NEW: Alex Hormozi Answers Your Questions on Reddit
In a Nutshell
Alex Hormozi's core message is that fear of failure and uncertainty paralyze more entrepreneurs than actual barriers, and the solution is to break vague fears into specific, manageable scenarios while taking action. The most critical business levers are pricing (charging what value is worth rather than cost-plus or competitor averages), capturing real customer moments as content, and focusing on rate limiters rather than doing busy work. Success requires assuming business risk through variable compensation or equity, selling to people with money, and recognizing that the worst-case scenario of business failure is rarely as bad as imagined—typically just having to get a job again.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Alex Hormozi is conducting a first-ever Reddit AMA, answering questions in order of upvotes. Questions with higher engagement receive priority responses. He advises asking high-quality questions for future AMAs to increase likelihood of receiving answers.
Hormozi rejects the premise that his advice for most people is to start with lawn or snow services. His general guidance is to start with the greatest existing skills and leverage. Lawn or snow services represent a low bar for those with minimal skills - just needing to knock on doors with a lawn mower.
He emphasizes that "best" depends on context and outcome. Most successful entrepreneurs start five to ten companies rather than just one or two. The first business is rarely the last, and learning transfers between ventures.
For someone with a cushy IT job, Hormozi recommends AI implementation for small businesses. This opportunity exists because there's significant people-heavy work integrating old systems with new AI systems. Compensation should be based on money made or saved for the client business, positioning the service close to revenue or bottom line.
In B2B, opportunities should be selected based on proximity to money. For consumer sales, target pain points affecting many people worth significant dollars.
Hormozi clarifies that not every person should start a snow blowing business, but for a 16-year-old with a lawn mower and neighborhood, it's an appropriate starting point. The key is demystifying business creation - the steps are consistent regardless of business type.
At zero revenue, all businesses require the same fundamentals: forming an LLC, establishing payment processing, and opening a bank account. Accepting a dollar from a stranger constitutes having a business.
When strongest evidence cannot be named due to NDAs, Hormozi recommends using "Acme Corp" placeholders while remaining specific about actions taken. He frequently shares anonymized portfolio company stories, stating companies have been renamed for anonymity.
He would not walk away from a great client due to inability to use their win unless case study usage was part of the original agreement terms.
Beyond past proof, present-day proof can approximate customer experience. For lead generation services, call recordings can be played for prospects to demonstrate the service quality. This creates meta-proof showing exactly what the prospect would experience.
The ultimate proof is a free trial arrangement where payment occurs after results are delivered.
Hormozi's advice applies equally to stable job holders, but applied to the business they work for rather than own. Principles like volume negating luck, doing unreasonable amounts of work, and persistence apply universally.
Compensation is proportional to risk taken. To increase income within existing employment, shift business risk onto yourself through variable pay structures or equity purchases.
Logical business owners willingly share fractions of money not yet made that employees directly help generate. The challenge is demonstrating direct value creation rather than relying on others' contributions.
Leverage is determined by mutual need - how much the employer needs the employee versus vice versa. Skills acquisition improves leverage.
Hormozi predicts the future of work involves individuals bringing their own AI agents into businesses. Rather than selling individual services, people will offer entire departments or functions through AI agent deployment, receiving aggregate compensation previously paid to full departments.
Contentment with current life means having already won. Desire for more income requires taking corresponding steps, starting with asking for more money then earning it through risk assumption.
A travel agency generating $160,000 in sales with $5,500 ad spend and $30,000 profit demonstrates strong unit economics with 6:1+ return ratios. The question becomes what prevents doubling ad spend.
Scaling limitations may include lifetime gross profit per customer being insufficient. Solutions include improving the offer, expanding to cheaper CPM channels, or expanding the money model to increase customer value.
Starbucks exemplifies LTV advantage - they can spend more acquiring customers because each generates $14,000 lifetime value versus typical coffee shops. Long-term competitive advantage comes from high-value offerings that many people need.
Short-term advantages come from different or cheaper distribution methods. Examples include Gymshark, First Form, and Quest disrupting established players through unique distribution channels.
