Leveling Up Why We Get Stuck (ALEX HORMOZI)
Summary
- Develop skills to a proficient level before deepening them through consistent execution, repetition, and improving focus and determination to avoid distractions.
- Persistent discipline is critical; resist starting new ventures prematurely, as exemplified by delaying my supplement company to focus on gym launch, leading to later success.
- Staying focused on the core business can be challenging as new opportunities become more seductive with success, but it is necessary to maintain growth.
- Mastery of a skill comes from a combination of initial proficiency and repeated practice, which helps deepen the skill far more than pure study.
- Being resilient and prepared to "get punched in the face" is part of the learning process that helps you solidify your skills and advance to new levels.
- Character traits such as patience, focus, and the ability to reject opportunities (saying no) are integral for continued success and breaking through to the next level of proficiency in any field.
- The concept of "stick-to-it-iveness" from Angela Duckworth's book "Grit" exemplifies the idea that durable success comes from perseverance in a path rather than frequently jumping between opportunities.
- You can be successful in anything, but not everything at once; focusing on amplifying a single pursuit is more productive than spreading yourself too thin across multiple avenues.
- Recognize that significant effort must be invested to break through a skill's maintenance level to a new level of proficiency, analogous to the effort required to gain muscle versus maintaining it.
- If income and skill level have plateaued, it's likely due to a lack of character development needed to further amplify skills and consequently income.
- Improvement is nonlinear; as individuals progress, the nature of what needs improvement shifts from hard skills to character traits, and sometimes the most critical skill is the ability to maintain the course and remove distractions.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest focusing on one main skill for your business or personal growth first. You don't need to be an expert right away, just get good enough to get the job done. Spend a couple of hours learning how to do that one thing by searching online or reading about it, then practice.
After getting the basics down, do it over and over. Like, if it's sales, keep talking to customers. If you're learning a tool, use it every day. You learn faster by doing than just studying. When it gets tough, don't give up. That's how you get really good, like mastering a video game level by playing it a lot.
Be careful of new shiny ideas, even when you start doing well. Success can make more ideas pop up like ads on a website. But don't click on them! Stick to your main thing. That's how you grow big, like a tree I guess.
Remember, it's about getting better at a few things, not just adding more stuff to do. If you feel stuck, it's probably time to work on your personal traits like patience and focus.
Here's the plan:
- Pick one skill to improve.
- Learn the basics – a few hours of study.
- Practice it – a lot!
- Push hard through the tough parts.
- Say no to distractions – stay focused on your main goal.
- Be patient and keep at it, even for years.
- If you stop growing, work on personal traits like discipline and not chasing new ideas.
This is how you get better and keep growing, in business and life. Stick to one path and you'll go far. If your money isn't growing, look at your skills and traits.oubted might be time to say 'no' to some things and 'yes' to focusing on the important stuff.
And if you're not sure, think about a fit body. Getting muscle takes a lot more effort than keeping it. It's the same with skills! Push hard to grow, not just stay the same. Keep it simple and stick to it. That's the real secret.
Quotes by Alex Hormozi
"You can be successful at anything you want, just not everything you want"
– Alex Hormozi
"The higher up you go, the more seductive the woman in the red dress looks"
– Alex Hormozi
"Greatness stick-to-it-iveness is what it is"
– Alex Hormozi
"The people who are most successful in life just stick with it"
– Alex Hormozi
"If your level of income has stayed the same for a period of years, that means your skill set has stayed the same"
– Alex Hormozi
Full Transcript
the character traits that must be associated that you learn as you go right because these character traits are things that have to happen in order for these skills to be consistently executed and so it's first you develop the skills right at a proficient level then you dive deep on those skills so that you get better and better at them and typically that comes through consistent execution and repetition which means that it takes the character traits of focus and determination and drive right and being able to be consistent and not go like go away and start looking at shiny objects looking at chinese objects looking at a new opportunity looking at this other side hustle you want to do whatever it is right because there's always new things and what's crazy about this is that the higher up you go the more seductive the woman in the red dress looks like and i'm saying that from matrix is my all-time favorite movie um the woman in the red dress i'm using this as a as a parable or whatever a visual for opportunity and when you're starting out the woman in the red dress always looks attractive and the thing is is that the higher up you go the more pretend she becomes now if you're a girl then i don't know a guy in a red suit whatever i don't know maybe that looks more like a pimp said forget about that but whatever you know george clooney or whoever your person is whatever you my point is um like i thought that i was having discipline and saying no to a certain level opportunity when i was starting my gyms right and i had to develop that discipline and then we started and then we started making a few million dollars a year and i was like okay i need to develop a new level discipline because there's more things that i want to do that i have to not be able to do right one of the biggest successful things i did was not start the supplement company until a year and a half after almost two years after gym one started all right i had planned starting the supplement company at the same time as i started gym launch original three and a half four years ago like they were at the same time i wanted to do both and layla the angel that she is was like no that's stupid don't do that and so she thankfully was like you have to have you have to stay focused and so because of that we were able to have the explosive growth that we did and then at the right time we were able to bolt that on now um big big big big picture i don't know if i would have done it again i still probably would have stayed even more focused on gym launch if i could do it all over again now we have it you know we we write a check for 600 000 every single month to our gym lords uh in terms of commission check so that's real money that i get to send back to the community and that's very fulfilling fulfilling for me um and it solved the problem that i always had when i have my gym so like there are reasons that i did it um and uh and so like history will tell whether it was the right call or not um i can never live the life of what it would have been if i hadn't done it um but i think if i were going back in time knowing what