Why losing friends is normal…

Summary

• The saying "your network is your net worth" is only partially correct; it's not just about wealth but about the value and influence your network provides.
• I own Acquisition.com, a portfolio company doing over $100 million a year, and I appreciate real conversations even if they come with trolling comments online.
• As you grow and succeed, you may lose connection with old friends, which is natural and shouldn't be a cause for guilt.
• Dean Graziosi, a close friend and mentor, shared that achieving dreams has a cost, such as negative attention or privacy invasions, but these are prices he's willing to pay for impact.
• Don't maintain friendships out of obligation; relationships should involve mutual growth and value exchange.
• Growth can lead to a loss of friends when they either don't support your success or your paths diverge; this is often a sign of personal development.
• It's essential to be comfortable with being alone, which helps be more selective with the friends you choose to have in your life.
• True friends will praise you behind your back and challenge you face-to-face, fostering personal growth and supporting your endeavors.
• Friendship dynamics change over time, and while it's okay to grow apart from old friends, it's crucial to make room for new ones who align better with your current path.
• Hold a high standard for friendships, and don't rush to fill voids left by past relationships; real, supportive connections will form when you're patient and selective.
• Accept the changes and sacrifices in relationships as part of your growth into who you aspire to be; it's all part of the journey towards self-improvement and success.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest making new friends who support your goals and growth. If you lose old friends, that's okay. It's part of the journey. Here's what you can do:

1. Assess your current friendships. Are they helping you grow, or just about the past? If they're not helping, it's okay to move on.
2. Be okay with being alone. It's better to have a few true friends than lots of shallow ones. Take time to know yourself without the noise of others.
3. When making new friends, look for people who challenge you face-to-face and praise you when you're not around. They should make you want to be better.
4. Be patient when filling the void left by old friends. Don't rush to make new ones. The right people will come along with time.
5. Remember, it's natural to grow apart from people. Accept it and don't feel guilty. Your path is unique to you.
6. Keep your standards high for friendships. You deserve friends who truly root for you, even if it means having fewer of them.

By doing this, you create a strong circle that supports your personal growth and success. Remember to be patient and selective, and the right people will come into your life.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"Real friends talk to your face and praise you behind your back"

– Alex Hormozi

"I think if you can spend time alone with your thoughts and be okay with just being you without other people, then you are more selective"

– Alex Hormozi

"I've got people who show up at my house and people who leave weird mean comments and he's like all the time. The thing is, is that that is a price I'm willing to pay to make the impact that I want to make with my life"

– Alex Hormozi

"I didn't have a tremendous amount of support from my parents for the decisions that I took until it was already beyond obvious that I was going to be successful"

– Alex Hormozi

"If you grow, you change; some people most people don't like change especially if they themselves have not grown or changed"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

