#1 Lesson for Young Entrepreneurs from $100M CEO | Alex Hormozi

Summary

• The most profound lessons often come from our failures, but the key is to learn the right lessons to avoid reinforcing incorrect beliefs based on experience.
• An early experience with inbound marketing led me to mistakenly believe that success should be fast and significant, but sustainable growth is actually more desirable in the long run.
• Having a long-term perspective in health and relationships has been beneficial for me, as it's been with my wife Layla, and I am now applying this to business growth.
• Sustainable, reliable growth is what the wealthiest individuals seek, looking for consistency and low volatility rather than chasing immediate, big wins.
• Increasing the time between thought and action in business can prevent rash decisions and allows for more rational planning, which is crucial as a business grows.
• The opportunity for truly successful businesses arises when they can grow without relying on the owner's daily involvement, shifting the owner's role to guiding direction for the leadership team.
• Aiming for consistent, moderate growth each quarter is a powerful strategy; for example, maintaining 10% growth every quarter leads to substantial success over the years.
• It's important to scrutinize both successes and failures to learn the correct lessons, which involves considering the possibility that external factors may contribute more to outcomes than we may think.
• Reversing the usual tendency to credit ourselves for successes and blame failures on circumstances can reveal new insights and help identify patterns that can lead to taking advantage of opportunities that arise.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest taking a step back to really think about your failures and successes. Sometimes, you might think you learned a lesson when actually, you got it wrong. So it's good to ask yourself: "Did I learn the right thing from this experience?" Take a moment and write down what happened and what you thought the lesson was. Then examine it to see if it's really the truth.

A good way of doing this is like when you invest in your health or relationships for the long-term. You wouldn't want to rush those, right? So apply that same thinking to your business. It's not about fast and big success. It's about the slow and steady growth that lasts.

When you're growing your business, try to keep things simple and steady. Like, if you can grow your business by 10% every quarter, that's great. Small, consistent steps are key. It's not about the big, quick wins. It's about building a strong foundation that doesn't always need you to keep it going.

Take the time to think before acting. This gives you a chance to make choices that are smart, not just fast or emotional. Remember, sometimes doing nothing is the best action.

And look at your business like you're planning to stick with it forever. Build it so that it can grow on its own, without you having to be there all the time. Set up a team that can take the lead and let you just guide them when they need it.

Finally, flip the script on how you view your wins and losses. It can be easy to think that all the good stuff happened because of you and the bad stuff was just bad luck. But ask yourself, "What if it’s the other way around?" You might find out new things that can help you see opportunities you didn't see before. By changing your perspective, you'll learn a lot and maybe even figure out new ways to succeed.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"One of the best things about entrepreneurship is the lessons that we learn from failure"

– Alex Hormozi

"Just because you have experience doesn't mean we took the right lesson from it"

– Alex Hormozi

"My own obsession with the hurry and the rush…at least it decreases"

– Alex Hormozi

"Most times no reaction is the best decision"

– Alex Hormozi

"The richest people in the world just look for reliability; they look for low volatility"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

