Brutally Honest Advice to my Poorer Younger Self

Summary

• Focus your time and energy on actions that will lead to making more money, rather than time-consuming morning routines which may not contribute directly to your success.
• Avoid drawing false correlations between successful people's habits and their success; instead, observe what they did on their rise to the top and emulate those actions.
• Understand that having a difficult childhood isn’t a guaranteed path to success, as the consistent work you put in is what creates success.
• Recognize that your 20s are a crucial time for personal growth and investing in your skills and education. Delaying this can put you a significant step behind your peers.
• Realize that the sooner you start on your business or personal development journey, the better, regardless of your current age.
• Judge job opportunities based on their growth potential, not just the initial salary offer, as the skills you learn can lead to greater future earnings.
• Remind yourself that the costliest mistake is not seeking the education and knowledge you need to succeed; ignorance is often the most expensive cost you'll bear.
• Tell your younger self to focus on building a strong brand and product, rather than just relying on sales and marketing tactics.
• Appreciate the power of word-of-mouth and a strong brand; when your product is good enough, marketing can take care of itself.
• Surround yourself with individuals who focus on potential and the future, rather than those who are fixated on the past.
• Trust your own judgments about your life path over others' opinions, as your future self is the one who will live with the consequences.
• Concentrate on observable actions rather than intentions when evaluating situations, as actions are objective and intentions are often speculative.
• Dismiss labels that limit your potential; challenge any preconceived beliefs about yourself and focus on growth and adaptability.
• Embrace "ignorance debt" and commit to lifelong learning to build a brand and product that naturally attracts and retains customers.

How To Take Action

Hey everyone, here's my take on rolling with the punches and making sure your journey to the top is as solid as your morning coffee – yep, even better.

First up, focus on the money-makers. Cut out the fluff. If something like a fancy morning routine isn't directly raking in the cash, scrap it. Replace those 3 hours you'd spend meditating and hydrating with real work that brings in the dollars.

Next, don't just copy what successful people are doing now. Dig into their past. What did they do when they were climbing up? That's the gold you wanna mine.

Now let's talk about learning. Don't wait around. Your 20s are prime time. But no sweat if you're past that – start now! Delaying is just like throwing opportunity out the window.

When sizing up jobs, go for growth potential over the paycheck. Skills you pick up can be worth way more in the future.

Never skimp on learning. Ignorance is pricey, my friends.

Tell your younger self to concentrate on a strong product, not just sales. A good product markets itself. And, word-of-mouth is your best friend. Make something too good to fail, and folks will do the talking for you.

Hang out with go-getters who look forward, not back. And remember, trust your own call on life – you're the one who's gotta live it, after all.

Lastly, challenge labels. Think you're not a morning person? Think again. You can be whoever you decide to work towards.

Put all this into action and don't just dream about success. Build it, create it, learn it. Remember, taking concrete steps beats spinning your wheels. Keep your eye on the prize, work smart, and learn every day. That's how you'll score the win.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"People obsessed with their morning routines make less money than people obsessed with making money"

– Alex Hormozi

"You can die when you're done, until then keep going"

– Alex Hormozi

"You have seasons of earning and you have seasons of learning"

– Alex Hormozi

"The most expensive thing you ever pay for isn't your car, it isn't your house, it isn't your insurance, it's the information that you don't know but should"

– Alex Hormozi

"The cost of success is the years of feeling like an idiot for things that you should have known by now"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

