3 Ways to Do What You Love (and get wealthy too)

Video

Summary

• I got so into fitness and talking about it constantly that my colleagues encouraged me to open a gym.
• Entrepreneurs can follow three paths: the artist, the pure entrepreneur, or a hybrid of both.
• The artist is someone who loves their craft, whether it's plumbing or coding, and they elevate it from a commodity to a luxury, raising prices as demand increases.
• A pure entrepreneur loves the act of business itself, regardless of the industry.
• The hybrid path involves someone like Tobias Lütke of Shopify, who focused on product development and employed others to run the business aspects.
• There's no right path; it depends on what fits best for you at the time, and you can shift paths later.
• I began as an artist passionate about fitness and transitioned into enjoying business even more.
• The artist path involves scaling quality over quantity, moving from commoditized to premium to luxury pricing.
• To succeed on the hybrid path, you need to find reliable people to handle business operations, with advisors to help make the right choices.
• The entrepreneur path is about treating the business itself as the art, often leading to multiple businesses over time.
• Your path may evolve, starting with a love for the work and then shifting focus to building an enterprise or dedicating yourself wholly to the business side.
• If you're passionate about your product or service, starting with the artist path may be ideal; if it's entrepreneurship you love, then that's the path to consider.
• Identifying what part of the business you're most passionate about helps determine your involvement level, whether it's product development, marketing, or fundraising.
• Your interest can change over time, allowing for flexibility in your entrepreneurial journey.
• The most valuable skills in order are product development, marketing, and then sales; a great product can lead to customer-driven growth.
• My book, "100 Million Dollar Offers," is an example of a product succeeding through word of mouth, selling thousands of copies without paid ads, demonstrating the power of a strong product.

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting with recognizing what you're most passionate about. If it's the product or service, like I was with fitness, that's your art. Focus on refining it and creating the best possible product. This can eventually lead to premium and even luxury pricing as demand grows. Remember, quality scales; it can take your commodity to premium level.

If you love business overall, then approach it like an artist with multiple "paintings." These are your various business ventures, and you get to explore and grow with each one.

For entrepreneurs who are a mix of the artist and the entrepreneur, like Tobias of Shopify, find reliable people to run the business operations while you concentrate on what you love. Here, having trusted advisors is key—they can help you make the right choices and find the right team.

Whichever path you choose, remember it can evolve. You could start as an artist and shift to focusing on the business as your art form. Stay open to change as you progress.

The skills that will bring the most value, in order, are product development, marketing, and sales. A great product can sometimes sell itself, as seen with my book "100 Million Dollar Offers." It has succeeded without paid ads due to its strong word of mouth, showing how a quality product is foundational.

So, recap the steps:

1. Find your passion—product or business.
2. Elevate your craft, from commodity to luxury.
3. If you’re a hybrid, surround yourself with a strong team—pick them wisely.
4. Continuously learn and be open to changing paths.
5. Focus on building a great product, which naturally leads to marketing and sales success.

By honing in on these strategies, you're setting a strong foundation for personal growth and business development without a big investment.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"The key here is that there is no right path; it's more about the path that works best for you during the season you're in"

– Alex Hormozi

"The highest level of advice is someone who has been there done that themselves and taken other people just like me to where I'm trying to go multiple times"

– Alex Hormozi

"If you know how to sell product, you'll get more promotion from your customers than anything else and that is ultimately what scales the Enterprise"

– Alex Hormozi

"The key to building a very, very big thing that lasts for a very long time is have an exceptional product"

– Alex Hormozi

"The most valuable skill that you can have in order is product first, then marketing, then sales"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

