Want to be rich? Stop letting THIS affect you…

Summary

• The challenges we face can significantly shape who we become; it's not just about us working on them, but also them working on us.
• Our interpretation of traumatic events can influence how we react and grow from them.
• Culture can define what is classified as trauma, meaning our perception of events can be reshaped.
• We can shift our understanding and categorization of experiences to avoid labeling something as traumatic, thereby potentially avoiding negative long-term impacts.
• Beliefs inherited from society should be questioned because they can unconsciously dictate our behavior and emotions.
• The notion that not mourning a loss implies not caring is a cultural belief that can be challenged to view grief differently.
• Happiness shouldn't be the sole pursuit; sometimes focusing on actions you believe are worthwhile, regardless of immediate happiness, can be liberating.
• Questioning your beliefs thoroughly, including concepts like trauma, allows for personal growth and a more controlled emotional response to life's events.
• My personal journey through faith and apologetics led me to prioritize what truly mattered and question beliefs more deeply.
• Accumulating wealth or success is temporary; it's like chips in a casino that ultimately go back into circulation when the game ends.
• Providing heirs with unearned resources can potentially harm them if they are not equipped to manage it effectively.
• Building something meaningful is valuable, but it's important to recognize that life's achievements are transient.
• Sharing personal beliefs isn't intended to provoke or offend; it's a reflection of one's understanding and the quest for personal truth.
• Accepting that others may have different views is crucial, as well as recognizing that our beliefs can evolve and serve us in overcoming life's challenges.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting with the understanding that how we view and categorize our experiences can shape us. If you've been through tough times, avoid labeling them as traumatic immediately. Ask yourself if these events could simply be challenges that are helping you grow.

Consider the beliefs you grew up with and challenge them. Are they really helping you, or are they limiting your potential? For example, if you've been told that not mourning a loss means you don't care, think about it. Does that really make sense for you?

Focus on actions you believe are worthwhile, rather than just trying to be happy. This decision can change how you feel in the long run. Do things that seem meaningful, even if they don't bring immediate happiness.

If you want to grow personally, start by questioning things deeply. Why do you hold the beliefs you do? How do those beliefs affect your reactions to life?

Remember, accumulating wealth or success is temporary. It's like playing a game that eventually ends. So, if you're an entrepreneur, build something meaningful but know that it's part of a bigger, transient picture of life.

When it comes to building wealth, be cautious about providing unearned resources to others, like heirs. They might not be equipped to handle it and it could end up causing them harm.

Lastly, have conversations that may be uncomfortable. Share your beliefs and be open to others having different views. Accept that our beliefs are tools for overcoming challenges and can evolve over time. Embrace the variety of perspectives and use them to fine-tune your own views and actions.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"The bigger the monster, the greater the hero"

– Alex Hormozi

"We question all of our beliefs except for those that we truly believe and those we never think to question"

– Alex Hormozi

"If you can control what you deem meaningful, you can massively shift the odds in your favor"

– Alex Hormozi

"You can't do what 99% of people are doing if you want to be in the 1%"

– Alex Hormozi

"We're just going to cast the chips in, so anyway"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

