From: alexhormozi
To make 2025 the best year of your life, there are four fundamental steps: eliminate distractions, get started, get better, and never stop [00:00:04].
Eliminate Distractions
Distractions are a significant barrier to success [00:00:09]. As the speaker’s father advised, “rich people buy time, poor people buy stuff; ambitious people buy skills, lazy people buy distraction” [00:00:13]. Your investments of time and money directly reflect what you care about and the person you aspire to become [00:00:29]. If you want to achieve different results, you must align your calendar and budget with your desired identity and goals [00:02:22].
Redefining Your Identity
Your priorities are dictated by what you spend, not just what you say [00:01:55]. To step into a new identity, like transitioning from a girl to a woman, new priorities must match the desired self [00:02:00]. This means making conscious choices and buying stock in that future version of yourself today, both with time and money [00:02:43].
The Role of Commitment
Commitment is defined as the elimination of alternatives [00:03:07]. To truly commit to your main goal, you must eliminate all other things that are not your primary focus [00:03:29].
Avoiding “Bad Friends”
One of the most common distractions is “bad friends” [00:03:49]. If you want better friends, you should get used to seeing current ones less, as better friends are often busy friends [00:03:51]. Consider these five questions when evaluating friendships:
- Would you take it as a compliment if someone said you were a lot like your friend? [00:04:17]
- Are you truly fulfilled by the friendship, or is it just to avoid loneliness? [00:04:25]
- Can you be unapologetically yourself, or do you feel the need to act differently to please them? [00:04:32]
- Do you like who this friend is today, or do you like the idea of who they could be someday? [00:04:42]
- Would you want your future child to be friends with someone like this person? [00:04:50]
Exceptional people are by definition rare, meaning it’s normal to have fewer exceptional friends [00:07:00]. It’s crucial to seek friends who have the same scale of goals and the same level of dedication and commitment to those goals [00:05:33]. Ambitious individuals must get used to periods of solitude as they transition between friend groups that align with their evolving aspirations [00:06:24].
Disregarding Mediocre Opinions
Do not let people with mediocre goals deter you from actions that will make you great, even if it makes you different [00:07:15]. Your ability to delay gratification is a function of intelligence, allowing you to expand the reinforcement window and learn faster despite short-term reward decreases [00:08:14].
“Winners focus on winning, losers focus on winners. And you never receive hate from above, always below, because winners have their eyes on the goal, not on other people.” [00:11:05]
When making big life decisions, you should listen to the people closest to your goals, even if they are not physically close to you [00:10:06]. People’s negative opinions often stem from their own unfulfilled desires or a “poverty lens” worldview [00:11:01]. Develop an armor against snide comments like “you work too hard” or “you’re too obsessed” [00:13:03]. Your standard for yourself should be higher than anyone else’s [00:14:19].
Optimizing Your Environment for Focus
Your environment significantly affects your efficiency [00:15:38]. To build anything great, you must be able to sit still, ignore notifications, and focus on one task for extended periods [00:15:44].
Tactical ways to reduce phone distractions:
- Switch your phone to grayscale, which decreases consumption by 30% [00:19:28].
- Turn off all notifications across all apps [00:19:39].
- Use a “do not disturb” mode so others can’t get through unless it’s an emergency [00:20:01].
- Eliminate entire communication channels, like email, if possible [00:30:01].
Use time blocking and timers to accurately track how long you’re truly working versus how long you think you’re working [00:17:40]. Focus emerges when you eliminate everything else; it’s not about pushing harder amid disruptions [00:18:40].
Get Started
Success is almost always harder, takes longer, and costs more than you initially think [00:20:41]. This difficulty is positive because it builds your character and makes your achievement more rare [00:20:50]. The higher the mountain you climb, the thinner the air and the rarer the climber [00:21:18].
Overcoming Entitlement
Entitlement, the expectation of receiving something without earning it, is a pervasive virus [00:21:38]. The world doesn’t give credit for trying; it gives credit for achieving [00:22:33]. If you find something difficult, reframe it not as a problem with the task, but with your false expectations about its ease or price tag [00:22:47].
“People think success is like watching a marathon, not running a marathon.” [00:23:38]
Success often feels like running a marathon without knowing where the finish line is, requiring you to run alone for extended periods [00:24:15]. The sooner you start, the sooner you get there [00:30:29]. It only takes about 20 hours of focused effort to become decent at anything, but many people delay starting for years [00:30:39].
Abandoning Limiting Beliefs
Eliminate the self-limiting identities and “isms” you claim about yourself (e.g., “I’m not good at math,” “I’m not techie”) [00:25:15]. Your identity is 100% under your control because you control your actions, and “doing is being” [00:30:30].
“No one cares about what happened to you then, only what you can make happen now.” [00:27:25]
Get Better
You only need three things to win: the balls to start, the brains to learn, and the heart to never give up [00:28:40].
