Moza nation real quick. If you are a business owner that has a big old business and wants to get to a much bigger business, going to 5100 million dollars plus, we would love to talk to you. And if you like that or would like to hear more about it, go to acquisition.com.

You can play anywhere on the page and talk to one of our team and see if we can help you get there. When I have any stressors in my life, I'm saying that I'm choosing, my brain is choosing to make meaning out of this when there was no meaning to be made to begin with. And so by doing that, I can play the notes of the piano of meaning that happen across the occurrences and circumstances in my life.

Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. Hope you enjoy and subscribe. In March of 2019, my wife and I were walking together after just having finished a $4.4

million month. And she turned to me and she said, alex, let's just shut it all down. She's like, I'm so tired of this.

I'm so burnt out. I just don't want to do this anymore. And it was at that moment that I realized that in order to progress in the entrepreneurial game, we had to change the way we operated, the way we thought.

And so if you're an entrepreneur and you're a business owner, the number one thing that I've seen that creates success is longevity, meaning that you can continue to play the game, because at the end of the day, none of us is going to quit business or hopefully not quit business. And so in order to decrease the likelihood that we quit, which is the only way to fail, we have to think through our problems with a defined framework. And so rather than focus on the actual framework of the decision making, what I want to do is focus around the state in which you can manage your own thoughts, right? And so I've had to deal with plenty of stressors, as you can imagine.

So if you're stressed in your own business right now, like add a zero to whatever your revenue is, and you'll have ten times the potential for stress if you were ten times bigger or 100 times the stress if you were 100 times bigger, which that depends on who's listening, we may be that for you. And so I can tell you truthfully that the way that I've been able to eliminate pressure, which has created longevity in the game for me has been through four strategies that actually work in the real world for me. So the first that I do whenever I have any kind of negative situation is I go 1000 x negative, all right? And then I reevaluate.

So let me explain what that means. So if, for example, there's something that's bad that happens, we get a bad review, or we get a client's upset, or I have an employee who says something bad to another employee or employee that's key leaves, or someone tries to a competitor steal stuff and then starts back, whatever it is. There's a million problems in Go business, or you have cash flow issues, or you can't make payroll.

Whatever it is. Right. I like to think of this one as my first, this is my first line of defense.

The first thing I think about is if this were to happen a thousand times more, right? And this works really well with what I would consider like minor to medium sized grievances. So things that happen that are kind of everyday business that can bother you for a day or two days or a week, right? Well, if you can just shorten that loop of that cycle of you being disturbed because the thing is lots of those things are going to happen every single week. A lot of times you just don't know about them, right, depending on the size of your business.

And so I just happen to know about it. Now, first off, I like to think about that. But second is I'll do this right, which is I'll imagine that every day in my life this happens whatever that thing is, right.

Customers upset. Now, obviously if it's a core issue, you have to resolve it. But in terms of it happening in my affect over my emotional reaction to it, then I think to myself, well, if this happened every single day and this happened every hour of every day, at some point I would become desensitized to it, right? Because I had so much stimulus of this, I would not be able to have an emotional response.

And so when I think and I imagine myself experiencing this negative thing over and over and over and over again it's called negative visualization then what ends up happening is I become immune to it. And so I think to myself, well, if I can become immune to it after a thousand tries, I can become immune to it on the first try because it means nothing has actually changed, only my perspective on the occurrence. And in so doing, you can shortwire yourself to that end outcome and then fast forward it to the present so you can live the rest of your day or less of your week without being emotionally disturbed.

And when you do that, at least for me, I feel like I make better decisions. And so I think for most of us as entrepreneurs and business owners, we are judged by the marketplace, by the quality of our decisions. That's ultimately what it is, right? It's just how good are the quality of the decisions that we make.

And so if I can decrease the likelihood that I make bad decisions, and I can do that on a regular basis, then this is something that protects my mind. And candidly, it's what makes life worth living. The second thing that I'll do is that when I'm preparing for something that I need to start doing right, because there might be habits or things that you need to start doing.

This is a slightly different example, but I'm giving you the four different strategies that have worked really well for me. The second one is, let's say you wanted to start working out because you're like, you know what? I've been neglecting my health, or you want to start eating healthy or whatever it is, right? Those are fitness examples, but just go with me. What I will do is I will expect the worst circumstance, all right? So rather than saying, okay, I'm going to go work out and feel excited, right, to go work out, I'm super pumped.

What I want to do is I want to plan and prepare my mental state for when it comes to workout. When it comes time to work out, I'm going to be exhausted. I'm not going to have slept well.

I'm going to have a lot of business stress. And so I have to expect that going into every workout. Now, if I don't have that happen, then it's a bonus rather than expecting nothing to be my mental state.

And then when something bad does happen, then I have this reason, right? And so it literally does go into truly expecting the worst case scenario and making the preformed decision to act anyways despite that because you have planned for it. So most people, most humans have really good psychological resilience if we brace for it. So if you're about to give someone bad news, for example, you actually have to let them, hey, this is bad news.

Hey, you might want to sit down for this, because people actually are very resilient if you give them a moment to emotionally brace themselves. And so what we're doing here is using this bracing technique on ourselves in advance of a situation that is likely to occur at some time between now and when we die, especially if it's a habit that has to be ongoing, right? And so what I do is I emotionally brace for the worst scenario. All right, that's number two.

Real quick, guys. You guys already know that I don't run any ads on this, and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys that you help me spread the word so we can help more entrepreneurs make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers.

The only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I ask you to do is you can just leave a review. It'll take 10 seconds or one type of the thumb, it would mean the absolute world to me.

And more importantly, it may change the world for someone else. The third thing that I do and this is probably the one that I use the most it's really the one that I use the most, actually. I'll say that one for last.