this is more brutally honest advice to my younger poor self this advice is only for somebody who wants to make more money grow in their business grow in themselves people obsessed with their morning routines make less money than people obsessed with making money people work sacrifice and then they get rich then they fill their time with weird routines then they forget how they got rich in the first place and then they tell other people the weird routines made them Rich rather than what they actually did which is whatever it took not some 3-hour morning routine there was a kid who dm' me who said hey I've been working with this business coach and he has me doing a morning routine could not make this up after I do my grounded walking I do my gratitude Journal I do my list for the day I do my ice plunge it's like after I do that he takes me about 3 hours in the morning to get all that done he's like I barely have any energy to like actually get work done I just said I'm going to give you the biggest hack in the world cut the 3-hour morning routine replace it with 3 hours of work and I promise you'll get more done and he messaged me back a week later he was like dude it changed my whole life I'm getting so much done now I was like what a [ __ ] concept if you work more more gets done and I love just looking at this it's like what actions do I have to take to get what I want anything that is not that is a distraction from it period if it takes you 5 minutes to feel 20% better and you can actually measure that your output goes up by 20% Then cool that makes sense so I'm not I'm not against doing things I'm against doing things for the sake of doing them and so one of the biggest issues with learning and education as humans do it is that we make correlations to things that are approximate they're close to another tall people play basketball I should play basketball to get tall we make these very mistaken correlations but we should look at is what it took to get there not what they're doing now so the better advice is to look at what someone was doing on their way up in the grind mirror that more than what they're currently doing at the top of the mountain so it would be like assuming warm Buffett is Rich because he drinks Coke I drink probably 5 12 ounce Cokes a day all you have to do also on the cories are there other people who drink Coke who aren't Rich I've had probably 10 different podcasts seed the premise do you think that the fact that you had a hard childhood has created the success today and I would say no I would say the work that I did created the success and all we have to do is look at all the other people who had bad childhoods who aren't successful and I think there are way more of those than there are that are to prove that it actually has nothing to do with who's successful there's also people who didn't have bad childhoods who are successful too and so it's just that many people have bad childhoods some of them become successful and so that's why trying to figure out why something happen happened I have spent less and less of my effort trying to do that and only look at what actions created a result rather than looking at intention or anything else that's a morphous that can't be measured 30 isn't the new 20 it's an excuse to take 10 years longer to accomplish the same thing you can die when you're done until then keep going in your 20s you're young you can [ __ ] around it doesn't matter cuz life is long number one that assumes that you're not going to die if you're in your 30s you know someone someone in your high school class who died and it's not just the drug overdose people it's the people who got shot got in a car accident had a weird brain cancer I've had all of those things happened to people that I went to high school with in one way I think it's a little bit arrogant to assume that you're just going to live because it means you can waste your life and I I wholeheartedly stand against that the second translation around that that I think has hurt a lot of people is that they can do what I would consider dead-end jobs and that means jobs that don't have any direct correlation to your personal growth has nothing to do with pay you can work for free and grow more than anyone else this is not saying that you need to go into a season of earning in your 20s but you do need to be setting yourself up for growth in my opinion if you want the big ultimate outcome and so most people that at least consume my stuff they want to be better they want to grow they want to get in better shape they want to have better relationships they want to have a better business they want to be you know bigger in every way they want to expand if you spend the decade of your 20s not growing and not investing in your skills and your education if if you do that in your 30s you're going to be further behind than someone who starts in their 20s you're going to be a decade behind you know nowadays there's kids who are starting the entrepreneurial Journey when they're like 13 and so when they're 23 they're Mr Beast he's young but he's actually pretty old in business terms CU a lot of people start their business journey in their mid-40s and so if they're 50 years old and started their business 5 years ago Mr Beast has twice the amount of time in the ring under the bar that they do for me I want to start my time clock on paying down my ignorance debt as fast as seemingly possible because the debt is a constant for everyone all of us are trying to pay down that debt as fast as we can and taking a decade arguably one of the most productive Decades of your life and not paying down that debt you just sit in such a deficit compared to your peer group some people might watch this and be 30 or 40 or 50 and be like well [ __ ] I took the wrong advice from the wrong guy guess what you're going to die it's not going to matter anyways big deal whatever the best time to do this was start when you were 10 and get born to an entrepreneurial parent who got you in their small business and invested in all of your education as a homeschooled student and taught you all the ways of of the of the Jedi but you probably didn't have that and so the second was time is to start now because let's play out the alternative how much does it serve you to just say I guess I have no chance okay die there's nothing left for me to do I will relinquish the remainder of my living days and years because I choose to lose and that's a choice and if you want that that's cool the idea of quitting simply because you're older because you didn't do something everybody doesn't do things that they know they should be doing now and that's because you're always going to know more in the future than you do in the past and so it's a faulty premise to say that I'm