Learn 97% of How to Get Rich in 11 Mins | Ep 1009

Alex Hormozi (0:00)

I'm going to give you my three favorite questions that I ask when I'm making bets in the business to make the most money. And I have these as almost like my treasured prized possessions because of how useful and how valuable the thinking frames they provide are. And so I'll give you conditions for using each of these three. So the first is, when someone wants me to do something, or they want me to approve of an action, I will almost always respond with, what problem are you trying to solve? And what's really interesting about that question is that a lot of times people have this emotional discomfort, there's a problem that happens, or they just don't feel good, which they determine is a problem. And then as a result, their actions skew all over the place. They're like, hey, I think we should do this employee engagement program. I'm like, okay, what problem are you trying to solve? Well, I just thought it would be good for the employees. I'm like, well, do we have a retention issue? Do we have an attraction issue? Are we unable to attract talent? Like, let me know. That's very important. Like, no, no, we don't have any retention issues, or we don't have any attraction issues. And it's like, okay, then why are we doing this? Well, I think it's good.

What problem are we trying to solve?

And so I would say that I've learned this problem question, because there's people, people are erratic. They want to do stuff. And so what ends up happening is well-intentioned people, nothing wrong with that, they will just take action on things that they know how to do when they are confronted with things that they do not know how to do. And so a lot of lack of focus is actually intellectual laziness. So what I mean is I think most people in their business know on some level what needs to happen. But because they don't know how to solve that thing, they then just find something they can solve because that makes them feel better and more competent, even though it makes no difference. And so, like, I would encourage you to think if I am being distracted, it means I'm being intellectually lazy because I can't stay on this task that I don't know how to accomplish and be incompetent for an extended period in order to get what I want, right? And so, it's a great suss out of the thinking diligence that the person is asking you to do something or that you're willing to make or that they're asking you to make or take, whether they actually really thought a throw. So, number one, someone asked me to do something, what problem are you trying to solve?

If I'm asking someone to do something, so I want something now, I ask the question, instead of giving the statement, I'll say, what would it take?

And so I almost always wrap my questions with, what would it take? Because it assumes success. And what happens is when I used to ask, and this is something I did earlier in my career, can we, could we?

I would get no's from people, and they would do a calculus in their mind of what they thought something was worth without complete context on my business like I have, or complete context for the plans that I have long term for the business. And then they would basically make a decision on my behalf by saying no.

So I actually have, I'm actually working off of incorrect data. Like this is really important shit, even though I'm just making a little webcam version here, but like really, really important, this is half the process, because we got a conversation about this. If I asked what would it take, someone can then just tell me what it would take, and then I can make the decision of whether I think it's worth it. And so the amount of things that have been unlocked in my business of me just saying, like someone says no, and I'm like stop. What would it take for us to do it? Obviously, if I had a billion dollars, can I do it? They're like, well, yeah. I'm like, okay, does it take a billion dollars? Like, no. Okay, does it take a million dollars? Okay, no. What does it actually take? We probably need to hire somebody. Okay. Well, it's going to make us an extra million dollars this year, and it's, you know, whatever, 100 grand for this person. Okay. Then let's do that. So you're just saying we can't do it with our existing infrastructure, or more specifically, that the existing infrastructure is prioritized against other things, which I can then say, let's deprioritize those and prioritize this. Right? So if someone asks me, let's do this thing, I like to ask what problem are we solving?