different ways to exercise different programming stuff and I was obsessed with it so much so that the people that I worked with were like dude if you don't start a gym I'll pay for the gym so that you stop talking about this stuff there are three paths that every entrepreneur eventually has to take you have the path of the pure artist The Craft of the pure entrepreneur and then a hybrid path so the path of the artist is the person who loves doing the thing now your art form might be Plumbing your art form might be carpentry coding software making media and making wallets you have something that you enjoy doing and you do it well the second path on the extreme is that you love business business is your art form and it doesn't really matter what business you're in I love working with different portfolio companies whether it's solar sales mortgage sales physical products software service businesses brick and mortar chains like we have all of those in our portfolio and I love growing them all and that's because the art for me is the actual business itself the third path is a hybrid path and each of these paths can go all the way to the max limit here so an example is Tobias Luca who is the founder of Shopify and so he loves building Shopify pages and he loves the coding and the product and so what he did was he found somebody else and have them build the business around him while he stayed focused on the main thing that he loved the most the key here is that there is no right path it's more about the path that works best for you during the season you're in because guess what you can also change paths later if you start in the artist path you might transition to the hybrid path or you might start on the honest path and go all the way to the entrepreneur path when I started I really loved Fitness I was obsessed with Fitness I had spent years I had competed in Fitness and so all I read all day besides a little bit of personal development was like macro counting different ways to exercise different programming stuff like exercise for ways to layer workouts program all that kind of stuff and I was obsessed with it so much so that the people that I worked with were like dude if you don't start a gym I'll pay for the gym so that you stop talking about this as soon as I actually started a gym I realized I enjoyed business even more than I enjoyed Fitness I started as an artist of fitness and I became an entrepreneur but let me play out all three paths to their natural extremes The Artist At Its extreme is somebody who continues to not scale an Enterprise around them and continues to do the thing at extraordinarily high levels and so this ultimately goes from a commoditized price point to a premium price point to a luxury price point all right so Commodities price point is like if you're a plumber you do the same Plumbing work everyone else does right now if you start doing it really well Word of Mouth starts to build and you can start raising your prices because you are now a premium provider you do better work you do it faster people come to you because they trust your work right now at the highest level it becomes luxury you become so advanced in plumbing you can do it for a massive building or you can do it for luxury homes and you make it look more neat and awesome and cool and whatever what happens is demand continues to increase for your services or your product and so rather than increase the number of units you sell you just increase the price you still make significantly more money and a lot more profit in that business model but it still keeps you doing the core thing which is that you like Plumbing you like making wallets you like being a carpenter whatever you can have incredible artists who sell their paintings for millions of dollars a piece and they don't have a massive organization around their main thing that they focus on every day is the art now there's obviously elements of Entrepreneurship there but because they make money the hybrid version developer who built the little website because he wanted to make some sort of physical products business that he didn't like the tools that are out there and he started making it but then other people because the product was so good started asking for it now he could have just continued to raise the price of the thing but at a certain point especially with software it made more sense to make himself Chief product officer rather than CEO and then hired a CEO and hired the executive team to build everything else around him because he's a big shareholder he has a lot of sway but on the actual chart itself he might be over here not necessarily at the top because he doesn't want that life you still do your art every day but then you find the people now that does require skill because you need to have the perspective from which to make a judgment on who is good enough to be able to lead your company now that's where having outside advisors and things like that to help you find those people who you do trust who already have that skill who don't have a vested interest in your business so they can give you the cleanest purest advice the highest level of advice is someone who has been there done that themselves and taken other people just like me to where I'm trying to go multiple times a level below that is someone who has taken multiple people like me where I'm trying to go they haven't done it themselves the level below that is someone who's only done it themselves and helps no one else the level below that is someone who saw someone go all the way themselves or saw multiple other people go there themselves below that is only seeing one person and below that is your mama uncle and your neighbor telling you their two cents about how you should do business when they've never run a business and have no no right to have an opinion you can leverage their experience to find the right people to fit inside of your business to build the business around you the third path is that of the entrepreneur that's the person whose art form is the businesses and so rather than thinking about making wallets and making more wallets the business itself is the painting and so they will have multiple paintings in their career as they develop as an artist so too does their expression of their art and so the types of businesses they build get bigger more complex more or need or simpler right it just depends on what type of entrepreneur they are I'll tell you right now the amount of businesses that I've started I started a non-profit online training business I switched to a for-profit training business and then I switched to a brick and mortar gym then I had a chain of gyms then I had a gym turnaround business I had a car tractor agency I had a dental agency I had a licensing business I've had an e-commerce business that sold physical products had a software business software to service B2B and now I have private Equity Firm and I'm 33. as you develop as an entrepreneur your art will change and it will be continually a changing expression of who you are and it will evolve so the biggest question is which of the three are you if you love the actual doing of the business the thing you do the product or service you deliver that is your art then I would say start with the path of the artist and if you're good because if you really do love it you should be able to beat other people who don't love it and so you should naturally through Word of Mouth be able to get more demand than you have supply of time at that point you'll have to start making the decision am I going to go hybrid are I going to go all the way entrepreneur if you're starting out right now and you're watching these videos and you just love entrepreneurship in general and you don't really care what you sell you just want to make money then you probably are more the entrepreneur path you just want to hustle you want to figure out needs in the marketplace figure out stuff that people are buying connect the two dots build the organization around it put an operator in charge and then let it run and make cash flow that's the entrepreneur path the middle path the hybrid path is usually someone who starts as an artist and then becomes that because they still want to build build the beginner prize but they don't want to sacrifice the thing they love the most which is actually building the product this little product thing as a side note could also be marketing it could also be Finance if you like a certain component of the business you can own that component of the business and have someone build it around you you could just be the guy who loves fundraising and you just love raising funds and that's how you build your business and you get everybody else around you to run it you will still leave your thumbprint on different aspects and be more heavily involved in different departments the ones that you love the most but at this point you do it by choice rather than do it by obligation do I love the thing or do I love the business of doing the thing and then walking that path down and the best news is you can always change your mind later the most valuable skill that you can have in order is product first then marketing then sales and so right now if you know how to sell it's because you don't know how to Market you know how to build products if you know how to market then you can sell lots of stuff but you're only going to sell it once because the product's usually not that good if you know how to sell product you'll get more promotion from your customers than anything else and that is ultimately what scales the Enterprise marketing can scale anything to a point and then what happens is the marginal cost of getting the next customer continues to get oh up and up and if you don't get Word of Mouth referrals from customers who use your product then eventually it becomes untenable and your company will Plateau and so the key to building a very very big thing that lasts for a very long time is have an exceptional product and I get that you're like sure but how do I make money and you know what if you just sell you can make money if you Market well you can make even more money and what happens for most entrepreneurs is they actually go in that direction they just learn how to sell because that's the easiest skill to learn you can learn it in a couple weeks learn how to Market takes a little longer you learn how to write copy it's really just translating the persuasion of sales into different types of media and selling to many people at once and so the highest leverage thing you can do is make an exceptional product that other people want to promote for you my first real big experience with this was the book so 100 million dollar offers is a book it's 99 Cents you get on Amazon like right now it sells 25 000 copies a month with no paid ads the reason for that and a lot of people who knew me from high school or new me from college are like dude it's so crazy some guy I know from work is like dude you got to read this book and it was your book you have more people who send you business than people who leave just based on how good your product is that continues to compound to the end of time