Million Dollar Lessons I Learned From My Wife

Summary

• Learned to never stifle a generous impulse; give praise or gifts immediately, fostering a positive environment.
• Realized you should sleep on emotional responses instead of reacting immediately to avoid regret.
• Started to view stress as a sign of being alive and caring rather than something negative.
• Understood it's okay to feel bad without acting hastily to alleviate the discomfort.
• Emphasized long-term vision over immediate gains, setting sights on eventual success.
• Recognized the quality of a business is tied to the character and vision of its leadership.
• Became quicker to extend trust internally but equally quick to revoke it if betrayed.
• Learned to believe people's character the first time, rather than giving multiple chances.
• Shifted from using punishment to using praise to foster long-term loyalty and team performance.
• Realized the importance of giving patience, trust, and forgiveness to receive them in return.
• Focused on competing with myself instead of others, aiming for personal bests rather than comparison.
• Began taking feedback seriously the first time, especially if painful, to improve quickly.
• Embraced swift action on tasks and trusted team members to lead, avoiding overly detailed SOPs.
• Prioritized genuine care for people over transactions, which fostered greater trust and cooperation.
• Tackled fears directly, especially when they pointed to necessary actions for growth.
• Considered networking less crucial to success than achieving goals to attract a strong network.
• Understood that focusing CEO energy on a single venture maximizes potential returns and accomplishments.
• Shared personal stories of growth, partnerships, and leadership, with emphasis on the influence of my wife, Leila.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting with praise and recognition to create a positive environment at work. If you think of something nice or a reward for your teammates, do it right away. This encourages them to give their best. It's important to let your team know you see and appreciate their hard work.

Try not to respond to bad news in anger. If you're upset about something at work, sleep on it before you reply. You might feel different in the morning, and you can handle the situation without saying things you'll regret.

Remember, stress means you're alive and care about what you're doing. Don't be hard on yourself for being stressed. Think of it as a sign that you care deeply, not something that's wrong.

Be patient and trust your teammates at work. If they do something great, be quick to trust them more. But if they let you down, be ready to take that trust back. Believe what people show you about who they are the first time.

Instead of punishing mistakes, use praise to help your team do better next time. People respond well to positive feedback and will work better and be more loyal in the long run.

Compete with yourself, not others. Aim to do your best every day instead of comparing yourself to what others are doing. When you get feedback, even if it's tough to hear, take it seriously and use it to get better right away.

When you have to do something, take action quickly. Don't wait or make super detailed plans that slow you down. And care about your people more than the transactions in your business. When people feel you really care about them, they will work hard and trust you more.

Lastly, tackle the things that scare you because they’re often what you need to do to grow. And focus your energy on one business or goal to get the best results. This way, you can achieve way more.

These tips are all about creating a strong team, managing your emotions and stress, and keeping focused on what's important in the long run. It’s not just who you are but how you lead that shapes your business and personal growth.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"Never stifle a generous impulse, whether it's a gift or praise. As soon as you think it, send it"

– Alex Hormozi

"You never regret taking a night to sleep on an emotional response, but you do regret the ones done in the moment"

– Alex Hormozi

"Stress doesn't mean there's anything wrong. It means you're alive"

– Alex Hormozi

"You can feel bad and do nothing about it"