what's going on everyone i think one of the best things about entrepreneurship is the lessons that we learn from failure right and i try and share as many as i can uh on this on this you know vlog podcast etc um because i think that if i can help you not have the failure to learn the lesson then you can get the lesson without the scar that being said one of the hardest things is learning the right lesson from failure and so let me let me unpack that because i think it's one of the most profound things that we as entrepreneurs or just we as people have to learn is making sure that we're we're getting the right takeaway so let me give you a couple different examples to show you the wrong takeaways um and then kind of maybe walk through a framework that might be useful so let's say uh you know you're in middle school and you're dancing with someone of the opposite sex or whatever you're attracted to whatever right you're dancing with someone you like and uh i'll just use the guy girl example because that's what i'm used to so it's like let's say i'm dancing with a girl and uh and she she breaks my heart whatever right if i said ah girls aren't for me right girls don't work right that would be ridiculous right of course it would be it would just mean that that didn't work in that one instance but if i took the wrong lesson from it then i might swear off women all together right and what's interesting is that that's an incredibly ridiculous example but people do it every single day right it's like a business owner who hires an employee and the employee doesn't work out and says ah employees they all suck they're not for me right it's learning the wrong lesson from the failure and so i think it's just as dangerous maybe even more dangerous to learn the wrong lesson because now you have a story that you've told yourself that reinforces the incorrect lesson and then from that point going forward you you operate under this false guise this false belief that you've told yourself that you believe is right because you have experience right and just because you have experience doesn't mean we took the right lesson from it and so i'll tell you one that's uh that's been really that's been really interesting for me to learn um is over the last uh you know over how many years right i have succeeded a lot based on inbound marketing all right so that means paid advertising to generate demand in inwards right and what's interesting about that is a lot of my successes come from it but what's interesting is that i think that i've had a really long-term perspective when it comes to my health right health and fitness like when i work out and how i eat i've always tried to pick really sustainable things that i can do forever right and i've been in pretty good shape for you know almost almost 20 years um and so that's that's been a successful action that i've been able to repeat over and over again to the same degree my marriage is actually probably one of the better things that i've done i picked that rationally my partner laila and we both said we want to go this way we have this mission we have these values and we'll figure out the love stuff as we go and we actually got married before we were really in love um mostly just because we thought we were so aligned and we've learned the love and every year it's actually gotten better and that was a rational decision that was made by you know by both of us but and it was based on long-term thinking but what's interesting is that i've like been able to observe my own actions uh over the last decade you know in business and i actually even think that i've still been more short-term skewed in my thinking because of the thing that i got really good at which is inbound and inbound you can immediately gen you can snap your fingers and make money tomorrow and you can make a tremendous amount of money in a very short period of time and i think in some ways i may have learned the wrong lesson from my early success which is success should come big and should come fast right for me right because that's that's my own it's for my own belief and um as i look at the things that i've done that i've done really well for a long period of time none of them follow that that path right and so i've been you know strategically or deliberately kind of deconstructing my beliefs around what i think success should look like and what growth should look like and i'm finding myself more and more trying to move in the direction of sustainable growth which i remember hearing when i was younger and being like ah that's horse crap but now as you know i feel like i've gotten more scars and more experience i actually think that if you're really looking on an endless horizon which is what i try to shift myself towards then you only do things that you think are worthwhile and your obsession my own obsession with the hurry and the rush you know i would love to say disappears but at least it decreases right because if you're like you get from the finite to the infinite you go for the can i do this until i die i know that what i do in fitness i can do until i die i know that you know the way that layla and i run our marriage i can do till i die like the way that we we've we've we've done this we can do so i don't know you might be like oh you've only been married for five years sure maybe yeah maybe like maybe maybe i'll have to keep saying this and then it's like you've only been married 10 years only been married 20 years i don't know we'll see right but it feels the same long-term way the way the other ones did because we have there's way less volatility it's just a slow and steady progress and so when i think about what i like how i'm trying to build things now it's different right uh in the beginning it was just like short hard fast like let's go let's go let's go um and i feel like now as i've gotten more experienced or more weathered it's more like okay this is our current growth rate can we just sustain this right because if we if we can just sustain this for 10 years we'll be at 100 million plus we'll be at 200 million plus if we just do this and what that's forced me to do is is increase the time between my thoughts and my actions which entrepreneurship is so interesting because you have to kind of unlearn some of the things that got you started in the beginning you can't do anything because you're so paralyzed so you do need to decrease some of the time because you start taking action right but at a certain point you start becoming so good at taking action that you end up breaking things right so you actually have to start increasing that time and what that does is it gives you more space to make decisions that are in a that are rational instead of emotional and so that's when you see a competitor run an ad or you see an employee leave with clients or whatever happens and you want to have some reaction and most times no reaction is the best decision and this is just like it's been this repeated trend that i've had and so my current the current lesson that i'm trying to see is is actually not from failure but making sure that i learned the correct lesson from my success um and thinking it might have actually been bad for me that i was that i was so successful so early on uh and it might have been that i took the wrong strategy from it and so what i the things that i'm trying to build now are far more enduring uh and more stable and do not require me or my skill at all and by doing that i feel like i'm getting closer to the first time in my life where i actually have businesses that truly run without me um like actually not as in like oh i don't do the day to day that's definitely one level and one component of it but when it can get to the point where it truly grows without me and i'm really just there to guide direction and be a sounding board for the leadership team that's in place i feel like that's that's where i should go um and i feel like the things that i'm building now are in alignment with that and it's been it's taken years to get here um and so anywho my goal is if you are if you are in it and you're not growing as as fast as you want but you are growing then extrapolate that over 10 years right extrapolate over five years and say can i just grow at 10 every every every quarter that's huge growth right can i just do this every quarter can i just make this sustainable can i make this consistent because what i'm seeing is the richest people in the world just look for reliability they look for low volatility which means less of this and so if i can decrease the volatility of the business by making things more consistent and not going for the big the big win that's like right there right and i just stay patient um it continues to pay dividends and so that's kind of the chapter that i'm in right now um in the lesson that i'm trying to learn or or walk uh and so i figured i would just share that with you and also just the thought process around looking at your successes and your failures and making sure that you learn the right lessons from them because i've definitely taken lessons from my successes that that were not that were not correct and i've taken lessons from my failures that were not correct and each each of them is equally dooming or damning right and a fun final thought that i'll leave you with is what if everything that you did when you were successful was not because of you but because of outside forces and everything that you've done to fail was your fault i've taken this perspective and tried to apply it to my life and i've had an amazing amount of inferences and thoughts that have gone around it that have been completely new so it's like what if what if when you were successful that one time maybe it wasn't because of you at all maybe it was just maybe it was just chance right maybe it's just coincidence and i think a lot of times we apply those frameworks to other people but never to ourselves so someone does something bad we say it's their fault something good happens if we don't like them we're like oh that was because they got luckier only because of this outside circumstance that wasn't because of them but we never apply that to ourselves and i think that if we do if you reverse it because we always want to say we take credit for our for our wins and we say our losses are because of outside circumstances but if we flip that a lot of times i think you get some really interesting lessons that can come from it and just just walking through the thought process what if this wasn't because of me what other things happened that didn't line up for me that were not my doing and by doing that you'll start to you'll start to see different trends and different patterns then maybe you cannot you can you can take advantage of opportunities when they aren't because of you but you can still take advantage right and so anyways i wanted to share this thought process with you for me it's been incredibly valuable um and i hope it is valuable for you too so uh enjoy and i'll see in the next [Music] [Applause] you