When sales agents limit scaling due to manual processes, the solution is hiring additional salespeople. The constraint identification process involves asking "what's stopping you from doubling revenue" and addressing that specific limitation.
Bootstrapped billionaires succeed through superior resource allocation - getting better returns on limited time, effort, and money. Elon Musk focuses exclusively on rate limiters when scaling businesses.
Hormozi distinguishes between public statements about AI usage versus actual implementation. A billionaire friend acknowledged not "vibe coding all day" despite public AI enthusiasm.
AI does not eliminate other forms of leverage - brand building, capital deployment, and existing advantages remain valuable. AI provides high-leverage tools for those without capital, with skilled users extracting more value.
AI cannot replace business fundamentals. Deploying AI aggressively without increased revenue indicates not working on the actual constraint. Automation of email reading doesn't automatically generate more money.
AI struggles with strategic decision-making due to confirmation bias toward user preferences. Decision-making requires human ownership of outcomes since AI cannot take risks.
Beyond AI, leverage exists through multiple channels: shifting from 1:1 to 1:10 service delivery provides 10x leverage. Moving from bespoke to templated solutions creates 3-5x delivery leverage. Selling 1-to-many rather than 1-to-1 creates virtually infinite conversion leverage.
Companies like OpenAI, Claude, and Anthropic employ thousands despite AI capabilities, indicating human necessity. AI-adopting companies are hiring more than non-adopters.
When someone reports following advice religiously - moving cities, posting consistently, spending on courses, avoiding social activities, doing 100 daily outreaches for years - without success, the issue is feedback integration quality.
Stating feedback incorporation doesn't make it true. Actual iteration and improvement would demonstrate measurable progress. The gap between stated actions and results indicates insufficient feedback incorporation.
If someone reached out to 100 people a day for 3 years, that equals 100,000 individual outreaches, yet they remain broke. This suggests the actions taken were not valuable to recipients. Spending money on courses has minimal correlation to making money compared to performing the specific actions required to generate revenue. The core issue is whether the person was offering something people actually found valuable.
The speaker states there is no universe where someone reaches out to 100,000 people, iterates their message 100,000 times, and receives zero positive responses. In the leads book, reaching out to 100,000 people with a free offer should result in a full client load. Some percentage of those clients would convert to paid work once capacity is reached, provide testimonials, or give referrals.
The conclusion is that the person likely went straight for paid sales on something people did not want. The recommendation is to start offering services for free to gain practice, collect proof, and improve skills before charging money.
There may be a supply-demand imbalance in the chosen market. For example, selling editing services to people on the internet may be a saturated niche. The speaker notes that winners can win in any market, but the current approach may not be working.
The fundamental issue is that the person believes they are working hard, but this belief itself may be preventing actual productive work from happening.
A 24-year-old licensed engineer in the Philippines earning $600 per month saves and invests 70% of income, living on $180 monthly. This represents extreme frugality. The goal is to earn north of $20,000 per month within 3-5 years regardless of method.
The key recommendation is gaining access to US markets. The accent becomes less relevant as skill level increases. The better someone becomes at their craft, the less the accent matters. The worse the skill level, the more the accent becomes a factor because it affects trust.
The speaker explains that if someone from the US can move to the Philippines and make money, and if American-born Filipinos can make money online and move to the Philippines, then the only difference between the questioner and those people is the accent. Being Filipino is not a fundamental barrier.
The licensed engineer credential may be irrelevant to making $20,000 monthly online. The speaker references a thought experiment with Steven Bartlett involving a suitcase with varying amounts of money ($1,000 to $100,000). The business started depends on selling skills and services rather than capital-intensive ventures.
The engineer credential is like the $1,000 in the suitcase - something invested in but not necessarily relevant to the current goal. The recommendation is to learn a marketable skill that either helps businesses make more money (B2B: marketing, sales, delivery improvements) or serves consumer desires.
Examples include recruiting influencers to promote products via dropshipping arrangements where promoters receive a cut. This approach can generate $20,000 monthly even if it is not a path to building a multi-million dollar business.
The speaker references a cafe owner in a 120-person town trying to scale locally. The solution was using the internet to access global markets rather than being constrained by physical location.
