Discussion on maintaining a balance between work and marriage, including the need for dates and delineation between work dinners and date nights.

Balancing Work and Marriage

Strategies for maintaining productivity and quality of work output, including the concept of minimum effective dose for each goal.

Effective Work and Rest

Discussion on supporting each other's ambitious goals and the sacrifices and understanding required in a partnership.

Supporting Each Other's Goals

Reflection on a disagreement in business decisions and the importance of effective influence and communication in a partnership.

Challenges in Working Together

Insights into the moments that solidified the relationship and the importance of respect and communication in a successful partnership.

Relationship Dynamics

Discussion on effective communication methods, including writing to each other and taking breaks to diffuse emotions during conflicts.

Communication and Conflict Resolution

Insights into the non-negotiables and agreements in the relationship, including prioritizing the marriage over the business.

Non-negotiables and Agreements

Understanding the concept of different seasons in a relationship and the importance of creating space to be missed.

Quality Time and Seasons

**Welcome to Our Special End of Year Q&A Couples Edition**

*Enjoy our special Q&A couples edition where we answer your burning questions about relationships, work-life balance, and more.*

**Quality Time and Communication**

- We prioritize quality time together, whether it's going out to expensive restaurants or chilling at home and watching movies.
- Our need for dates is proportionate to how much we're working, and we adjust accordingly.
- We delineate date night versus going out to eat to make it special, and we communicate openly about our expectations and needs.

**Maintaining a Work-Life Balance**

- We believe in effective work rather than working 24/7, and we prioritize our marriage when our work output drops.
- We recognize that achieving big goals requires sacrifice and understanding from both partners.

**Communication and Resolving Issues**

- We recognize when we're not communicating well and find different methods to communicate effectively.
- We give each other space and time to think before responding, and we're willing to let things go when needed.

**Non-Negotiables and Agreements**

- We have mutual agreements and understand that expectations may change over time, and we're willing to adapt to each other's needs.
- We prioritize respect and understanding in our relationship, and we give each other the space to grow and change.

**Achieving Success Together**

- We believe that we could have achieved success individually, but it would have been harder and taken longer without each other.
- Finding the right business partner is crucial, and we feel fortunate to have found each other.

**Work-Life Balance as Business Owners**

- We understand that we may not always get what we want in terms of spending time together, and we accept that and find other ways to fulfill ourselves.
- We create space to be missed, and we cherish the time we do get to spend together.

We are beyond grateful for your support over the last year and can't wait to spend the next year with you. Keep being 1 of 0. 2024.

"Mastering Work-Life Balance and Communication in Relationships"

Go to expensive restaurants and watch movies at home

Have business dinners and go to five-star restaurants

Go to Jimmy John's, Chick-fil-A, and Chipotle

Go to fancy restaurants and go out for work

By going to business dinners and eating at five-star restaurants

By physically changing environments and writing to each other

By avoiding the issues and letting them go

- The video is a Q&A couples edition where they answer questions about maintaining a work-life balance as a married couple
- They discuss their date nights, communication, and working together in their business
- They emphasize the importance of respect and understanding in their relationship
- They also talk about their individual moments of realizing their partner was the one for them

- The couple values respect and communication in their relationship, using texting and changing environments to resolve conflicts.
- They have non-negotiable agreements and prioritize their marriage over their business.
- They believe in low expectations and high commitment in a relationship.
- They prioritize quality time together and understand the need for individual fulfillment in their busy schedules.

Layla shared insights from the book "Mating in Captivity" by Esther Perel, emphasizing the importance of creating space to be missed in a relationship. The speaker expressed gratitude for the support received and looks forward to the coming year with their audience.

A married couple discusses maintaining work-life balance and relationship dynamics in a Q&A video. They emphasize respect, communication, and prioritizing their marriage over their business. They value low expectations and high commitment, and prioritize quality time together. They also share insights from "Mating in Captivity" and express gratitude for support from their audience.

