I don't care about. And so I think one of the most interesting ways of thinking about life is through game design. Like we are all playing games. Many of us are involved in multiple games. At the same time, we have our business game, we have our fitness game, we have our relationship games. There's these games that are involved in many of them. Some are finite, some are infinite. But this particular thing, let's just say your career, your interests, understanding who the person is who determines who wins. And so in this particular instance, I said to her, number one, you are not the one who's defining the physique that is going to win this competition.

Someone else's. Number two, it's not super clearly defined. And even if it were, would you want it? Now, the way that they do this in the aesthetic shows for bodybuilding and things like that is they try and signal to the whole sport what they want by who they select as the winners. Seems kind of obvious. It's a little bit backwards, but that's kind of how it works. Like, this person won. By the way, that's what we're looking for. It's like, well, no shit, the game's already over, right? But that's kind of how it works. And so for the next competition, people try to look more like that one, and somebody else wins, and if they want to shift a look over time of what they're looking for, then they start moving what they want the champions to be. All right? But the point is this, is that in order for her to look that way, she would have to make sacrifices in her life that I don't think are worth making. Rather, they would be too costly to the other parts of her life. And so in talking about this, it was just such a really interesting notion compared to how people live their lives. I think so many people live mediocre lives because they play games that other people designed that even if they did win, they wouldn't want the prize.

And so if you're playing a game right now and you're losing, you have to ask yourself, is this a game that when I take it to the natural dream I actually want to win?

And what is the price of winning and what is the benefit of winning?

And I think that the fitness in the aesthetic world is kind of interesting because like many people who are in that world believe that if they somehow become a pro or win a certain number of shows or become top on Olympia or whatever, that that's somehow going to make them successful in business. And it really couldn't be further from the truth. There's tons of broke fitness people. And all they have to do is to look at past champions, and some of them who didn't learn business just are broke. They stopped getting their moment in the sun, they get their sponsorship go away, and then they're back to zero again. And so what I think happens more often is that they have a way that they kind of understand how to do. They know how to increase their reps and eat and do cardio and all that stuff, improve over time. And so because they understand how to improve at this, they choose not to be a beginner in other places, like business, like marketing, like sales, etc.

And so they, without conscious knowledge, end up dedicating five, ten plus years of their life and taking years off their life from a health perspective, because the sport, especially at the highest levels, is really tough on you, to not actually get what they want, because they never played it out, because it was emotionally uncomfortable to think about what it would be like to suck at something new. And so I think it's a really good allegory for how a lot of us, myself included, right, we live our lives, where it's like, what thing am I doing? What game am I playing that I am only playing because I'm comfortable in the game and I understand the variables in the players and I know how to win? And so just because you know how to win, doesn't mean you should win, and it doesn't mean the game is worth playing.