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Copywriting Masterclass, #1 Creator Mistake, 1M Books Sold — Alex Hormozi – Transcript
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Summary
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- Alex Hormozi exclusively writes on days when he has nothing on his calendar and can dedicate six to eight uninterrupted hours.
- Alex Hormozi outlines books with a table of contents first as a game plan, structuring each chapter with a narrative, description, examples, and notes.
- Alex Hormozi explains that the core four activities an entrepreneur can do are cold outreach, warm outreach, paid ads, and content.
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Alex rosi has written two killer business books that together have sold more than one million copies and all that obsessive writing has gotten him to 9 million followers across social media platforms and this is the first interview he's ever done that's all about the writing process one of the things that super distinguishes you is you just like go into Heros cave every morning and you
just write right right so tell me about how you do that I wake up and then I caffeinate and then I put earplugs and headphones on um I close all the windows and I really only write on Bays that I know have at least like six hours or more un interrupted um sometimes eight like I definitely suffer from like zerck effect which is open loop right the idea like
if you have something later on in the day like it it it messes with me a little bit because I feel like I want to be able to lose myself in the writing and then like come up for air whenever I want to come up for air rather than think like I have to be done by this time so that I can prep for this meeting or take this call or do this thing um and so I almost exclusively write on days where I have nothing on my whole calendar and so I optimize a lot of my calendar around when I'm in a heavy
writing season around not having anything at all on my on on it and then when you sit down to write and say at 6:00 a.m. are you like I want to write for six hours these are the things I want want to get done I'm GNA get to- do list how do you think about that man I feel like I'm incredibly unstructured with the writing besides just like violent effort but that's about it like I I write what I write um I never had writer Block in my life I usually have a
game plan of what I'm going to write so like I would say from a writing process perspective I outline a book with what the table of contents is first I think we were talking about that before this started like the table content is the hardest thing I spend my time on once I have that that's like basically the game plan and so each of the chapters I tend to have the same structure because I write the way I would like to read and so I like to have some sort of narrative or story that kind of puts context to
what I'm talking about I also write obviously non-fiction and so this just gives color to that um I give a very short description of what this thing is that I'm that I'm going to be talking about um and then usually plentiful examples and then I will basically put all of my my Alex notes um basically is the end and I pretty much stuck with that setup for all of the books that I've written um and I think that that
setup has just gotten cleaner and clearer between the books um because they fundamentally are like my notes brought to life in a book format um but the hardest part for me is usually picking what story I want to tell um in each chapter that best embodies whatever the principal is or whatever the the the the core message of the chapter is um and what visual framework I can tie to
that that kind of like melts everything together or like ties it all together in a really clear way that's what I spend like I and I usually do words first and I'll then put these highlighted caps marks where I'll say like a picture that looks like this and then I'll move on so I basically do words first then I'll go back through I'll keep cleaning words and then I'll put rough Doodles in and then only at the very end will I come in
and put the final Doodles because sometimes like my orders change and I'll put numbers in a doodle that if I move the paragraph around like I have to redo it um but that's been my My overall process for writing but I just I just write and I write as much as I can until I can't write anymore where I feel like my words pre-uni of time starts to like Drop pretty precipitously tell me about those notes where do they come from is that like a note on your phone is that
stuff that you've written in emails I have so many books to write like right now I have like 20 more books that I have outlined my books are limited by my ability to promote and launch them more than they are limited by my ability to write them uh because I have what I know what my other books would be like I already know what my next two books are going to be yeah um and I write a lot of stuff down because I don't want to forget it like I have
this this Excel sheet that has like 600 stories of my life and when I go back through them I'm like oh yeah I forgot what that happened like and it's like it's it's in some ways it's kind of scary because I'm like man this was my life and I barely remember and I have to like retrace the synapses to like go back into the experience and I think that um a great a great fear of mine is forgetting um and so I write to crystallize um the memory but also
whatever the finding was because I feel like if you can't remember the lesson you might as well not have lived it and learned it and so I spend a lot of time trying to crystallize uh the knowledge into like artifacts that and I refer to my own stuff like I I use my own books for reference I think there's an Indiana Jones quote that I like a lot it's a it's Sean conry who says I think it's Indiana Jones th um and he says uh he says I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember it and uh because he was
like you don't remember it he's like that's why I wrote it down but but it's funny because people write things to remember things but they also write them because they think they'll forget them so it's just kind of this really interesting dichotomy like how how writing serves people different ways yeah so then when you're writing your books it seems like you're really good at crystallizing ideas in your head so when you sit down write leads or offers how much Fidelity do you feel like you had before you started the writing
project versus how much of writing is a process of discovery for you I say it's two-third Discovery one third getting the stuff that I already have out okay yeah like as I'm writing it I'm like o I didn't think about about that I'm going to have to clarify that and that's kind of like I feel like the most exciting part that's the fun part is when I like encounter some apparent conflict between two ideas that I know are both true but seem to be conflicting yeah that's where like all right where's the Nuance here
under what context where where's the through line for this that can create some framework that actually applies to everything and so um the two modes that I use for the Frameworks or even the writing that I have in general is uh util utility and validity h so uh is this true and in how many situations is it true and is it useful H and so for example if I say sometimes things happen
