I SPENT $100,000 on courses, so you don’t have to…

Summary

• Courses don't make you money because learning one skill, like copywriting, isn't enough; it's part of a larger set of skills needed to run a successful business.
• Viewing the journey to success as building a bridge with each skill as a brick can help identify missing pieces that prevent progress.
• Businesses operate like a pipe, converting eyeballs into money. If any part of the process is weak (like marketing or sales), it restricts the entire flow.
• The disappointment with courses often comes from unrealistic expectations about immediate success, similar to how people aren't upset about not speaking Spanish after high school classes—it’s about what was expected.
• Over half of the companies in my portfolio are education and training companies because I believe in vocational training that offers practical, applicable skills.
• The traditional education system is failing many by being outdated and overpriced, which is why e-learning is booming.
• E-learning offers a way to gain practical skills that lead to income generation, unlike many degrees which can leave you in debt without improving job prospects.
• When selecting a course, focus on gaps in knowledge rather than reinforcing skills we already enjoy or have mastered.
• Take responsibility for your own learning; even with great teachers, students need to actively engage and apply what they've learned.
• Before passing judgment on courses or individuals, consider direct experience and personal interactions, understanding your current limitations and growth potential.
• We should approach people and courses with a mindset of learning, even from negative experiences, rather than quick, binary judgments.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest focusing on the skills missing from your business infrastructure, like bridge building with each skill as a necessary brick. To move forward, identify the skills you lack and work to fill those gaps. It's not about having one skill, like copywriting but having a range of skills that work together.

A good way of doing this is to think of your business as a pipe, converting audience attention into money. If you're struggling in marketing or sales, tackle those areas because they're restricting your flow. It's not enough to have a great product if no one knows about it.

Remember, education is what you make of it. You need to apply the skills you learn actively. If you've taken a course, use it as a stepping stone, not a miracle cure. It's one piece in the larger puzzle of running a successful business.

When choosing courses or learning material, it’s smart to look for what you don't know yet. Strengthening your weaknesses is just as important as enhancing your strengths. By doing this, you can cover all aspects required for your business to thrive.

Also, I would focus on your learning attitude. Take responsibility for it—great teachers help, but you've got to engage. And before judging a course or a person, try to have direct experience with them. Understand where you are limited and where you can grow.

Lastly, try to learn from everything and everyone, even from negative experiences. It's about having a mindset focused on growth and improvement, not making quick judgments. Each person and course, good or bad, has something to teach. Approach learning with this mindset, and you're more likely to succeed.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"The reason the course that you bought didn't make you money is oftentimes because the thing that the course taught is not the only thing that is required to make money"

– Alex Hormozi

"You should think about business like a pipe right, you've got eyeballs over here and you've got money over here"

– Alex Hormozi

"If you can shift that perspective, you'll stop having such negative views around some of the earlier teachers in your life"

– Alex Hormozi

"Doubling down on your strength from a large perspective is a very good idea"

– Alex Hormozi

"Winners are just taking responsibility for both sides of the equation"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