The speaker confirms plans to publish a personal dictionary translating abstract concepts into concrete, measurable behaviors. Multiple books are in progress, with five half-written manuscripts currently being developed.
B.F. Skinner is identified as the father of operant conditioning. Additional learning came from conversations with a friend who is a master at the subject and through using AI as a tool for understanding behavioral principles.
An online fitness coach is concerned about AI replacing their business and is considering pivoting to selling shirts and in-person coaching. The speaker explains that clients hire coaches for accountability and encouragement, not just information.
The speaker shares a personal example of recently getting a strength training coach and realizing they primarily want approval and reinforcement for lifts rather than programming information. AI can generate workouts and diet plans, but cannot provide the human reinforcement clients seek.
A case study is provided about Coco Fit, a gym concept that attempted to replace personal trainers with machines and fobs that tracked workouts. The business failed because the fundamental assumption was wrong: people lack motivation and accountability, not information.
The recommendation is not to abandon the coaching business due to AI fears. More businesses are being killed by the fear of AI than by actual AI displacement in the short term. People hire coaches because they like the coach's vibe and see them as an authority figure who will provide motivation.
The speaker is asked about their subjective perception of death and whether viewing humans as organisms running behavioral loops eliminates fear of dying. The response is that if a thought does not serve you, it is probably not worth continuing to think.
The speaker does view themselves as someone who does things they have been reinforced for doing. Fear of dying may be reduced by this perspective, but preference for staying alive remains strong. The beauty of death is that once dead, you do not know you are dead - only the fear of death causes distress.
The speaker does not wrestle with the unknown after death. For the entirety of the universe's existence before their 37 years of life, they were not alive. The state after death will be the same as before birth - nothing. This perspective has freed them from stress about mortality.
The explanation is that human brains are designed to keep us alive and pass on genes, not to maximize potential or happiness. We must actively orient our worldview in ways that serve us rather than being controlled by evolutionary defaults.
Someone describes optimizer paralysis where ego is tied to outcomes, any chance of failure feels like identity death, and they were reinforced as a child to never fail. They unconsciously only pursue activities with high certainty of winning.
The response is to not kill the optimizer mindset but use it strategically. The person is already in a state of failure by their own admission since they are asking the question, so they are not leaving success to chance failure - they are choosing whether to attempt success.
The speaker shares their own experience of being magna cum laude, finishing college in three years, and being at the top of their class. The motivation to take risks came from considering their 85-year-old self and the guaranteed regret of behaving cowardly throughout life.
All failure besides death is psychological - it consists of rules made up and lines drawn in the sand. These are fake games with fake rules that can be changed. The reason for not taking action must be identified because that inaction is currently serving some purpose.
The speaker states that the questioner does not deserve their current identity of being an optimizer with a track record of success if they refuse to take risks. Identity can be redefined based on any label chosen at any time.
Someone has strong operational skills but struggles with sales and cold approaching. The sectors mentioned are real estate, property management, and hospitality. Doing the work is easy, but getting opportunities is the pain point.
Two solutions are provided. The easy way is finding someone with complementary promotional skills since big businesses need operational expertise in leadership, people management, and processes. Partnering with promotional entrepreneurs allows leveraging each person's strengths.
The hard way is developing the deficient skills. The work that needs to be done is specifically on the areas of weakness. Easy work is doing things that come naturally, while hard work is doing things that are difficult and emotionally draining.
The emotional component involves dealing with uncertainty about whether outreach will work, when it will work, and whether iterations based on feedback are correct. Finding a community of people doing the same thing allows learning from 100 other people's experiences rather than solely from personal trial and error.
For lead generation in the MSP (Managed Service Provider) space, which is saturated, three primary channels are identified. The fastest method is paid advertising, which can be implemented immediately. Outbound comes second in speed. Content marketing tends to be the slowest approach, though exceptional content can go viral quickly.
A fourth option is finding adjacent businesses that already have the desired leads and creating partnership arrangements. When these businesses cannot sell to a prospect, they can refer that person in exchange for a portion of the revenue. This creates cash flow with no risk, no work, and no delivery requirements.