– Alex Hormozi

"Longterm over everything"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

before I met my wife I never cracked $3 million per year and after I met my wife 24 months later I took home over 17 million in personal income and there are 17 lessons that she taught me so the first one I learned from her was never stifle a generous impulse whether it's a gift or praise as soon as you think it send it and so when I started you know my businesses earlier on I obviously you know I got up to about 30 employees between my gyms honestly I was not that good at running it and it was because I just ran everything off of fear and Punishment and it sounds more malicious than it probably was that's just kind of how like most small business owners operate is they just kind of like yell at people when they mess up and if I'm not talking to you it means you're doing everything fine which is kind of like the opposite of how you want to run a business because then that means that you just condition everyone to fear talking to you because it means when you talk to them you only there to punish them and so then your employees start avoiding you and they don't tell you what's going on in the business and so when Lela came in she had come from uh had two really positive working environments that she worked at before and one really negative one and she had seen the big contrast the thing that really motivated her and just transparently has been one of the secret star of success is that she's always wanted to have an amazing place to work as in create and Foster an environment where people feel safe and comfortable and praised for the work they do and the smart thing about that is that you have kind of two levels of effort that you can unlock in every person so the first level which is what most people work at which is the minimum amount to not get punished and so if you punish someone if they do anything below this then they just go right above that so they basically do the law of least effort so they just go right above that just enough to not get punished and that's how most people live their lives it's also really unfilling kind of sucks and people don't live to their potential and your business doesn't grow nearly as much as it could the second level is a completely different fuel that unlocks something that we call a discretionary effort which is all of the effort between what someone needs to do just to keep their job and as much as they possibly could if they did their best all of that upside is discretionary effort because you wouldn't fire them even at the bottom but everything else on top of that is kind of like gravy and so she has been so good at unlocking discretionary effort in all of our teammates because she really genuinely Fosters people and coaches them and has very fast feedback loops we run everything on a project management tool and so she's in there all day long just being like awesome job this is great keep completing that this is awesome work hey can you ask me here and she's just all day long so people are getting really fast feedback loops from her constantly for little iterations of work and so people want to do more things faster because they get more feedback faster from so that's number one on the other level from a grander level every single employee comes in fills out a form and we learn the things they like they don't like favorite foods that kind of stuff and when someone does something great she will immediately find their employee profile remember the thing that uh they said they really liked and then usually send a gift that's related whether it's a gift card or an animal or a jersey or whatever the thing is that they kind of like and it shows people that you really listen and that you care and the best way to make people think that you care about them is to actually care about them um and Lila does it better than just about anyone and so I would say that is the one of the biggest reasons that we were able to unlock much more operationally complex businesses is because people wanted to work I would say for us but realistically for her um and they felt they were be invested in and so they were willing to invest back to the business the second one is that you never regret taking a night to sleep on an emotional response but you do regret the ones done in the moment and so when I think back to before Leila I would often have bad news or something bad that would happen and I almost like got off on being angry like being enraged feels good like it feels like you're just like in absolute power mode but then like afterwards you have like a anger hangover and I definitely did that a lot in my earlier career and I'd regret it and then you basically Foster an abusive relationship and I don't I use that lightly but more so just that there's a cycle of anger and then apology and then anger and apology and it's just a it's a it's not good for either party and so when she got me to do was basically slow down she's like hey I get you're upset if you're still upset tomorrow chew their head off and nine times out of 10 I'd wake up the next day and be like it's fine they didn't mean it there it wasn't malicious intent it was just dumb and whatever and then we asked the question how can we decrease the likely this happens again in the future and then we can be productive about it rather than just insulting or assassinating someone's character and she honestly is almost a freak at this point of being able to like sit in the middle of like uncomfortable conversations and have Zero Effect it's been amazing for our marriage uh because like I can escalate um in terms of getting angry and more aggressive and despite being a girl who's smaller than me so I don't care what you say if you're a bigger guy and there's a girl and you're alone and you get angry they get scared I don't care what they say it's just like it's a it's a physical Instinct and she has been able to tame that in her mind and even when I can get like more heated she'll just say like I totally understand where you're coming from like let's talk through it let's figure it out and um even just seeing her do that has helped me learn to just like regulate my own emotional responses to stimuli a lot better number three stress doesn't mean there's anything wrong it means you're alive and so one of the things Ila jokes about is like dead people problems it's like if we want to not have stress about some she's like ah those are dead people problems like if if we have zero stress it means we're dead right and so um the converse of that or the inverse of that is that if we feel stress it means we're doing things and it means that we care and so I think that reframing anxiety as just caring and there being nothing wrong with that um has basically stopped the second line of dialogue of self judgment