I emailed myself all of my failures for the last 5 years…this is what I learned..

Summary

• Document personal lessons and experiences by emailing yourself; this evolved into sharing thoughts on Twitter.
• Sold a majority stake in a software company after reaching $12 million in trailing 12-month revenue.
• Sold two-thirds of Gym Launch and Prestige Labs at a $46.2 million valuation, an all-cash deal without earn-out or seller financing.
• Published "100 Million Offers," a bestseller for eight straight months with nearly five thousand five-star reviews on Amazon.
• Grew social media followings significantly across multiple platforms with little initial knowledge.
• Earned $7-8 million in EBITDA from sources outside of business exits.
• Sold personal assets, including a Bentley and a personal home, and transitioned to leasing to reduce liabilities.
• Personal happiness and fulfillment are not solely dependent on financial success or others' recognition.
• The pursuit of legacy may be a flawed concept given that time diminishes the memory and impact of individual achievements.
• Establishing clear personal meanings and values is critical for a fulfilling life.
• Sold businesses and decided to donate wealth upon death, rather than accumulating for legacy or inheritance.
• Achieving and maintaining hard work and continuous learning as personal drivers rather than external rewards or recognition.
• Understanding the importance of willpower over intellect in entrepreneurship and valuing the journey of improvement.
• Adopted inverted thinking to solve problems more effectively, considering how to destroy something before identifying how to build or save it.
• Recognizing the necessity of financing customers can significantly improve sales in any sector.
• Focus on selling outcomes rather than the mechanics of service delivery to connect better with customers' desires.
• The importance of reading and extracting impactful lessons from select books rather than consuming large volumes without discrimination.
• Authenticity in social media content creation attracts a genuine audience and can fuel organic growth.
• Aligning social media strategies to each platform's specific formatting and audience expectations is essential for effectiveness.
• Transparency about intentions in content creates trust and better connections with viewers.
• Emphasizing scarcity and setting clear boundaries for products and services can lead to higher demand and customer satisfaction.
• Leveraging talent and trusting capable employees without micromanaging them is vital for organizational success.
• Focusing on hiring experts with proven skills can be more beneficial than training novices.
• Strategically managing time with a clear separation between creative work and meetings can enhance personal productivity.
• Continuously evaluating personal relationships and streamlining communication for positive experiences and reduced stress is beneficial for overall well-being.
• Measurement of success via multiple life domains, not just financial, leads to a more holistic and satisfying view of achievements.
• Setting attainable goals and consistently achieving them fosters momentum and long-term growth.
• Embracing contrarian investing and staying informed to make strategic financial decisions can lead to significant rewards.
• Specializing in domains of expertise for investments provides the opportunity for outsized returns.
• Leveraging collaboration, capital, code, and content is fundamental for scaling wealth creation.
• Recognizing and embracing periods of waiting as active decisions that can be valuable for strategic planning and long-term success.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting to document your personal lessons and experiences. It's simple to do. Just send yourself an email about what you learned or failed at. You might even share these thoughts online like on Twitter. It's low-cost and it helps you remember and learn from your experience.

A good way of finding happiness is to look inside and decide what's important to you. Don't worry too much about legacy. Time makes people forget others anyway. Think about what keeps you from giving up – that's your true meaning in life.

Try to learn something every day. It doesn't have to take much time or money. The act of learning itself can make you feel good and keep you driven.

If you can, sell things you don't need like fancy cars or big houses. Leasing can be better because it means fewer worries about stuff you own. Living with less can make you feel free.

Remember to focus on the journey, not just the end goal. The fun is in improving and working hard, not just the rewards you get at the end.

When facing a problem, try thinking backward. Ask yourself how you could make it worse, then do the opposite to solve it. This is a low-cost strategy that can make a big impact on how you solve problems.

If you have a service, sell the results people want, not just how it works. This connects better with what they really wish for.

Read books, but don't just read any book. Pick carefully and try to learn something that will help you. And when you share ideas, be real. Share what you know and what you truly think. This attracts the right people to you.

It's okay to say 'no' and limit how much you take on, whether it's work or meetings. Boundaries can make other people want what you offer even more.

Build a strong team by hiring skilled people and trusting them. Good employees are key to a business doing well.

Set reasonable, clear goals. When you keep meeting your goals, you feel good and keep growing.

Save your money for smart, long-term investments. Spread your bets across many things that you're good at. This will likely pay off more in the end.

And lastly, remember to wait sometimes. Not every action needs to be right away. Some things get better with time.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"Entrepreneurship is a battle of will not intellect"

– Alex Hormozi

"Only talk about stuff you know or that you have experienced"

– Alex Hormozi

"In order to attract A-level talent, you have to have a level 10 opportunity"

– Alex Hormozi

"Supply and demand drive price just so much"

– Alex Hormozi

"The amount of money we make is directly proportional to the amount of leverage we are able to employ"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