These partnerships provide significant leverage by accessing the marketing, advertising, and selling machines of partner businesses. This approach allows more targeted and meaningful average attempts, such as showing up in person when visiting their area rather than just sending DMs.
Sending very heavy lumpy direct mail creates memorable touchpoints that cut through standard marketing noise. One effective approach involves crumpling a sales letter and placing it inside a small trash can before mailing. The accompanying letter states: "Hey, I figured you were going to throw this away in the trash anyway, so I figured I'd save you the step. Haha." This unusual delivery method increases engagement because recipients remember the sender when follow-up calls reference "the guy who sent you the trash can," often creating a foot in the door. Being willing to fly to prospects' locations for a few hundred dollars when the deal justifies the expense makes prospects more likely to agree to meetings because "he's in the area."
A scam is fundamentally something deceptive in nature where you promise something that you do not deliver. The first rule of marketing is to state the facts and tell the truth. If the facts and truth are not compelling, the solution is to change reality by working harder to make the thing better so the stats and facts become compelling, rather than juking statistics. As long as you don't promise anything you can't do, you're fine when helping clients.
Every entrepreneur must decide whether to pay more attention to the people they want to help or to those who hate them for trying to help. People will hate you no matter what you do—if you do nothing, they criticize you for doing nothing, and if you do something, they criticize how you did it. This behavior stems from gaining relative status by putting other people down, which is evolutionary. The advice is to choose helping customers and ignore criticism because critics don't care about you anyway, and they feel that way because you remind them of the risk they were unwilling to take for themselves.
AI will become more adept and able to do more things, requiring adaptation of its use in places with the highest leverage specific to your constraint.
Pricing is the single strongest lever for making money in business. Pricing is often amorphous because it's speculative—value is directly proportional to what someone else is willing to pay. For a house with no comparables, value depends on buyer circumstances, with hard costs forming a baseline and time saved representing additional value.
Three incorrect pricing approaches include: looking at what everyone else charges and taking the average, which guarantees commodity status; doing a little bit more for a little bit less, which is even worse; and cost-plus pricing, which focuses on your margin rather than customer willingness to pay. The perfect price is one a customer will buy at the maximum they're able to spend.
Value diminishes within a customer's experience, as illustrated by beer pricing at a ski lodge where the first beer has significantly higher value than the second, which is higher than the third. The solution involves calculating how much more the first beer is worth and determining average purchase quantities. For recurring services, linear pricing should be avoided when possible by implementing onboarding fees and upfront charges because customers typically have the most pain and deprivation at the beginning.
The traditional approach of offering free trials was flipped by charging $500, $2,000, or $5,000 on first transactions because the day prospects visit the gym represents their maximum motivation and pain point. This front-loads revenue while the value of community membership is valuable but less than weight loss. The reason people buy is not always the reason they stay, requiring pricing based on relative value at specific moments.
Rich and poor customers may both need the same service but have vastly different willingness to pay. The goal is finding the sweet spot where the maximum number of units sold times gross margin generates the highest absolute revenue. The pricing curve shows two points where equal money can be made by selling more units at lower prices or fewer units at higher prices.
For service businesses involving humans, premium price leadership is recommended because serving 10 customers at higher prices generates the same revenue as 100 customers at lower prices, making scaling easier. The operational infrastructure required for 100 customers represents 10 times the absolute profit potential.
The fractal nature of customers shows that the bottom 50% of Americans hold only $2.70 of every $100 in total wealth. The next 40% (50th to 90th percentile) holds approximately $30, the next 9% holds mid-30s dollars, and the top 1% holds 30-something dollars—meaning the top 1% has 11-13 times the money of the bottom 50%. This distribution makes logical sense to target higher tiers because that's where the money is.
The big mistake with pricing is not going high enough or low enough. Small tier increases like $129 to $149 per month target the exact same buyer. Instead, pricing should be designed by thinking about how valuable solving the problem is for each customer segment, starting with price and working backwards. A $9/month product tier might be followed by a $99 tier that's 11 times more expensive.