around being stressed around stuff and more times than not I used to get more stressed about my stress than I was getting stressed about the thing I was getting stressed about and so the amount of stressors that come up in business every single day are countless and wherever you put your attention everything else flows and so being able to remove the Judgment around caring as I now see it um basically released me from all of that wasted attention and so the amount of productivity that increased as a result of not judging myself on those things was huge the way that she saw stress and stuff just helped me just be even more chill and all of these kind of lad her up to making better decisions and you know if you think back to the problems that you had 10 years ago whatever they are you probably laugh at the size of the problems you had then compared to now and I try and forward cast that to 10 years from now I will laugh at the problems I have today and so like as we get bigger we expand and so hoping or wishing that we don't have problems is wishing that we don't win because if you really want to have no problems then it means you're wishing that you fail number four you can feel bad and do nothing about it man this is like if Lila has a [ __ ] Jedi power it's this is that she can sit in discomfort for a very long time and said she's like oh I feel terrible about this and then most people are like what are you going to do about it and she's like oh nothing yeah nothing nothing I'm just going to feel terrible and that's okay and just the acceptance of like the fact that I feel terrible is an emotion which has nothing to do with the actions that I'm choosing to take because every action that I would take as a result of feeling this discomfort is only going to lead me further away from my goal or cause me to act in a way that's not conducive to what I want and often times when we go to New Growth levels there is discomfort that's why it's called Growing Pains not growing gains right it's painful to grow because you have change you have stretch marks it's literally what you have when you grow and so the discomfort is a requisite for growth and so to try and then do something about it expends effort where none is needed and it actually detracts from the growth you actually grow more slowly by trying to combat your discomfort rather than accepting it for what it is as a requisite for the success that you want to have number five and this one's big longterm over everything I know what we're going to do by the time we're dead and it isn't worth trading that for anything today that could take away from from that and like Leila breathes this like she is so long-term thinking like I really have learned I would say Almost 100% of my long-term thinking from her um because she is just so unwilling to sacrifice anything in the short term that will take away from the longterm goals that we have and I tend to be like and I think that's a little bit of our yin and yang and so I tend to move faster I tend to break things I tend to be more okay with imperfect like MVP you know minim of viable product like let's get it out there and just see what the market wants things like that and on the flip side she's so protective of our reputation and of making sure that customer have an exceptional experience in whatever we do but I think we've learned of one another in that way but if you're somebody who's more like me and if you watch my content maybe you do resonate more with that um if you don't have AA then maybe taking some of these lessons that I have learned might help you the same way they help me which is like you might want to take an extra second and make sure it really does what you say it does because the one thing that can guarantee that you don't get to where you want to go is that people think you're a liar and liar has a very strong connotation but a lot of marketing from a lot of people is exaggeration to the point of like it not being true number six the quality of your business is directly proportional to the quality of the people you hire which is directly proportional to your character and your ability to cast a Clear Vision and how they fit in it not just how you accomplish your own goals and so I would say early Alex was very much like they're like What's the mission of the business and I was like to make lots of money that was the mission of the business make Alex Rich um even if that is your mission don't say that and so she was like no one wants to work for that she and she would look at me she be like I don't want to work for that and I'd be like [ __ ] fine and so as I've tried to work on myself and very transparently since Lila joined me Lila has exceptional character and honestly the internet will never know because only the people who work in our company can really know how great of a human being she is um but and unfortunately no one will believe me because I'm her husband and people think that I'm fluffing her so whatever but you can judge the validity of that statement based on the quality of the people that we bring in because really wonderful people wouldn't work for people who sucked and Lila is exceptional and so because of that I've been able to have people who work in my companies who are way above what I could probably attract on my own and it's all been because of um honestly her Relentless Drive in personal development like she actually has done more personal development work than I think like than anyone I know um and just continually trying to get better I mean one of the the reasons that married Lea early on I said and I told her this it's was like in a word I was like you're just coachable like she takes feedback like she actually only requires one piece of feedback to make a permanent change it's I haven't seen anyone like that in my life like I'll give you an example like when I um in the very beginning of our relationship like she would like she would laugh at like a joke or something and she'd be like ah you're stupid like she' say like that joke and um I think she did a couple times and I was just like hey uh probably my own thing I was like but I don't like when you say that from that day she's never said it again the thing is is like the world's a lot smaller than people think it is especially the higher up you go and especially the more talented people you get because like winners hang around winners and so it's funny cuz like all the guys on my media team who were like the high up dudes know the guys who were on high up media teams at all other places and they all talk and I know who's an [ __ ] and is a dick to their team and guess what happens when that guy is dissatisfied for a day he comes to my team because hopefully our guys are like these guys are cool like like we work hard but we work hard because we want to we want to