a lot of people have heard the term your network is your net worth to a degree that's true to the other degree that's the average of the five people you spend the most time with well it's not true for bill gates and for jeff bezos because the people that they spend time with are less than their net worth which would mean that their net would be less than that and so you know there are statements that are thrown around frequently that don't have necessarily a lot of evidence but you know are i would say spiritually correct and so what i want to talk about today and for those who don't know me my name is alex for mosey i own acquisition.com it's a portfolio of company that does over 100 million a year make these videos because i just love getting troll comments about being in my mom's basement this is not this is actually just a closet cause i just like having no windows and i wear the things that i'm comfortable in that being said in the last year i would say that i fell out of touch with the last two friends that i had from high school and or college and this has been a process that's happened you know gradually over time and i was having a conversation with dean graziosi who has become a very very close friend of mine and i brought the topic up with him and i thought the discussion would be worth sharing and so one of the things that he told me early on in our relationship which really really gave me a lot of pause was the cost of his dreams and so i asked him earlier on and it was about 18 months ago before layla and i decided to build kind of our personal brands etc about you know the cost of fame and he said yeah you know i've got people who show up at my house and people who leave weird mean comments and he's like all the time the thing is is that that is a price i'm willing to pay to make the impact that i want to make with my life when he said that it just it really struck me because to me it was in a lot of ways you know selfish to kind of not spread the message out of fear of what it would cost me that being said there's obviously pros that you know you know we've made whatever decision that they outweigh the cons but it was just an interesting perspective in terms of just it is a price that he was willing to pay and so i want to lead this discussion towards the friend conversation that i had with him and he had said that he recently had lost one of his last friends the last friend that he had had from kind of his childhood and i think that there's a lot of people who are like you know never forget where you come from and the people who supported you etc and i think that's true but i think for the mass majority of us a lot of people don't support us on our way up at least it felt that way for me what's interesting is that a lot of people root for you until you do better than them and they stop rooting for you and i'm not saying that the the people um that i'm talking about were like that but it's just that was like the first wave of friends that i lost and it was just because they didn't actually want to see me win and i had a quote uh the other day that went pretty viral on twitter which was real friends talk to your face and praise you behind your back and fake friends do the opposite and when i say talk i mean like bullshitting you know what i mean like give each other you know give each other flack if i'm giving someone flack they know that we're homies you know dr cashy i was i was i was thinking about patenting uh the hormozy advertising cycles i spent so long developing the cycle which is going to be in one of the books that comes up you know in the future and his comment was get over yourself and that's what i and that's exactly what i want from a friend right i want somebody who's gonna say that rather than be like oh that's cool and then be like i can't believe this guy and so we have these people that we collect you know throughout our lives and sometimes that come in you know you've probably heard the saying they're here for a season a reason or a lifetime and i think you know for me a lot of people have been seasonal and so i wanted to share that because i know that i'm sure some of you have had a similar path to me in that i didn't have a tremendous amount of support from my parents i think they now retroactively think they supported me because it's much easier that way but i did not i did not have any support from my parents for the decisions that i took until it was already beyond obvious that i was going to be successful and that took years and that was very hard for me at the time i think friends fell in that same category and so when i was having this discussion with dean we we dove into this a little bit more but as we you know ascend towards our goals and i don't say a send in a literal sense in terms of like socioeconomic status or whatever but just like we move closer towards we want to where we want to go and our vision and our mission and our lives become clear it also becomes clear when you have contrast with people from your past and i have several rules of thumb that are i've begun to develop around these relationships one of them is if i could only talk about the past with someone they usually aren't good friends of mine because i don't really live in the past i live in the future i live in where i want to go what i want to do the things that i find interesting or the present of the things that i find interesting today or right now top of mind and if i can't talk about those things with somebody then our friendship kind of by its very nature will decline over time because there is no growth right because it's only in the past and i have felt a tremendous amount of guilt around the loss of those relationships but i also felt a guilt of carrying them on as in i felt like i needed to water these plants out of necessity rather than out of you know some sort of exchange now some people might decry that or speak against the idea of having an exchange but i don't think that's realistic i think that people stay in relationships because there is an exchange of value that occurs now i think the difference is the strength or depth of the relationship is how long you are willing to wait for the exchange to occur so a parent for example is willing to wait a very long time for a positive exchange from a child coming back to them right now and some people could make the argument that you know children are a gift throughout that entire period of time and that's awesome and that's a perspective whatever but just to use the time frame as a nice thinking process if you just met someone if you don't feel like there's you know a huge benefit to to to knowing them uh you know within the immediate future you probably don't really pursue them out and the longer you have had positive exchanges the longer you are willing to wait for the next one right it's it's intermittent reinforcement from a behavior uh standpoint right like we are literally reinforced in this relationship and the way that addiction works is the same thing right like you immediately get positive hits