Brutally Honest Advice to Build Your Confidence
Summary
- Take more risks earlier in life; you'll value the crazy stories and experiences more than the comfort of playing it safe.
- Confidence builds from accumulating evidence of what you can do, not just innate belief.
- Be willing to fail and suck at things; that's the prerequisite for getting good at them.
- Focus on the specific skill you want to improve rather than unrelated activities; practice the exact thing you want to master.
- Real confidence looks like certainty and comes from repeated experience and successes.
- Steady effort may go unnoticed, but it's the key to eventual success. Stay the course without immediate rewards.
- To rise to the top, persist where others give up. Example: consistent podcasting can put you in the top 1%.
- Recognize that context often trumps message. Your background and achievements frame how people perceive your content.
- Strive for real-world evidence of your capabilities to validate your expertise and silence detractors.
- Excellence is now more attainable because so many people give up easily; persist and rise above.
- Lingering on the past can be detrimental; focus on the present actions that shape you, not past reasons or traumas.
- Evaluate your success based not on others' metrics but on your own efforts and inputs.
- Set personal rules for winning that align with your values, and play the long game in life, business, and relationships.
- Embrace the underdog narrative; it can transform your disadvantages into a powerful success story.
- Separate from others' opinions about your life path. They often reflect their insecurities, not your potential.
- Document the challenging times in your journey. They will serve as powerful stories and motivation later on.
- Aim to become a "hero" in your narrative by using personal pain to drive positive change, not to propagate more hurt.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest taking more risks early on. Do things that might scare you. That way, you get stories you'll love later, not regrets.
Build your confidence by doing things, not just thinking about them. You don't need confidence to start; you need to start to build confidence.
Don't be afraid to fail. It's okay to be bad at something in the beginning. It's part of learning.
If there's a skill you want to improve, practice that exact thing. Like sales? Make more sales calls to get better.
Keep at your efforts, even when it feels like no one notices. It'll lead to success when people aren't watching.
Persistence makes the difference. For example, if you're podcasting, keep making episodes. Most give up after just a few.
Remember, people see you through your achievements. Your wins shape how they listen to you.
Create personal evidence of your achievements. It'll make you stand out and shut down doubters.
Nowadays, excellence is rare because many quit quickly. If you keep going, you'll stand out.
Don't dwell on past mistakes. Focus on now and what actions you can take to improve.
Measure success by your effort, not the result. Success can come when you've put in the right work.
Set your own standards for winning, aligned with what's important to you. It's a long game.
Embrace your tough times by documenting them. They'll be your motivation and proof of growth later.
Be a hero in your story. Use tough times to drive change for the better, not to add more pain.
Quotes by Alex Hormozi
"Don’t build confidence, build evidence"
– Alex Hormozi
"The world belongs to those who can keep doing without seeing the result of their doing"
– Alex Hormozi
"The price for excellence has never been so low"
– Alex Hormozi
"The secret to longevity…if you make your stuff so fucking good that only one person who gets exposed to it sends it to somebody else, then you have nothing to worry about"
– Alex Hormozi
"No one's going to watch your first 20 episodes anyways"
– Alex Hormozi
Full Transcript
this is brutally honest advice to my younger less confident self having an epic story is about asking the girl it's about shooting the shot it's about launching the business about running the ad about knocking on the door quitting the job taking the risk when you're 85 years old and on your deathbed you're not going to wish you had fewer crazy stories you're going to wish you had taken more shots don't build confidence build evidence confidence comes as a result of evidence not the other way around confidence without evidence is a delusion it's you beating your chest looking at yourself in the mirror trying to pretend you're something you're not do it so you get the confidence but don't think you need confidence to do it so the whole idea of fake it until you make it should switch to walk it before you talk it right prove it to yourself so you don't need to prove it to other people and let your path that you're talking for you until you win effort always goes unnoticed get used to it if you aren't willing to suck you're never going to get good losers stay losers because they aren't willing to lose confidence is also domain specific so you can be really good at public presentations and really bad at talking to girls it takes a lot for a skill to transfer between domains and so if you want to get good at the thing don't try and do something to the left of it just do the thing the first sales consult I ever took I didn't close and I say that because everyone just imagines that mosy just came in just slinging credit cards and stacking bodies right it didn't work that way I came in it was a 5minute conversation the girl was like I need to go get my card from home and I said oh yeah okay go do that and she walked away and I went to my boss he's like how'd it go I said oh I closed her and