do a good job and so that that culture has been because of the Relentless effort Lea has done to work on herself so that she can translate that into her team which then translates that outwards because if you think about building an asset which is what a business is or what it should become if you want to create something of value it's never about how much you can do it's about how much you can organize everyone in a singular Direction which is why I said cast a Clear Vision because sure like on one level if you're a great person great then you can attract great people but great people will still only be there because there's an ambition component which is okay you're cool got it that's checkbox one check boox 2 I have a dream for my life does my dream fit within yours and so you have to cast a vision big enough that someone else's dream can fit inside of it I genuinely think that Lela sees organization as a vehicle for personal development for everyone in the company and the fact that we do business I really genuinely think for her is secondary so there's an exceptional book on this by Patrick only called the motive and she asked me to read it for like 2 years and I just didn't because I'm a wonderful husband um and so one day and it's like it's like a 100 pages I read it in 90 minutes before she woke up one day like I literally sat down it was like sitting on the counter I was like ah [ __ ] I'll read it and I I just I I read it cover to cover in one sitting and she came in to like have coffee with me in the morning and I just looked at her I was like I get it I'm really sorry and if like I highly recommend if you're a small business owner or you're an operator you're somebody who actually runs your business read the mode um it I was the the bad guy in the example and it shows what it looks like to be a good operator of a business and it was literally the exact opposite of everything I did number seven be fast to extend trust and be even faster to take it back and so I tend to be the more trusting of the two of us remember I'm the Yes man you know someone's like I'll do XYZ I'm like sure he said he'd do it why wouldn't he do it she's like did you not see the flashing scam sign over his had that's just Vegas lighting to being like I'm a scam I was like oh [ __ ] no I didn't see that and so the amount of um mistakes one that she's helped me avoid but secondly that Lila will still extend trust and she does that and I would say that this particular kind of quoter ism is more about the team so I was really fast to extend trust externally to vendors and Partnerships and things like that but really slow to extend internally and I think she is that flipped is that she's really slow to extend trust to people outside but on the inside if she's like okay if you passed all these walls you're in now like you're in like you're on the team and we will treat you like you are on the team but if you give us reason to not trust you we will take that back and so that is how I think she's kind of like protected the kingdom if you want to say it that way um that I've learned a lot from her and so I think it's the internal external kind of dichotomy that was flipped between the two of us um and I think because she extent trusts um people trust us back and that was something like in my organizations that was just run by me earlier I didn't trust anyone and no one trusted me number eight don't require three strikes to get someone out of your life if someone shows you their colors believe them the first time this one I think Lea is [ __ ] queen of I tend to give Second Chances again this is more externally Partners this guy did this thing in the past you know maybe he was indicted for fraud it was a misunderstanding Leela's been just very adamant that like if someone has a history of something I don't want to be their come up story like let someone else take that shot I'll I'll I'll be after that because there's enough people who have just crushed it and been awesome the whole time and haven't [ __ ] anyone over let's just work with them and um we have avoided a lot of Calamity because the amount of times that I have done that and been burned um is honestly the majority of the time as as ugly as that sounds and I I I want to believe in Redemption and I I do I think but I think I want to believe in it in some on someone else's DME number nine pun M only gets short-term obedience praise gets long-term loyalty this is really interesting that took me a long time to figure out so from a human behavior perspective um punishment Fades over time and so let me give you an example so if if you ever like drank too much one weekend you wake up the next day and you're like hung over you're like I'm never going to drink again and then the next weekend you're out there partying what happened is the punishment associated with The Hangover faded but the reward associated with getting drunk and partying stays the same it's the same reason if you break up with somebody months later later you think about the good times but you forget about the bad times you ever see them again then all of a sudden it all comes rushing back you're like oh my God this person sucks what was I thinking right you remember it all because punishment Fades reward stays over time and I'm going to get really real I think the reason that people speak really nicely about people who've been dead for a long time is that that person has never had the ability to punish them anymore for a very long time and they only remember the good things all that to say in an organization you can absolutely get someone to do whatever you want if you punish them like if I hold a gun to somebody's head that's a threat of punishment you can get them to adhere for the most part but the moment you remove the punishment or you remove the threat they behave exactly the way they were going to before but if you reward they will always want to have that reward and it does not fade and so if you want the team to continue to act the same way when you are not there then using reward rather than punishment is a better long-term strategy the problem is and this is what confounds everything is that you can get way faster results with punishment and so you have to be more patient and more willing to continue to invest in people when they mess up not get angry and continue to only reward the good things so that you Orient their behavior in that way but then you have a longer on-ramp but then they are way more self-sufficient longterm so you get higher Returns on an employee by investing longer in the short term so you get better long-term rewards whereas punishment you can change their behavior quickly but you always have to keep punishment and you also have to increase your punishment so if you're the type of Boss who just always yells the same way eventually people