Want to SCALE your business? Go here: https://acquisition.com 
Want to START a business? Go here: https://skool.com/games 

If you’re new to my channel, my name is Alex Hormozi. I’m the founder and managing partner of Acquisition.com. It’s a family office, which is just a formal way of saying we invest our own money into companies. Our 10 portfolio companies bring in over $200,000,000+ per year. Our ownership stake varies between 20% and 100% of them. Given this is a YT channel, and anyone can claim anything, I’ll give you some stuff you can google to verify below.

How I got here…

21: Graduated Vanderbilt in 3 years Magna Cum Laude, and took a fancy consulting job.
23 yrs old: Left my fancy consulting job to start a business (a gym).
24 yrs old: Opened 5 gym locations.
26 yrs old: Closed down 6th gym. Lost everything. 
26 yrs old: Got back to launching gyms (launched 33). Then, lost everything for a 2nd time. 
26 yrs old: In desperation, started licensing model as a hail mary. It worked. 
27 yrs old: "Gym Launch" does $3M profit the next 6 months. Then $17M profit next 12 months.
28 yrs old: Started Prestige Labs. $20M the first year.  
29 yrs old: Launched ALAN, a software company for agencies to work leads for customers. Scaled to $1.7mmo within 6 months. 
31 yrs old: Sold 75% of UseAlan to a strategic buyer in an all stock deal. 
31 yrs old: Sold 66% of Gym Launch & Prestige Labs at $46.2M valuation in all-cash deal to American Pacific Group. (you can google it)
31 yrs old: Started our family office Acquisition.com. We invest and scale companies using the $42M in distributions we had taken + the cash from the $46.2M exit.
32 yrs old: Started making free content showing how we grow companies to make real business education accessible to everyone (and) to attract business owners to invest or scale their businesses. 
34 yrs old: I became co-owner of https://Skool.com to help the many people who want to start a business online do so.

Today: Our portfolio now does $200M/yr between 10 companies. The largest doing $100M/yr the smallest doing $5M per year. Our ownership varies between 20% and 100% ownership of the companies. Many of them we invested in early and helped grow (which is how we make our money - not youtube videos).

To all the gladiators in the arena, we’re all in the middle of writing our own stories. The worse the monsters, the more epic the story.

You either get an epic outcome or an epic story. Both mean you win. 

Keep crushing. May your desires be greater than your obstacles. 

Never quit,

Alex

*FULL DISCLOSURE* 
I make content to make money - just - on a longer time horizon than most. I want to build trust with business owners so we can find the best ones and help them scale. And if they’re awesome, write them a check and go all the way as partners.

How do I maintain being a husband that is present with my wife while also consistently grinding to achieve my goals?

Welcome to our special end of year Q&A couples edition.

You guys have questions and we may or may not have good answers to them.

Expensive restaurants, chill at home, etc.

I think we go out to expensive restaurants sometimes, and sometimes we chill at home and just like watch movies and do nothing.

I will say that our need for dates is proportionate for how much we're working.

So if we are working a lot, we will need to take dates.

If we're not working a ton, We kind of have enough time with 1 another intermittently that I feel like our need for like carving out time goes down a lot.

For me, I delineate date night versus going out to eat because for context, we go out to eat pretty much every night of the week.

And so what makes it special if you go out all the time, like is it the fanciness of the restaurant?

Not really, because we do a lot of business dinners and things like that.

So we go out to like five-star restaurants probably 3 nights a week.

My point was that the difference between going out for a business dinner and going out on a date is that I dress up.

And by dress up it means I don't wear this.

And so that's the, yeah, I shower, I put deodorant on, and I don't wear a hat.

That's actually, in my opinion, the main delineation between going out to eat for work or whatever, versus when we go out and actually do a date.

If we do an at-home version of that, It's like we're going to watch a movie together that we both feel like watching.

It's like ice cream at home, She'll pick out all the chunks, all the good ones, and then she'll just leave me like vanilla.

I feel like when we have like 17 pints of ice cream, that's acceptable.