documented email chain that i've called lessons and failures and in that chain whenever i have like a lesson that i feel like i've learned i would email it to myself with kind of the circumstance and you know the the lesson so i could document it and i've been doing that for five years this may be the last year that i do that because i've kind of transitioned to documenting my thoughts on twitter uh rather than an email chain to myself and so that's actually grown a lot because they were public rather than private and then consolidated but this video is far overdue because it is from the lessons and failures of 2021 and um you know perennially this lessons and failures videos tend to be like my number one video for the year and so i hope you enjoy it i'm going to be covering a vast you know big big swath of topics during during this video and just to give you a little bit of context uh my name is alex for mozy i own acquisition.com it's a portfolio of companies at this point over 100 million a year i make these videos because i'll be dead one day and that's all that's left and so just a couple of major bullets from 2021 i sold the majority stake of allen which was a software company that we owned 100 of it had done 12 million in trailing 12 months revenue we sold it to strategic buyer the terms and price of the deal i signed a nine disclosure four so i cannot share that part but we did 12 million leading into the sale we sold two thirds of uh of jim launch and prestige labs which was a company that we founded my wife and i to american pacific group at a 46.2 million valuation it was an all-cash deal for us there was no earn out there was no seller financing there was no transition period and those were the terms of that deal so i was able to do that and i negotiated in so i could tell you guys on this level youtube video in addition to that i wrote and published 100 million offers uh which to date is still the number one bestseller for advertising for now eight straight months or at least the time of this video um it has nearly five thousand five stars on amazon and a five-star uh 4.9 ranking on there which i'm very grateful for so thank you guys uh part of moza nation for for sharing the word i hope to continue to write more of these books i have a lot of outlines it's just very hard to make them exceptional and that's why they take so long that being said in the same 2021 we grew uh tik-tok instagram youtube all to over 100 000 into subscribers followers et cetera in a year and uh grew twitter uh to 20 000 and 90 days all of which without really any knowledge of these platforms so um i'll share some of the things that that worked for us if that is of interest to you guys despite the sale not including the sale money that we got from all three of those exits that i discussed we still did seven to eight million dollars of ebitda or like personal earnings um outside of the sale from real estate things like that and just from dividends from other companies we own i sold our bentley that was uh the only nice car that we owned we had an i8 but it was a gift we still have that we'll probably end up selling it because it's just not that practical and beyond that i also sold my home and so at this point i own no personal assets and i'm leasing my life and so that's kind of what happened last year so let's get to the lessons because you're like alex i don't really give a about your accomplishments and i tend to agree with you we'll dive in together to some of the major topics i'm going to start with some heavy hitters and then we're going to get into the more tactical stuff one of the heavy hitters here is if we think about you know betty white have you heard of betty white she was one of the golden gals super successful actress uh she just died right before 100th birthday very sad and what's interesting is that she was kind of a meme all over the place that how she just missed it by like 14 days but what's interesting is that you probably haven't thought about betty white since then or you might not even heard of her what's interesting to me about that is that betty white achieved pretty much all levels of success she was a really nice person she was a huge human rights advocate she donated tons of money she was famous she had like she did everything right and yet you probably haven't thought about her except for me making this video right and i think in a lot of ways that's how our lives will be and it gives me a lot of perspective in the things that we find important and how much we value the opinions of others when most of them won't even remember after we die like even a few weeks later they don't need they'll just continue to live their lives and so if people don't even care for more than a few weeks that we died why do we ascribe so much value to how they want us to live and so that has been kind of one of the guiding principles that i've tried to think through with you know how i live my life and kind of this this next chapter and it's been it's been a great lens for realizing that most things just don't matter and that most of the meaning at least for me comes from the things that i choose to deem meaningful rather than a capital meaning that has been prescribed from everyone else and i'll share with you a quote that was very meaningful to me because again this was just a long email chain that i've sent to myself but albert camus was a french is a moroccan philosopher and he said the meaning of life is why you don't kill yourself and that will probably trigger a lot of people and that's not my intention but when i heard it so succinctly stated i thought about it i was like that might be one of the best messages i've heard the reason you don't kill yourself like right now you have a reason like why don't you do it like what is the deep core reason for why you don't kill yourself that reason is is your actual meaning that is the thing that prevents you from killing yourself and so that is the meaning for you and i thought that was really fascinating now obviously for people who have you know who follow a certain or specific faith that is going to be maybe the reason and if it's not the reason then that might not be your deepest held belief kind of interesting thought but for me that was uh very interesting and i'll share with you what the reason i don't which is i i just love learning and i just there's so much more to learn and that's really it i just love learning and i want to continue to learn because i enjoy it so much and i would be really bummed if i died because i wouldn't be able to learn all the stuff that i want to learn and then uh dispelling the legacy myth kind of once and for all my great great grandfather was a king or something in iran and maybe this is folklore but doesn't really matter because the the point of the message is the same i don't actually remember his name um i think it's hormoz han but doesn't matter the point is i don't remember his name and he was like royalty and he had 400 kids and he was a ruler and so think about that from like an achievement perspective he like ruled a country so wealth kids fame all of those things right and here i am only like five generations later and i can barely tell you his name i don't even know what he looked like right and so i mean he influenced my life in basically no way besides the fact that he i was pro-generated from him right and so we have these ideas of legacy and they are not real because if you just take out the time horizon for any reasonable period of time a thousand years ten thousand years we will be forgotten right there is no legacy and so the idea of like i want to build a legacy is silly unless you want to say that it's just well i'm going to leave an impact on people and those people even impact on people then cool then you just want to help humans and that's fine but the whole concept of legal legacy though is kind of superfluous it's kind of irrelevant it's just living your life according to your values which is great but i wouldn't necessarily call that a legacy i have taken the stance that it's very much a myth and that us accumulating assets is very much like a casino analogy that a lot of a lot of you guys have loved from mosination which is if you imagine life as a casino where as we come in or come of age we get a chip and we get seated at a poker table and we're dealt cards right and based on our skill we're able to continually hopefully amass chips over time um and continue to play and the difference between a casino uh in the real world and the casino of life is in the real world you can cash out your chips and walk away with more money but in the casino of life when the green river taps you on the shoulder and it says you it's time to go you get up from the table your chip's still on the table and everyone pushes it back to the middle and then everyone redistributes those things the lanes you own the bassets you own etc those just get redistributed new people own them right after you and i remember thinking about this when i had bought a piece of land and i was like this is cool i own this land and then i realized that that land had been bought from another guy who'd been bought from another guy who'd been bought from another guy every one person before me had been like this is mine but not really we just kind of lease it while we're alive and then we die and then we give it back and then someone else takes it right and so death taxes everyone 100 and so that thought process for me has led to you know the decision that layla and i had which is to give away our wealth when we die no matter what because we don't think it's good for anybody to inherit tremendous wealth because we think it ruins the person and if we're gonna give it back to humanity anyways then might as well just be more targeted in how we give it right and so that has been a lot of the thought process around like why do we choose to do what we do because it's one of the questions i get on interviews a lot which is