https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRhArskhqms

1 00:00:00.000 --\> 00:01:00.000 hi my name is alex ramose and i own
acquisition.com and our portfolio companies will do 85 million this year
and i have absolutely nothing to sell you what i want to talk about
today is one of the the pivotal moments of my life that that took me
from uh really just getting into a head-on collision in a dui and having
basically no money to my name to you know 12 months later having three
million dollars in profits not knowing what to do with it there was a
series of decisions that happened in that period of time that radically
transformed my life and so i want to talk to you about one of the more
significant ones today and so uh kind of like i just alluded to leading
into my dui head-on collision i had six gyms two with one partner i had
uh four three with another partner and then i had one on my own so i had
all these kind of weird arrangements that were going on in my life at
that time um i also had a partner that i was doing a 50 50 split for
dental agency work and another and the

2 00:01:00.000 --\> 00:02:00.000 same partner we also had an agency
together for chiropractic agency work i'm also doing in-person gym
launches so that means that i'm i was flying out in person and doing gym
turnarounds and trying to launch gyms and at the time i was so stressed
that i was drinking i mean probably half a bottle every night just to
honestly not to get drunk but just to not be stressed it took me a
really long time to just even like function you know what i mean in the
morning because i was so spread thin mentally and what i want to kind of
talk you through is some of the decisions and how i thought through them
because i don't know where you're at right now and it doesn't really
matter what the scale is of what the decisions are because i've made
decisions like this at multiple times my life i ended up going to an
attention coach i know that sounds ridiculous but i went to a coach to
help me manage my attention and so one of the things that i think us as
entrepreneurs we think about all the time is like you know we're
managing our time we're trying to be productive and i worked every hour
of the day that i was awake and yet i still didn't have that much money
at the time everything was tied up

3 00:02:00.000 --\> 00:03:00.000 and you know the gyms and all that kind
of stuff and cash flow for employees and all that kind of jazz and this
uh this coach had kept telling me he's like you need to you know you
need to aggregate your attention you need to focus he's like you're
spread all over the place i pretty much just like would nod along and
and listen and i tried to do some of the stuff they told me to do but um
i wasn't making i mean i was making some progress but it wasn't until i
drank so much that i ended up getting into a head-on collision about 60
miles an hour on the highway and i actually walked away from that and uh
it wasn't i didn't hit anyone i was actually getting pulled over and
there was a car that was in this in the side the shoulder that was
turned off it was dark and so i was looking over my shoulder um and just
kind of going from lane to lane as i was you know getting into the
shoulder as i was getting pulled over as i was getting pulled over by
the cop in the shoulder there's a black car and i just i nailed it and
so anyways uh they say that because i was drunk i was really relaxed and
that's why i didn't get any injuries who knows but anyways i

4 00:03:00.000 --\> 00:04:00.000 stepped out of the car you know i'm i'm
getting whatever they do you know sign you know sign paperwork whatever
and um the next day uh after layla picked me up from jail as my
girlfriend not um not my wife at the time she was like this guy's a real
winner anyways and so she picks me up and the next day i have a
conversation with him obviously and he's like he's like your lack of
making decisions is going to kill you and i remember him saying that to
me and he was like the reason you're stressed is because you have all
these decisions that you know you should make and you're not making them
i wanted to make this because uh i wanted to talk about probably the the
the second hardest decision i made in my life the hardest decision was
quitting my job probably the second hardest decision was was the
decisions that i had it was a multitude of decisions that i had to make
that i knew i was supposed to make and i just didn't know how to
confront them and it seems like it's a common theme in my life that when
i only make decisions when i'm literally confronted with my own
mortality and so if you notice that as a common theme

5 00:04:00.000 --\> 00:05:00.000 among my stuff it's because for some
reason i can't get myself to decide to do things unless i literally
think i'm going to die and so i saw this and it became the the catalyst
for me making a number of changes in my life and so what i did over the
next you know really the next 48 hours was a rapid series of decisions
that consolidated all my attention um into one thing and so that's what
i want to talk to you about so the first thing i did i called up the
partner that i had the two agencies with and i said hey i can't do this
i'm doing gym agency work where i'm flying out and doing turnarounds i'm
doing dental agency work and we're doing chiropractor hdr i was like i
can't do any of it so i'm i'm just i'm out i just was like i'm out you
can have everything i'm done it was like okay um and that was a horrible
conversation to have because i felt like i was letting a partner down
and then i called up um the partner that i had in uh in in in the the
multitude of gyms more of the gyms um and i said hey you know

6 00:05:00.000 --\> 00:06:00.000 how can we figure out a way for us to
you know walk away i want to do this gym launch stuff um and so you know
we ended up working it out and i basically gave away the gyms at fire
sale numbers more or less i was able to sell uh two of them successfully
in a for a better number but the rest of them i pretty much just gave
away and then uh the partner that i had that i was in the new gym with i
said you know hey i'm i'm i don't i don't want to do this anymore i need
to focus on on gym launch obviously all those conversations did not go
you know super well they weren't super well received but i think i just
was only able to have the courage to do it because i had almost died the
night before and so it just gave me this massive perspective where i was
like am i i'm so afraid of letting these people down that i that i might
die and so i ended up making that all those decisions just in a matter
of like a day or two and and having those conversations and so i think
the the the lesson for me

