Stop Seeking Their Approval If You Don’t Want Their Life - Alex Hormozi
In a Nutshell
To succeed, ignore opinions from people whose lives you don't want—most are average and their approval signals you're staying average. The path to exceptional results requires enduring a "lonely chapter" of rejection and doubt while pursuing goals others can't see or value. True progress often means abandoning local maximums and continuing upward even when everyone around you questions why you're working so hard.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Don't listen to other people's opinions. Most people are fat, poor pansies and don't listen to them when they try to deter you from whatever it takes to succeed. The average person will always try to keep you average. It makes sense that if you want to be extraordinary, you will do things that an ordinary person would see as extra.
A lot of people want to see you fail because it justifies the risk that they chose not to take. We always have to think about listening to the people who are closest to our goals, not closest to us.
We yearn for the approval of many people who don't have lives that we want. If they have a specific life, then it means that is what they think is valuable. If we don't want what they have, then why would we value their weight on our decisions?
People have a mold that is their life. When your life no longer fits their mold, they state the obvious: you are living your life against their preferences. We somehow feel like that needs to change.
When we're younger and growing up, we can't leave. We do need to live our life according to our parents' preferences, our teachers' preferences, our classmates' preferences, our principal's preferences. But when you get older, you have to break the mold and decide what mold you want. In so doing, you will be against their preferences.
If the vast majority of people have a life that you don't want, then you're going to do things that the vast majority of people don't agree with.
The average American adult is obese, likely to be divorced, and has less than 1K in the bank. Doing what everybody else does sounds like a great idea, but it's actually a reliable route to a life that you're probably not looking for.
The path to exceptionalism is lonely. Loneliness is something that we decry as a society, that there's something wrong with it, something bad, something wrong with you if many people disagree with you. But success and pursuit of large endeavors is one of those few domains where everyone disagreeing with you is a signal that you are actually doing something different.
Sometimes doing something different is the wrong move. Larry Ellison said: if everyone thinks your idea is stupid, either they're right or you're right. If you're right, then you're likely to make a lot of money.
We have to be willing to do exceptional things in isolation and deal with the pain of rejection. Some of rejection isn't people saying no, I don't want to buy from you. Some of rejection is people rejecting your behavior, rejecting who you're becoming, rejecting the choices that you're making.
Rejection often surfaces as snide remarks, jokes that are demeaning that have a little bit too much edge to them, or even just being excluded, a more silent version of that. Not commission, but omission. Those moments of being left out are very painful.
You trade those moments for the many moments when you're at home alone looking at your life around you and saying this is not what I want. I don't want to be here, I don't want to be who I am, and I don't want to be there with them either. It's no man's land.
This is the beginning of the metamorphosis, the beginning of the transformation. It's the single most powerful idea: the lonely chapter.
The lonely chapter is the amount of doubt that you have to endure when doing this for the first time when nobody around you understands what you're trying to do. When you're actively being discouraged from making changes and you have no promise of glory or success on the other side of it, that is one of the most perfect cocktails of pain and discomfort that you can go through.
This happens on every mountain. It happens on your first mountain and it happens on your second mountain. If you have achieved some level of success that everyone around you deems as successful enough by their standards, not yours, when you pursue the next summit, then all of it begins again.
For a lot of people, the first big lonely chapter they will feel will be after their first success. For a lot of people, the first success is done within the frame that they're already inside of. They get to the top of it and realize it wasn't what they wanted.
Some people decide to go back down. Maybe some people don't need to go up the first mountain to realize they're somewhere they don't want to be. But for a lot of people, especially people that are driven and pushed toward excellence, they actually have to get there.
One example: getting one of the biggest events companies in the UK, running an organization that is cool and fun, defining it, being the boss, everybody knew me, there was some wealth and some status and some freedom and there were girls. Everybody's telling me that this is something that I should be happy about and satisfied with, and for some reason it didn't feel right. The only way to try and find something new is to let go of something that everybody else is telling you is something that you should want.
Local maximums are the furthest up they can see up the mountain. When you get to that new local maximum, you have a different perception than they do and you can see the next peak and they can't.
There is a difference between having fallen off and having never made it. Having fallen off a lot of the time is somebody going from one local maxima to another local maxima that's higher or to a global maxima. Some fall-offs occur not through choice but that evolution might be somebody going: my priorities have changed and you are judging me on the scorecard of the game that I used to play. I'm not bothered about that anymore. They say that guy fell off.
When you haven't won yet and have no evidence or no proof that you're going to be successful, everyone will ask why you're working so hard. And then once you win, everyone asks why you're working so hard.
People were literally always going to ask why I was working so hard or why you were working so hard and why are you pursuing your goals because they're saying that your goals are not the goals that I would pursue. To which you would respond yes.
An entrepreneur who wants to dominate their market and put everyone else out of business was told: when you actually beat them into true submission, it's really like a giant beating a child because it's almost never a true fair fight and there are no rules and there is no referee and no one determines you the winner.
What ends up happening is you get bigger and bigger and bigger and then they shrink into irrelevance and then you see a Facebook post that says that they've changed their goals and that they actually determine that this isn't as important to them as it once was.
When losers lose, they change their goals rather than say they lost. It's more that they might have at some point while they began to lose, maybe it's the first quarter, the second quarter of their game, they're down by a few points, they might have some awareness of what it would take in order to win, but they determined at that point that the trade was no longer worth it.
That is okay. That is a shift: if someone no longer determines that the price is worth it, then amazing, they've made a conscious decision.
What to advocate against is having that decision made for you because you weren't conscious of the decision being made to begin with and then just basically accepting it.
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