like why are you still motivated to do it it's like well what else would i do i'm not going to just sit and drink puny class all day that would be terrible and the process of success for me is the process of becoming the becoming is the is the success and so hard work is the goal that is the goal hard work that we find meaningful and that is for me learning is meaningful and i learn by doing so that being said 2021 was also difficult for me because it was a year that i basically took off i did not work much at all and that was mostly to kind of have the full experience you know i don't want to say i don't want to poo poo not working without having not worked and after not working for almost an entire year i can tell you for me no bueno it was very sad for me it was very depressing for me i did not enjoy it i did not get any meaningful it just was it was not good very empty and so i'll give you a couple of quick conclusions that i had uh from that whole year um the first thing is that uh for me price of things no longer confers value which is actually kind of interesting because when you think about it in the beginning you can go out to a night restaurant and it's really fancy because it's a nice restaurant and so the fact that you're sacrificing so much to go out makes you enjoy it more if you save up to buy a purse if you're a girl then the purse is more meaningful to you but if you can buy a purse off of you know one minute's worth of income then a really nice purse or the most expensive purse off one minutes worth of income then the person no longer has that conferred value from the price and so what's interesting about that though is that it allows i feel like me now to look at things without price altogether because if all things cost essentially zero then you get to just purely look at things for what they are which is you take out the marketing you take out the psychology it's like do i like this thing does it serve me does it have function and so that has been kind of my outcomes razor for how i deem things more valuable to me so i realize that i prefer just simple cotton tanks because they are just easier for me and i like them i don't need more expensive tanks because i don't like them i like these ones right and if there's something that happens to be more expensive and i like it the best then i will get that right but price no longer confirms value if you don't feel like the price gives you status because you don't get your status from the expensiveness of the thing or the cost of the things that you wear kind of interesting next was um i had the realization that i had no way to actually spend the amount of money that we have accumulated over our lives that we continue to accumulate there's no real way to spend it like as in consume it like you can spend it to buy assets for sure but then those assets just make you more money and so buying things for the sake of consuming them there is a very easy limit that you reach where they're there you don't really get any more benefit and so realizing that there's a diminishing marginal return with money was like an interesting conclusion to like realize myself and i think what's interesting is that having more allows you to realize that you were just as happy when you had less and maybe you have to do that on your own and get there to let me prove it to myself as les brown says but to me it was it was just a very interesting you know kind of realization um the next one was as a result of this you know dealing with tax shenanigans as as i like to say um almost went down this path of building like these cascading trusts to decrease tax drag uh only exits that we had and i think it probably would have saved me somewhere in the neighborhood of about six million dollars was like i just don't care enough i'll just pay my taxes and um i already have more than i can i can spend or eat and move on and at the end of the day like for me i realize that the wealth is built through the owning and not the selling and so the goal is to just transact as little as possible and just continue to build value in the things that you do own because most things over a very long period of time just go up a lot and so it's all about patience and i like this is a quote that you can you can share but i like setting up games where if i wait i win and so those tend to be the games that i now am more drawn towards whereas i feel like when i was younger it was more like if i can't win fast that i want to play but now it's like i would love to have the games where you cannot win unless you wait because i know so few people will play and typically the rewards are outsized next one was just really thinking about ownership in general for personal belongings uh i have still dedicated you know a layla night now we own nothing we lease our lifestyle and i would say that it has been very freeing we thought about buying a house again and we actually ended up deciding not to do that and so we are just leasing our lifestyle and it is very freeing i will say that one of the things that i also have started asking myself as a question for framing what someone else who's ahead of me is doing and this might be useful for you is a lot of times i originally would look at what is this person doing that i'm not doing right and so it comes from the assumption that i need to do more right whereas if we come from the opposite perspective of what is this person lack that i have what is this person not doing that i am doing i think a lot of times there's more answers to that question that are more meaningful than trying to do more because at a certain point you max out your ability to do and if you're doing all day long right and you're not getting to where you want to go then what you're doing is the wrong stuff to do and so it's not about doing more because what you're doing is already maxed out it's about doing less and about doing different and so in order to do different if you're maxed out you must do fewer of the things you're currently doing and so that is a really good limits task for me to think through what are the character traits that someone might lack that i have what are the activities that they are do that are they are not doing that i am doing so that i can look through a different lens you know through which to improve myself and then the final one on on living stuff and this may have seemed a little bit more heady than some of my uh past lessons and failures but i think part of that was just because you know with the sale of all three businesses and the dividends and everything like we crossed the nine figure net worth at you know layla's 29 i'm 32. and so we have a lot of summers left hopefully and so it it gives you a little bit of perspective on like so what do i want to dedicate the rest of my life to and so the the last framework that i'll leave you with in the kind of the woo-woo uh-ness of this video is the 85-year-old decision framework which is instead of talking to an 85 year old which is a great thing to do by the way if i imagine myself as an 85 year old version of me and i ask that man for advice on what i should do in situations a he's an uh always making fun of me but beyond that i get really really clear answers from someone who wants truly just my best and i found this to be a repeated theme throughout my life is that a lot of times i know what i need to do and i'm just not doing it that may be true for you too is that a lot of times we don't have as much ignorance as we think we do we just have a lot more fear to take that action and so when i talk to my 85 year old self i get a lot of clarity in terms of what decisions i should make and more realistically how few of them really matter because when i think about my 85 votes off all he ends up telling me to do is like enjoy the enjoy it like you're gonna die and definitely don't sacrifice anything for me like i would give everything i have to be 32 again 85 year old self would give everything he has all the billions of dollars just to be 32 again and i have that gift right now and it's kind of interesting and so too many of you probably you know if you could if you could give up everything you have to get 10 year to go back in time 10 years would you do it and it's not to relive life from a regret standpoint but just to have 10 more years right of youth i think a lot of people would do that which then gives you a really interesting perspective on the value of money and how we trade it for time and living that was one of the frameworks that i've been really thinking a lot about when it comes to my life the next one is about solving problems which is a lot a lot of you guys know that i'm a huge fan of charlie mungers and one of the processes that he champions is inverted thinking which is or inverted problem solving which is rather than asking how do i want to solve this problem i try and destroy the solution so for example if i wanted to destroy my marriage what would i do right i would probably not be loyal right i would probably never compliment my wife um and i could you know the list would go on right and what's interesting about the inverted thinking process is that you think of far more ways that are threats to a certain condition than you do solutions naturally and i think it's because our brains are wired to think of threats right we're trying to survive not thrive but you can use and trick your brain into thinking of all of the threats that could possibly come up within a given situation and then all you do is reverse them right and so if you think how can i destroy my business you know as easily as quickly as possible what i do then you tell yourself what those things would be right and then all you have to do is reverse those and those become your strategic anchors those becomes the biggest priorities in the business that you need to do more of and so it's a really wonderful process that has taken me time to just you know immediately go to that you know first i had to think about it