Like a used corpse that just got like all of its organs taken

You just sacrifice yourself as a husband so you can achieve your goals.

To give an actual realistic answer to the husband who asked that question, no 1 works effectively 24 hours a day.

It's about doing effective work, not just sitting in front of the computer pretending to be productive.

And I say pretending, not that this person is, but like I would be pretending to be productive, productively procrastinating.

Like if you know that your work output drops per unit of time, and I usually know what type of work I'm doing.

So for me, if I'm editing, I know how many paragraphs I can edit per unit of time, or how many pages I can type, or how many slides I can make a presentation.

So if you have work that you are comfortable knowing what your rate of progress is, if I start seeing that drop a lot, I usually call it because then my quality of work also goes down because the next day I have to fix all the stuff anyways.

So the TLDR is when your output goes down, sub that with a higher ROI thing.

So it's like, if I have 16 hours of awake time per day, if I do 15 hours of work in 1 hour of marriage time, I'll get a really high ROI on that first hour of marriage time.

And so like optimizing around life is like the ROI I get from that 1 hour is worth dropping the last hour of work.

And so I think I try and think about it like that.

It's like, what's my minimum effective dose for each goal?

And usually you can still heavily index on achieving your goals because it usually takes more time than your marriage does.

And then have the time when you do need to rest and recharge to be dedicated to your spouse.

And I think it's also like seasons, you know, like when you're writing a book.

I think in the very beginning, when you did the first bout where I realized like, oh, we're not going to have a lot of time with each other.

It took me a minute to like accept that we all are gonna go through seasons like that in our lives and the bigger your goals are 1 I think the more understanding you need to be as a partner for that person because the bigger the vision they have for their lives the more that you're going to have to recognize that that requires sacrifice and bouts.

You having those big goals for yourself was the first time in a relationship that I had a man who had bigger goals for himself than I even had for myself, which I was grateful for and I'm grateful because I felt like the relationship that many times I had in the past was distracting from my goals.

Whereas it should propel you faster to your goals because you support each other in a way that creates an environment where it's easier for each of you to hit your goals than harder.

And I think a lot of people make it harder for their spouse to hit their goals than easier.

There's always going to be times where we're gonna give each other leftovers and it is what it is.

But I think what we're really good at doing is we communicate about it.

And it remains an open dialogue versus like complaining to other people or being passive aggressive.

And I think a lot of spouses have unrealistic goals for 1 another.

And what that means for me is that like, you have to accept the trade off for the thing that you want most.

And so if you want a spouse who's super goal-oriented and super ambitious, the trade off, the price tag for that is that they're going to work more and their schedule is not going to be as flexible.

They're not going to be able to go drop of a hat, get away weekends and vacations and stuff if that's the season they're in.

And so I just think it's unfair of either spouse to have dual desires of things that conflict.

And so you just have to, in my opinion, pick the 1 that matters more to you.

I think we have just changed our expectations over time so that they actually meet reality.

And so if this individual is upset or feels like expectations of what he, quote, should be doing as a husband is not what he's currently doing.

He either needs to change the expectations of what he needs to do to be a good husband or he needs to accept that this is actually the new normal for whatever season he's in.

Was there ever a time where you felt you shouldn't or couldn't be working together?

I think the only time that I ever even questioned us working together was the 1 fight we got into.

Basically we had a large disagreement on where to take the business and what decision to make with our software business.

I think we like locked ourselves in a room for like 2 days because we realized we completely disagreed.

But I, in a way, realized from that experience that I allowed him to take full responsibility for the outcome by not using better skills of influence to try and get him to see my point.

Instead, I was just very frustrated and I gave up and I was like, screw it, whatever, we'll do it your way.

What I don't have to do at that point is take responsibility for an outcome.

Every time that you kind of do that in a conversation, what it really was doing was like, this is a really scary decision and now I'll just let Alex take responsibility for the outcome.

1 of the things that Layla's improved a lot on is, I used to be like, sell me on it.