Investing in Yourself
You cannot expect someone to invest in you more than you invest in yourself [00:44:40]. Ambitious people buy skills, paying for them with time and money, which means taking resources from other areas [00:45:25]. You are the asset you build, and every investment you make in yourself compounds [00:21:05], as every skill stacks on top of others [00:47:24].
“Don’t invest in Dogecoin. Don’t even invest in the S&P 500. Invest instead in the 500. Invest in you.” [00:50:11]
One way to invest in personal growth is to pay an “ignorance tax” by seeking out and paying for knowledge that accelerates your learning curve [00:48:19]. This can involve joining masterminds, attending conferences, or moving geographically to be near mentors [00:49:03]. The value of a skill is the difference between what you’re currently making and what you could be making once you acquire that skill [00:51:09].
Embracing Failure and Learning
Failure is a requisite probability for taking action [00:40:52]. When you fail, you get feedback, which helps you get better, increasing the likelihood of success [00:41:02].
“Losers stay losers by never being willing to lose. Everyone loses before they win.” [00:41:13]
Your second attempt after a failure often takes twice the emotional effort but half the actual effort, because you now have realistic expectations of what’s required [00:42:17]. The best entrepreneurs have the biggest failure resumes [00:42:48]. The beauty of success is that you often only need to win once for a significant outcome to pay for many previous experiments and failures [00:43:23].
Prioritizing Skill Acquisition
Initially, your goal should not be passive income, but rather to learn how to make money while you’re awake [00:59:27]. Once you have more money than you can reinvest in education and skill acquisition, then you can focus on passive income [00:59:41].
An education investment budget should be a priority [00:59:54]. Spend your savings on education and skills as much as possible, as it’s the closest approximation to buying time and pulling your future forward [00:56:01]. Knowledge and skills are the only things that cannot be taken from you, unlike material possessions [00:39:17].
Never Stop
Staying focused is like beating an addiction: it’s not a one-time victory, but a daily fight against changing distractions [01:01:44].
The Power of “No” and Relentless Effort
To win in business, you need to be able to say “no” without remorse and hear “no” without a loss of enthusiasm [01:02:28]. As you gain skills, more opportunities will emerge, and the true challenge becomes saying “no” to enticing distractions and other opportunities to stay focused on your primary goal [01:03:21].
“When it’s easy, do more. When it’s hard, do different.” [01:09:50]
When things are working, put on blinders and accelerate [01:12:15]. If you’ve never worked 30 days straight, working 10-12 hours a day, try it to realize your true capacity and build resilience [01:12:55]. In the beginning, you have to compensate for fewer skills with more labor and volume [01:18:42].
Micro Speed, Macro Patience
Maintain an obsession with speed in daily tasks, while exercising macro patience for long-term goals [01:18:57]. Ruthlessly question timelines, automate tasks, and eliminate waste to accelerate your progress [01:21:06]. You can compress years of learning into weeks or months by aggressively pursuing knowledge and practice [01:20:51].
“The reinvestment in learning skills never ends.” [01:23:42]
The Rule of 100 (Daily)
Apply the “Rule of 100” daily to ensure consistent effort and improvement [01:27:49]. This includes:
- Reaching out to 100 people [01:27:53].
- Making a post you spent 100 minutes on [01:27:56].
- Spending $100+ on ads [01:27:59].
- Spending at least 100 minutes a day making, improving, and researching ads [01:28:00].
Key Principles for Sustained Growth
- Your work works on you more than you work on it; you are the product being built [01:28:32].
- Everything is unscalable in the beginning, and that’s how you learn every piece of it to become an expert [01:28:41].
- The pain of repetition forces you to seek improvement [01:28:52].
- Complaining is a net loss that wastes energy and loses respect [01:29:43].
- Thousands have succeeded before you; repeating their activities will yield similar outcomes [01:30:26]. If something isn’t working, it means “I don’t know how to make it work” or “I am not good enough to know how to make it work” [01:31:00].
- Business is shockingly simple but surprisingly hard, and the “hard” comes in the form of consistency [01:31:22].
- Nothing hard lasts forever: you either quit, it gets easier, or you get better [01:31:54]. You only lose when you quit before seeing it through [01:31:54].
“Behind mountains are more mountains. Goals aren’t finish lines, they’re mile markers.” [01:25:06]
You did it for the climb, not just the mountaintop [01:25:46]. The lazy don’t know how to start, the losers don’t know how to finish, and the legends don’t know how to stop [01:26:30]. In any game worth playing, you win by staying alive long enough to outlast everyone else [01:27:05]. This highlights the value of hard work and persistence and perseverance in entrepreneurship. It is foundational personal development for success, emphasizing the process over outcomes and the importance of starting personal growth early.