in this video i'm going to explain to you exactly why the courses that you buy are not making you money and it is not for the reason that you think this was um kind of prompted because i was tagged in something where someone was like i thought this guy sucked and it was because i heard some other guy talking about him and so i just immediately you know made a judgment and now i started watching his youtube and i read his book i remember all offers you can get it for 99 cents and i was like oh this guy is pretty legit and for some reason this has got me hit my head racing on a number of different topics and i tried to write them all down on my phone so i could make this for you but i'm going to explain to you why your course didn't make you money i'm going to explain how you can try and use get the best out of courses how you can know how to use judgment and when to apply it and finally i'll explain to you why spanish is a scam all right lots of lots of pack stuff today first off the reason the course that you bought didn't make you money is oftentimes because the thing that the course taught is not the only thing that is required to make money and so for example if i were to learn how to do math do i need to know how to do math in order to be good at business yes does knowing math make me good at business no it is a subset superset relationship do i need to know how to write copy to be good at business yes if i only know how to write copy will i make money no the reality is that in order to get the first dollar across the bridge it's much more important to see it as a bridge from where you are and where you're trying to go and each one of the bricks represents a skill that you'll need if you do not have one of the bricks you will not be able to continue to pass the difficulty in what most people have is that they continue to reinforce one brick and they still have a gap so it's like i take six different courses on copywriting but copywriting isn't the link that is broken in the bridge to get you from where you are to where you want to go and get that first dollar across or get the increase in dollars across because if you want to think about it differently think about it like a pipe and right now you've got let's say thick tubes for the vast majority of the pipe so you could have lots of water that's flowing here but then you have this tiny little tube over here because it's a weakness in the system and it affects the overall throughput from your entire business right you should think about business in my opinion like a pipe right you've got eyeballs over here and you've got uh money over here right it's everything that happens from eyeballs to headlines to ads to copy to clicks to conversions to sales to upsells etc all of that is just this process where eyeballs get turned into money and so if you can just shift your perspective from like i bought a course on copywriting or i bought a course on facebook ads or whatever it is and i didn't make money it's not because the course was bad maybe it was but that's not the point the point is that it's probably because you're missing another piece of the puzzle and that's why it takes so long for so many people when they get into the game and they get so frustrated at the beginning because everybody tells the story i bought all these courses didn't work for me and then i finally got this thing and then it all took off but many times that last course was just the last piece of a bridge that other people helped you build and i think that if you can shift that perspective you'll stop a having such negative you know views around some of the earlier teachers in your life and then you'll also be able to just spot the gap in your learning and then attack it ruthlessly and i think that's one of the things that most people don't do is they just start continuing to learn about the things that they enjoy rather than continue to focus on the things that they lack now sure doubling down on your strength from a large perspective is a very good idea but the business as a whole especially if you're a solopreneur right or an entrepreneur who's starting out and only has a team of five maybe 10 people like the business has to do all of these things period so you can be you know skewed in a certain direction you might be better at acquisition you might be better at product maybe better fulfillment whatever it is right you might be better at those things than like learning about that stuff but in order for the business to be successful all of these roles have to exist and even if you don't want to specialize in it you still need to know enough about it to be dangerous so you can make a judgment on how good someone else is to make to know if they can fit into your business so i wanted to cover that first off the second thing is that for some reason and actually for some reason i'll tell you exactly what the reason is people get very upset about courses they buy on the internet and yet for some reason no one is upset about the fact that they took four years of spanish and can't speak a lick of spanish hmm why is that because of expectations it's all it is it's because of expectations they believe or maybe you believe i don't know that if you buy a course right that immediately you should be successful and i'm gonna be here to tell you that that's not true and that's because if you just show up at school i mean shoot some people enroll in classes and never show up is like if you enroll in a spanish class and never show up is the is spanish a scam probably not do you believe that it's possible that there are good students and bad students just like there are good teachers and bad teachers do you think it's possible that half of students are below average half of the people watching this might be below average hmm interesting and so if half the people that take an educational course are below average then it would be reasonable that half the people take a course will get bad results now a good teacher can shift that percentage and but the thing is is what ends up happening is it's a bell curve right and this is studied a zillion times over classes and humans exist in a bell curve and so a good teacher can move the bell curve one direction or other but they're still going to be the outliers in the front and the outliers on the back and so the reason that people get upset is because of the expectations they cast upon what they believe they're going to get and i think part of that's a fault of the marketing and the sales process etc and don't get me wrong i think there's definitely things that can be improved there but i think that you can try and wish and cast stones on those people um or you can just understand going into it that there's a responsibility that you would have as a student just like if you went to college to do a certain