If 20% of customers buy something five times as expensive, adding that 5x price point doubles overall revenue. The goal is ensuring every offer tier doubles revenue overall, which requires 5x pricing relative to the base given 20-30% typical upsell uptake rates.
For managed service providers handling IT, cybersecurity, and support, the core challenge is that perfect performance means nothing happens, making prospects compare providers by price per user since value remains invisible until something breaks. The service is fundamentally a version of insurance focused on the "don't"—preventing outages, breaches, and email fraud.
Instead of selling "nothing happened," the focus should be on what it costs when something does happen. Guarantees can be created responsibly by managing risk and conditions, such as offering a month free if service goes down. This becomes a controlled risk where closing twice as many customers while losing one month from every third customer can still improve overall math.
To escape commoditized pricing, focus on: the actual cost of an outage, speed of response and delays, ease of use, and sacrifice reduction—what customers don't have to do because of your service. The goal is selling that the plane lands on time rather than that nothing bad happened, while guaranteeing around bad outcomes responsibly.
Passion for technical work does not prevent business success—claiming passion prevents business achievement is cope. Being really passionate about the product might be one of the few things that actually matters. If someone would do complex work for a billion dollars but not for a dollar, there's nothing wrong with the work itself, just the pricing. The real issues are typically lack of sales skills and underpricing rather than technical passion.
Everyone starts somewhere and fails at selling, including failing to sell free trials. The solution is learning sales and pricing skills, then selling what the work is actually worth rather than believing the excuse that being too passionate prevents business success.
In order to make money, you have to be willing to say no. And you have to have faith that if you continue to do the advertising activities, which is letting more people know about your stuff, that you will get another customer who says yes.
Action alleviates anxiety. The uncertainty is what could happen. All these different things could happen. Of those things that could happen, how many of them are under my control? If none of them are under your control, they're not worth thinking about. Because the fear only exists in the vague, never the specific.
Fear comes from the amygdala, a walnut-sized part of your brain that gives you this very strong feeling. It's super evolutionary, hundreds of millions of years old. Alligators have them. It's very good at changing your behavior because it kept you alive. But what it's not good at is being detailed.
If you say, "The uncertainty of business frightens me," that makes sense. But what part? Is it reaching out to people that frightens you? Is it that 17 people didn't respond to your email? Play it out further. If this business fails, which means that you didn't make money fast enough to pay your bills so that you have to get a job again. If that's what we decide failure is. But we can decide what failure is. If you keep trying, did you fail?
One of the interesting things about success is that the only requisite for success is that you try for it. And if you try for it, you're successful. Because when you sold the company, you were successful the moment you decide you are. If you had a kid, and they tried really hard, and they were 7 years old, and they weren't a billionaire, would you think they were a failure? No. You'd be proud of them for trying and getting better. And so we could take the exact same frame for ourselves.
When you play out the worst case scenario, you realize it's not that bad anyways because you're not going to starve. You're going to have shelter because you probably have friends who you don't seem socially inept. If the absolute worst case scenario is you could move in with friends, move in with your old folks, and if you have neither of those, you could move into a homeless shelter. And still get food. That is the absolute worst case scenario. Which means you don't die. Which means that you have unlimited shots on goal.
If you have skills, the worst case scenario is that you just have a job and you have to work 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. longer than you currently are. Doesn't sound like that bad. The idea of fear and uncertainty is holding you back more than the reality of the uncertainty, which is you don't know when it's going to work, but you know that it will work as long as you keep working.
Do you have a team? Yes, I have a team. How do we do it? You need to make it easy and convenient for you to capture rather than manufacture content. The easiest thing to do for any business owner is that you capture you delivering your services to customers. So you probably deliver services. Any service business owner does, which is 78% of businesses.
Every time you're servicing a customer, we should be capturing that. And when you capture that, that becomes content. That becomes ads. And that becomes case studies. It becomes marketing collateral. Since you are working all day every day, the easiest way to start is just start with what you're currently doing and capture that.
The 201 version of that is okay, yeah, but no one's interested in that. Of course no one's interested in the whole thing. What you want to do is compress what 6 weeks of work with a client looks like into 60 seconds. That's the value. The format is the value. What you're looking for is winning formats. Where do I set up the cameras and recordings to capture the moments? You want moments. No one can see 6 weeks of a project, but they can see the moments.
