Original subtitles

Here are brutally honest truths that will give you an unfair advantage.

I'm Alex Samosi, the founder of Acquisition.

Com.

It's a portfolio of companies that generate hundreds of millions of

dollars in revenue per year in aggregate.

A lot of my success in business has come from finding

and exploiting unfair advantages.

Hopefully, this video helps you do the same.

Let's start with number one, pain is the price of progress.

The fastest growth periods are often the most miserable.

If you want to progress, get used to pain.

If you think about what actually occurs when you grow, you stretch

past your point of comfort.

Even if you're growing a muscle, you stretch, you break it down, it's painful.

If you have growing pains, like as a kid, it's like you grew too fast and your

joints are in a lot of pain.

If you're a company and you expand, this is technically supposed to be good

stuff, but it doesn't make it any less painful.

Elite athletes don't get stronger during easy workouts.

If we want progress, we must accept the price of pain that's attached to it.

You cannot both want progress and live an easy life.

These two things conflict.

Number two, happy but not satisfied.

Let me explain this.

You're allowed to be happy before you hit your goal, just not satisfied.

There's a very big difference between being content with your life,

content with your work, and complacent, meaning you're not going

to take any more action.

There's this great Haitian proverb, which is, behind mountains are more mountains.

It's like after every peak, you can just see more peaks ahead of you.

The work works on you more than you work on it.

For me, I remember I had a year that I basically went in retirement trying

to figure out what I wanted to do.

The thesis that I came out with was that hard work is the goal.

The fact that there's something that happens as a result of hard work

is really just a secondary effect.

It's a consequence.

But the goal is the work itself.

I had a friend this morning who messaged me and they're like,

Why do you still work?

I was like, Because it's the thing that I enjoy doing most.

When I looked back on my life, when I didn't work,

I was bored and felt depressed.

When I do work, I am stressed But I do have moments that I really enjoy as well.

I took this as a a foundational truth for me, not for everyone,

that there is misery on both sides, so I might as well be productive and useful.

The only way to be productive and useful is to be happy about the process but not

satisfied so you can continue to provide value to the world.

Now, number three, ignore critiques.

Now, this is probably easy to say, hard to do.

Let me break this down a little bit more.

So friendly reminder that most people are fat, poor, pansies,

don't listen to them when they try to deter you from doing

whatever it takes to succeed.

So 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, and this is the really hard part that I had to come to terms

with, is that 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.

If you want a more violent version of this, your critics

are going to eventually die, and their opinion isn't going to matter

then, which means it probably also doesn't matter now.

So might as well do what you wanted to do originally.

Number four, selective product Productivity.

Productivity comes from all the things that you choose not to do.

I'm going to define two more terms for you because I think it's important.

I see commitment as the elimination of alternatives.

If I get married, then I eliminate all alternatives

to the person that I'm married to.

That is commitment, which is very similar to focus.

Focus, if you think of the hypothetical extreme of focus, is that somebody

does literally nothing but one thing.

They don't eat, they don't sleep, they would eventually die,

but they would be 100% focused during the time that they were alive.

Obviously, we have to put a couple of things in.

You have to eat food, you have to sleep.

But the most focused person does the fewest things outside

of the thing they're focused on.

Focus is about the number of things that you say no to.

Having this framework work is, in my opinion,

more powerful for productivity than just about anything else.

People are always trying to figure out productivity hacks,

but they want to add things to their lives to become more productive,

which is completely counter to what focus even means.

It's getting rid of everything that's not the thing is how you focus.

Now, part of that also means environmentally.

If you have a window that you look outside of, and you've got people who walk past

your office, and people can knock on the door,

or you've got Slack notifications, of course, you're not focused because

all of those things are not the work.

I'm going to give you an analogy here.

Imagine there's a wall that you have to get over.

You have to get a critical mass to get above this wall.

And so you start putting up these ladders against the wall to try

and climb over the wall. This should make some sense.

But as you try to build up the little rungs of the ladder,

so you put four rungs up.

Well, you're not going to get the critical mass required to get over the pump

to actually get the success you want.

But the idea, the fallacy is that, Oh, I'll just do all three or four of these

four of these things and I'll see which one works.

When the reality is that any of them work, but none of them will work

unless you work on one.

We have to take these four rungs that we're able to build

and say, You know what? We're not going to do that.

We're going to put that rung here because I'm going to take that time.