not going to take action today because I didn't know something in the past everyone doesn't know anything in the past but all you can do is take action with what you know today and by taking action you have learned and so you actually take one step to making your first payment on ignorance debt through actions not words I mean I think a lot of people know the story of the 30-year-old Barista if you love that then do it you know what I mean like I have no judgment on what you do do if you don't love that and you wish you were doing something else that's what I would say I have a problem with which is why are you not doing it and I think diving into that which is usually some sort of fear some sort of anxiety some sort of label that they believed that isn't true from someone else and just trying to Zone in on like why am I not doing it and taking two steps closer to it not just like because I don't know what I'm doing well duh okay neither does anyone what are you doing about that just defining it to what actions am I going to take as a result just makes life a lot easier what does figured out mean it means that I'm going to read 2 hours a night on a specific subject until I feel like I can make a decision within 30 days on what I'm going to do great that is something I can do and I can measure whether I did it or not you have seasons of earning and you have seasons of learning I had this kid who reached out he was 18 years old said he was going to edit videos for us when he came in he said I want $100,000 a year as an editor as a starting job his reasoning was that somebody else had offered him that amount of money I want to make this statement because I think it's logic iCal and also stupid if you're optimizing for your earning potential in your 20s you're missing the [ __ ] point this individual had the potential to be on a team that has a massively globally recognized brand in terms of media and from there learn how to be way better than they currently are and then become a creative director at another company or at one of my portfolio companies like that is the career path and instead was comparing that to something that you would make $100,000 a year and be the only person in the depart department and no one there knew anything about media and so he wasn't going to learn he was going to earn whereas somebody who got into the big leagues and learned 10 times the skill set then 10 years later is either starting a multi-million dollar company or heading up a multi-million dollar division in a billion dollar company and the potential is so much wider because 10 years from now someone says what's your experience it's like well I I worked at a real estate firm and I made their social media content who gives a [ __ ] whereas if you're like I work for one of the biggest media companies out there everyone will give you the job offer and that is when you can choose to earn over learn but people make the trade too soon because they compare themselves to people on social media and think that the .1% is the norm whenever you choose to earn rather than learn you're right hooking life and saying I'm no longer going to develop and this is good enough and so if $100,000 a year is actually good enough for your long-term goals then do it but I would imagine that it probably isn't for what you really want to do long term and I'm using 100 you know six figures as a as a placeholder it can be whatever number you want when you make that decision that you're no longer going to learn that's when you stop growing your potential to learn more I say this because that's what I did I had a white Coller consulting job for defense Contracting I had a top secret clearance I had everything that looked good on paper space I intelligence I had a two to threee path clearly for for getting an MBA at an IV League school and then decided to drop all of that and start working for $13 an hour at a gym after I graduated magn klady in 3 years from banderol I know what I'm asking people to do and I'm not asking them to do something that I wasn't willing to do and I think that I might have even a more extreme version that most people are having to live with trying to say like well I can't figure out what I want is a really paralyzing place to be that I think a lot of young people are in is like I want to find my passion but the big misnomer is actually a language issue which is that people say they want to find their passion rather than they want to build it or create it or learn it and so like I can promise you that if you're good at something you'll like doing it and the only way that you get good at something is by doing things you suck at and doing a lot of it so let's say you make $50,000 a year it cost you $950,000 a year not to know how to make a million do a year so how much is that education worth answer the difference the difference between $1 million and $50,000 which is $950 Grand if you learn how to make a million the education is worth the difference this is why education and information are the most valuable things that we can know Elon has like lost everything and then gain it back so many of the best off Runners have stories where they lost it all and then gain it back and so how is it that they can go to to zero back to a billion where somebody starting at zero can't get there because they didn't lose the education they didn't lose the learnings they had a bad role and sometimes in business you do make bets on markets and sometimes they don't shape up but you didn't lose and a lot of times you actually gain in experience so that the next bet pays off even bigger everyone gets this wrong the most expensive thing you ever pay for isn't your car it isn't your house it isn't your insurance it's the information that you don't know but should I mean how many things can you think of right now that if you knew 10 years ago would have materially changed your financial outcome your relational outcome your physical outcomes probably a lot what is the value of that information borderline Priceless and so the idea that we wouldn't invest in paying down that debt of ignorance that we owe the universe is just because we don't know who we're paying the check to every month for the things that we don't know that we don't value it appropriately the cost of success is the years of feeling like an idiot for things that you should have known by now all the the decisions that I made up to to this point led me to hear and I don't regret my life so I don't regret not knowing I mean if I started over I'd be wealthier than I am now you know what I mean I can't go back in time but if I could go back in time to talk to my 20-year-old self and it wouldn't change the outcome of my life now cuz I would never roll that dice is I would say there's