the bigger the monster the greater the hero the things that we go through work on us more than we work on them and in this video what i want to break down is the things and how we call the traumatic events that happen and how we view them can change how they affect us and how they create us and shape us as people and i was recently interviewed in a two-hour podcast with graham stefan if you don't know who i am i'm alex mozy i own acquisition.com we own a portfolio company that is about 85 million a year and so on this podcast probably the most shared and retweeted and cut section is a section i'm about to show you um it was where i got into it with one of the other the the interviewee or interviewer of the podcast uh talking about trauma specifically we get to some really deep stuff and i think that you get a lot of value from it if you've never watched any of our videos welcome to mozy nation lots of love and i'll see you guys in the next couple seconds would you consider yourself emotional yeah i mean probably so i think i have emotions got it because a lot of the times at least in my experience like and and what i've seen people that are nihilus it's easy to that's like an easy out if something bad happens if something good happens it's just like oh yeah that's fine sweep it under the rug it's not it's not it matters anyway so bad happens it's not like you actually deal with the process whatever you know event or action occurred that make you felt that emotion if we believe that we have to like why should we why should you feel that emotion like why should we process a traumatic event like what does that mean well i do believe that there are you know things in your brain biologically that if they are deprived of something or there's like some bad traumatic event or something like that will affect your biological dramatic versus non-traumatic i mean i feel like the definition of the word trauma would probably but what would be the line between like okay and like let's let's give an example of something terrible actually not because it's a podcast and people might hate on graham so let's just say something bad happens that we describe as bad in this culture in another culture that might not be bad it's trauma in this culture it's not trauma in this culture so if the circumstance is the same why was it traumatic circumstances weren't the same why not because the culture the facts were the same will we describe the facts as changed which means that we can choose to call something trauma but wouldn't isn't it doesn't it make sense that people would be built up due to a culture and environment 40 year old guy sleeps with a 15 year old girl terrible we won 200 years four year old guy sleeps with a 15 year old girl 100 normal how is it trauma now and not trauma that and mind you like this is not my state i'm just i'm you have to pull an extreme example if we're going to talk about trauma to illustrate the concept so if it's traumatic in one instance and not traumatic in another then it means that we can basically change the cultural narrative that we're ascribing to our context and make it not traumatic that makes sense which means it didn't matter which means the only thing that matters that you chose to make it meaningful well let's say like like the the the passing of a parent or like a 100 or something like that if we think we feel like we have a narrative that says if i don't mourn it means i didn't care about them right that's a statement of belief i could say that if i don't mourn about them it means i totally cared about them like why does my morning have any indication of how much i cared they're non-correlates right but it's just because we have like we have so many of these belief statements that quote society or things that we inherit but we just choose to say that this is how life is and so i think it's just like monitoring what those statements are and so like one of my favorite one of my favorite sayings probably like if i had one thing on my tombstone it would be it would be a permutation of a quote by orson scott card which is we question all of our beliefs except for those that we truly believe and those who never think to question yes they get clumped right so it's like we like oh of course i'm opening to question my beliefs it's like what's trauma like when someone's like i was traumatized it's like were you or do you just choose to label this trauma and then now you [ __ ] up the rest of your life because you call it trauma when 200 years ago it was life and a thousand years ago having your parent come in front of you was just nature if you want to go biology and so we're just like we just choose to create meaning around things and so like at the end of the day like end to end end bottom bottom bottom root yeah all our brains do is just create a new story meaning and so we say this is a threat this is not a threat we make like we need to reinforce this behavior we don't need to reinforce this favor all through meaning and so if you can control what you d d meaningful you can massively shift the odds in your favor because you don't need to ascribe meaning to well couldn't that be let's say like like 500 years ago you see like a parent killed in front of you isn't that because all you have in your mind is like food shelter water sure and now that we have those things taken care of our minds go to other places sure i just don't think it changes the actual facts so it's like we have we there's there's stimulus response right and so like we get to control the response we control the stimulus was it um it's either seneca or epictetus who's like no one yells at a rock right so it's like if you are the rock then like just it doesn't matter right like you just like eventually like people just [ __ ] off and just leave you alone and so like and if you if you see stimulus of life that way in terms of like how you deem things or label things traumatic or not dramatic or good or bad you know it's the same thing i'm sure with like the hate comments and whatnot is like if you deem the comments of of the fans as meaningful then you will both care about them being positive and you will care about them being negative but if they're not meaningful at all to begin with then like i don't think you can do either i think you just either have to participate in both sides or you remove that is also a belief statement right so like maybe you can so you know interesting thoughts so how did you transition from assume i'm assuming you used to care a little bit more about beliefs and stuff like that how did you transition from that to now not caring and did you have to completely change your mindset to where your automatic response to things was just like what what are these chains of emotions and like the cultural constraints and stuff like that that are making me feel this way yeah that did you just switch that light switch or do you still on occasion catch yourself slipping i just did right now i was like i just said that as a belief right that's what i figured 100 yeah i mean i think you systematically you hear like that's why the talking is so important like what words are we using what do those words mean like you say trauma like define that what do you mean by that which is why like when you hear really good writing that's academic like the first few pages will be like we're going to talk about this and this is how we define this and this is how we define this it's like we're putting constraints around the words that we're using because they mean they equate to thoughts they're just buckets right that we like say a word like trauma and like it means something different to all three of us so it's like we have to agree on the definition before we can talk about it that makes sense um and so no i had um so i i definitely made a conscious effort when i was like 19 or 20 i became a born-again christian um the dunk the whole thing was like oh my god life's amazing jesus is great and then i ended up falling away from that because i was like i don't know if this is true and then i spent the next five years dedicated to apologetics which is defense of faith of the christian faith so just learning the arguments around like why christianity like is true right i ended up not believing in it and i can give a variety of reasons but i'll give you the simplest one hopefully i'm not insulting anyone this is just my belief that i'm sharing which is a lot of one of the biggest one of the strongest arguments for christianity against other world religions is that other world religions say like if you go to the good place