and then you can start extending how long before you get another positive hit which is also how abusive relationships work right like abuse abuse positive abuse positive pause and pause and then like abuse and then positive is a little bit later and then a little bit later until the point where there's almost no positive whatsoever i'm not saying that's how you should run relationships but more so how we work as humans the point of me breaking this down is that i have lost a lot of the friends or almost all of the friends that i had when i started my journey and the upside is people will come into your life to fill the vacuum that the other people left but sometimes it doesn't happen immediately and i think getting comfortable with having space is a good thing and a lot of people have the impulse or urge to always have people around them and i think it's to their own detriment because i think if you can spend time alone with your thoughts and be okay with just being you without other people then you are more selective and it's the same way with dating some people can't be alone some people can't be without a significant other and so they just end up chatting up with the first person they see after they become single again right and it's because they have a fear of being alone more than they hold a they have an aligned mission with someone that they think that this person is really the best pick and so a lot of ways are similar to dating with friends in that we can hold out uh and really just pick the best people and i think that you know if we at least for me if i have two or three good friends i'm i'm more than satisfied my cup is very full but i think where i feel drained is where i feel like i have lots and lots and lots of acquaintances that are transactional in nature but purely transactional or at least they have a much shorter time horizon for the transactions to occur and so i sell this to say if you have lost friends during the process of the climb i don't think it is something that you should lament or be upset about i think that it is a sign of growth because a lot of people say hey you've changed and the only natural response that i can have to that is you have it and i think that that's kind of sums up the entirety of this of this video which is if you grow you change some people most people don't like change especially if they themselves have not grown or changed and or if they have grown in a different direction from you and it is natural for us to not want to continue relationships with people that have grown or have values that are too far in contrast to our own in those contract those values can change over time and that's okay and so i think that for me it took me a really long time to navigate through this and it was kind of an emotionally explorative experience to just say that's okay and is this price something that i'm willing to pay and for me it's a resounding yes i would be far more sad that i had not realized my potential or what i hoped to accomplish in my life in exchange for relationships that that i sacrificed in order sacrificed my dreams in order to maintain now that being said it almost appears as though i'm sacrificing all relationships in order to have the dream and that's not what i'm saying i'm saying that you will sacrifice old relationships and you will create room for new ones and so i think that there's this i don't know old wives tale or a societal expectation that if someone sheds friends for lack of a better term or loses friends or friends you know dissipate into the distance over time that they are a non-constant person and i think that the answer to that question is yes we grow and unless the friends you have are growing with you and are pushing you to grow then they are probably not friends who will stay with you for the long haul and so for me i'll leave with this kind of last thing that i think about for the people that i want to be friends with i want friends who root for me behind my back and that is rare most people do not root for you behind your back it is sad that there are more strangers on the internet who root for me than people who knew me from back home and it's because we had a shared context at home and the discrepancy between where you are and where they are over time they personalize the fact that they are not with you because they had the same resources at the same beginning and so you're in a different place as a result of your own decisions and so as a result they feel bad and they don't like that and you're a reminder of that what i seek from the friends that i have um are one that they genuinely are rooting for me and that is evidenced by them rooting for me behind my back i also hope that they talk to my face because that is what makes life worth living for me but i hope to admire them i want to strive to be more like my friends in certain ways and i hope that they raise the bar for me to be better and be better in the ways that i want to be better and so in that way picking friends who are people who are further ahead of you doesn't have to be financially it can be it can be in marriage it can be physically it can be whatever and then the hope is that you are better in some ways than they are and then they can grow from you in that way and in that way you both get better and then you have a an extended exchange that continues directionally towards both of your goals my definitions and my view on friendship has changed over time it probably will continue to develop and refine but i mean this because i have a lot of people who message me and are like hey i feel really alone right now i don't feel like a lot of people are supporting me and i make this video say that's okay and i think that there are seasons and at the end of a season when you have a vacuum someone does step in to fill it and i can promise you that if you have a higher standard and you wait and you don't just give of yourself for no reason just because you are afraid to be alone or be without friends you will end up with better friends who actually root for you and are not just place fillers or false friends who you know smile to your face but stab you behind your back or actually talk down on you and so i think if you can have that bar and you can have that tolerance and give yourself that space and that permission to say i've lost a friend and that's okay and i still love them as a human even if i can't give the time that i once did because it doesn't make sense for me anymore because we've grown apart and that's okay and so i've given myself that permission to say these are the prices that i'm willing to pay to grow into the person that i want to be and that's okay and so mosey nation i love you all the road can be can be arduous but i i think the road itself is the reason we do it because of the person that we hope to become and in the process of becoming which is the successes i've defined it is the process of becoming and the process of striving is the success and so anyways my friends keeping awesome i love you all i'll see you guys next vid bye