What are the key moments of this customer's journey? Probably when they sign up. Probably when they get onboarded. Probably their first milestone. Probably a halfway point. Maybe at the end. Great, that's five moments. Can I compress that into a 60-second video? Yeah. Can I do a case study video where I break down a 6-week project into 16 minutes? Probably. You need to take better notes on what your customers are doing. That would be the quick manufacturer. But you can also just capture instead of manufacturing get way more content. That's how we do so much. I'm not actually making content the vast majority of I'm making content, I'm just talking.
Either something you've answered a million times or something that you think people can find out on their own. The most common question that I get asked is why don't people start? What do you think is holding people back from being successful from doing what they want? And it's just fear. And it's because people are so afraid of the idea of failure that they won't even sit in it long enough to actually look around the room that failure lives in to see what the decoration looks like. They won't look at the floors, they won't look at the ceilings, they won't look at who else is in the room, they won't look at they're actually in a room, that they actually still have food, that it's actually fine.
Leila has this quote that I love, but it's fear is a mile wide and inch deep. So when you look out at it, it looks like this vast ocean, but when you take your first step, you're like, "Oh, there's nothing here. It's very empty." It comes from an old part of your brain. And to be clear, it was there to keep you alive and was a good thing. But when the reality is that like you're not actually fearing for your death, but you're behaving like you're fearing for your death.
One of the things that I've learned from Elon, just from observation, and Peter Thiel made this really excellent point about this. He said, "If you were to have like when Elon had started his three companies, anybody would have said, even one of those companies succeeding would have been a monumental success." Like a very characteristically low odds bet that any one of those three made it. And Elon himself, when he was asked, "What do you think the likelihood of each of the companies work?" He said he put it about 10% odds of success. Three companies. And all three of them did work and became, you know, multi-hundred billion, trillion-dollar, whatever companies.
Peter Thiel talking about this said, "Elon must understand something about risk that we don't all get." And I think there's something very valuable in that. If the richest men in the world understands a concept, then probably one of the most central concepts of entrepreneurship, which is risk, better and differently than everyone else. One of the big things that he understands is that he is fearless. And so when people play games with Elon and that I've only observed this from second-party commentary, so that's all I can comment on, is that he is just relentless in his attack. And he's fearless. He just fears nothing. He just continues to go in because I think what he has realized, and I think the longer you play the game, you realize is that the downside doesn't really exist. It's not real. You're not going to die. You're not really going to be shunned. The worst-case scenario is you have a story and you have a reasonable excuse like everyone else who had a startup that didn't work. That's your downside. And so so much of it exists in our areas because we act as though that taking that step is going to kill us.
In the short term, there are more jobs in the AI-rich companies than in the non-AI companies in terms of job growth. So, if we're just looking at facts, that's what it is right now. For my own son that's coming, I'm going to do the only thing I can do, which is I'm going to equip him with as many skills as I possibly can so he can navigate the world to get what he wants out of it. Not just out of world, but just out of life. And so, I would probably give the exact same advice to myself and I'd give the same advice to you, which is that like keep learning more than anything else. Like you will never be worse off from knowing more. You will never be less capable in a given situation by being more capable.
In game theory, the most flexible player wins. Same thing with Darwin. It's the adaptability, which is the thing that allows you to win. And so, adaptability comes from being able to succeed in different conditions and different environments. And so, part of being able to succeed in different conditions and environments is your ability to learn, which is a function of intelligence, which is how quickly can you change your behavior. And so, if you see this big threat and you let's say you're a cold caller, then yeah, maybe you might have want to learn other skills along the way. But the idea that there's not going to be any jobs like in the near term, I don't know if I you know, the data suggests you know, the opposite of that. And like I said earlier, the biggest frontier companies have, you know, 5,000 plus employees and so like it seems like they still need some humans.