two things that you don't understand that will massively change your life you don't understand brand and you don't understand product because I was obsessive in my 20s on sales and marketing and what I would consider fast money I had fast feedback loops so I would I get better at sales and then I immediately make more sales I get better marketing immediately make more money and so I had this very fast feedback loop that gave me the misinformation or the false belief that this was the right path but I was actually just playing the wrong game because it's kind of like in The Matrix when Neo says to morphus so you're saying when I'm fast enough I'll be able to dodge bullets and he said no I'm saying when you're ready you won't have to me being obsessive about sales and marketing was me trying to get faster and faster in the Matrix and not being the one and seeing the code for what it is which is that if you make a product that's good enough people will do the marketing and sales for you if your brand is strong enough people will make the association that they want to buy your stuff regardless of how good your copy and your headline and your landing pages and your conversion rate optimization and your media buying are I kept getting really good at a game that if I knew how to master the big things that mattered would make those skills almost irrelevant when $100 million offers came out the book I didn't make it for anything I made it for me and it was originally intended to be an internal document and so I just wanted to make it exceptional and what happened once I released it is what shocked me the most was that I posted once and I just said hey I wrote this book I hope you guys like it and then we sold out in minutes and I was like that's weird the next month more copies sold and then the next month more copies sold and then the next month more copies sold and it's continued to sell more copies month after month after month for 2 years and it's still number one in its category on Amazon and that was with zero paid marketing purely off of people telling people about the book and so when I saw how much leverage that was that that book sells thousands a day not dollars thousands of copies a day I have never marketed anything well enough to sell a thousand customers a day now mind you I've always had more expensive stuff that I've sold but like I'd never seen that kind of transaction volume and the only way to get that kind of transaction volume is to have a huge amount of Leverage The Leverage that product unlocked for me or that understanding was that if you make it good enough and I love this saying which is there's too big to fail and I love the other which is too good to fail my headline for $100 million off offers makes no sense no one knows what $100 million offers is and it's just like a picture of a $100 bill it's a big purple book like it actually makes no sense but the contents of the book were valuable enough that people were like just just read it and they said it so many times to so many people and most people who when I see the comments and I see the reviews they say I had four different people in the same month tell me in different groups that I should read this book so I decided to do it even though it looked hokey and oh my God this thing is unbelievable and then they tell 20 people or 100 people that was when I realized how much Leverage spending more time upfront on building a better product would unlock for me what I used to do was spend 2 months building a good product and spend two years marketing that product with great marketing rather than spending two years on a great product and then for the rest of my life not having to spent any dollars or effort on marketing so that it would sell again and again and again because of the quality of the product itself and so that was the first lesson that my younger self needed to understand about business and the level of detail that it takes to go from good to Great is so much wider than people think it is the difference between an eight and a nine is 10 times the wor the difference between 9 and 9 and a half is 10 times the work the difference between 9 and a half and 9.75 is another 10 times the work it's so much more effort and honestly when I was younger I couldn't even comprehend the amount of work that I can do now and for me that amount of work is the amount of unbroken Focus time that I can stick with one task I did not have that level of focus I didn't have a strong enough no muscle I didn't know how to turn down other things that would distract me for long enough if you can count in terms of hundreds like I can promise you if you put a th000 hours into something it'll probably be pretty good and most people spend like a 100 hours on something or I mean that's [ __ ] most people spend even less than time than that you start a clock when you start working you stop a clock when you stop working you spend 1,000 hours or 2,000 hours on something there's a level of detail because of the number of exposures you'll get to it the crispy details of the product or the service that can only come from looking at that thing when it's cold looking at thing when it's hot looking at it when you're angry looking at it when you're sad looking at it when you're inspired looking at it when you're bored you see it with different lenses and then what happens is it just gives you so much more depth and context to whatever you're trying to build that that's the difference between mediocre products and excellent products and it just takes time in an ocean of volume which there's more commoditized products and services today than ever before there is outsized returns to being number one it is an even bigger win or take all market now than it ever has been because of social media and the ease of letting other people know about stuff if you are truly the best everyone will know and if everyone knows you are the best you will have more demand than you can possibly deal with people think the word of mouth is dead when there's literally never been an easier way to go viral in a literal sense from people telling other people about stuff I said the second lesson was brand and so I had to look at a company or brand as a learning tool as what are people going to learn to associate my brand with the tangible and the intangible ideas there are many people that I associated with when I was younger that I would never associate with today even though I would say well I don't act that way I don't live my life the way they live their lives people would still make that Association if I did nothing but talk with porn stars on my show people would still make a very different association with me and so I want to embody certain values that I want my brand to associate with