deliberately and then i saw the utility in using that framework and now i use it quickly you know it's more top of mind for me now that i solve more problems through inverted thinking but it takes time to get there and so that has been probably something that i've worked a lot on in 2021 that i hope serves you but you can really solve so many questions you know like if i wanted to make an offer or would i if i wanted to get something that no one would say yes to what do i do and then you put all the things down and great do the opposite of that right if i wanted to sell this person what would i do great what would i to make to guarantee that they would never buy what would i do right and so you you reverse it and then that gives you what you need to sell and so you can solve so many problems that way but i think it just it triggers a different part of your brain and you solve problems differently a few major lessons one is uh financing so we're gonna we're gonna go from clouds all the way to dirt okay so business business if you can find people the money to pay they will find a way to make it work and so i think that financing is something that is underrated i think the entire education industry at large exists because government gives basically free money to anyone who wants to get educated through student debt and student loans and so that whole industry probably would not exist if you know if that student loan thing didn't happen and so if you can find yourself in industries where there is easier lending you will sell more people at higher prices just interesting lesson that was a great reminder for me number two whenever possible especially within services sell to gold rather than selling programs uh and the reason for that is because people want to buy the outcome they don't want to buy your program so if someone wants to buy you know uh they don't want to buy your gym membership they want to buy a body they want to buy what their body's going to look like and so sell that it's a it's a very interesting nuance but it's really important when you're trying to you know persuade someone to take action and it be and it creates a clear line between their purchase and their desired end state and so rather than sell like i said you know a 12-week whatever sell the goal and so i think if you can make that shift uh in your products and services you ultimately sell more people and have happier customers moving along i read 70 books uh last year i barely read most of them i skimmed the majority and that was mostly because most of them were just not that interesting or that good um the books that i read intentionally last year so i would skim thought they had good stuff and then reread uh ready fire aim which i've talked about which is uh masterson uh stephen schwartzman's what it takes really good book conscious capitalism i read the first half but it was really good and it really shifted how i saw business and what we want to do with acquisition.com in terms of giving back and helping all stakeholders because i'll go on the tangent that this book led me to which is the realization that charity as a whole is a very broken model and so it's my belief and this is what my you know what i hope to accomplish with acquisition is that if we can create an entity that is self-sustaining and self-growing and continually gives a percentage of its earnings then we will have created a charity that grows and fuels itself rather than creating a charity that solicits money because the exchange just it's just not there it's always banking on goodwill rather than a value exchange from selfish people and so i think it's much easier to focus on people's as a large selfishness and then only have to get one person to be more giving right which you could make the argument that we're being selfish by giving but whatever if you only have to convince yourself to be giving and then convince everyone else to be selfish it's much easier to do that over a longer period of time than convince everyone else to give right that is kind of the perspective that has changed for me with regards to charity and giving overall and so laila and i have given millions now uh to charity and i feel like now that we've been involved there are things that i would want to improve and the only solution that i could think of was creating a true for-profit type business that would attract the best talent who could grow the thing and then dedicate a specific percentage of the profit every year no matter what that would go to the causes right and then that way as the company grew so too with the giving right rather than always soliciting all right so that's one of the things that the conscious capitalism gave to me i read everything uh that warren buffett and charlie munger have written i read that last year so there's the the shareholder letters um that uh buffett has written there's charlie munger's almanac and there's just basically anything they've written uh the transcriptions from all of munger speeches uh very very very very good very impactful for me and the almanac of naval ravicon that was a good book uh very easy read like two hours very very easy read um i think i read it again like literally right afterwards very good book very very good all i have to say about that very very good book now let's get even more tactical social media so um some of the things that worked for growing these social medias for us number one is only talk about stuff that you know or that you have experienced or that real for you um i think one of the things that i see at least turns me off when i see other people's stuff is i see people clearly regurgitating other people's content and it's like this has already been said and you're not adding to the body of knowledge you're just you know diluting down your version of it and it's just not that useful right it just it's not value additive and so it either has to be true because you've done it or it is true to you and i think that is a very good so like if you're starting out what's true to you is that you're trying and so that would be true and your experiences that you're going through are true and so that is kind of in accordance with the whole document don't create concept from garyvee which is very difficult to operationalize but at least just capturing the things that you're going through no one can no one can no one can claim that you are speaking false truths like no one can negate your truth of what you just did right if you did this thing or you helped this client that is true there's no way that anyone can can say that you didn't do that right and so you can give your unique perspective which is adding to the body of knowledge rather than regurgitating stuff that you read in a book right which goes down to if someone has already made it don't remake it next one is um i realize for me i don't want to have a schedule uh so what i mean by that is like i don't have a schedule for posting stuff uh i'm not a social media creator i i'm a business guy you know what i mean like we take investments in in e-learning and and really internet businesses uh is is what we focus on so you know that's where i make my money the schedule felt very constraining to me and when i didn't have the schedule i ended up making more and so that was something that i figured out for me was useful the next one was like why do you make stuff uh and i think i alluded to the beginning of this video but like making stuff there's obviously making stuff for you know the audience but i think for me it's making it for me making it to document so that when i look back and i'm old and gray and baggy and saggy i can be like oh yeah that's what i used to think about when i was at that point and it get it'll it'll help me document my what i'm thinking about at that time and hopefully maybe for you if you can shift that frame i think would be helpful and i heard this from grant that i really liked he said assume no one will ever see it and make it anyways right and so when he said that i thought that was like it corroborated the conclusion that i had gone to or come to it next one was uh you want to be platform specific for formatting uh that's something that we you know we found out like you just you got to be platform specific and so either learn the platform by using it or find someone who does that was very helpful for for us the next one is that people feel intention more than anything else and i think that was a big lesson for me because like i don't sell anything i have a book that's 99 cents that you can get on amazon because the cheapest they'll let me list it for is 99 cents and audible they don't even let you list your own prices they list the prices people feel intention right and so i think that people are always waiting for the other shooter job at least for me in my channel like when is he going to pitch or something like i have nothing to say right like unless you're a company in which case i'm buying not selling right and so the point here is if you're coming at it from the right place like people are exceptionally good at sniffing out why people want something right like we're very good at not being deceived like it's very good from an evolutionary standpoint to not get double crossed right and so we i think we have very good intuition to who is lying right and so the easiest way to get people to believe you is to tell the truth and if you do want to sell people stuff just tell them you're trying to sell them right like in the companies when i like when we were selling stuff i was like i'm here to sell you i want to make money that's why i'm here and i do long-term want to make money from all the investments that we make which these videos do help with that to attract internet businesses but a lot of my opinion is the fact that i know that i'm going to die and it's not going to matter anyways and like this is fun for me tone like in selling matters more than words and that was something that i got to see firsthand i saw