amount of stuff and the reason i'm bringing this up is because i genuinely am super passionate about education in general over half the companies our portfolio our education and training companies i believe in vocational type uh training stuff which is why you know our gym company is basically how to run a gym right and um you know companies that i like are like niche expertise type things like how to run an auto shop how to run a plumbing business like because that stuff doesn't get taught anywhere when i look at the educational system as a whole i think almost everybody watching this especially if you're in my channel we can agree that the education system as a whole has failed us you know learning about aztec literature probably isn't isn't going to serve us in the real world and so i think that the reason all of the e-learning is booming is because education has failed to keep up with the times and it's wildly overpriced the value to price proposition is one of the most laughable in the entire world they settled an entire generation with debt and no way to repay it you get to the end of four years you're 100 000 in debt and and you have literally no more skills that will qualify you for a job you can get the same jobs before and after a four-year degree it's nuts and so the reason that you know acquisition.com exists for us is so that we can hopefully you know my goal is to is to build the new world of education which is how people can actually get skills that can feed themselves and it was because i went to some of you guys may not may not know this but i went to vanderbilt um i graduated magnetic and bloody in three years so i was a good student i don't have the typical entrepreneurial journey of like teachers never understood me and like i i always messed around and couldn't pay attention like i didn't have that like i i worked really hard and i got good grades and despite that nothing that i learned at vanderbilt at all in any class was more valuable than any course i've ever bought in e-learning how crazy that is right like i've bought courses on freaking everything i bought courses on youtube ads ball courses on on copywriting i bought courses on sales i bought multiple courses on sales i bought i mean everything you can possibly imagine i bought mentorship or workshops i bought seminars all of these things if you were to spend the same hundred thousand dollars that you spent on a four-year degree versus spending a hundred thousand dollars on the in the e-learning community on the on the most vetted courses and go through them and give yourself four years to be successful if you compare the two people it's apples and oranges it's not even close in terms of income generation that they get in that same comparison which is why i'm so pro e-learning in general i wanted to hit on this because i think it's so important and this is why people get upset and they buy one course and they think i didn't make a million dollars and therefore all e-learning is bad which is just like such a poisonous thought that i just hope that if you're watching this you don't feel that way because you will like the moment you decide you don't want to learn in online it's the new world you don't even like i don't even know what to say like it's it's the new world and i make this channel so that anybody who who doesn't want to spend any money you can have access to everything i've courses for free at acquisition.com um i'm publishing 10 books and i'm giving them away at 99 cents because i can't give them cheap on amazon um so that everyone can happily and i made these as textbooks so that you can actually know like this is a this is how you make an offer right and this is how you can start your business um and start selling stuff anyways not not to go more into that but one your course didn't make you money because it's probably not the weak link in your chain number two you're probably upset about it because the expectations that you had was that if i buy this thing i will make lots of money and that's partially follow the marketing of the people who are selling the course so i'll agree with you there but overall if you remove that expectation there's lots of good stuff defining courses and i've and i've learned basically everything i know from courses and application one thing that i think is important is that if you were in a service business right or you are somebody who's trying to learn a skill like i said earlier you have to come a certain percentage the teacher has to come a certain percentage and the better the teacher the less skilled the student needs to be but at the end of the day if i take a course or i go into a workshop or i take you know do whatever i know because of who i am that i am going to get a return on my money because i will find something to learn i've learned from bad courses because i'm like these are things that i'm not going to do when i build my course and that has been valuable to me and so a lot of people just create themselves as victim and continue to play the story like woe is me you just gotta get over it because no one cares no one's gonna help you like only you are gonna help you if you keep telling yourself the story it's gonna it's gonna kill you let me give you a fun example if you've ever been to dairy queen and um i have which is delicious by the way for some reason let's say the girl at the front when she flips the thing flips your flips your dairy queen shake right the ice cream falls out because she does it bad right whatever do you then all of a sudden say screw you warren buffett in your terrible business one star or do you think it's possible that that employee is new the last piece that i want to say is um around judging others and it's kind of what i started with this thing was one of the guys who posted this thing said that someone else had told him bad stuff about me this is a rule so i'll try and share as many of the algorithms that that layla and i have developed in terms of making decisions which is we try and make if-then statements uh that we don't have to repeat decision-making processes because there's a lot of attention and time and energy to make decisions and so if you've made one then just boom that is an algorithm that if this than that and then you don't have to make it again and so it just makes your day faster and easier because you don't have any emotional effort so i'll give you one of our money ones which is no diligence no deal really simple right and if we don't both agree we don't move forward so there are simple things that we've done over time to just simplify our decision making process and so decision making algorithm i want to give you around people that i have is that if i don't know someone firsthand i don't make a judgment right and let me tell you a couple reasons why because there's