he was like oh that's awesome he's like you got the credit card I said oh no she's going to come back with the card and he literally stopped what he was doing with six other guys around him and they all non-stop laughed for a minute straight like they couldn't breathe cuz they thought how stupid what I had just said was but I had no idea and so that was my first ever experience in sales I'm known for sales now and I wouldn't even say I'm confident in sales it's just more like this is what works and has worked for me take it or leave it and so people perceived that as confidence but it's simply just based on experience and confidence comes from experience what it really is is a prediction what you think is going to happen will happen and so even in statistics what is your confidence metric this is 78 it's literally just what the percentage likelihood that what you think's going to happen is going to happen and so how do you increase the likelihood that what you think's going to happen is going to happen have it have happened already I could have either spent 30 minutes every day looking at myself in the mirror and telling myself I was going to be a great sales guy or I could have reviewed the [ __ ] script which one do you think would get make me a better salesperson reviewing the script you can take all the time that you're trying to spend psyching yourself up and you'll feel significantly more confident not having done that and simply knowing what you're going to say which you get from practice the world belongs to those who can keep doing without seeing the result of they're doing and the longer you can wait to see the result of you're doing while still continuing to do is the extent to which you can win big in life for example to be a top 1% podcaster you have to upload 21 podcasts 21 top 1% % 90% of people don't get past one 9% don't get past 20 and then 1% of podcasters of all of them make it to 21 plus so when people say try harder it usually just means don't give up the price for Excellence has never been so low people give up so easily now that it's just so easy to win by just being willing to post 20 times you're in the top 1% like am the top 1% we're not even talking 10 top half top one % people are so afraid of being humiliated they get the long-term humiliation of never amounting to anything no one's going to watch your first 20 episodes anyways and even if they do it doesn't matter because that's not what you're building towards like you posting those 20 isn't what you judge yourself on you should be judging yourself on the difference between your first one and your 20th one are you better probably and the difference between your 20th one and your 100th one because the win is you you are the asset You're Building not the downloads that you get on your first shot mosy immediately had a podcast with millions of downloads every single month no I spent 4 and 1/2 years making two podcasts a week straight didn't miss and guess how many podcast downloads I was getting per month at the end of that 2 to 3,000 downloads a month not a lot I used to think to myself okay well each one of these podcasts gets like 200 downloads well 200 downloads is like an auditorium of people and so would I feel okay giving a speech to 200 people yeah and even before that when they was getting like 10 or 15 downloads per episode if I had a little lunch and learn that I would I used to have to do to like get leads for a business I'd be fine talking to a group of 10 or 15 people because the reality is that those people are doing me more of a favor than I'm doing them they're literally giving me their ears so that I can practice my voice and how to talk and how to present and it was only at year 4 and A2 to 5 when things started taking off and you know what the two things that changed are one is I did call I changed it from gym secrets to just the game which was a business thing so it made it more go more people and the second thing and here's the real one is that I sold a company for $46 million and so people are like oh what does this guy have to say and the big thing that everyone misses is people try and dissect my content the message is 10% of how people consume it 90% is the context around the message so Elon muskin can tweet on the toilet and be like I'm on the throne taking a [ __ ] and it'll get a million likes why because it's Elon Musk he's the richest man in the world and owns three of the biggest companies that are most Innovative of all time I don't Kid myself and think that like my content is so much better than other people there's plenty of people have better content than me that don't get the same views and the reason is because I have the context they don't have the proof and solve for the proof and then the content will take care of itself because one you will know what you're talking about because you have proof that you know what you're talking about and people will believe you which is why you should solve for evidence above everything else like evidence gives you the confidence if someone says Alex I don't think you know [ __ ] about business I'd be like okay it doesn't really affect me I do know we cross 100 milon net worth at age 32 I know that but if someone said that to you and you haven't accomplished anything you don't have anything to stand back on and it hurts you more but I have proof so it's like you can just deflect it towards the proof and keep living your life the secret to longevity is especially in the content game but really in any game that you're trying to at least help other people with is that if you've done the thing you can be certain rather than confident be certain based on what you've done not based on what you say other people