$100M CEO: “Why therapists failed me…” [language warning]
Summary
- If you're struggling with issues like anxiety, depression, or other personal deficiencies, I'll share a framework that has worked for me.
- Most therapists might try to find meaning in your problems by exploring your past, but I believe digging up the past can sometimes create more anxiety.
- I think the AAA approach of reinforcing identity with a deficiency every day is counterproductive to overcoming it.
- To stop being addicted or stop anxiety, stop giving it power by constantly thinking about it or doing routines centered around it.
- I've learned to adopt the mentality of "F**k Happiness," which means I don't give my unhappiness power by obsessing over it.
- By not giving attention to psychological problems, they tend to shrink into irrelevance.
- Own your deficiencies publicly to remove the shame and power they hold over you.
- I believe the power comes from accepting deficiencies rather than defending against or altering the meaning attached to them.
- In an argument, or in your own mind, agree with the criticism and then move on without giving it power.
- Not every method works for everyone, and while therapy helps many, my method focuses on acknowledging an issue and then depowering it by saying "So what?" and letting it diminish in relevance.
- Shame dissipates when exposed to light, so talking about something that causes shame openly can remove its power.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest starting with not letting psychological problems or personal deficiencies take over. This doesn't mean ignoring them, but rather not obsessing over being happy or anxiety-free. You can try the "F**k Happiness" mindset, which is just a way to stop giving your unhappiness so much power.
Here's a step-by-step plan:
- Acknowledge your deficiencies or issues without shame. If you're feeling anxious, just note it and move on. You don't have to dwell on it.
- Share your struggles or deficiencies openly when it's beneficial, just to take away their power. Own it without making it part of your identity.
- When you face criticism or negative thoughts, agree with them briefly (e.g., "You're right, and…") and then let it go. Don't defend or overanalyze, just accept it and move past it.
- Shift your focus from the issues to what you find meaningful. Realize that not everything needs your attention, especially the background noise of your thoughts.
Remember, these methods may not work for everyone, but they can be low-cost, low-time ways to start changing your mindset. People are different, so if this approach doesn't suit you, it's okay to try something else. The key is to do what works for you in diminishing the power of your personal challenges.
Quotes by Alex Hormozi
"Most therapists are humans and most humans suck at most things, especially things they think they're good at"
– Alex Hormozi
"The way to stop being addicted to something is to stop thinking about it"
– Alex Hormozi
"Time does heal lots of wounds"
– Alex Hormozi
"The only way to struggle to deal with shame is to shed light on it"
– Alex Hormozi
"The only way to truly fight it is to not fight it at all"
– Alex Hormozi
Full Transcript
in this video i'm going to be talking to you about how to fix the character traits and deficiencies that you have in your life so whether it be struggling with anxiety or happiness and depression or being a bad husband or being money focused or whatever the thing is that you claim to have a problem with i'm going to give you really the only mental framework that has ever worked for me if you're new to the channel my name is alex from rosie i own acquisition.com to portfolio of companies is about 85 million a year i make these videos because candidly i enjoy sharing some of the things that have helped us kind of get through things as we've grown our companies and there are a lot of people who are broke and i don't want you to be one of them and so i'm going to probably piss a lot of people off in this video so i'm going to give you a heads up second thing is i will be cussing in this video so if you have kids around um i would say you know mute it or listen to it another time so i was talking to an entrepreneur the other day and uh they were saying that they were having panic attacks right and they were struggling with this issue what i want to do is walk you through um the process that i was explaining to them now at this point they uh the reason the the panic attacks started uh for this entrepreneur ironically um is that they were talking to a therapist and the therapist was like let's look at your past and dug up you know crap about their past and then they started looking at this thing and then they started getting you know anxiety kind of remembering all these these kind of past experiences and whatnot here's the thing most therapists and i say this with zero degree most therapists are humans and most humans suck at most things especially things they think they're good at and so most of them are just normal people who did okay in school and now just like talking to people and don't have any [ __ ] clue what they're doing all right so here's the deal here's the hot take what most of them will do is they will try and pull something up and say something to the extent of what do you make that mean what does that mean to you the thought process behind this is hey you have this thing it's triggering a feeling it's because you think that having anxiety makes you a bad person or makes you a bad entrepreneur or whatever thing that you say it has meaning right what do we make this mean all right that's the question what are you making this mean all right so if you have problems and this is especially important with cyclical behavior reinforcing behavior this is also one of the reasons that i actually do not stand for the whole aaa concept of standing up in front of people every morning and say hi everybody i am an adult i [ __ ] hate it it's literally like owning this deficiency and incorporating it and weaving it into your contract and your identity and you reinforce it every [ __ ] morning it's insanity to me the way to stop being addicted to something is to stop thinking about it like what does it look like to not be addicted it looks like you just continuing to live your life not even thinking about it what does it look like to not have anxiety it's not you doing your anti-anxiety routine in the morning and saying i suffer from anxiety or i struggle with anxiety it's not saying that and saying i have to do these things i must i should i i need to in order to not have anxiety because then you're thinking