get immune to it and so you actually have to increase the intensity and variety of punishment in order to keep it effective just getting into Behavior stuff um and that sounds like a terrible way to live and so from her I have seen her just use reward she just dos out reward in such a strategic like she's like a uh she's surgical in how she can pinpoint how to give reward at the right time for the right people for the right activities and Orient the organization so quickly towards the cookies or nuggets that she puts out that everyone just gets excited and she does it to me too because hey I likes being rared too and so the thing about human behavior is that even if you understand it it still works I'll give you a really micro example so we had uh someone on our team who we always really enjoyed filming with and we wanted to uh put that person in charge of the whole department and we're like okay well how do we get someone else to be just as good at filming with us and so we were like okay well we can't just tell people like be good at filming we like what is it about that person that makes them so good to film with and what we realized when we broke it down one of the things is that like when we were talking they would not along like they were listening to what we were saying and so for you you're just a camera right now but you're watching this as a person but for me I'm just looking at a camera and so having someone behind who's like giving me feedback in real time created a short reinforcement or reward Loop that made it more enjoyable to film with and so for us identifying that little Loop made the whole thing more enjoyable and so in all aspects of business there are these little short reward Loops that we can identify and then get really tactical good about them and incentivize those things and now when we bring someone in they know that there's three four five six activities that somebody who behind a camera has to do that makes them excellent behind a camera and then we can onramp people and reward them for those activities because those activities reward the person who's doing the recording and then that becomes The Virtuous cycle of reward and that becomes really fun and profitable 10 you cannot ask anyone for things you don't already give them think patience trust forgiveness so I said earlier that Lila extends trust first she extends forgiveness first she is patient with others first and so I I would say earlier on in my career probably still a little bit now I demand things from people that I might not have given them or demonstrated first and so over time I've learned through her demonstration I've learned from her that she just demonstrates whatever she wants and as more people like to Model Behavior it's how humans learn if she does something then people will do it too and so kind of like the monkey see monkey do thing I learned that talk is really cheap from her and what your actions do through demonstration speaks volumes and she can change the entire behavior of a team by just acting the way she acts and then people act in accordance with that 11 be fiercely competitive with yourself ignore everyone else I spent way too much of my earlier years in business before Leila looking at what my competition was doing I would obsess over their ads over what they were saying over what they were producing over what their workouts Works remember that I was in Fitness and I was like they're sending people over to steal my workout I swear to God I was like I would like worry that they were stealing my workouts just crazy stuff and you know what some of them were but like who cares like if they're stealing your workouts it means you're doing better than them it means they're trying to copy you and Lila was just so good like Lila is fiercely competitive only against herself and it like truly is like she actually doesn't give a [ __ ] about what anyone else is doing and I uh definitely was really competitive with other people and then in so doing just wanted to do better because I wanted to beat them rather than because I wanted to get better as long as I was better than them I felt like I won and she basically helped me see she was like I think you have a lot more potential than beating these people she's like I think beating these people is a small goal and so it only put the bar above my nearest competitor rather than what she believed I was capable of and I think that when you have somebody who believes in you like that you start to believe in them too number 12 listen to feedback the first time whether it's from friends family customers employee if it makes you better change it now no matter how bad it hurts I definitely had the uh kind of a little bit of a CEO bubble um before Lea and I uh started working together and so people never wanted to give me bad news because I would chew them out and so they stopped giving me bad news but it also they stopped giving me the truth and and so it becomes very difficult to win if you don't have the truth and so you make decisions based on data and the quality of your decisions based on the quality of the data and so you cannot say that you want to make the best decisions and also not be willing to listen and I definitely suffered that for a very long time because most times if you are presented with the data you can make really good Solutions like you I used to joke about this with our team I was like really good data makes you look like a genius because if the problems are obvious in the numbers you can just solve them where you can in trouble is where you don't have the data and you're basically operating blind and a lot of people operate like that for years because their teams don't want to tell them anything and so Leila one solicits feedback two she encourages it and I would say she encourages it even more if it's negative and so and I'll be really real with you in the beginning they will say something mean cuz you will solicit the feedback and then you will have some sort of facial expression and then you still like you just have to power through it and be like please do it again I'm like like I'm working on this and I'll give you the magic question that she's asked that I think is one of my favorite questions for feedback which is what would you tell me if you knew I wouldn't get angry like what would you tell me if you knew it wouldn't upset me and it just opens up the form of like because it gives people the frame because a lot of things people would tell you if they didn't think it would upset you and so you say what would you tell me if you didn't think it would upset me and you get so much truthful feedback from people like hey you're really short or hey you're able to communicate with or hey you take really long to respond or hey you tend to be late on meetings and it really pisses everyone off