someone deliver a pitch that was really bad someone else basically go up and say the same thing with the right tone and that was where the intention came in and it crushed and i think that seeing that juxtaposition just showed me how much more the intention in the heart behind the action like humans are so good at sniffing out intention we can it's just so you have to be so perfect at lying it's impossible and so the easiest way to to become to become trusted is to be trustworthy right is to actually have people's best interest in mind and if you can't get that then like figure out a way to do that and then the selling will happen on its own the next belief that i had that was broken was that organic traffic is very worthwhile if you are patient you are good enough and i think that being good enough comes back to the stuff i started earlier which is only talk about stuff you know make sure it's true because you did it if someone else made it don't remake it like make it for yourself assume no one else is going to watch it and still make it anyways and at the end of the day i think this stuff has to be art because you make art because you believe it should exist not because the art's going to do something for you true art is made to exist because you believe it should exist because you believe the universe is better for it like you believe the body of knowledge exists as as a result of this thing if you're making something to do something it's usually not as good and people can sense it and i think that's where people fail with organic marketing uh which is just like earned media and i'll share this with you my my youtube team bro scott told me something uh that he said was like his biggest learning that i'm sharing with you from what he told me and he was like you have the you have the longest time horizon of anyone i've ever worked with it's like you just you're talking like you know five year and ten year time horizons for like whether we're going to deem something successful or not and i you know i guess sometimes you adopt these things and you get so used to it that you forget that other people don't think that way and so i guess i'm sharing it with you because he he seemed to think that it was something that was worth sharing but like time is everything like how you think through how long something is going to take because time is really just a function of your expectations of an outcome and so if you could extend the time rise into infinite then you basically remove your expectations and when you can create without expectations you usually end up creating better stuff and so it's one of those things where like you only gain your life when you choose to give it right you only achieve happiness when you decide that it's no longer a priority right and you just start to live and accept the moment for what it is and so i think that it's in a lot of ways it's similar that time horizons really feed into everything and the most successful people that i know have the longest horizons and in game theory the person with the longest horizon wins it's the difference between finite and infinite players and so you can literally give yourself an immediate competitive advantage simply by thinking i will outlast i will endure and i will be here for a long time and you build with that in mind right so what happens is you just you get rid of all the short-term plays like i was asked the other day like why don't you create a no strip line and i'm like because it's just not what's what's the point you know what i mean um maybe i'll change my mind later but like i just it's like short-term cash crap right and so i think it's all about being long-term selfish rather than short-term selfish and long-term self-esteem comes from just giving more than everyone else which ends up benefiting humanity which is great that humanity serves or rewards the people who give the most which i think is interesting moving along so we had coveted in 2020 2021 was the recovery for all three of our companies it taught me a very important lesson which is a buffett quote but market over manager which is it is more important the boat that you are in rather than how hard or how well you row and um you know our company was able to have a very strong recovery um as a result of that but it taught me that we were not supermen that we are fallible that we are that we can lose and despite how hard we row it's you can still have harder like you can still not achieve the outcomes that you want and so i decided you know when when when the flu hit or whatever that i was not going to like we were i was like we're not going to be affected by this like we've made i was like i've made the decision that we're not going to be affected by this but you know my decision did not really change reality and so it really was very humbling for me to see that like yes indeed market is stronger than the manager and so that is what you know spawned me to create the 55 minutes of becoming a millionaire that that presentation because it's all about opportunity vehicles and that was a great deal of my thinking last year in putting together what we were doing with acquisition.com another conversation that i had was with perry belcher um who told me a story and i think he's he's in i think he's 60. hopefully perry don't get upset with me maybe he's in his 50s i don't know and he said that when he looks back in his life he said three or four huge like where he was crushing it just home runs right where he was just hitting it out of the park business-wise he said every time he did it he thought it was because he was doing so well he said but when he looked back on it it was because he had hopped on a trend that was happening that he was unaware of and um he was like he was selling gold by the inch at some point like in his first big you know home run thing and it was because uh it was a it was gold-plated metal but it was because the cost of gold was so expensive and so he happened to hop onto a trend that he was unknowing of and so people wanted alternatives to gold right and so he was selling something that capitalized on a trend and it blew up and he's got a company now that does uh you know bookkeepers and va's and it's because cost of wages in the u.s has skyrocketed and there's a huge demand for offshore services and so he's just riding that wave and he said so you know as i've gone on he's like i've learned a market learn to sell i have all these skills and expertises but a lot of times i was just riding the market and so i think that i too have had a little bit you know i think i've had a little bit i've been a little more humbled by life that some of the biggest successes we had have just been luck you know i mean we were at the right place the right time the thing is is that when those occasions do happen uh swinging hard at that fat pitch because you don't know when the next one's going to come and so i think that that was something that we did well but i would urge you that if you are in something and something is growing is crushing it don't think it's because of you but do go all in and i think that you will be very happy with the outcome the market makes a lot of our success we feel smart or dumb and it has nothing to do with us the entire time uh was the little little email thread that i left to myself and so that was uh very interesting for me now next lesson in failure talent so a lot of stuff on hiring and building team because that was what was necessary for us to to sell and obviously build the hold code for acquisition.com so for context uh you know everybody in the hotel acquisition.com we've got harvard grads we've got uh mckinsey which is the number one consultant management consulting firm in the world recruits from there we have some of the best strategists from vanguard which manages six trillion dollars that we recruited in to really get the absolute best of the best people uh we had you know our cfo has been cfo of a 5 billion a 1 billion a 750 million dollar company she's been sell side exits 16 times so very very very very well-versed experienced team and so i've learned a lot about talent um the management the acquisition of talent and my perspectives on business have fundamentally changed from they were five years ago i used to think it was all about strategy now i think it's all about people and because if you find great people great people build great strategy and execute great strategy to build great companies you can't build a great company without great people and i just i just i just really i just didn't think that when i was younger i was like i can will power my way through it and it's just even if you can you can't do it forever or maybe you can i don't know but uh for me like at a certain point it wasn't worth it in order to scale like only one man only has two hands and so you have to have more hands and you have to have more people aligned with your mission and so here's some of the conclusions that i've had around talent um over the last however long better understanding of entrepreneurs versus entrepreneurs so i had a big you know i used to say like you need to find entrepreneurs not entrepreneurs silly it was a false binary entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs exist on a continuum you have some people here either more or less entrepreneurial and all of those things can change given a dynamic plenty of people were employees got laid off and coveted and decided to start making money on their own and then found out they did have an entrepreneurial streak right and so i used to think that this was much more like born and i think now that it's much more made and i never would have considered myself a big risk taker i did everything by the book you know for basically all my career and i was only very lucky that i hated my life so much that i was willing to quit everything uh to start a business but that is not common and it was still one of the hardest decisions of my life and seeing how