Then I'm putting from I got a second opportunity to put it here.

I'm going to take this rung and put it right here.

Then I'm going to take this rung, and what do you know?

I can get over this hump on top, and I can get to the other side

of the wall, which, of course, is where all the money and all

the happiness and all the girls with beautiful hair.

Look at this beautiful hair. This beautiful hair.

Now, she looks like a bug.

Anyways. Hold on a minute.

There you go.

What's crazy is that this literally happens at all levels of business.

People who are starting out, trying to start five things, people

who are at their second or fifth year.

I talked to a guy last night who has a really good business,

really good margin, 50% margins, has great revenue retention.

He was in cybersecurity. People stay with him.

People pay. He has no problem getting customers.

He has no problem delivering them. I was like, What's the problem?

He's like, Me. He said, I just I get bored.

He's like, I just want to start more things.

I'm like, Yeah, you got to stop that.

The thing is, think about how much more successful you'd be.

So zoom all the way out.

Think of somebody who gets better every single year and works

on the same project for 20 years.

You'd be like, My God, that guy's probably really fucking good.

What's interesting about this is that it doesn't matter what project

the person works on.

You do 20 years of reps and you do nothing else, you're going to be good.

If you know that That's a fact.

That's a certainty that you're going to be good with 20 years of practice.

Then the objective is to just get 20 years of practice in one

thing and stick with it.

So your plans aren't working because the plans are wrong.

The plans aren't working because you're not working on the plan.

The hard part about the plan is not creating the plan or

even following the plan.

It's sticking with the plan.

That's the hard part. All right.

Number five, fear versus regret.

Change is scary, but so is regret.

The life you live depends on the one you fear most.

The more successful version of yourself also has fear.

It's that your fear of regret is greater than your fear of rejection.

Think about that for a second. I'm going to say it one more time.

Your fear of regret must supersede, must be bigger, must be greater

than your fear of rejection.

I remember when I quit my management consulting job, which took me six months.

I'm not saying this from a pedestal. It took me six months.

I decided I wanted to quit.

It took me six Six months before I actually quit.

By the way, you can measure how powerful someone is by the distance between when

they make a decision and what happens in reality.

If you want to feel impotent, then take as long as you possibly can

between when you make a decision and when you act on that decision.

Now, for me, it was six months.

All I did was I called my friends up every night.

I was like, I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to start a business.

We talk every night, literally every night,

and I would be pacing in my condo like, I'm going to do it.

I wouldn't do it. I was too afraid.

I was too much of a scaredy cat.

But the thing that got me over the hump was this.

Number one, I knew that when I looked back on my life,

if I never took the jump, I would have been ashamed of myself,

and I would have felt like I was a pansy.

I was like, I can't die a panse.

I have to be able to make a jump.

Number two, I played out plan B, which is, okay, let's say

I actually completely fail. What happens?

I was like, Well, I'm not really going to be homeless.

I know enough people that I can get food.

I was like, okay, so I'll probably just couch surf.

I'd have a little bit of shame.

But at the end of the day, what would I really do?

Well, I could always apply to get the job that I I had back,

or I could just go to another place with an experience or a story that would

set me up for something cooler later.

All of a sudden, I was like, Wait, so my plan B is that I just have a cool

experience that I could talk about at a job interview or to go to business school?

Okay, that doesn't actually sound that bad.

There was this huge amorphous fear.

But I've just noticed in my life that fear only exists in the vague.

It doesn't exist in the specific.

If you're afraid of something, try and break it into pieces and spell it out.

Play out the next two or three steps.

Because all of a sudden, if you're in the developed Western world,

the downside risk is not really real.

The only real downside risk is the opinions of other people who will say

that you failed, who you don't care about anyways.

But you think you're going to die, but you're not.

You're just going to learn some stuff, and you'll be like, Oh, maybe next time

I'm not going to make that mistake. That's it.

I say this, and it's easy for me to say, but it took me six months

to figure this out.

But I do remember my final straw was the realization that I had at the time,

no girlfriend, no kids, and I had no real financial

responsibilities besides eating and having a place to live.

I said, If I can't make the decision now because it feels too risky,

I will never be able to make the decision.

Because if other people rely on me...

Now, some you, and you're like, Well, Alex, I've got people who rely on me.

Yeah, I would say that it makes it harder.

And what now? Harder and so what?

But for me, that was the thing that got me over the hook.

It was like, If I.