like those are things that people say but if you don't solicit it that way and so I would encourage you even maybe even with your spouse to start but your team it's a really good exercise uh and you get some really good answers and a lot of times you get blind spots that you become made aware of and at least as far as I'm concerned like I would rather people talk [ __ ] to my face 13 this one's a mey one all right so I'm just going to read this directly the best operators take action immediately on tasks they don't let anything sit on their desk they are delegation and accountability machines not quote systems people they get mounts of work done through leading others to think for themselves only dumb people need rules all right let's break this down a lot of earlier on business owners want toop standard operating procedure every single component of a business the problem with that is that the business environment changes rapidly and by the time you have sopd everything everything has changed and so anything can be continually broken down into smaller and smaller scals if I said hey I need you to write a marketing campaign that is different and can be broken all the way down to turn on a computer navigate to Safari go to this URL here is how you type right like everything can get broken down but at a certain point you expect a certain level of confidence and the way to move quickly within an organization is to extend trust and have people who you trust to make decisions on your behalf in order for them to make decisions on your behalf which means that they can move quickly without having to standardize every single operating procedure is that they have shared values with you you say this is how we want things to be done and then you demonstrate those things being done so they know that you are not full of [ __ ] if people see you say this is what we do and then in the hard circumstances you act in accordance with those values and then you public reward the people who in hard circumstances also act in accordance with those values independent of your intervention of you interfering more people will do it like this one is is so prevalent so everybody who's under 10 million listen up true operators are leaders like it really took me a long time to figure this out it's not about systems like they like processes they just wave their hands and really what it means is they just like make everyone's life harder in order for a process to be put in place and stay within an organization it has to make a net benefit on the organization so there's something called local cost and Global cost or local benefits and Global benefits so I'll give you a simple example if I ask the sales team to write notes in the CRM it will have a local cost they will now have more work to do than they did before if those notes then get used by customer support and onboarding and product and delivery and they're really integral to the rest of their client experience there is going to be a global benefit so more people benefit the organization will benefit from this small cost that's a good return on investment often times quote systems people don't think that way they just think everything has to be somewhere and we have to put systems around everything and that often times slows people down and they cannot communicate what the global benefit is because if I don't use some of that information for example then maybe I shouldn't ask my sales guys to write that down because all I'm doing is incurring a local cost but I don't have a clear benefit and I'll give you a different example because I think this is such a prevalent issue in businesses I had an accounting team in one of our companies who said hey can we have some software developers write some code to automate this task that we do and I was like okay well how many hours a week does it take they're like di it's like four hours of manual input every week I was like wow that's tough and so I went to software developers and I said hey you know what would it take to do this they're like oh we can do it in 14 days and I was like okay accounting team was like great can you sign off on this I was like okay hold up what is the cost of 14 days of a full Dev team doing this it's 5,000 a day FYI for this particular team and so 14 days time $55,000 70 grand you work for 4 hours a week on this thing so it's 52 * 4 all right so it's 200 hours now you make $70,000 a year so 10% of your paycheck gets allocated towards this task so $7,000 so in order for me to get a return on this 14-day quick automation system it would take me 10 years and that's a pretty shitty return and that assumes that nothing changes over the next 10 years in our business that would cause us to have to update this thing break fix because we switch systems and I think you can get where I'm going with this of course it made no sense but quote systems people will systematize without considering the long-term consequences and the global benefits of why they're even doing it to begin with they just get OCD about [ __ ] and they just want to system everything but all they do is slow people down but Lea has operated every business we've ever done and the reason they've gotten big is because she delegates Authority as soon as things come on her desk she shoots them out she's just a delegation machine and she trusts the people and so it's much more about empowering those people so that they can do the things the way they want them to be done as long as they still meet the objective and she gives way more Liberty because she chooses to hire more competent people which Lads up to some of the things earlier which is if you have really dumb people you have to make really strict rules and if you're already making strict rules you lost people will care about you and care about your business if you act like you care about them and the easiest way to act to like you care about them is to actually care about them and so I um I would say prior to Leila I tend to be much more like a utilitarian in terms of how I thought about people like people are cogs in a machine we need to build a machine when you assemble the cogs in place put some carrots and sticks and they will act in accordance with that and uh Lea with her much more Nuance understanding of human nature uh was like that's probably not the best way to do it and so um I I remember earlier on I was like I was like how do you how do you act like you care so much and she was like I do care Leila will always prioritize the human above the role and that's hard to do as a business owner and so I'll give you an like a very clear example that happens all the time in business that's really tough so let's say someone comes in and you invest a ton of time in them like you invest a lot of training a lot of a lot of real man- hours that you Mentor you coach