and anything that is not those things by default detracts from it because it dilutes the association branding is like curating a garden where pretty much anything but the flower that you're trying to grow there is a weed even if it's a daffodil even if it's a sunflower even if the flower itself is fine like I said I have no issues with porn I think it's a sunflower whatever but if I'm trying to grow roses that anything that's not a rose doesn't belong being so Vigilant about defending that Garden of Association and reputation gives you so much leverage because the reason Warren Buffett now can just do deals that no one else can do is because his handshake means more than the US governments if he says he will pay we know he will pay if he says he will be there to ensure your entire city we know he will he can do a deal on a one-page agreement for billions of dollars because people trust and they know that his reputation matters more than anything to him and so trust is leverage for deals it's leverage for sales the first experience I had with having a strong brand was when we were probably a year year and a half into gym launch I launched what would become Allen my software project and when people heard I had launched a new thing the clients that I had were sending screenshots of their credit cards to my C customer support team saying I don't know what it was but if Alex made it I'll buy it and so all of the ideas and the obsessions around how it was going to Market it and how I was going to position it the thing that mattered most was what they had already received from me and how much I had delivered on my first promise and so when I realized that I was like all of this sales and marketing stuff gets you one sale delivering exceptional product an exceptional reputation around your products gets you every other sale after that and you will always be able to sell the next thing provided you delivered on the first thing and that's where there's this obsession with marketing because there's always more people to sell to it's a very in my opinion tiring life you always have to go get new customers if you make sales to get customers rather than get customers to make sales you make the customer the goal and then you get to keep that relationship and then next year you still have that customer if you got a customer just to make a sale you have to go get another customer to make another sale next year but if you make a sale to create the relationship of the customer then next year that customer will buy again and the new customer will buy bu and the third year you get the first two years and the Third customer and then that is how you create a compounding vehicle and so both of those things brand and product are actually underlying one concept now that I'm saying it out loud which is I didn't understand compounding I thought that it was normal to have to go out bang doors call phones DM run ads to get customers every single month and that next month I'm going to have to get another 20 just to keep the lights on rather than having spent more time on my reputation and the quality of my product so that when I sold the first they would never leave again and then they would send me the next 100 and I wouldn't have to do anything and then I would be able to fend people off and then I'd be able to raise my prices and be able to take people on my terms but I didn't understand any of that and part of that is because I wanted money so fast and building a great product takes longer building a great reputation literally never stops until the day you die leaning into that lesson you know the first book I launched and I think it did two or 4,000 copies sold its first month something like that you know the second book that launched 2 years later sold 250,000 copies cop in its first month which for context the average New York Times best sell ourselves between 10 and 100,000 in its first 12 months and we sold 250 in the first month the only way that that can happen is if the people who bought the first book buy the second book and everybody they tell also buys and that book still continues to sell at twice the rate of my first book today here's how to spot friends that are worth cutting they only talk about your past not your future so if you go and you hang out with your buddies and all they can really reminisce with you on is the things that you did together but none of them are talking about what they're going to do or what you're going to do for me that's a Telltale sign that they're living in the past they're not even living in the present their best years are behind them and for most of us we want our best years to be ahead of us and we want somebody who's also looking at the same goal as us which is growth which is moving forward just making progress if you are a growth oriented individual and you feel like you're not sure about your environment or if it's conducive the easiest liment test is who talks about the future and who talks about the past keep the ones who only talk about the future future cut the ones talking about the past 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 now when I first said this I got Flack from a bunch of parents they were like I really want the best for my kids I was like that's not true you want a version of your children who serves what you think will make you look the best family I would say more often than not has a closer alignment with your long-term goals than strangers do and so it makes sense that family would have more aligned interests but not completely aligned interests with you cuz the only person who has a completely aligned interest with you is future you keeping that as the litmus test of whose opinion I'm going to listen to although it's more difficult has ultimately been very fruitful for me because if you're looking at two even two parents you can disprove that concept by saying okay well both parents want different things for me of the things that both parents want which of the things help each of the parents individually out cu I can promise you that the thing that one parent wants doesn't hurt them and help the other parent if they disagree it's usually something that's more aligned with their worldview their beliefs or what they will get status from in their Community for you doing and so all of the things I just described have nothing to do with you so why consider it I'll say this upfront I hate why questions cuz who knows why but I would say that I if if I had to make a guess on why we care about other people's opinions it's because we've learned to care about other people's opinions and when we're children we learn to orient ourselves to the world through other people telling us what is what literally when you're a kid you point and then you say