Like, I wanna believe you, but I'm not sold.

She would just say like, this is what we need to do, even though there was like a mountain of a hundred things behind it.

She would just say the end of the problem, of the math problem, but it was like, show your work.

I don't get how you went from here to here.

And I just, I didn't see the dots connecting.

People see us now and they're like, you guys have really good partnership.

And communication, it was really hard for the first

Yeah, we've only had 1 real big argument in our careers.

It was even about like relationship stuff.

I don't think I'm a good training partner.

Historically, I don't train well with many people.

You also don't like that trainer who's yelling at you to be your spouse.

So instead of him yelling at me and me doing the exercise, I just go, why are you yelling at me?

Actually, I think now if we train together, it would be completely different to be fair.

I actually just like going to the gym and listening to music and not talking to anybody.

Yeah, so we go to the gym at the same time and we don't work out together.

We love the car ride there and the car ride back.

Yeah, we actually, yeah, we enjoy the car ride.

When did you know she was the 1 that was a fit for you as your spouse and her the same to you.

I was waiting for you to say, how'd you know I was the 1?

You looked at me creepily and I was like, that's how I knew.

She looked at me like I was a piece of meat.

Big moment number 1 was when you went to Hawaii and sold your ass off when we weren't together.

So we split for like 30 days so she could do a launch.

I had just split with 2 different business partners in the last 30 days.

Like it was all of this happened in like a 60 day period.

Honestly, it was just because she stood tall when everything else was crumbling around me.

And I didn't deserve the loyalty that she chose to show me.

You stood tall and like basically followed through with my commitments even though you didn't owe me anything.

Because I basically made the agreement to the stint order that we'd launch it.

But like we broke up, she could have just left and gone home like that.

When I lost everything the second time, Layla was like, I would sleep with you on her bridge if it came to that.

I was like, I like you, but like I respect that if you don't find me respectable at this moment because I have nothing.

And so that was, I mean, honestly, there's probably 2 big moments for me.

Yeah, we had all the hardship in the beginning of our relationship.

Like all the hard stuff was before we got married.

1 of them was after you got the DUI and...

No, I mean, and then I was like, what's he gonna do next?

You just completely turn shit around when you see someone there and like their darkest moments like what are they gonna do and he just just went right through it and picked his shit up and was like, I'm not going to fucking indulge myself in that.

And I would say the second time is when, maybe 9, 10 months in the relationship, and I felt like, I wonder if he's ever going to let me in.

And we were at 1 of your old gyms and somebody was saying something and then you looked to me and you said Well, I'd really like your opinion and I was like And in that moment I was like, I think he's making an effort To be more collaborative and then he did and then you like fat like very quickly accelerated in terms of like your team board.

If there was ever something that we built a relationship on, the bedrock has been respect, not love.

I think feeling in love can come and go, but at least for me, respect is more unchanging.

Well, yeah, I think all feelings are fleeting and respect is like when I look on paper at this person and their character and I admire this person's character there are gonna be moments when people are in a relationship where they're like fuck this person you fucking so annoying whatever everyone has those moments everyone has those thoughts But when someone has like really outstanding character and they're a respectable person, it's much easier in this moment to be like, I'm proud to be married to this person.

And you're not gonna be feeling super romantic most of your life.

Like you're gonna be working at your job, you're gonna be with friends, you're gonna be out, You're gonna be running errands, you're gonna be stressed, you're gonna be dealing with life shit, you're gonna be with family, you're gonna have kids, like all these things.

And so it's like in all of those moments, outside of like the fairy tale 60 minutes every 2 weeks you get, like how do you feel about that

If not, what do you do to communicate so well?

I think that we're fairly good at recognizing when we're not communicating well, and we usually try a different method of communicating.

Oftentimes we step away and then we write to each other.

Because it gives us time to look at our thoughts before we say them to each other.

Number 1 hack, we text when we're angry, which is actually like seems like opposite.