there's a couple variables i think are worth exploring the first is that who here has thought to themselves when i look back on my own past i was an idiot i do all the time every day right and sometimes today i think yesterday was an idiot right and so if you think back to your past you're like man that guy was an idiot right he was so arrogant he thought he knew him so much how can i then assume that right now ten years from now i'm not gonna look at who i am now and think the same way and so i question me's judgment from five years ago i'm like man the perspective in which you saw the world was ridiculous first off me just me trying to just deal with my own variable of my own judgment is shaky at best right and so if i'm looking at someone i barely will cast a judgment because i i'm an idiot half the time and i know this because of how i know what i was 10 years ago and hopefully 10 years from now i'll feel the same way now now that's variable number one variable number two is that the person that you were listening to also is an idiot now compared to who they're going to be and they probably might be in a certain mood or they might have certain views about the world that are contrary to what i just brought up earlier and so they're like if i buy something it should immediately work now as business owners we want to take complete responsibility for that absolutely 100 bar none like our goal always should be a hundred percent of people who who do business with me get value and access to what they paid so much so that they want to tell their friends right that is always the goal and that is always the ideal that we have to charge behind because us blaming our customers is the stupidest possibly the stupid thing you could ever do because it does not improve your business at all you get you get no benefit from blaming your customers but as a customer you have to understand because if you're a winner you'll notice that winners are just taking responsibility for both sides of the equation right and so if that person right that that you're getting the judgment from isn't a winner and they have stories that they tell themselves and they might be an idiot now compared to who they're going to be in in x amount of years that if they tell you so and so how many times you've heard there's two sides to a story the more you get around the business game right like there's always going to be another side of the story and so i would have judgments that i would cast on people earlier on that prevented me from doing deals with people that i now know and i was like i can't believe i didn't have this person in my life for five years because of some post i saw it was so ridiculous i gave this post more power than my own ability to make judgments as on another person i guess the moral of the story is if i'm not close enough to know someone and actually have conversed with them then i'm not going to cast a judgment you know the amount of people who who go nuts on the fact that i i paid grant 30 grand for an hour by the way i paid 120 grand for four hours was actually what it was and that was just the first hour but so if anyone wants to go even more nuts about it but the point is is that like everyone there most people i would bet have never actually met grant and so they cast judgment without knowing who he is and i think that even if you don't like someone and i'm not saying that grant is perfect or by any stretch of the imagination my god the man has demons so do i you miss all of the gold that people can provide you in your life by writing off an entire person i think people are made up of lots of things or complex beings sometimes you have good days sometimes you have bad days and if someone meets you on your bad days you're like i was having a bad day but that's just the judgment that they have hopefully you're getting the idea here that there's so many variables that it makes it virtually impossible to cast judgment on someone unless you have some sort of direct relationship with them and even then 10 years from now you're gonna think you're a right now hopefully if you grow and so i um i take 19 grains of salt i take pounds of salt with every one of the judgments that i have and i just try and think to myself like is what i am getting from this person valuable is there something that i can learn of this person rather than this person is good or bad and i think that a lot of times we like to create binary judgments this person is good this person is bad rather than the fact that people exist on multiple continuums this was a uh hopefully a perspective shifting video that i was inspired to make because of the pose that i was tagged in i just hope that everyone can take a quick second before you know if you if you buy something buy it and understand that it probably won't be the the one link that you were missing if it is then that's the thing that creates this crazy breakthrough but oftentimes it's just one of the many bricks that has to be built on the way to where you're trying to go and understanding that we're responsible and that that teachers and students have a have a two-sided relationship the better to the teacher the less bad the student is but half of people are below average right and like i said half the people listening to this are below average so think about that for a second and then when we cash judgment on other people is it really worthwhile or is it maybe more useful to say i hate this person but they're better than me in these ways and i can learn of them from that and so that has been some of the some of the useful shifts that i've had as an entrepreneur that have provided a tremendous amount of value to me in my life and have helped me move past things both emotionally where i didn't get you know an ideal experience instead of holding on to this poison just letting it go because and now at this point i don't really experience the poison because i just don't have the expectation and so i think that the more aware we can become this is just me talking the more aware i can become of my own expectations the more uh honestly the happier i am in life because uh i don't really create a lot of room for myself to get let down because i'm not expecting anything it leaves room to be pleasantly surprised so anyways if this provided value to you if this video was a pleasant surprise hopefully or shifted some perspectives hit the subscribe button i can't wait to see you in the next video lots of love and uh for those who don't know us my name's alex for mozy i own a portfolio companies call in acquisition.com right now we do about 85 million a year um the whole goal is that i'm trying to create a billion dollar portfolio and recreate the middle class in america and uh i'm gonna do it one video at a time so keeping awesome lots of love and i'll catch you soon bye