so if you do a good job you go to a good place right and fundamentally that's it's a it's a hard paradigm because it means like at what point are you 51 good versus 49 should i have just held one more door open and i would have gone to the good place forever not even talking about like finite circumstances and creating infinite outcomes but like whatever and so if you can draw that line then it makes it it kind of makes it ridiculous right it like kind of breaks down on the like be a good person system and so that's all world views with the exception of buddhism and christianity with christianity they're like you don't have to be good you just have to have faith and if you have faith in jesus and you go to the good place right and so the the reason that for me fundamentally i didn't believe in that was because you actually create another false binary which is believe or not believe when in reality is to what extent you believe it's how hard you believe and again you create another 50 line which is i believe one percent more and then i would go into the good place forever so anyways the point is is that i i studied apologetics for a long period of time and then i was really sad and i was just like [ __ ] sad i was like [ __ ] happiness i was like i'm just going to do stuff that i think is cool and that was like that was like the first break in the chain for me um my slogan to myself was actually just about happiness and that was wildly fraying because i stopped judging myself for not being happy and then i was just like oh i'm like i am unhappy i'm like cool whatever i just kept going and all of a sudden just like stop mattering to me like i don't think about it i genuinely like i don't think like does this make me happy does not like i don't think about it you just do what you want to do in the moment do whatever you're doing and it's not like it's like all short-term like all pleasure-seeking whatever like i still have a long-term perspective of like this is what i want to build yeah like i want to write these books i want to build these courses i want to do this stuff but it's like those are things that i enjoy so that's what i that's what i do i love it it's great all right i don't have anything i mean i had questions but now i know the answers to them just based off here i'm just listening i'd rather just listen and not say i know it's like i don't want to mess it up but then i created a belief that now i'm going to mess it up why does that matter i know i mean i know it's crazy stuff but like i think that like if you want to you can't do what 99 of people are doing if you want to be in the one percent yeah fundamentally and so like you have to have like what i would consider like maybe uncomfortable conversations just be like that's okay like cool like i just i'm gonna do my thing and then they're like and the thing is a lot of times if you just even just make your statements of like this is how i believe like people feel like you're attacking them especially if you articulate it well because they're like why i don't i'm like cool like i don't get like do whatever you want like it's all good to me and so which is why i don't talk about it as much publicly how about this yeah what bothers you there's got to be something out there that like i also haven't wasted a lot of time it's the only thing i don't have a lot of this may seem like a silly question but if you go to a restaurant and you order something let's say you order a steak and you order it medium well and it comes back medium rare do you say something not worth its time no i don't actually you don't no why would i i don't care but at the same time i was like well a lot of people would be anxious to say something and i figured you probably wouldn't care about those emotions right i wouldn't even have an emotion first i mean that's such a yeah yeah yeah i mean maybe like like like we have a big ad campaign that's supposed to go out and like i get all the creatives today before and it's supposed to launch would that annoy me i'd be like yes but let's fix it you know like this is bad we can't run this let's try again you know and in the end it won't matter because we're all gonna die and this money's gonna go back to the game i'll give you this one analogy this might be a good wrap up so this is like my mental analogy that i make sense to me which is like if if if life were a game and all of us are given a token to like enter like a casino because we're in vegas right so we're all getting you know a token we enter the casino we sit down at the table to play poker and everybody's playing everybody's got cards and all you know we're dealt cards everybody's dealt different cards and we got to play the hand we're done and depending on our level of skill we amass more and more chips throughout the game and um at the end of the game the difference between the real world and the casin in the the game of life in the real world you just you go and you can cash out your chips and you walk out with money and there you go there is your day but i feel like in the casino of life you get tapped on the shoulder by the grim reaper he says your time's up and then all your chips get pushed right back to the middle of the table and then you leave the casino empty-handed because it was a fake game with fake rules that didn't matter and so like we accumulate these chips that i'm just gonna push back in the middle again that other people are gonna play on and like the reason that that analogy became real for me is like i bought this piece of land in austin and i was like that's neat and then i was like how many people have owned this piece of land it's like the guy you know the guy before me owned it and the guy before him owned it the guy before him doing it and i was like and they were like this is mine and they die or they sell it and someone was like this is mine it's like they're just chips that just get played with and they just get amassed and they get redistributed it just doesn't matter like death taxes everybody 100 so like everyone's like estate planning it's like dude 500 generations from now a your your offspring are you know 500 to the you know 0.5 or you know one half to the 500th power of like diluted they're basically just humans at that point so if your wealth somehow is a big enough that it can be diluted that that much and last that long the people who own it are just humans so like they're so they're just as close to me as you are you know it doesn't matter um and then the alternative is the people that i'm giving this to are just the ones that i care about are the immediate family but then when people get resources that they didn't learn how to uh use or manage then it destroys them because it's too much potential energy they can't handle it and so it's like it's really for nothing and so like if you want you can build something that you think is cool but like at the end of the day like we're just going to cast the chips in so anyways alex's world views but it's a great analogy just lots to think about this one yeah i don't have to re-watch this but you know you know what's funny i was actually thinking i would yeah re-watch this listen to podcasts this segment i would actually listen to this yeah money income no earth [Laughter] investing indexes savings accounts what credit cards that's good geez thank you so much thank you alex for coming on this has been an incredible podcast yeah i think so i appreciate i appreciate you having me and to the audience like i know that a lot of the stuff that i say can be uh triggering and i know that at different points in my life if i had heard someone say what i'm saying in the position that i am i would be offended um and i want to make it clear that it's not my intention to do that um at all it's just me sharing beliefs that uh as i understand the world and that there's no way projection on you or how you see the world et cetera it's just this is how i see the world and these are beliefs that served me well um that helped me overcome a lot of things that i thought mattered you thought there we go that was it that should be our intro yeah that could be our intro that's a good segment to put right there in the beginning because it's going to catch people where they were like what what's offensive but what am i going to disagree with perfect let's do that thank you so much thanks for coming on man it was nice meeting you too thank you good luck on your tinder date thank you thank you should grow the stash out by that you think so i mean if you want to that's why i shaved it last night by the way