and sometimes things don't incredibly valid not very right now on the flip side a lot of like at least in the non-fictional World a lot of like sales and marketing lore very useful not valid so I can prove a time when there's some sort of tip or trick that works maybe in this scenario but not that scenario and so trying to distill out like what's the fundamental principle that applies to all scenarios is what makes that interesting for me like I have tons of anecdote and that's what creates some of
the stories that are like in the books that I have um but I I call it like how do I break this so I'm like how do I break this model how do I break this truism and if I can't break it I can't think of a way that I'm like it's done like it's good yeah my challenge when I do that is I kind of fall in love with my ideas especially after I've just written them so like if I'm 2 p.m. I did a morning writing session I mean it's like I it's like my mom like you can't say anything bad about her you mean but
like it kind of takes time and so I'm pretty depended on other people that how we break ideas it doesn't sound like you have that same challenge though I definitely rely on my editor but I feel pretty strongly in saying that like I have very little um loyalty to my ideas like I'm very willing to be like oh yeah this is probably not right I'm absolutely married to the truth zero about how we get there right and I think
that's that's um that's at least how I approach this so what do you do you enter these intense writing seasons and is that like a season of no type thing where it's like an official thing so let everybody know I'm GNA be writing and I do say it's a season of no so um Rea team knows that basically like I'll probably cut my calendar down significantly and maximize for full free days and typically during that season I'll only have two days ra te meetings
and so I have five days a week that are completely empty and one of those days will probably get hijacked but I would say I'm pretty good about keeping that schedule because I also really like writing writing has definitely been a um a guilty pleasure um I love writing and it doesn't it doesn't make the most monetary sense for me but I really enjoy it like I was the um VP of the school paper I was the editor-in chief of the
literary magazine when I was in high school I got a full scholarship to toughs for writing um when I was in high school I end up going to VB but like that's so like I I really love writing um and I think that a big part of it is I love learning and I feel like if I really want to understand something I write a book about it yeah and that's been the process and so I love business and so I love the components of business and I come in with like my preconceived ideas these are these anecdotal
Frameworks that I when I have four five six 8 10 Frameworks that all of a sudden start have like a through line that I see I'm like there's a book here but then when I dive in it sometimes sometimes it goes great and I'm like wow I was right and then sometimes I'm like oh my God I was wrong that's when it's like really going through the muck sometimes not as fun but I want to like get to the other side and I know the value of getting to the other side because that's where I feel like you get the most uh fulfillment where you're like this is true like you either talk
to people one onone or you talk to people one to many they're either people who know you they're people are they're not fight me right you I mean it is valid and it's useful I love the idea when you're writing and you feel like you've just got an x-ray vision on how reality works it's like I've looked at a hundred sales letters and I just saw like the core component that just went in all those that for me the line that people say sometimes is I don't like writing I love having written that's how
I feel about the craft it sounds like you enjoy the process a lot more though I like both I really do think I like both I really enjoy writing I do enjoy writing and I enjoy having written those moments where you have those like little mini breakthroughs ever we call them at least my editor we call them like fight me fight me statements we it's like we say his things it's like fight like that is true like there's nothing you can say about that you know and um when it's also useful that's when it's like we create these at least these little monarch to live by tell me about
usefulness you've mentioned this a lot usefulness utility how do you think through that when someone uses this thing because I write non-fiction right and so when someone uses this framework this tool this tactic do they get to the desire they get the desired outcome and so if it is valid um then it is true but if it's not useful to anyone there's no context under which they would actually use it and it would materially change the decision-making process or their
behaviors in a way that would humiliate or make their lives better and so I like the the best frame like the value equation was is probably the core framework of the offerus book right that's the like that was the me that actually took like multiple years before I actually you know crystallize that um but that framework is useful all the time everywhere like it's useful for ads it's useful for sales letters it's used for making offers because fundamentally it's what do
people want right they want things that are fast they want things that are easy and they want things that are risk-free and if you try to find another component that that's that's not one of those variables it's like it probably is one of those variables I have yet to see and maybe we'll see it later um but I I've seen many people will republish the value equation either as their own or they like change the icons but like no one has changed the for like they are
the forward and so I see that as like it is valid now when I see like I think bad Frameworks you can make a framework anything you put a triangle you put three things on it it's a framework right yeah but that's not a good framework because I can break it pretty easily if I see lots of people starting to morph things around then it means that it's not correct right whereas the the like value equation has like stood the tested time at least for now I only a few years but do you know the concept
of Mei so this is they use this a lot at McKenzie different companies like that so it's mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive so an example would be ah we're struggling with our content strategy for the business all right well we got three options we can do more yeah we can do better or we can do different but actually there's no kind of content Improvement plan that isn't part of those
ofs so when people break down problems they'll use the word Mei and then that's how they think about it so it can hit all the options but also all the options are different from each other wholeheartedly agree and that's the that's 100% how I think about it I can't think of something that's where I think breaking the model like if I can think of an example that doesn't fit in this the model's wrong and I just keep doing it until I get those I mean more better news or more better different