what's that and then they say this and so you have to listen to other people on the way up the problem is at some point you have to turn it off and say you know some of the people I was listening to had no idea what they were saying but you don't know they have no idea because you don't have a context to make a judgment you have to learn to become human and then you have to learn to become yourself and I think that at that Turning Point you then have to analyze the beliefs that you've been given and then keep the ones that you choose most parents are risk averse rather than risk-taking for for their children so like we are willing to take more risk for ourselves often times than our parents are willing to take on our behalf and I think that's normal they want to like keep you alive there's a lot of evolutionary Drive behind that and so they're playing not to lose but if you want to play to win then you have to take different bets I think a lot of younger people get really confused because they spend a lot of time talking about ideas and very little talking about doing actions and so if you just Define the World by only things that occur in it and not things that occur in your mind there's a lot less noise and so it becomes easier to see the farest from the trees let's say I have an employee and I want I hop on a one-on-one and they said something in a meeting before and I say I think the intention behind your statement was that you wanted me to do this and this is how I was feeling about your statement and this is probably where you were feeling everything I just said is a complete waste of time because all I know is that they said this and so just focus on the facts and if you can do that it actually makes living life a lot easier or navigating life a lot easier at least it has for me because those are the only objective truths an easy frame for that is like would it be admitted to a court at as evidence you saying you were offended is not evidence John said this to Sally these words that's evidence indisputable and so just look at the things that are Beyond reproach look at the things that are indisputable look at the things that are facts that are observable and the world gets a lot quieter and you also realize that most people are full of [ __ ] and don't know what they're talking about I mean if someone was like hey Alex why did you get into business I could make up an answer it just how do we know it's true trying to figure out someone's intention is [ __ ] if someone ask me why did you get into business I can make up an answer anyone can make up an answer why do you like making money why do you like sales why do you like marketing why are you good at this I can make up any answer all I know is that these things have occurred and so we can look at my actions and we can look at the results the rest of it of which which had what influence on what like I can't relive my life and I can't run the experiment and so trying to determine why like was it because my mom didn't hug me was it because my dad hugged me too hard who knows I can give anyone and someone will nod and say great because we've trained ourselves to say to answer when someone says why do you do that you give them words and they nod and say oh that's interesting but like it doesn't does mean it's true and so I just try and skirt the whole conversation because there's no point so when someone's like well I'm the type of person who I'm like just stop then they start using this label to decide whether or why they can or can't do something I wouldn't be successful with that cuz I'm a KN freak why because you take trash out of your car regularly why does that have anything to do with whether you could do this or not I used to think and told people I was bad at math until I was 25 post College post consulting job all of it and then I decided that I was not going to be bad at math and so I was like okay well I'm not going to use a calculator and so then I started getting better and better at doing math problem and then lo and behold uh when I took the GMAT I was like okay I have to study twice as hard for the math section and I did just as well on the math section as I did on my verbal but my whole life I had said I was bad at math and so I didn't study as hard because I was bad at it everyone who's listening to this has something they say about themselves they're like I'm not organized I'm an early bird right like we have these labels we give ourselves but like why do we have these labels like if you needed to wake up early [ __ ] wake up early if you need to stay up late you stay up late the labels change our Behavior more than we change the labels I really abhor labels overall because I feel like it limits my action when I get on podcasts and I have talks and people try and label me you'll probably actively see me break the label almost every time because I'm really aware of it and a lot of people aren't and I don't think people do it on purpose in a bad way I just think that they will speak things over you which is why I hate going home because no one speaks [ __ ] over you more than your family and the people who knew you in high school Alex has always had a short temper you you're a hotthead literally people from home describe me that way I was like I don't think I'm a hotthead they will say that and then I feel like I have to really put up my mental like defenses to be like this is not true here is the evidence that this is not true what would a hothead do in these scenarios that is not the way I behaved therefore right and i' have to I have to basically unwind that [ __ ] whenever I go there and so that is why I've been an advocate of like if you want to change your behavior change your environment because they're not going to reinforce labels that you then also perpetuate in your own mind by the actions you take as a result and the only reason they want to label is because it's shorthand for other people to understand not cuz it's true they just want to say he had a bad shot and so they take your whole life and they just say bad that's not true there's more Nuance to it I prefer to think of ideals and think of taking steps towards those ideals and since ideals are not binary of like he is courageous or he is not courageous but how courageous is he or how patient is he not impatient or patient but how much then I know the values that I want to embody and then I just take steps towards those every day with the actions I take and so if I'm deciding do I want to take this action I say which action aligns most with the values that would have EMB body and then I try to do that so rather than being like Alex is patient i' be like Alex attempts to act in accordance with the value of patience and sometimes fall short but dries his Darkness