easily some people quit their jobs compared to how long it took me to do it even when i had no stake i had no family i had no kids it was still the hardest decision my entire life i really do think more and more that entrepreneurs are made rather than born and it is again a continuum and that continuum can change uh where you sit on that continuum can change based on your circumstances right and so i think that there's this like he's a pure entrepreneur he's not a peer entrepreneur and to me i feel like it's like in this context for right now and that can change so that was something that i thought was interesting and in that way when we're recruiting talent i'm not really looking necessarily for entrepreneur entrepreneur it's just like is this person aligned with where we want to go and are they motivated intrinsically by getting there right if so then they will be entrepreneurial if we can create the environment such that those character traits come out and i'll tell you the one thing that sealed the deal for this is that layla's father is the or was the dean of the mechanical engineering department so academic you know all the way tenure the whole like literally the most secure security you know driven career path of all time and i remember saying i was like if he can start doing entrepreneurship i was like i will change all of my views because i mean literally like an engineer in academia tenure like it's just like all of the most security driven things and lo and behold here he is now you know starting his entrepreneurial dream that now that he retired and he's making money and i like i'm just filled with pride uh seeing that but at the same time it just it gave it just it was such a testament to the fact that we can change our stars we can be what we want to be and that was just such a big profound proof point for me that it really shifted the way i saw talent and entrepreneurship in general next one was uh in terms of finding talent it has now been my it's now my feeling that it's better to find a 400 batter than to teach someone how to swing right i would rather find people who are really really good already and then orient them rather than try and teach someone how to do the thing right now you might not be able to afford that at a certain point in your business career but that is still the ideal that i would that would go towards and if you look at what you know steve jobs you know was able to do in his in his career he was really the assembler of great people towards a common mission and goal and that is what creates big companies is lots of people aligned in a specific direction to something that is meaningful which again if the point of your company is to make you money it's not that meaningful for a lot of people and so it has to be something bigger than you and that again is something that i had to learn once you do that you need to get out of their way really and so i have a friend of mine who owns a company and he's uh ceo of that company and the founder of the company you know made him ceo but he has become he's not really a ceo by the true sense that he's not actually executing and like leading uh the stuff because the founder is micromanaging which either means one of two things you either don't trust the person to to do their job or you're not good at hiring people that's it it's like either the person has the talent and you need to trust them or they don't have the talent which means you suck at hiring but either way we suck and so once you do have the right person we have to extend trust even if that person hasn't quote earned it yet because it's the only way that the machine runs and trust is typically reciprocal and sometimes you have to give it first and you will make more by giving it than by deciding to live a life without trust even if you get burned so that was been a lesson for me um from the last year one of the next ones was uh a players are the things that really grow business and like once you get stuck at like 30ish million and i've said this said this and i will say it again i was stuck there for for almost four years right and the thing that that got me out of that was realizing that i it was kept being me i kept trying to make me the center but it had to be everyone else it had to be other leaders it had to be other people driving the growth and setting up the incentive such that like they can win big time not just little time but big time and uh part of that i got from schwartzman's book in order to attract level 10 talent you have to have a level 10 opportunity and most people are not actually pursuing level 10 opportunities they're just trying to make some money and so if you want to attract the best people and work with the best people you have to be going after the big stuff the big goals right and it is just as hard to accomplish a big goal is a little goal and it takes just as long so you might as well go big that leaves me the next one which is like character and values must be present in order to attract caliber people right high caliber people and so i think one of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship is the leadership component because it's it's the most raw it's who you are right people have to buy into you because like you as you grow like get go up in the in the ranks like you're not going to be smarter than the people you hire like a lot of people that work at acorns.com are smarter than i am like i mean that generally that's not just like me paying lip service like they're very smart and they're smarter especially in their domains than i am the only way to attract those people is obviously to have a mission that that makes sense that they want to be a part of like i had to change i have to be better right this is adopted from mongers you know things of living an excellent life but it's living a life without envy it's living a life without resentment a living a life of discipline of not overspending means remaining charitable despite circumstance dealing with reliable people and doing what you say you're going to do and what you were supposed to do those are very easy to say very hard to do and i think that if we hold those as ideals we can just keep walking towards them without with knowing wholeheartedly that we will never achieve perfection but the process itself can be a perfect process even if you have an imperfect outcome and so in that way we can be joyful in our imperfection because we are following a perfect process so to me that's very cool but i think that if we view our leadership as a process of becoming rather than getting there then we will attract people who also want to walk in that path alongside us so that was from a talent perspective major lessons time horizons if you can extend them you will win sometimes we need to eat for an extended period of time and uh entrepreneurship is a battle of will not intellect and that was something that i learned especially in 2021 um and 2020. it is a battle of will not intellect i'm just going to say it again i don't know what you're doing right now it is a battle of will not intellect because since it is an infinite game which means that the point of the game is to keep the game going the point of the game is to keep playing not to win right because there is no winning you realize there is no winning so if the point of the game is to keep playing then it's about will it's about the will to endure it's about the will to continue and so if you can frame it that way then the game gets much easier because you realize there are no wins and losses as long as you're playing and if it is a game then what better to do in life than play next one is the importance of frame so this one is a really insane story and i'm gonna try and tell it as short as i can dean graziosi who's now become a very close personal friend uh he told me this story that just blew me away so if you don't know who he is he uh dean has is one of if not the best marketer out there he's unbelievable he's tony robbins right hand man he he's the main driver behind you know the business machine that that works there and he also has his own brand and they're all mass market and he had multiple brands before that motor millions and real estate and he's done a lot of stuff and he told me about this um ad that he ran and he was this perfect dad that he ran with larry king and he did this book interview and he was like it was the perfect interview i knew it was going to crush as an infomercial and then it bombed and he's like and he watched the whole thing and he knew it was going to be awesome he didn't get it so he flew larry king live out because he looked at all of his best winning infomercials and he looked at his and he thought that the first two sentences of the one hour long segment needed to be changed and so he flew him back out he did he redid the entire setup of larry king live covered all the expenses just so he could re-record the first two sentences and he re-recorded the first two sentences and then that infomercial did 100 million dollars plus in sales and to me the biggest lesson there from a marketing perspective but also from a psychology perspective was the frame is everything how you frame a conversation how you frame a situation how you frame a circumstance to yourself or others will massively change how they perceive the remaining information that they that gets transmitted to them and so when we're selling how we set the frame when we're trying to persuade our team how we set the frame when we want to make an offer how we set the frame when we want to make an ad how we set the frame are so important and if we look back on the best ads that you have those hooks you know ogilvy i think said once you've ridden your headline you've spent 80 cents out of your dollar in advertising and so realizing that that frame is so important has really made me rethink a lot of the things that we think about in our ads our copy headlines etc and how much more time needs to be allocated to that