No, it's like, Let me clearly think out what I'm trying to say, and then I say it, and then I reread it, and then I read hers, and I'm like, okay, she's saying this.

And it creates more space between the communication so you can think about your response.

And so for us, I think it's just decrease the emotionality that we resolve things with.

I do think that 1 of the keys besides the text thing is that we physically change environments.

So it's like, if you're in a TIF in the kitchen, if she goes to the living room and I go to my office and we text, it's like we both physically change environments.

I would also say that, you know, we are busy.

And so oftentimes we need to go do something and then we just come back to it later and half the time we're like, yeah, let's just fucking forget about it.

Like we're like, it's not even like we were just both whatever in the moment, it doesn't matter.

Yeah, and I think 1 thing that we do well is we're willing to just like let shit go.

What are the non-negotiables in your relationship if any it's

Yeah, it's funny because I think we talked about them more around when we got married and now they're just facts

Yeah, actually they were the negotiables They were like what are the things that we both mutually agree to and if we want to change 1 of these agreements We both need to agree on it.

Otherwise, we stick with what our commitment was.

This will be, quote, unhealthy in the marriage world.

But I actually told Leila, I was like, the business comes before our marriage.

That was the first 3 years of our marriage.

Yeah, so people get divorced because of money issues.

So feed the business, the business feed us.

Then we were both miserable at like 3 year point and Layla and I sat on the bench 1 day outside of our house and we were like, I don't like this.

And she was like, I don't like this either.

And we were both like, I wouldn't want to continue this way.

And she, I know going into that conversation was afraid like, well, what if Alex just like, this is what he likes and this is what he thinks normal.

And honestly, if I'd said like, I love this, this is great.

I think Layla would have been like, this doesn't work for me.

And on the flip side, if it had been the same way with Layla, I probably would have been like, it won't work for me.

And so we tweaked how we were going to work.

And so we said, well, if we're miserable, we won't stick with the business.

So we were like, let's make our marriage first.

And if we're happy, then the business will win or not.

And so when we flipped it, it actually tremendously improved our lives.

I was like, I think we 3 extra marriage this year when we made that change.

And she was like, only an entrepreneur would say that.

But yeah, we definitely tripled that year.

When we got married, we both looked at like the highest success marriages are people who have low expectations and high commitment.

I'm going to expect that you're going to not change and not only that, you might get worse.

And I'm still committing to this provided you don't change your values and what you wanna do, things like that, like the big core things.

In order to have a relationship where 2 autonomous people can be together, you have to give each other that space to just experiment, do what you wanna do, find yourself at times, change, adjust, you know what I mean?

Not freaking out about things not being to your expectations or to your desires.

It just lowers the pressure in conversations.

Like the reason a lot of people split up during like engagements is because whenever you have conversations, you're like, wait, you didn't pick up your socks.

Does that mean that you're never gonna pick up your socks for the rest of my life?

And for the rest of my life, I'm gonna see socks on the floor?

And so I think just being like, huh, I don't like this.

And if I forget by the next time we talk, then it's probably not that big of a deal.

And the flip side is if everything is super so easy, like you just like let everything roll off, it's like usually just not confronting shit.

Because no 1, no 2 people are perfect together.

Like there's just always, like they're your people.

You have tons of different things and communications and things like

We both know that both of us have these things that are huge strengths for us.

And so then we each get to deal with each other's like downsides of those strengths, you know, which, you know, 1 for me is like super high activity, high output driven, can get a fuck ton of shit done.

I also care so much about so many things that I tend to stress more over stuff.

And I'm super, super distracted for the most part.

I can seem aloof and disinterested in a lot of small stuff, which I think a different spouse might interpret that as Alex doesn't care about me.

It's just been like, oh, Alex just doesn't care about any of this stuff.

And that's not a reflection of his care for me.

He doesn't, it's not even that he doesn't care.

I always appreciated it was that Leila never tried to change

I think we seek each other's opinion on things because we respect each other's opinion, not because we need the approval.

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Answering Juicy Questions About Our Relationship