This is probably a relatively contrarian take and especially as a company that uses a lot of AI. AI feels like it has hit some sort of asymptote where it takes a huge amount of energy to make very small and incremental improvements. I can't really tell you a gigantic difference between like you know, I think when GPT went from three to four, that was a monster difference. From four to five, it was significantly smaller difference in my opinion and there's some models right now that we run that are still four cuz we think it's better and faster and it just like it actually sounds less AI sloppy.
There's a French AI guy who talks about this, but basically the way that we're currently training AI has diminishing returns and until we can get AI to train in the real world with real-time feedback loops, just training on more data is not actually the solution to getting it to be smarter because I think all of us have seen the AI slop of the internet and been like, well, this isn't that good. There's some room. What not to do is to don't hide. Don't bury your head in the sand and hope for it all to go away. Don't live in fear. Ask yourself what can I do to best equip myself to succeed in an environment where the conditions change? And that's going to be learning skills and that has not changed. And it would just be what skills are you learning which would probably be AI adjacent skills so you can learn it. Just like you know, years ago when you know, Word and Excel and Zoom and these tools came in the beginning, it was like, oh yeah, I'm proficient with Word. No one really says that anymore cuz it's assumed and I think to the same degree learning how to use AI right now is a newer skill, but in time it will be something that everyone is doing because they'll have lowered the barrier to getting into it.
What would you say running from problems and traumas by working? Is it maintainable long term? The reason I actually really like this is because we use imprecise language and then have imprecise outcomes in our life and don't know what's going on. So, running from problems and traumas. You're not actually running from anything physically. And when we're talking about things that are amorphous, I prefer to use precise language so that everyone can get on the same page. So, you cannot run from a problem. You literally can't. Like your problem. Maybe you're you know, I mean, I guess if your wife's angry and you run away from her, I guess you could physically do that, but the problem would still exist. Most problems you cannot physically run away from, so we need to use more precise language, which means that avoiding is probably what we're talking about here.
Problems I would say things that are against our preferences, things that happen that are not going the way we want them to go. Traumas, the reason this is important to define is because like otherwise you have all these, you know, internet whatevers who are like, "Ah, trauma's stored in your body and your body you know, it's it's it's as though the the body's a computer." I'm like, "Where is it stored? Is it stored in my liver? Is there a storage place there? Is I've got Juliet who's pre-med. And I was there storage in your bones for these things? I don't know. I don't know if your trauma gets stored there. Now, if you get a cracked rib, sure. And you know, you're going to have the scar of a cracked rib, but if your dad's mean to you just with his words, I don't think it's held in your I don't think it's held in your bones, you know? So, I'll go out there because I think people make these they try to anthropomorphize issues into giving them this animation that's not real. We can confuse people very well with analogies. And so, I try to not use analogies when I'm trying to explain something rather than to motivate.
Trauma means you learn something from a bad thing. It is accelerated learning from aversive stimulus. Now, where this gets interesting is if I'm a child and I burn my hand touching a stove, I probably will learn not to touch the stove again. Was the stove burning my hand a bad thing? Yes. Did I learn a permanent lesson from that? Yes. Was it trauma? By my definition, yes, it was trauma. But then the question is, is it bad that my child learns to not touch the stove? No. So, is it possible that a good thing can come from a bad experience? Yes. So, does that mean all trauma is bad? No. And so, when we unpack this, we stop having this emotional charger even around the word or bad things happening to us because it means that we can truly make lemonades lemonade out of lemons. You can have a bad thing happen and have good things happen as a result. And so, it's a permanent change of behavior, permanent learning from a aversive stimulus, bad thing. Permanent lesson, one-time bad thing. So, or repeated bad thing. So, you could be like, my dad traumatized me because he didn't hug me enough. Okay, what behavior did you permanently learn as a result?
Whether the trauma was good or bad depends on whether the behavior you learned helps you or hurts you achieve your goals. If you're in combat, I'll bet you some of the traumas that people are in combat learn helps them survive. In that condition, it might not be bad. Is it still trauma? Yes. Is it bad? Did it keep them alive? Yeah. Now, they come back stateside. Is it now hurting them with their goals? Yes. So, we need to unlearn something. And this is the difficulty with trauma, which is that you learn something consciously or unconsciously at some point from bad stuff in your life. And so then we have to ask, does this help me or hurt me? If it hurts you, then we have to figure out here's the big magic sentence here. What do I do instead? When this happens, what do I do next time? What do I do instead? What do I do that is more aligned with my goals?