if eighty percent of your dollar is spent on the headline then you should spend eighty percent on that piece right on just perfecting that i'll tell you in the split test that we run things like that it's been bar none crazy to see how different just these tweaks are just on the headlines themselves and so the next one i want to cover is people are either helping you become the person you want to be or they are not there is no in between and so we have these people that we have in our lives and i think sometimes it was useful for me to kind of take inventory of like who are the people that when i see their name on my phone i get a pang of cortisol like i get a little bit of stress because i think they're taking something from me and when i actually looked through my my text messages it was 41 of texts were something that caused me stress and i was like well half i was like no wonder i hate my phone right and so piece by piece trying to remove uh people or just slow down the the communication cycles with people that i thought were draining me has been a very good process for me overall for thinking clarity and for accomplishing what i want to accomplish and so i don't know where you're at and the people but i think if you can take inventory of like and i just feel like the easiest litmus test is look at your phone look through your last week of texts and then think about which of these people are trying to take something from you and if you can slowly phase those people out and only have more of the people who who energize you i think life is just better right because if if you lose your phone and you're happier as a result of it it makes you really wonder why you have a phone success must be measured through multiple metrics so this was a huge one for 2021 for me is that and this is a quote from charlie munger is that someone is always doing better right someone's always doing better than you and so in in one aspect and so i think it's useful to have uh multiple metrics for measurements so you can have your body you can have your marriage you can have your finances you can have your business you can have your team you can have your kids you can have whatever like multiple metrics for success and in 2021 in my direct income not including the the sale numbers it was a medium year for me but for my marriage it was an amazing year and i'd say like we you know we three axed our marriage uh last year but it was a great great year for our marriage and so i think that and i think about 85 year old me looking back it's like yes good like multiple metrics for success and so i think measuring those things has been helpful for me when i think about a year of lessons and failures uh that was a good that was a plus in the plus column because i didn't used to do that the only goals i ever said were financial and so i think now i think i think more a little bit more holistically um next one is uh simple attainable goals create crazy growth one of the things is like now that we work with you know a lot of portfolio companies that are in internet businesses that are doing you know three million plus et cetera we set goals with them a lot right and a lot of times i see the goals that they want to set them just these massive goals and the thing is is that when we extend this horizon if you can get a 10 or 20 per quarter growth that's unbelievable and that adds up very very very very fast but everyone wants to double every 90 days and that's just not realistic and so they always fall short and so i have been a big proponent of how can we set a goal that's impossible for us to hit and then let's crush it halfway through the quarter and then reset the goal because i feel like it's better to just keep setting goals and keep crushing goals than to set goals and then miss them everyone has different psychologies around this but for me i like to make a commitment and stick with it and know that i'm going to hit it that has been very helpful and i think as i've gotten older in entrepreneurship i have set more and more reasonable goals and i think that as a result of that we actually grow more consistently and build a better company because we're not trying to do something crazy to hit a goal for no reason because it's arbitrary we set up the timeline so if we set the timeline way way way in the future and we know that we can just hit these basic benchmarks over a longer period of time we're going to build something huge and it's just thinking like that is what unlocks the huge growth potential that time provides next one contrarian investing so you must be willing to do the unpopular thing to be against the cycle right when everyone's worried right like when everyone's buying and buying inflated prices that's when you have to hold and just wait i look at uncle warren and he's got 25 percent of his uh of his assets in cash right now like that's a little interesting to me best investor of all time he's seen every cycle imaginable he understands stuff better than anyone he's probably also more connected and he's got 25 in cash interesting right very very interesting the next one is from an investing standpoint um layla and i have really committed just only investing in things we know which is why we work with internet businesses because it's the business as we know right and so sticking with that as our primary thesis so like there's something that you do know better than other people stick with that for us we limited real estate we still have you know a portfolio in real estate but it's limited due to the fact that like i don't have skill or experience in that and i can get outsized returns doing the thing that i'm good at right and an interesting thing is like if you get 10x on one tenth of your money you still have 100 irr right and so if you're worried about inflation for all of your money it's like if you get crazy returns on 20 of your money it still covers your whole nut right and so i think that's always making sure that you have the downside of mitigation you buy with a margin of safety right which is again uncle warren a couple things on time so i've realized that for me meetings on mondays work great so i just always just throw mondays up as like this is the day that i do for meetings that's that right i just accepted that as as a reality for me so people ask me about how my life looks that's how it looks mornings are sacred for me and so for me morning is until i lunch so basically 4 5 6 a.m until noon is my time to do stuff and i think that that has probably been one of the most integral habits that i have had in my life which is that i just get all my done before lunch after lunch i do all my meetings and all my calls and all those things because my creative juice if i if i take meetings first thing my creative juice is spent and i can't work after but if i do creative stuff in the morning i still feel like i'm very effective on meetings after that for for whatever reason and that works for me some people might be opposite but i think having that dedicated time is really important some people work and then they love working from like whatever you know eight o'clock at night until two in the morning everyone's different but for me having that dedicated time has been super important next one i want all of my i like having space uh to do free things on my calendar and so when i have everything every minute booked um and this has changed over time for me and maybe it'll change in the future but i get i stress out and i feel like i'm less productive and so having free time to think and create ultimately produces outsized returns it's just not as reliable or at least rather as it is more volatile in nature so i might have a free day and not get anything done and then i might have a free day and crush it but i know that having free days makes me more than never having free days hopefully that makes sense next one is that writing next books so i think a lot of people underestimate how much time it takes to make something that's excellent and the difference between good and great is vast and so uh when we're making products i share this story because i think it will resonate with someone like writing this book uh took me a really long time right and that's why i think it ended up being uh pretty decent because we spent so many times rewriting it like i rewrote this book four times end to end the leads book i've now i'm on my sixth version and it's still not done yet because it's it's honestly a more complicated topic and it just takes it just takes work sometimes the work just needs doing for it to be excellent and so that is just a reminder more than it is a lesson and it's for myself included um because i get impatient i want to send you guys the next book i want to publish it but like it's just not there and i'm also doing all the other stuff and so it will happen when it happens and i promise that if it you know has my name on it and i'm saying it's great then it is my best effort to be exceptional and worthy of your time next one is uh supply and demand i have i feel like every few years i get like a new level of depth on my on my understanding my perceived understanding of those two forces but man supply and demand drive price just so much i just and what's crazy is that you have you can influence demand by being persuasive right in that you can channel more of it towards you it's even easier to influence supply uh and so it's it's so it's so interesting to put limits on things and again it's very counter-human right we think if we limit things we will make less money but a lot of times when we limit things we make more money which is why a limited swag drop makes more money than always have the t-shirt on your website and so creating and imposing limits creates clarity of thinking it creates clear value and you actually end up getting more people who want it because it is scarce and so i am continually re-re-taught i re-learn this lesson in different in different ways and it's been very valuable