about anxiety you give anxiety power and so what i'm going to walk you through is the way to hold the space and own the power that you have in your own mind outside of the thing that you were projecting the power onto the process that these therapists that are [ __ ] retards will do is they will lead you through this thing where they try and transform meaning they say instead of saying it means you're a bad person what if we just said this is you know it's a good thing or it's not a bad thing right so we're trying to transform meaning and i think that's like level one elementary you know grade school of of cognitive behavioral therapy right i think that's grade school but the thing is and this is the problem because i've gone through the cycle which is why i'm speaking about this so passionately and i'll tell you a quick story before i dive in so there was a period of time in my life where i was very unhappy all right and so i obsessed about happiness right i read all the positive psychology journals i read the the books i read the happiness equation i mean like i went through all of these things and yet after spending all of this time trying to obsess about happiness i was no less no more happy and so then i thought to myself well in one instance i can spend lots of time and effort and be unhappy or i can spend zero time and effort and be unhappy well this one cost me less i might as well start pursuing this and this is what happened i adopted this mentality and i will share it with you called [ __ ] happiness all right bear with me and so what ended up happening is that i thought these thoughts and and whenever uh the idea of is this making me happy and all of these normal trigger thoughts i'd be like oh i'm not happy this isn't good i feel sad blah blah blah blah i would literally have this trump card that i would just pop in my head and be like [ __ ] happiness and i keep moving the difference between [ __ ] happiness and let's think about how we should be grateful for things is that when you say [ __ ] happiness or [ __ ] the thing that you are struggling with [ __ ] anxiety [ __ ] whatever is that it no longer has power because we're not trying to transform the meaning of the behavior we're eliminating the meaning behind it all together we're transforming it into nothing and so hear me out for a second and i don't know why this is getting all spacey and weird i've tried to fix this thing a hundred times the reason this is so important all right is that when you enter these vicious reinforcing cycles so let's say it's like oh god uh i'm afraid i'm gonna have a panic attack tonight i don't wanna have a panic attack you start thinking about having a panic attack and then of course you have a panic attack because the fear of the thing is what reinforces the cycle and you can do this with anything right it could be it could be a guy with erectile dysfunction like i hope it doesn't happen i hope it doesn't happen and then it happens right because you're worried about it happening not because the happening itself is the thing right and i'm trying to use examples that purposefully people derive shame from because the thing is is that the shame of the occurrence is the thing that gives it power and so if you remove the shame and by the way the way to remove shame is to shed light on it so nothing can give you shame if you admit it openly think about it if everyone knows the thing and you accept the thing or deem the thing meaningless then it no longer has powerful over you so let me let me give you an example so this entrepreneur that i was talking about earlier they were telling me that they were having you know they're having anxiety taxes preventing them from sleeping etc right and i was like so they're like well you know i'm really working on it i was like why and they like looked at me cross-eyed and i was like how long have you been working this you know like you know eight months and i was like are you less anxious than you were before they're like well i think a little bit and i was like do you think you would be a little bit less anxious if you just did jack [ __ ] and waited eight months from when you went from when you were bad until now they were like well maybe i was like time does heal lots of wounds i was like so you spent all this time to get this little outcome and you could have just let time happen and probably had the same outcome right right i was like but let's take it one step further why didn't you tell me how many bowel movements you had yesterday i mean i didn't think it was relevant exactly so why are you sharing with me that you have panic attacks because you think it's meaningful you derive meaning your brain is telling you that this is something that is a problem so the thing is is that the deeming of the thing a problem is the problem and trying to change it or transform the meaning into something else is in my opinion just as bad because the way that you created the mess that you are in in a vicious cycle of reinforcement is that you found a thing and then you said i will give this meaning and then you spent the rest of your time trying to transform the meaning when if you want to solve the problem the experience of having the problem solved is to not think about the problem at all what it is is actually reversing the process that created meaning to begin with which is removing meaning altogether i'm saying this because i've had so many things that i've struggled with in my life that i would consistently obsess about over and over and over again oh i don't want to have that happening ah i don't want to have that happen again and then it would happen and so in my opinion the only way to overcome these issues is to you can you can slap the [ __ ] happiness concept on it but is to destroy the meaning of the thing itself and let it shrink into irrelevance most my opinion most of the psychological problems that we deal with are better dealt with not by trying to directly combat them but by not giving them the power of our attention and there's a big difference here i'm not saying the thought of anxiety comes up you say oh i don't want to think about it because then it's fear fear gives it power shame gives it power it's not that it's looking at it and saying why are you bringing this up this is irrelevant this is a non-issue and so for the same reason that you can have noise in the background and you don't think about it is that it's just noise and so what we do is we shrink the thing from being a signal that our brain deems meaningful to noise that is in the background that we no longer ascribe meaning to altogether and that is how it