should do there used to be uh too big to fail and I think there's an alternative which is too good to fail if you make your stuff so [ __ ] good that only one person who gets exposed to it sends it to somebody else then you have nothing to worry about and you will eventually get discovered it's a Time game and in the meanwhile you just keep getting better which is the point because at the end of the day you're going to die everyone's going to forget about you anyways and so you might as well just work on the one asset that you get to keep for the rest of your life which is you and rather than measuring yourself based on how many views he gets versus how many views you get measure Yourself by how much work he puts into one of his shorts versus what you put into one of your shorts and then you might think the output is more reasonable and if there's a top sales guy in your organization who's making more money than you compare not what his commission check is to yours every month compare how many calls he's making how many times you practice the script how many calls he's made before you how many sales he's closed before you what time a day he shows up at work what time of day he leaves whether he works weekends or not whether he's willing to hop on the phone in a family context so he can still close the deal if you're doing all the inputs the mat the outputs will always match on a long enough time Horizon and if you are new to the game then my recommendation is not only to match inputs but to double or triple the inputs that someone ahead of you is doing and the reason you do that is because if you just match your inputs then you're always going to be behind them because they're already ahead of you because they're better than you and so if you both do the same amount of work they're going to keep getting better and so with you so you have to do twice the work you got to be like Kobe right where everyone else is doing one practice a day you do two practices a day and in the beginning they'll be better than you and then you'll match them but because you're doing twice the work eventually you'll get better and then that's how you win yeah and one of the biggest misnomers in in whatever Endeavor you're trying to track is people track the wrong metrics they track the lagging metrics rather than the leading metrics lagging metrics are what happen those are the outputs and if you want to track those fine but the real things to track are what you're doing to create the outputs so I don't want to necessarily even track sales I want to track how many calls I'm making if I'm trying to get in shape I'm not necessarily going to track the weight I'm doing I'm going to track how many calories I'm eating and so the more ways you measure the more ways you can win and so the idea the ultimate win at life is where you can shift things that out of your control that you deem winning to things that are under your control which you can deem winning because if you're measuring on whether you lost the fat or not sometimes people take longer some people don't that's something that you actually can't control what you can control are the inputs and so if you say based on this if I do this one thing every day for a long enough period of time I'll eventually get there the real winners cut out the I'll eventually get there and say if I do this every day I have won the thing that I try and focus on now is the Delta between how hard I tried and how hard I can Poss possibly try and if I know that the gap between those two is zero then I have one and I've decided to spend a inordinate amount of effort trying to make that my definition of winning is that there's nothing left in the tank if you get into a harder career path or one that takes more reps to get good at or more reps to get into then every day you can win based on saying like everyone else does 100 I do 250 and I have nothing left to give I won and that should satisfy you and if you're if you're obsessive on the external thing that takes too long and you will give up too soon one of the things that took me too long to learn was the difference between the finite and infinite frame and so finite frame is where you have known players agreed upon rules and a way to win or lose at the end and then the game is over an infinite frame you have known and unknown players no agreed upon rules and the point of the game is to keep the game going and all the greatest games that I've ever participated in marriage Health business you don't win at marriage the point is to stay married you don't win at Health the point is to stay in shape you don't win at business the point is to stay in business and so by default if you don't give up you win and so that's the big frame shift which is why leaving everything on the field is the way you have to Define winning if you want to win in the long term and anything worth doing takes great time if you stick with it and you make that the win you'll notice that the external win will just happen on its own and if you really commit to that perspective it won't even mean much to you because if you make that everything it's the same thing with the guys who win the golds and then kill themselves or win the championship and then go into these massive depressions is because they're playing the wrong game when Kobe was asked shortly before he died like do you think that you're somebody who's afraid of losing or do you think you're somebody who loves winning he basically denied both frames he said I'm paraphrasing I just love playing to the best of my ability and that's what he measures himself off of the fact that the world chooses to measure him on the fact that he's won so many games that's the world's problem not