A different version of this, the emotional brace is an extreme version, right? So kind of this is imagine the thing that you just said happened that bothered you for a thousand times, and it stops affecting you. The second one is you emotionally embrace yourself. The third one is you imagine worst case.

All right? Now, the point here is kind of like a pain anchor, okay? And so what I mean by a pain anchor is it gives you perspective on your current issues, right? So for this, for example, whenever you've had a family member die or someone close to you die, or some of you even have a pet die, depends on where you're at in your life, right? If you have something that was painful for you, right? All of us benefit. We get the gift of perspective from those who die. That's one of the final gifts that any death occurs that's in your proximity will give you.

Right? And so for me, I think about that negative situation. I really, like, try and soak myself in it, really try and put it on and walk around in what that painful state would be. Whatever.

Whatever worst case scenario I can imagine, it might be death of a spouse, it might be death of a parent, whatever, right. Or a child. Something horrific, right? But if I can truly allow myself to go there, then what happens is I get so much context and perspective on the little thing, like somebody bashing a piece of content or someone saying that they hate your ad or whatever.

It might be the thing that is deriding you. And all of a sudden, that problem becomes massively minimized, right? It becomes almost inconsequential. And what I found is that over my life in the business, there's an infinite amount of problems.

Truly, like, there's an unlimited amount of problems. I could think of so many things we should be doing or we could be doing better or should not have happened, right? But it's only because we put the word should in front of it that we have an expectation that is different than reality, which creates the friction in our minds. It creates the dissonance, it creates the unhappiness that we have.

And so if I can imagine the worst case scenario and then actively minimize my current situation, then I usually can get right through it. And most times what I found is that most problems shrink into irrelevance within broader context. They actually never get solved.

We just realize that we just don't care and that they are no longer meaningful to us. And so that has been something that's been very useful for me as we've grown, because, frankly, the bigger your company gets, the more ability and potential you have to become stressed. And I think most of us are here for freedom.

And so if you want freedom, then you have to, or at least for me, I have found that I have to manage my mental state in order to continue to make high quality decisions. And so that leads me to the last one, which is probably my my favorite and most used one that I use on anything. And this may bother some of you, and that's okay.

This is an n sorry, universe, is that this is a worldview that I have. So don't be triggered. Don't take offense to this, but I'm telling you what has worked for me.

And so I believe that the universe will continue to expand until eventually everything becomes a fine mist over a long enough time horizon. The sun will give out, all stars will extinguish, and then everything will just become a fine mist. And as silly as that may sound, it means that anything that we do, this video, anything that I accomplish in this world will eventually disappear and be meaningless.

And so some people find that incredibly depressing. I don't. I find that to be incredibly meaningful because it means to me that I'm allowed to I am the only person that ascribes meaning to anything, because it means that nothing has inherent meaning.

And so that means that when I have any stressors in my life, I'm saying that I'm choosing my brain is choosing to make meaning out of this when there was no meaning to be made to begin with. And so by doing that, I can play the notes of the piano of meaning that happen across the occurrences and circumstances in my life. And so when I think about it in this context, everything shrinks into irrelevance.

And so a lot of the concepts around, like, I want to build a legacy. I want to make an impact. I want to leave a dent in the universe.

You're not you're probably not going to leave a dent in the universe. And even if you made some big advancement, within 500 years, it'll probably be forgotten. And that would be like, if you're the top 1%, right? It's unlikely, but it is 100% likely that over a long enough time horizon, everything will disappear, right? And by doing that for me, it decreases the pressure that I put on myself for having to I must, I should I have to like, I can't live without those thoughts that strangle me, right? Those are the things that destroy my ability to make decisions, because I come way more emotional as a result of them.

And so whenever I have any kind of negative occurrence or any stressors that come up in my life, which are inevitable, I use this as my ultimate frame of reference. This is my ultimate trump card that I use to keep my emotions at bay and ultimately say I am the master of my own universe. I get to decide what has meaning.

And for me, I'll tell you what I have found most meaningful for me, is that my purpose in life, to my knowledge at this point, is to learn. I love learning. And so that is why I make these videos, because I feel like I am able to better learn how to think, I'm better learned how to run businesses, I can better learn all of the aspects of everything by teaching it right.

And I'm sure if you ever did a book report when you were in high school, you learned the one chapter you had to do your book report on or give a presentation on way better than any of the other chapters. Because when you have to teach something, you have to learn it better. You have to learn the nuances of what makes something work.

And so for me, even cataloging these things has been useful for me because I think these are all the things that I do. But now I have a process that I can continue to use rather than use haphazardly just because I've just trained myself over time doing this. And so I don't know where you're at in your business career.

If you're at seven figures or at eight figures or multi figures, you have multiple companies, whatever it is, right? This has been so personally impactful for me that it has helped me be in this for the long haul. Because if nothing has meaning except for what I choose to give meaning, then it means I can choose to only play games that I find meaningful. And by extension, I will not fall out of the game or quit, because the thing that I'm doing is the thing that I derive the most meaning from.

And so I will be able to outlast longer players in that pursuit. And what happened is, for me, my life becomes a glorification to an ideal that I create. And so for me, like the content, I will do everything I can to continue to improve on this.

I'm paying coaches, I'm going through courses to try and make the lessons that I have more engaging, more entertaining, more educational, have more stories woven into them so that hopefully I can transfer these things to someone else. Because that is what I find meaningful. Not because it is eternally meaningful, but just because that ideal to me has meaning.

And so that is something that I believe is the eternal. Values are eternal, and values will exist even when everything disappears in the universe. And so for me, I choose to dedicate my content to those ideals.