eventually shrinks into a relevance and then we only choose to allocate our attention towards the thing that we find meaningful right and so when what happened in my little [ __ ] happiness story is that i said this is no longer a productive conversation i'd be like i'm unhappy like [ __ ] happiness whatever i'm gonna keep moving and a funny thing happened a few years later i looked up and i realized that i was significantly more happy than i was before or as i prefer to say i was significantly less unhappy which also gives less power to the thing altogether a different point that i want to bring up because i think it's equally important around this this topic a lot of the fear and the shame comes from perceived judgment that we have from an anonymous outside society right we have a voice or a series of voices that we believe exist that only exist in our mind that are judging us based on this behavior that we are suffering from one of the reasons that i like to own the deficiencies publicly is not because of you guys it's for me i own like for example when i had uh you know when we were we were running and growing our our first big business which is the licensing business i was always up front i said i'm here to make money and the reason i said that was so that i would have no shame in making money because then if people in the future were going to say something like alex is only here to make money i would then look at them and say and so here hear me out listen to this dialogue let's say i was attacked because the attacks that i'm saying i'm going to portray as though it's outside but it's inside of our minds that we attack ourselves right so let's say somebody comes up to me a woman and says you're a terrible husband most people say that there are two forms of defense against this number one is saying no no i'm not a bad bad a bad husband right and then giving all the reasons why i'm a good husband the other way to defend against that would be to say well you know being a husband is not necessarily such a bad thing right and so one is to dispute the other is to alter right we're altering the meaning behind the thing the first is we're combating and we're saying that we're not the thing but still allowing the thing to have meaning allowing a bad husband to be a negative connotation that we ascribe meaning to i think this is meaningful and i it's negative but meaningful and so i will say i am not that thing or version two is this thing is meaningful but i i understand it and interpret differently right those are the two ways the second way is how most therapy works and i also think that it's [ __ ] and so here's door number three is that you look at the thing in the face and you say and i think you're a bad husband and you're right and and watch them shrivel they will be paralyzed because everything that they have exists to have a counter force but if there is no counter force for it to react to the thought process stops and so if you struggle with these vicious recurring consistent dialogues and and arguments in your head about what's good and why should change and why you need to be different and why this shouldn't be this way just look at it in the eyes and say and and i'm going to give you a really controversial example of what i think should have happened in a public scenario tiger woods he was outed you know what i mean or ousted or whatever it is you know what i mean he was publicly shamed for the the cheating thing right and mind you this is not me condoning cheating this is me to illustrate a position of power and this is a public demonstration of power but you can take it in terms of how you can internally project that power onto the idea that you want to vanquish all right and we don't vanquish it by transforming it we vanquish it by eliminating the meaning altogether and letting it shrink into irrelevance so what tiger in my opinion should have done in that situation when they said you banged all these girls and you were lying and blah blah blah he should have said yes i'm a liar and a cheater but i'm the best [ __ ] golfer there is next question what do they say when you accept it there is no conversation and so try this in the next argument you have with someone a but more importantly with yourself is that someone says i think you're x y and z and you said you're right just give the power just just say sure you're right now what and so your point when your brain tells you something that you don't like or that you don't want to look at instead of trying to make it into something else liking it to an irrelevant observation brain why didn't you bring up that i have brown hair because it doesn't matter brain why didn't you bring up how many bowel movements had yesterday this doesn't matter brain why didn't you say tell me how many uh how many stairs i went up yesterday because it doesn't matter you don't find it meaningful and so why am i now deeming this thing to be meaningful it's irrelevant to me it's it it halts the conversation and it stops the cycle i say this and i know that i got passionate about this but i say this to someone who struggled with this for a very long time and so the only psychotherapy that i was able to do was on myself and it was not through talking out all of these things and i know that a lot of people get triggered a lot of people are going to say hey i have a therapist they changed my life good for you that's awesome keep doing it i don't care what i'm doing is i'm trying to talk to the people who have not had that or have done that and it and it did not work for them all right and so i'm sharing the single most powerful mental model that has worked for me which is purposefully staring at the problem and saying so what your move and watch it shrivel and then moving on the [ __ ] with your life so anyways i love you all mozy nation appreciate you thank you for giving me the attention that you did today i make these videos because i just i i i hope that some of the lessons that that that have served me uh can serve some other people at least and if you're in a darker place or you're struggling with something like anxiety or struggling with shame around some sort of activity that you have done i can tell you the only way to struggle to deal with shame is to shed light on it shade shame only exists in darkness and the only way something has power is when we fight it because we deem it meaningful or worth combating and so i think the only way to truly fight it is to not fight it at all and say it is not a fight worth having and then it will evaporate and so anyways my friends keeping awesome lots of love i'll see you guys next video bye