ours it's saying I'm game master not a player and I choose to play by these rules and as long as I playing I win by default and it's because I'm not accepting the world's rules for winning I make my own an easier analogy here is and this is a naval Ron quote he said what looks like work to other people should feel like play for you if you look at an artist and he's painting you're like hey how soon are you going to finish that painting the point for the artist is to paint he'll finish that piece and he'll start the next one but the process of painting is the thing that they enjoy and so the idea is that if you can commit and the broader you can generalize what you're committing to the easier it will be to stick with it so you might be like I love making calls but I hate entering things in the CRM well both of those are required for the role of sales and so I prefer to chunk up a level and say I prefer to do hard work because of what that work does to me then whether I'm putting [ __ ] into the CRM or editing a document or having a hard conversation all of those things are difficult and I see those as all contributing to the person I ultimately want to be until eventually I die and it won't matter anyways and so the only asset that you really get to keep with you is your character and that's the only thing you keep building and so if you make the character the W at the end of the day did or I did I not contribute to the character of the person that I want to become if that's the W every day you can never lose if you have your menu option of things that you can do in life just remove quitting as one of them and then try your next idea and if you are in that Rocky cut scene and you're 2 months in 3 months in remember that the rocky cut scene in the movie last a couple seconds and the rocky cut scene in real life might last a few years and so whenever I get to a low point where I think why do I even bother doing this I just like to remind myself this is where most people stop and this is why they don't win and as hard as this is going to sound the best thing that I ever did was not listen to other people's opinions about my life they don't want the best version of you they want the version of you who best serves them and unfortunately the closer people are to you the more similarly they they'll see themselves in you and the more your success will make them feel bad about themselves and I can promise you this from somebody who might be a little further I have more people who root for me now that I've already won than people who rooted for me along the way no one is doing as well as you think they're doing so by comparison everyone is better off than they think because the cumulative median visually is probably three times higher than what the actual median is and so if you're like oh I'm average or slightly below average compared to the perceived median of society you're probably way above average and that's okay and being above or below average doesn't even matter anyways because you've got a lot of innings left there's a lot of quarters left to play and so like until the day you die you still have hope you still have a chance you can still keep moving forward whenever someone gives you your their opinion about what you should do with their your life it's really them saying this is my preference of how I want to live my life and I say great live your life that way and I'll live my life this way because me living my my life has no effect on you so live your life the way you want to live it and I don't want your life either they State make those statements because they feel uncomfortable and so they have to like release it and so they say that to you to make themselves feel better and that's their problem not yours I think I've learned a lot of frames around not caring about others people's opinions be out of necessity because I was so crippled by the opinions of other people for what felt like such a long time that I always had to face my death in order to get myself to move and so I talk about death a lot because it has actually been one of the few things that actually motivates me to change my behavior and so when I had done all the things that I thought would impress other people one I realized that they didn't really care and secondly I realized that I deeply cared about how much I hated my life when I was like is this what winning feels like because if this is what winning is then I don't want to play by thinking I'd rather be dead than continue to play this game I was forced to change the game I was playing which is like well what is a game that I would like to win at well I'd like to win a game that is by rules that I set out and there are things that I can control and then those people because you break their mold of what they're supposed to be doing and they might be miserable too but they are not willing to take the risk that you're willing to take because they care about other people's opinions more than you do because they haven't gone through that little journey that you just went through fine you do it your way they do it their way I mean I went from prodigal son my father super proud of me graduating Vanderbilt in three years president the fraternity vice president of the powerlifting Team Management Consultant to uh minimum wage employee like that's a pretty significant Dro in status I have these frames because people will say whatever they want but for me that relative drop in status was a lot I went from about as high status as you can get in a as a 22-year-old to about as low status as you can get I mean I remember having people be like so did you go to college and I was like yeah I went to college and I [ __ ] murdered it and I did everything