i've known now i might not have done it um but you never know so i'm telling you like i've i've made these mistakes you know what i mean and the thing is is that that level of opportunity looked even more seducting or seducing or whatever the word is um when we had two years more of a distribution base compared to when we had at the beginning and so i wasn't able to say no to her that opportunity later on as i was in the beginning and that was a deficiency in my skill set at the time my character trait of staying focused right and so um like i'm saying all this if you're looking at it in terms of in verticals the first step is filling the holes and that's stacking all the skills together so you can get the first dollar to go over and that's just becoming proficient not amazing just proficient you don't have to be an expert at running traffic you just need to be able to actually know how to run an ad and the thing is is that most proficient skills only take like like not a lot of time like you can google how to do x and if you consume for like two hours of information you'll probably be proficient most people just don't take those two hours to do it because it's uncomfortable and you're not good at it right so you consume the information and then you try right and then you fail because you're not good at it you learn and then just use those first initial tries you learn more in your first 20 sales than you do in the first 20 hours of learning about sales stuff right you first time you actually step in the ring you learn more about fighting than you do during all the time that you're practicing right because it's real right so you're developing you're stacking your skills and you're becoming proficient at it next step you have to do repetition and be we being willing to get punched in the face over and over and over again right so that you can deepen those skills and that's what amplifies the skills that you have so that you can get to another level then as you get to another level then your character traits need to be strong so you can stay the course all right like the biggest thing in the book uh by angela duckworth called grit which is really interesting um is that the people who are most successful in life just stick with it like greatness stick-to-it-ness is what it is so it's how likely are you to abandon a certain path to pursue another thing right and the people in the beginning have very low stick within this entrepreneurs shiny objects shiny object shiny object they're jumping from opportunity to opportunity and they never give any of the opportunities a chance to be successful so one of the interesting things that maybe you can think about in terms of a quote you can take with you is you can be successful anything you want just not everything you want all right that was a huge lesson for me all right i had a i had a friend from high school who reached out who had a contracting business and a roofing business and they were flipping houses so it's three separate businesses and i was like dude like like what do you wanna help with and he was like i don't know like what do you think i should do and i was like pick one he's like well we're making money in all three of them and i was like cool pick one each one of those businesses can be a billion dollar business you can be a billion dollar roofing company you can be a billion dollar flipping homes company you can be a billion dollar general contractor there are examples of each of these things right but you just can't be a billion dollars in all of them and so there's a fallacy that we tell ourselves as entrepreneurs which is that if i do more things i will make more money when in fact i need to do fewer things to get to where i want to go and the reason i can tell you that it's the truth is because you naturally think the other way and that's what most people think which is why most people aren't successful right it's they they can't focus because there's too many things it's just so easy just add this one thing you do this other thing and all of a sudden you're two spread thin you're not focused on amplifying the things that you're doing to get better you're not deepening the skills you're spreading yourself there right and so once you acquire the skill set once you become proficient then you amplify the skills that you have by deepening them and in order to deepen them you have to have the character traits of sticking with it being patient being focused learning to say no and doing things over and over again and accepting the fact that it may take years it will take years in order to become to break through the next level of proficiency because when you were developing a skill um let me give you an example with to to tie this as an analogy for fitness the amount of effort that it takes to maintain muscle versus the amount of effort it takes to make muscle as you become more advanced dramatically increases and what's interesting is that there's this big area of no man's land between enough to maintain and enough to break through and create a new stimulus for growth there's this huge area in the middle and most people just work out above minimum effective dose but below the threshold that it takes to adapt all right and so when we focus or when i focus on trying to get swole and trying to gain more muscle i try and go all the way to the other end to break my body the point that it has to adapt and get better right and so with the same thing with skill sets is that there's a minimum effective dose and then there's a whole bunch of area in between where people do stuff enough but not enough to get better but still like they could take the extra time allocate it towards deepening a skill and going all in on it um it and really push that forward and really deepen it rather than just consistently maintaining where you're at and you can know if you're maintaining where you're at because if your level of income has stayed the same for a period of years that means your skill set has stayed the same and if your skill set has stayed the same it's usually because you lack the character traits in order to deepen those skills to amplify the revenue and to amplify your skill sets so that you can make more all right so um i hope this makes sense uh this was like one of the one of the many things that i'll probably talk about after um the summit um so leveling up why we get stuck and it's because the things that you need to improve on are different all right in the beginning it's skills but then you have to change your lens and then after that it becomes traits right it becomes character traits and those are very different to level up right because everyone just always assumes it's going to be linear the same way and that's why people get stuck is because the actual thing that you need to improve changes right not just skills but the actual nature of the change itself changes uh which is pretty cool and sometimes the skill itself is to not do other things right sometimes the skill itself is maintaining the course and that is the skill that is the thing that you need to do to get to the next level is to do less and it's remove constraints so i hope that makes sense for you i hope you enjoyed that if you did like this and you're listening on the podcast drop a comment drop a like um if you think someone else will listen to it tag them tag your friends hope you have an amazing day and lots of love as always keep being great [Music] you
