The Young Man Who Figured It Out Faster Than I Did

I spend a lot of time reading, watching, and studying people who are smarter than me.

It is a habit I picked up early and never dropped.

When I was an apprentice electrician, I studied the journeymen who ran circles around me.

When I was a foreman, I studied the general foremen who ran projects I could not yet run.

When I started my own business, I studied the people who had already built what I was trying to build.

Most of what I know, I learned from watching someone else do it first.

I paid attention.

I took notes.

I applied what worked and discarded what did not.

So when I tell you that Alex Hormozi has put together the simplest, smartest roadmap for success I have ever seen, I am not saying it lightly.

I have been studying frameworks and mental models for over forty years.

I have read more than a thousand books.

I have built a career, a retirement, and a business on principles that took me decades to assemble through scar tissue and trial and error.

This young man took all of it and distilled it into a six-step plan that anyone can follow.

I watched a video of his recently.

The title is If I Wanted to Make My First $100K in 2026, I’d Do This.​

It is under twenty minutes long. And if you are a man in your twenties or thirties who feels stuck, who feels like the world is passing you by, who feels like you are working hard but going nowhere, I want you to watch it.

After you read this, go watch it.

But first, let me walk you through what he said and why it matters.

I am going to give you the framework.

I am also going to give you the scar tissue that proves it works.

The Money That Changes Everything

Hormozi has made a lot of money.

Forty-two million in distributions.

A forty-six-million-dollar exit.

A hundred and six million in a single weekend.​

But he will tell you that the moment he felt the richest was not any of those.

It was when he had a hundred thousand dollars in his bank account.

Before that, he was sleeping on a gym floor and doing math on whether he could afford groceries.

Once he had that first hundred thousand, he stopped having to worry about tomorrow.

• Bills
• Rent
• Car insurance

The constant low-grade panic of whether the numbers would clear.

He framed it plainly.

You cannot think about your long-term vision if you are trying to pay rent.

That is just real.

I know exactly what he means.

I spent my years after high school lost.

I was living at home.

Working part-time at a restaurant.

Training in aikido because it was the one thing that made sense.

Everything else was noise.

I did not have a hundred thousand dollars. Fuck I did not have a thousand dollars.

I did not have a plan.

The first time I felt like I could breathe, like I could actually think about the future instead of just surviving the present, was when I got into the union and my income stabilized.

I remember my first year as an apprentice. What I call my "Top Ramen and quesadilla days."

But after my 2nd, then 3rd year, I was not worrying about money anymore.

Suddenly I was not doing math on groceries.

I was thinking about what kind of life I wanted to build.

That shift changes everything. Hormozi nailed it.

Step One: Cut Every Cost That Does Not Keep You Alive

His first step is brutal.

You cut all costs so you can take more risk.

No eating out.

If it is not from a discount grocery store, you do not buy it.

The clothes you have right now are your clothes for the next two years.

You go to work and you go home, and home is as cheap as you can make it.

Alex split a bedroom in a six-bedroom house with another guy.

They stared at each other across the room every night.

He was paying three or four hundred dollars a month while his business was beginning to make real money.

He stayed there anyway.

His point is not that poverty is noble.

His point is that every dollar you spend on comfort is a dollar you cannot spend on getting ahead.

You need cash flow to invest in skills.

You need runway to take risks. You cannot build either one if your lifestyle is eating every dollar you earn.

I did the same thing when I turned 20, just a different flavor.

I moved from Honolulu to Glendale and lived in my aunt's den. A den. Not a bedroom.

A converted space with a pullout couch.

I drove a car that was worth less than my toolbox.

I wore the same clothes until they had holes in them. I was not trying to impress anyone.

I was trying to build something.

Nobody wants to hear this step. Everyone wants to skip to the part where they are making money.

But you cannot skip it. The math does not work.

Step Two: Save Your Time Like It Is Stolen From You

Hormozi says your nine-to-five job is not killing your dreams.

What is killing your dreams is what you do with the four hours before work and the four hours after work.

You have a five-to-nine in the morning and a five-to-nine at night.

Most people waste both of them doom-scrolling or decompressing or doing anything other than the thing that would actually change their life.

He talks about Kobe Bryant's perspective on this.

The math is simple.

The execution is hard.

Then he introduces a concept that took me years to learn on my own: the difference between a maker and a manager.

I learned this when I became a foreman.

A maker needs long, uninterrupted blocks of time. A perfectly productive day for a maker is a completely empty calendar.

A manager needs the opposite: short bursts, quick decisions, as many touch points as possible.

If you mix the two, you get nothing done.

​Task switching is the killer.

He blocks his days so that maker time and manager time are separated.

Mornings are his. Mondays are for managing. The rest of the week, he tries to be a maker.

I learned this the hard way on job sites.

When I was running work as a foreman, my day was a constant stream of interruptions. Questions from the crew. Calls from the general contractor. Problems that had to be solved immediately. I could not get anything built in that environment.

So I started work before I even got there, at home while eating breakfast, planning the day.

Before the crew arrived. Before the phone started ringing. Those two hours of quiet while making my lunch, eating my breakfast, then driving to the site.

Then when I got there early when I could walk the site and think and plan, were worth more than the rest of the day combined.

That was my maker time. I just did not have a name for it.

Step Three: Pick Something People Already Pay For

Here is where most people go wrong.

They try to invent something new.

They try to be original.

They try to build a business around their passion and then get confused when nobody wants to pay for it.

Hormozi's advice is simpler.

Go find what people are already paying for and learn how to do that.

Look at your own credit card statement. Look at what businesses spend money on: advertising, content, outreach, funnel building.