and so like for us you know at acquisition.com we're taking on internet businesses it's like we have a lot of people who who reach out and we just the reason that we have such high returns with the companies and they grow so well is because we have no need to take anyone i don't we don't need to do any of it and so we just get to pick the ones that we want to do for a long time because we want to do it and because we think we can absolutely kill it and i think that having that i don't like there's no need there's no scarce there's no there's no vacuum that needs to get filled there's no short-term arbitrary goal that we're trying to hit it's just for the love of the game and as a result of the long-time horizon you can have more scarcity because there is no arbitrary goal that we need to hit and in so doing you create better outcomes which is again so counter-intuitive that it drives me nuts but it's also like the one of the beautiful things with life that i feel like i'm learning right now and so anyways i to me that's like a very beautiful contrast that i figured i'd share with you just the idea that the perceived supply and demand are really the only factors that influence price and we can control both of those things and especially how few things we want to sell if it comes to our time our attention etc and a lot of us we better serve just limiting the amount of people and actively saying i'm only doing this once that cap is met being done it's amazing how good it feels to say like i have hit like i we are we are where we need to be that is all we don't there is no need for more we have enough right and then when you so choose to you have built up sufficient demand that when you open up the door the slots fill back up and you can close it again right and it's much better to always know where your next meal is coming from i think emotionally than to never know and always feel like you are wanting and craving more and so it's been an interesting process uh to kind of like walk through that and i think a lot of service-based businesses would be very well served properly utilizing scarcity to better serve their customers to increase their margins and ultimately provide a better experience overall because they're not doing it because they have some arbitrary goal that they just like set and they're like i want to hit a million a month for no reason right why why right if you can answer that question i guarantee you'll hit it last one last last major lesson topic for me was uh leverage the amount we make amount of money we make is directly proportionally amount of leverage that we are able to employ you know naval has his his his four that he talks about i renamed them as cs so i could remember it but you've got collaboration which is employing other people you've got capital which is using other people's money you've got code which is using software and you've got content or media right which is uh all of these things uh especially the top two you can replicate without cost right like if two people use a software 100 people use the software there's very little additional cost if one person watches this video or a thousand people watch this video there's no added cost to me for capital if i can use other people's money right then i can grow something faster if i can use other people's time when it comes to labor then i can do more right and so i think understanding how to use all four of those things is one of the things that unlocks true wealth and so i would encourage you and this has been a process that i've taken i've really geeked out on but look at the wealthiest people in the world and look at the people around you who are succeeding who are growing quickly and look at which of those four c's if one two three four or all of them they are using to grow their businesses and so now when i look at opportunity it's how can i employ the most leverage and the opportunity because then all leverage does is give you higher output per unit of effort or time that's all it is if we only have limited time the extent to which we can multiply that time is an extent to which we're employing leverage which is the multiplier and so these are all multipliers in and of themselves if you look at facebook they used they have labor there's lots of employees who are working there there's capital they use other people's money to grow the business there's code which is the software base that the whole thing is built on and they sell media it's all four right all four things are created and that's why the thing is the empire that it is you can see how people are employing these things together you look at uh grant and some of you guys for some reason like poopoo the fact that like i've even talked to grant which is beyond silly to me whenever someone's doing better than you at anything there's something we can learn from them right and so like i'm okay i'm gonna i'm gonna talk to your heart for a second it is your ego that is fragile that makes you not want to learn from someone else who's doing better than you in some way because you feel like it makes you suck and you want to give an excuse for why someone else has achieved more than you in that way well he doesn't have the ethics that i have well he has better genetics well blah blah he was born better looking whatever it is right for the wife right whatever it is it doesn't serve you and i say this as somebody who used to do that a lot and so i realized that i was not getting any better by giving up all my excuses for why i wasn't achieving what someone else was achieving and so the biggest goal was to reframe my envy into curiosity which is how are they doing that and how am i not doing as well as them if i claim to be all these things then the reality should match that and it's not and so i will break down why i think um i think grant's going to multiply by a lot like a lot a lot i'll tell you why so one he knows how to he knows how to galvanize people towards a cause so he knows how to employ and and and have people aligned so that's he's got collaboration the next level is he's got capital he's raising tons and tons and tons of money to to buy stuff and he's got tons and tons of content and uh the next move that i think he's going to make is um is around starting a bank and i think it'll be one of the most brilliant moves that he makes because what's even easier than getting someone to invest just get someone to save and what'll be cool is that what is going to happen is he's going to have so many deposits into cardone bank that he can then use that money to go to the fed and he can lever bank rates of leverage um and then buy way more stuff to get returns on that because people are still too chicken to make investments for themselves so they're just going to bank and he'll give them a better return on their money than the banks are and he'll be able to suck so much cash from the universe of his audience and that he will get so much leverage on the things that he's going to buy i think it's going to be a really really cool thing to say and so anyways i think they're in that way we can learn of him now does he have any does he have any code no he's got three other four maybe he'll be able to embed that stuff in later maybe he won't i don't know and so the thing is just like you don't need to have all of them but the more of them you have the more multiplicative the effect is on the ultimate amount of money that you make and when someone goes from you know zero to billionaire in a decade i think we can all learn something from it i certainly am trying to analyze everything that someone is doing much better than i am um is doing right especially with the same period i'm like well i i was alive 10 years ago and he was live 10 years ago and he became a billionaire in that time and i did not become a billionaire therefore he's better at this game than i am right now right and so um i just think it's really valuable to look at that way the last piece is uh seasons of waiting waiting and in action are active decisions charlie martin talks about this when it comes to investing he's like not selling is an active decision all you have to do is look at the markets because people cannot hold themselves back it's not that we are doing nothing we are doing nothing get the difference we're not doing nothing we're doing nothing and that was the active decision we chose to make and so sometimes we just need to wait and that was something that i feel like i learned last year as well was that you know you can't you can't uh you can't have you can have you can't get nine women pregnant for a month to have a baby right like some things take time i think an acceptance of a different view on time has been something that shaped my life for the better and i can tell you the people unequivocally that make the most money that i know all speak in the longest time horizons and the people who make the least amount of money unequivocally talking the shortest time horizons the people who talk about today tomorrow next week this month make less money than the people we're talking about five years from now without fail and so if that's all you can think about which is what are we making this month what are making this week what are we making today right you need to extend your time horizon because when you do that you think smart because you think long and when you think long you make games where if you wait you win and so mosi nation those are the lessons and failures from 2021 those are things that i learned that were very valuable to me i made another video about just lessons that i learned from the sale which i think i might have made a little bit too technical and i have another video that i made uh about how to sell a business uh that was very in-depth as well in terms of the actual process of selling because i get lots of questions around that and so um check out those videos if you did and as always love you all and i'll see you guys next video keeping awesome bye