and the cuz the implied question is why are you here and so that's what in the beginning hurt a ton but then I just realized that they just didn't know and they were were asking genuinely and all of my judgment around that was just my own problem how I'm perceiving this question is affecting my mood to such a great degree what if I applied this to every question all these people are asking me things and I'm either getting offended or getting complimented but the statement doesn't change so that sounds like a me problem and so the more I started diving into things like that the less bothered I became by everyone everyone else's opinion because they also have no context even if they did mean it is an insult so what if they're saying well I'm better than you I'd be like yes you are a lot of even successful people frame their success around trying to prove someone wrong right but when you try and create your entire existence in opposition to someone you actually give them complete control over your life it means that because of the things that this person has said I will choose to change all of my behavior which basically means that the directives from that person have commanded you to do whatever you do and if you like to be a free person and want to be somebody who acts of their own valtion then I choose to accept insults so that I can live my life rather than living in contrast to them and giving my control to the person who insulted me I that would mean I put me changing your mind above my goals which I don't do my goals are more important to me than changing your mind I'm super sensitive to I am statements labeling statements like this like I'm a neat freak I'm the type of person who so whenever you're dating someone you're getting to know someone people like to blanket I am statements really early on to set the stage like I'm this type I'm the type person who likes to show up early I like to clean things I'm a labeler I'm a whatever and then and this is the Insidious part they then say because and then they insert a reason that they made up or that sounded good in the past and people nodded their heads and agreed with because my mom never loved me enough because I didn't get enough hugs because I gave a speech once and everyone laughed at me because you don't know and the reality is you will never know all we know is that you do a certain type of behavior that's it by giving these because statements all this power you actually put all the power into something that is unchangeable in the past and so you have to keep dealing with it whereas if you just said I do these things period now if I want to change what I do then I should just reward myself in the present for doing something different and that makes it a lot more valuable and it makes your identity and what you do as a result or rather what you do and your identity as a result something under your control you don't want to blame the things in the past that you can't change you want to blame things in the present that you can't so if you said I have trouble getting close to girls because my mom and I aren't close one you give your mother all the power in your love life you give power to something that happened in the past that you can't change to things that are happening in the present that you can change and so wouldn't it be more useful to say in the past I have struggle to get close to girls period now that could be for a number of reasons thing is is that you don't know what reason it is cuz I could say let's say imagine all these things happening you struggled with your mom let's say you had a bad breakup at some point in your life you're not in shape I could say I struggle getting close to girls and I could use any of those three as my reasons but which of those serve me none of them all we know is that you struggle to get close to girls okay well then just look at what it would take to get close to girls and then do that rather than having this other thing that's attached to the behavior that you can't do anything about it just makes changing who you are and what you do a lot easier sometimes people are such douchebags they will tell a young child you will never have a successful relationship with a woman because you don't respect or love me a mother or the reverse could be true of a father they're a [ __ ] douchebag for saying that because they are labeling you with something that you can't change but that's their problem it also is no basis in fact when people are like look at how the son treats the mother that's how he's going to treat his wife why the [ __ ] would I treat my wife like I treat my mother dear God that's just a statement that sounds good but has no basis in fact you treat your wife like you treat your wife you treat your mother like you treat your mother they're different people people want to have problems because it gives them a reason to suck and it be okay it gives them ego padding so they can protect themselves for the reason why they're not successful for the reason they haven't accomplished what they said they were going to accomplish and so they lean on their potential comma and their trauma as the two reasons that people prop up I've got lots of potential but I have all this trauma and neither of those matter I've gone through three stages of like mental development in terms of how I see changing my behavior in the beginning I attributed my behavior to my past traumas the second phase was that I I chose to change the story what if my mother was just trying to feel better it wasn't my fault so then I changed my behavior in that sense the third phase which is where I'm at now maybe it'll be a fourth phase but the third phase was I behave this way period the because