7 00:06:00.000 --\> 00:07:00.000 um that i've taken with me that's been
the most valuable thing of this is one you won't die when you make those
those calls but second a lot of times i feel like when i was a newer
entrepreneur and even as i feel that as i accumulate unmade decisions
right i think we accumulate these unmade decisions unma un unconfronted
conversations and what happens is there's like a portion of my brain in
my decision making my thinking power that just gets allocated to this
chunk this this decision right that needs to be made that is unmade that
i know i should make and i probably know what the right call is but it's
just sitting there unmade and so it's like as we start accumulating
these things it's like my my actual amount of of thinking power
continues to decrease until you get to the point where you're so
reactive because you have no brain power and as a small like corollary
to that i don't know if you've ever like if you remember when you were a
kid and you had like homework or something like that and you were like
staring at a math problem you can figure it out and um and you know you
you're staying up late into the night you're like whatever i'm gonna

8 00:07:00.000 --\> 00:08:00.000 go to sleep and see if i can think
about the morning and then you wake up the next day and you feel
refreshed and and you look at the problem and it seems obvious you're
like oh it does here it is and then it's done right um i feel like that
is the that is an expression of having far more attention far more
decision-making power far more thinking power um because you can
concentrate on this one thing and all of a sudden it seems easy and i
think that business and life are a lot like that at least they have been
for me where it's like if i feel like like simple decisions are are take
an inordinate amount of effort it's because i'm too distracted i have
too many things too many unmade decisions too many unconfronted
conversations that i need to have and um those can be life conversations
with a spouse it can be conversation with parents they can be
conversations with siblings they can be conversations with business
partners they make conversations with employees they can be decisions
that must be made and i think one of the power most powerful things that
that i've tried to remember is like i'm only one decision away from
changing my life just one decision i'm one decision away from from
changing my life i can quit my job that is one decision right i can
start a business that is one decision these are

9 00:08:00.000 --\> 00:09:00.000 decisions that we have to make at some
point in our life and these are like the crossroads there's two kind of
major major themes that i have one is that most people don't regret
doing things they regret not doing things and so i know that when i die
i don't want to regret not having done things i'd rather do things than
fail so that i do not have the regret and i'll have the experience and
having that kind of thought process has been extremely helpful for me to
draw back to the point of uh this this whole thing when i made these
decisions and layla was with me because she basically said as well after
i got off the phone call with the coach she was like if you don't change
things she's like i'm not like this this has got to change like i'm not
going to be around she kind of indicated that she didn't say it directly
but i think i understood i could read between the lines and i valued my
relationship with her uh more than a lot of the other things that were
going on in my life and i could tell that she was a little bit outside
of the storm that was alex hermosie at the time the storm of chaos and
so she was like you have to make these calls and so i made these calls
physically like phone calls and also these decisions

10 00:09:00.000 --\> 00:10:00.000 and what resulted next was really the
you know i had to suffer the pain of the consequence of those decisions
which was very hard for me um but i felt determined that i had made
those decisions i felt confident and i felt like i had more attention
and more bandwidth at my disposal because i had made the tough calls and
i started believing in myself more because i was like man if i can make
these calls then i can do this next thing and so that was kind of i
would say the explosion that created the beginning momentum of like i
can do this after i basically shut down as many different side projects
as i could that's when i went all in on gym launch and so gym launch
actually was started in 2016 which was probably 2016 into the first half
of 2017 was like the worst 18 months of my entire life and that was also
when i coincidentally met layla my wife so she saw me at the absolute
worst and for some reason decided to stay with me because she believed
which is why she'll always have my my eternal gratitude we made this
call i ended three partnerships i sold

11 00:10:00.000 --\> 00:11:00.000 sold or let go of fire sold you know
at the time i guess if you if you were just trying to number those like
eleven nine businesses or something that was going on and so this is one
of those things where people were like man i have i have i have so many
businesses uh you know et cetera and it's like you have to do them in
the right sequence like i didn't even i wasn't barely making any money
and i had all these businesses so i could feel good about my status when
in reality i knew that i wasn't that successful and so um it was only
when layla was like this gym launch thing is working like all we have to
do is just give it our full attention and it will work at that point i
felt so i want to stay defeated but i also felt like my my slate was
clean right i had cleaned the slate and like i pushed everything off the
side in the face of my of my mortality that the stress of not making
these decisions was going to kill me and so um that's when i just
focused full in on on on gym launch and um and things kind of took off
and i think in another video i'll tell you that story of how how things
actually started there um because i think it's valuable for a lot of
people who are going through it right now um but i guess i wanted to
make this

12 00:11:00.000 --\> 00:12:00.000 video because the the takeaway that i
had from that is that i'm always one decision away from changing my life
and um i'm often one conversation away from getting my attention back
i'm one decision away from getting all my attention back from where i'm
feeling distracted so i don't know where you're at right now but the
most valuable thing that we have as entrepreneurs is not our time but
our attention if we have all of the time but we have a million things
going on we are useless because we have no decision making power we have
no thinking power because little pieces of our brain are being allocated
these unformed unfinalized decisions um that maybe can cost your life
and i don't know i mean it did almost for me which is why i've been so
ruthless with my attention since then um and so and had to by by
consequence so disciplined with my focus it's not because i'm naturally
that way so hopefully this story will illustrate that to you that this
was not something that naturally came to me but was a decision that i
had to make to save myself and so um don't know where you're at right
now my name's alex from rosie we own acquisition.com uh our

13 00:12:00.000 --\> 00:13:00.000 portfolio companies now do about 85
million a year i have nothing to sell you um i made this channel because
a lot of people are broke and i don't want you to be one of them and i
think that everyone has 100 within their control to become the top one
percent of the united states which is already the top whatever percent
in the world so anyways lots of everyone um if you did like this hit the
subscribe button if you didn't love you either way uh and i'll see you
next video bye
