Brutally Honest Truths That Give You an Unfair Advantage in Life

Here are brutally honest truths that will give you an unfair advantage. I'm Alex Shamoszi and the founder of acquisitions.com. It's a portfolio of companies that generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year in aggregate. And a lot of my success in business has come from finding and exploiting unfair advantages. So hopefully this video helps you do the

same. So 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 occurs when you grow, you stretch past your point of

comfort. So even if you're growing a muscle, like you stretch it, 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. So let me explain this. So, you're allowed to be happy before you hit your goal just not satisfied. And so, 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 went into retirement trying to figure out what I

wanted to do. And the thesis that I came out with was that hard work is the goal. And so, 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, , I had a friend this morning who messaged me. They're like

"Why do you still work?" And I was like "Because it's the thing that I enjoy doing most." And when I looked back on my life, when I didn't work, I was bored and felt depressed. And when I do work I am stressed, but I do have moments that I really enjoy as well. I took this

as a foundational truth for me, not for everyone, that there is misery on both sides. So, I might as well be productive and useful. And 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 critics. Now, this is probably easy to say, hard to do. So, let me 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, right? And so a lot of people, and this is 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. And 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 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. So, if I get married, then I eliminate all alternatives to the person that I'm married to. Right? That is commitment, right? Which is very

similar to focus. Focus, if you think of the hypothetical extreme of focus, is that somebody does nothing but one thing. So 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, right? Obviously, we have to put a couple things in. You have to eat food, you

have to sleep, right? 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 is in my opinion, more powerful for productivity than just about anything

else. Right? People are always trying to figure out like 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, right? So, if you like 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 and you've got Slack notifications, of course, you're not focused because all of those things are not the work. So I'm going to give you an analogy here. So, imagine there's a wall that you have to get over. All right? In order to you

have to get a critical mass to get above this wall, right? And so you start putting up, , these ladders against the wall to try and climb over the wall. All right, 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 hump to get the success you want. But the idea, the fallacy is that, , I'll just do all three or 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. And so, we have to take these four rungs that we're able to build and say, what, we're not going to do that. We're going to put that rung here because I'm going to take that time that I'm putting for my second opportunity, put it here. I'm gonna take this rugg and put it right here. And

then I'm gonna take this rug and what do ? 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, , the girls with, , beautiful, beautiful hair. Look at this beautiful hair, right? This

know, beautiful, beautiful hair. Look at this beautiful hair, right? This beautiful hair. Now she's looks like a bug. Anyways there you go. What's crazy is that this happens at all levels of business. Like people who are starting out trying to start five things, people who are at like 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 cyber security. People stay with him, people pay. He has no problem getting customers. He has no problem delivering on 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." And I'm like, "Yeah, you got to stop that." Like, it's like 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 good." And 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. And so if that's a 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, like 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. So, change is scary but so is regret. And so, the life you live depends on the one you fear most.

The more successful version of yourself also has fear. is 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. And so I remember when I when I when I quit my management consulting job, which took me six months, so I'm not saying this from a pedestal. It took me six months of I decided I wanted to quit. It took me six months before I quit. By the way, you can measure how powerful someone is by the distance between when

they make a decision and when it happens in reality. So, 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 6 months. And 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." And I, , we talk

every night, every night. And I would be pacing in my condo like, "I'm going to do it. I'm gonna do it." And 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 and I was like, I can't die a pansy. I have to be able to make a jump. Number two, I played out plan B, which is, okay, let's say I 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, right? And I was like okay, so I would 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 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. And so all of a sudden, I was like, wait, so my plan B is that I just have a cool experience that I can talk about at a job interview or to go to business school. Okay, that's that doesn't sound that bad. And so, there's 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. Like 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 like you think you're going to die, but you're not. You're just going to learn some stuff and you'll be like, " , maybe next time I'm not going to make that mistake." And that's it.

And 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 like 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 of you are in a position where people do rely on you and you're like, "Well, Alex, , I've got people who rely on me."

know, 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 hump. Was like, if I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it. I'm never going to have fewer responsibilities. And to play this

out a little bit more, if you have people who depend on you, their dependencies on you might increase. And so, if you can't do it now, you still might as well do it, right? Because it's only going to go one way. Number six

persistence creates timing. So you can time everything perfectly if your intention is to never stop. I'm going to say this one more time. You can time everything perfectly if your intention is to never stop. So think about this visually. So let's imagine

that this line right here is the is your lifeline. It's life as time passes. Right? Now let's say that you have some special thing that's going to happen here and some special opportunity that happens here and some special opportunity that happens here. What most people try and do is they don't want to

take they don't want to work at all and then they're like, " , I'm just going to work here and then I'm going to work here and then I'm going to work here." But the likelihood that you're there in these three moments is very low if you're trying to time it. But if you work the whole time, then the timing will always be perfect because you will