the person up and after 6 months of all this investment you realize that the person is better fit doing something else not at the company and not saying like you're firing them but more like I think you can move on and doing something bigger or doing something somewhere else or even doing something at a competitor's business because you have an opportunity there Lila will genuinely say I really think you should take it and I am like [ __ ] you die but she doesn't think that way Leila really taught me how to just talk to the human and really put the human first and when we do that you get a huge Global benefit she has been so good at separating role from Human um that it's benefited us long term and then also here's the the second order of magnitude um comeback is that the person who does get Applause on the way out and has a I would say like a graceful exit those people feel like they owe you one because of how graceful the exit was and they will send customers your way they will send they will often times help you train up the next person they will help recruit for you and then long term if they do really well you might do business together and we've had every one of those incidents happen with people that have blessed our company and all of those opportunities and all of those doors would have been slam shut if I put their head on a spike number 15 do what you are most afraid of because it's usually the thing that you need to do most this is like a classic ilila you know example or question for strategy is she's like what are we most afraid of doing and she'll ask she'll ask the follow question like what would we do if we didn't think we could fail and I think you get really interesting kind of thought-provoking answers that come from out especially when you're thinking about strategic Direction big vision for where you're trying to go and most times we realize that we don't take the big moves and a lot of times it's cuz they're painful and that's why we're afraid of them like there's a hard conversation like what are what do I what do I need to do right now there's this conversation I have to have and so it's like that's what I'm most afraid of right now it's usually the thing I need to do in the Fitness World to give a completely different parallel usually the exercises that you hate doing the most are the ones you usually need to do right um and so I feel I feel like it's almost a perfect corer in business is that like a lot of the thing like ah I don't like reading our customer reviews it's like dude you got to read them every day even though it's painful you got to read them right because you got to know how you can get better and that might be the thing that you're most it's like ah man I know our stuff's a little outdated but like H I don't want to like to go through all the work of like making an entirely new product or a V2 it's going to be so it's like what's the thing we're most afraid of doing it's probably the thing that you need to do and so she's again so good at embracing discomfort and saying like what is required um that I just I've learned that from her and so we've been able to basically what might have taken me six months to confront might take me a week now to confront and so we just move so much faster through obstacles because before I would just put it off so number 16 is that uh networking matters if you have nothing to offer right don't sacrifice your goals in order to network because if you accomplish your goals this is the big one if you accomplish your goals you have even more to offer and the network will be there for you but the reverse isn't true because if you don't if you didn't accomplish the thing in order to network more go to these events and these these masterminds and these things and and network and podcast and whatever the less successful you become the more you plateau the more irrelevant you become and the less the doors stay open for you and the more you have to hustle and grift and and shake hands and kiss babies and do all this business card handout [ __ ] but like the person who has the best network in the world is Rogan or Elon or Mr Beast like any of those people can call whoever they want up and they don't need to go attend networking event because here's the converse of that imagine they had sacrifi imagine Mr Beast for example let's let's say Elon imagine Elon had sacrificed the goals that he had for the business so that he could attend more networking events and take more meetings and hey got a second hey can I pick your brains hey um like hey do hop on this podcast with me even though it doesn't really make sense just because someone asks for your time doesn't mean you owe it to them just because someone sends you a message doesn't mean you owe them a response and this took me a very long time to learn Lea's been so much better about that she's so good at saying no that we practice it I'll even tell you like we don't really do like New Year's resolutions or anything like that but one thing we committed to this year was um social obligations are not obligations if we want to go we will go and if we don't want to go we will not go and if they no longer want to be friends with us that's fine because if we didn't want to go anyways and they stop inviting us great Real Talk play it out well then it's like well they might say bad things about us so does everyone else everyone else you pass have bad things to say about you it's just part of life number 17 you cannot be CEO of more than one thing no matter how much you want to or how how good the opportunity is saying no to everything means saying yes to the one thing that matters and so in another video I basically talk through the biggest mistakes I made in my life and one of the recurring themes that happened before Lila and even as ashamed as I to say this even with Lila um being with me is that I I would steamroll her in the earlier parts of our career before I respected her opinion as much as I do now um well she's like don't you feel like we have enough going on that we shouldn't take off you know take a take a bite at this other thing and I'd be like no we got it we can handle it um and I was wrong and so I want to be really clear about something cuz I think there's a lot of confusion about this kind of in my audience I own equity in a lot of companies that is very different from being CEO or operator in a lot of companies at an extreme example if you buy stock in 10 companies on on the stock exchange you are an owner of all those companies you do not operate any of them ownership is very different from operating in my opinion you can only operate one thing very well if you operate two you operate them at a huge decrement so I'll give you an example here here if you can run two $1 million businesses by being CEO of both you have the potential to run a $10 million business if you only picked one there's a Hu it's not one plus one and then it's really $2 million business it's really like you have five times the output if you just focus because the thing is is all of the wins come from the depth and the Nuance it comes from the the outsize Returns come at the very end of the race that's where you make the smallest individual improvements but you get the biggest returns from it and so a simple example is the difference between gold medal and silver medal in the Olympics is a fraction of a second but the difference between gold and silver in real life implications is everything you're either the best in the world or you're not and who knows who the bronze medalist was last year no one knows but everyone knows who Usain Bolt is so there's huge increment increment there's huge real life returns for getting this little bit better that all of the focus centralized on one thing gets you that you lose out on because and the thing is is that because of your own ignorance because you you're not close enough you can't see the opportunities that you can't see they are unknown unknowns from an opportunity perspective that you only become aware of if you cut off one of you know another saying is killing your babies like you have to kill one of your babies so that you can let the other one grow up and so I have been the king of wanting to keep all my children alive but the amount of money that I made after cutting out all of these side projects and these side hustles and these gigs and these weird Partnerships like all of that happened in the first year of Lea and I being together because she was like dude I think you could do so much more if you could actually focus and like I tell these stories because I I was that person and so I was like if you were struggling with this stuff I get it I'm not like like I did this and I [ __ ] up and I'm trying to help you not [ __ ] up and get there faster I had a chiropractor agency I had a dental agency I had my gy launch business where I was flying around in person doing different launches I still owned my gyms from back home five of them five of those are individual businesses I had one two3 had eight businesses that I was CEO of all of them and it was horrible this is when I lost everything this is when I had a DUI head on collision this is when my mother went to the hospital also a terrible thing my grandfather died who I was really close with all of those things happened in like a six-month window and Leila to5 was like what are you most afraid of right now and I was like I'm afraid of having this hard conversation with these partners because I don't think I should be in these Partnerships anymore she's like well they're not going to end themselves and I'll be really honest with you the only way that I was really able to do it was I got in my head on collision in the DUI and I had a coach who told me um they're like your stress is going to kill you just said that like you got out alive so what are you going to do now and so I basically had to face my own death or mortality you were just getting out of life like I had got a head- on collision 60 MPH and I walked away like nothing like I just walked out of the car and um it wasn't with another thing it was with an it was a stopped object everything's fine um and after that and realizing that I could have just been dead because of how stressed I was um I just ripped the Band-Aid off of everything I like in a row I did it in one day I just called the first one up and I was like hey can't do this anymore I like what do you mean I was like can't do this anymore not going to do the partnership and the second piece of advice that I was given if you have to exit some of these hard things um was do right by everyone he's like exit everything and do right by everyone he's like because if you if you screw one person over you will regret it forever and so that means all stakeholders that meant employees that meant customers that meant landlords that meant every Partners everything and so it was an excruciating process for me I had to write checks over over and over again to refunds and partners and buyouts and vendor contracts I had signed and Lease agreements that I was on the hook for I mean everything I just had to it just like it just killed me but I just had this big thing which was like the alternative to this is I die and so I hope that you don't have as extreme of a circumstance but I only say this because I understand how hard it can be and I fortunate or not had a near-death experience which then made everything shrink in comparison in terms of how important it seemed to me I had a business owner friend that I know who was doing 10 million bucks a year and he had like 17 businesses and he was running all of them and it was absolute Insanity I was like how many business you he didn't even know he had to pull up an Excel sheet I was like this is absolute craziness and so I said which one's the best one he was like this one I was like okay hypothetical for you I said if the only thing you had to do in your life was double this business and you had no other businesses to care of take care of do you think you could do it he's like oh my God it' be a [ __ ] Breeze I'd be able to do that in my sleep and I was like so why don't you guy spent the next year getting rid of all of his extra companies and that one company has grown and so the thing is just like we want to not leave money on the table we want to take the short-term wins but whenever you take those you actually take away from the big pot of gold which is the main focus that you started to go after to begin with and so I am more guilty of this than just about anyone I can I don't know of anyone who's been worse about this than me and so I just say this because like my income and my net worth skyrocketed directly proportional to my ability to say no before I met Lea I couldn't crack $3 million a year I had lots of different businesses I had a ton of stress um and I had a lot of bad Partnerships not bad Partners mostly bad structures because I didn't know about her and when she came in and I watched how she worked and I watched how she dealt with people and I watched how she operated at business I learned so much and 24 months later I took home 17 million in personal income so I went from not cracking 3 million in Revenue to taking home 17 in income that was the difference that those lessons and watching her operate taught me and if all of these stories of all the things that I learned from Lila have been helpful I have a separate video where I break down how I lost over $100 million in 11 different mistakes that I made in my life and exactly what you can do to avoid them and likely you might be actively making one of those mistakes right now and I hope you don't so watch the video