statement in the second half is completely irrelevant one because I don't know it two because I can't change it so I might as well just choose to do the thing that I want to do irrelevant of my past the single strongest predictor of my behavior is what will make the more epic story I've thought about that frame a lot and it's still continued to win out and so when I'm forced to make a decision between two things I prefer to choose the one that's the more epic story because either you have an epic story of failure or you have an epic story of success but no 85-year olds are regretting their epic stories they are regretting the stories they never told our minds are meaning making machines and they have to be because they create associations between things we know and things we don't know that's how we learn the problem is that our brains will make wrong associations and then they will plague us for the rest of our lives but we can just redefine what the association means for ourselves to make our lives easier because whether you miss the game-winning shot when there's a huge crowd or you miss it when no one else is there the only reason it h hurts more is because you choose to let it hurt you more now there are things that you can do prior to the game-winning shot that can increase the likely that you make it which is that you practice way more in high stakes conditions over and over and over again and if you do that it increases the likelihood your confidence that you'll be able to make it why because you've made them before and if you're like well I missed my first ever game-winning shot now what do I do well you practice in every other condition that's as close to that as you can until eventually you make one and then when you do make one you'll have evidence that you've made one and you try and make one again what you probably don't know is that Michael Jordan has missed more game-winning shots than he has made but he's remembered for the ones that he made but how was he able to make them by missing and being willing to shoot again on that basis of story The many excuses that we give ourselves in Reverse can make a more epic story and so rather than to say like these are all the reasons that I can't succeed I think reframing that is these are all the reasons that when I succeed it'll be an even better story and it'll be more inspiring to other people is a much more powerful frame the more disadvantages you have when you start the more epic story you have when you win Donald Miller has one of the most powerful frames of heroes and villains I've ever heard of heroes and villains always have the same backstory it's pain they're always an orphan right or the the villain has some sort of disfigurement to show that they went through hard times the difference is what the character chooses to do about it villains say the world hurt me I'm going to hurt it back Heroes say the world hurt me I'm not going to let anyone else hurt this way so Heroes use pain villains are used by it and so I think all of us have the choice to become our own Heroes our own villains in our own life simply by how we choose to do with the pain that we all inevitably experience so pain is a constant the choice about how we react to it is the thing that dictates the path of Our Lives you know there there are certain rules of playing the game that have served me really well one of them is and that's okay and I probably use that frame more than anything else which is I'm not close with XYZ relative your parent your mom your sister your brother and that's okay it's been a a lot of my mental effort trying to untangle stories that I told in the past about things that were my fault or were a problem and the easiest way that I found to solve problems is to decide they're not problems to begin with I have a handful of pictures that I took for the first 5 years of sucking during business and I use those pictures all the time every day and the zillions of pictures after I became successful I barely use any of them the time to document your life is when it sucks not when it's great because those are the stories that you're going to tell and those are going to be the reminders that you use in the present day of things that you have been through and prove as to who you really are because my favorite line in The Matrix is in the second or third Matrix when Morpheus is standing on the hell and he's looking at towards everyone and he said I stand Here truthfully unafraid not because of the path that lies before me but because of the path that lies behind me and so the struggle period that you may be in right now is the path behind your future self that you are building so that that man or that woman can stand on the pulpit and look at you straight dead in the eyes in the mirror and say I'm confident and I stand truthfully here unafraid not because of what I said my goal is going to be but because what I've been through to get here and so here's my advice to my younger self document your life more otherwise you'll forget the details and the details are what make it worth remembering it's the times you're sleeping on the floor it's the time the person walks out and you miss the seventh sale that day it's the time when your bank account's at its absolute lowest it's when you're car breaks down on the side of the road and you're like what am I going to do now I can barely afford this right those are the moments the ones that you want to ignore the ones that you want to look away from that are the ones that you need to capture because those are the moments that you will tell in the future of things you got through because no heroes are heroes without Epic monsters and the bigger the monster the greater the hero