If that's true, then what we have to do is basically create some sort of reward loop or cycle around trying to take this first action. And then once we get that reward cycle going, then that new behavior gets reinforced under this condition. And then we have reversed our trauma. Or we just learned something. And so the reason I'm so specific about this stuff is that like I used to get buried by this and so I explain this this way because this is what got me out of it. And so I used to be in my head all day long. I'd stay in my apartment for months on end, not leaving cuz I didn't know what to do. I was analysis paralysis. I thought my trauma defined me. Because I used these amorphous terms that I heard on the internet, I read in these self-help books that no one defined. And so they became these big boogeymen that I was trying to avoid cuz I didn't know what the was going on cuz I never defined anything. And so if you don't have what you want, you have an inaccurate view of reality. Your model for predicting what is going to happen in the world is flawed. You do not have all the variables, you do not see it clearly. The people who are able to get what they want see reality more clearly than you. And part of you can take that as an ego hit. Don't really give a. You can do whatever you want. If your model of the world is working for you, go for it. I don't care. But if it's not working for you, then I would suggest or might I offer an alternative viewpoint, which is just to find what the you're talking about.
Is it maintainable long-term? So, let me rephrase the question as I think it was intended, which is can I use work as a way to not work on my problems? And I think the answer is, is it maintainable long-term? I mean, it's as maintainable as long as it maintains. Like, basically, if you're able to do it in the short-term, what prevents you from doing it in the long-term? Real question. I don't know the answer. If there is something that accumulates, then we would have to deal with it. And when the punishment of not dealing with it supersedes the reward you get from working and avoiding it, you will change. And so, I think a lot of people get weighed down by the shoulds of their life. I should do this. Like, is it maintainable long-term? I don't know. Have you done it long-term? Cuz you can always do it long-term and then the day that it's not, you can change. I mean, when I was like when I worked a lot in my 20s and I worked a lot in my early 30s. I work a little less now than I did then. And along the way, people would be like, "He's going to wake up one day and he's going to realize he did it all wrong." You know what's great about that? Is that the day that I wake up, I'll change. It's like, in what world did we stop getting permission to change our minds? In what world did our priorities become fixed in stone? Why must we do everything as we always have done it? In order to be consistent with ourselves? Is that under the assumption that no information is ever changed? That no one has learned anything in their lives? Is there okay to have something that's okay for a season and not forever? Of course. And so, I by and large reject these shoulds because they don't serve you. And they certainly don't serve me.
When I was mourning my mother's death, the amount of people who told me how I should mourn my mother's death? That how I did it, I should do it differently? Like, they have permission? Like, they have some sort of authority over my life? Like, their opinion on my suffering, I should somehow weigh? Like, what is the appropriate amount to mourn? What is the correct way to do it? What is the correct way? Is there a book that says this is the correct way? According to whom? Based on what? People will put they will thrust their on you. They will put these expectations they will put these labels on you. And then you will confine yourself by these words that you never define and neither did they. And you will make real choices in your life that have real consequences based on words that do not matter. Based on opinions of people who never even thought about what they were saying. And so, my simple ask to you is just ask, "What does that mean? How do you know that? So what?" Whenever you're confronted with these things. What does maintainable mean? How do you know that? Okay. And so what? Maybe it's not maintainable. Okay. And then when I don't maintain it, I'll stop maintaining it. Do I die? No. Is there a mariachi band that comes out and sings me a song when I maintain it long enough? No. We're all going to die. We don't know when. And so focus on the work that's in front of you, whether that's work with your family, work with your career, work on your health, whatever it is.
My grandfather said this to me. Those are my favorite things. He was he and I were super close and he died 10 years ago. And he said, "You only have two hands and one brain. Use them." And so if you find yourself not using your two hands and your one brain, you're probably living in someone else's game, not your own. With that, I'll leave you guys. Appreciate you all. Happy AMA, Reddit at all, YouTube at all. You guys rock. Appreciate you.
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