Each one of those is a skill that on its own can build a million-dollar business.

Pick one.

Then he drops the rule that ties it together: the 1/1/1/1 rule.

This is what I'm doing build The Leader's Dojo.​

Sell one product or service to one avatar on one channel until you make a million dollars.

Do not diversify. Do not get cute.

Pick one thing and stay on it until the math works.

I did not have this language when I was starting out, but I followed the same principle.

When I was introduced to the building trades apprenticeship opportunity. I did not try to invent a new trade.

I did not try to build a career around a hobby.

I saw that electricians got paid, and I saw that the union apprenticeship was the path in, and I put my head down and stayed on that path for years.

One skill. One industry. One channel.

For 35 years, a 7-figure nest egg, and still healthy and young enough to continue training martial arts in my 60s.

The result was a career that gave me everything I have.

See the pattern?

Step Four: Learn the Right Way, Not the Comfortable Way

Hormozi has a definition of learning that is worth tattooing on your forehead.

Learning is not consuming content.

It is not listening to podcasts.

It is not sitting in front of a screen nodding along.

Learning is the same condition producing new behavior.

If you are in the same room, staring at the same screen, and what you do every day does not change, you are not learning.

You are entertaining yourself.

He reframes Malcolm Gladwell's ten thousand hours as ten thousand iterations.

The difference matters. Iterations assume failure.

They assume feedback. They assume you are doing something in the real world, getting a result, and adjusting.

If you post a piece of content and nothing happens, that is feedback.

The feedback is that it was not good enough.

You adjust. You try again.

That is an iteration.

That is why I put out The Daily Dojo, not the Weekly or Monthly. Iterations.

His method for accelerating this: do a lot of volume, analyze the top ten percent, figure out what they have in common that the bottom ninety percent do not, and then do more of that and less of everything else.

Repeat until people start calling you a natural.

I have been doing this on the mat for decades.

Every round of sparring is an iteration.

You try a sweep. It works or it does not. You adjust. You try again.

You study the black belts. You figure out what they do that the white belts do not.

You copy the good stuff and discard the rest.

Ten thousand iterations later, someone looks at you and says you must be talented. You are not talented. You just ran more reps than they did.

The principle transfers everywhere. Sales. Writing. Business. Parenting. Anything you want to get good at follows the same arc.

Step Five: Spend Money On What Moves You Forward

At this point you have cut your costs and freed up your time and picked a skill and started learning.

Now you spend the money you saved on three things: tools, implementation help, and trial attempts.

Tools are the software and equipment that save you time. A CRM. A landing page builder. A course platform. Cheap leverage.

Implementation help is courses, communities, tutoring. Hormozi is a huge advocate of one-on-one tutoring.

He says it has fallen out of fashion for some reason, but getting someone who knows what they are doing to sit with you and teach you directly is one of the fastest accelerators available.

Trial attempts are the money you spend failing. Ad spend. Software you try and discard. Content you produce that goes nowhere. You cannot learn without failing, and some failures cost money.

I would add something Hormozi did not say in this video but has said elsewhere: the fastest way to learn a skill is to hire someone who is already good at it and have them teach you directly.

I have done this. When my wife's business was struggling and our marriage was on the line, I did not try to figure out marketing from scratch.

I found people who knew more than me and I learned from them.

I've paid over $100k for courses so far and that's not stopping.

I've invested over $50k for coaching. I paid for the right to ask stupid questions and get real answers.

That investment saved my marriage and built a business that still feeds our family today.

The money you spend on learning is not an expense. It is the cost of becoming someone who can earn more.

Step Six: Do Not Let Your Lifestyle Catch Up

This is the step that kills most people.

​Lifestyle creep.​

They start making money and they start spending it.

They upgrade the apartment. They lease the car. They eat at nicer restaurants.

And suddenly they are making twice what they used to make and saving nothing.

Hormozi was making twenty thousand dollars a month in personal income from his first gym and still splitting a room for four hundred dollars a month.

He knew he wanted to go bigger. He knew he would need the cash to open another location, to attend conferences, to keep learning. So he stayed cheap.

He put it bluntly. You want to be rich, not look rich.

This is about a hundred thousand dollars in the bank, not a hundred thousand dollars in revenue.

Everything minus food and shelter is your profit.

I have watched guys I worked with make great money and spend every dollar of it. Guys buying the big truck to haul their boats, quads and toys. Foremen buying the RVs and camper vans.

I decided early that I was not going to be one of them. I set a retirement goal fifteen years before the date.

I had a thousand-day countdown timer on my phone as the day approached.

I drove the same car. I lived below my means. I banked the difference.

You do not get to a hundred thousand in the bank by increasing your income alone.

You get there by not letting your lifestyle take back every dollar your income produces.

The Checkpoint That Unlocks Everything

Hormozi closes the video with this.

When he and his wife Leila hit that first hundred thousand in savings, he looked at her and said, "We did it."

They calculated that two people could live on that money for three and a half years with no income.

He was not thinking about investments or compound interest. He was thinking about the fact that he did not have to worry about rent or food.

For the first time in his adult life, he could think long-term.

That is the checkpoint. Until you pass it, you are surviving.

After you pass it, you are building. You cannot change the world if you have to pay rent tomorrow. That is just real.

I passed my version of that checkpoint when the union apprenticeship turned into a career.

I did not have the language for it at the time. I did not have a six-step framework.

I stumbled into it through luck and stubbornness and the willingness to live in my aunt's den until something clicked.

But the principle was the same. Get your costs low. Get your income stable. Bank the difference.

Then think about what you actually want to build.

Alex Hormozi figured this out faster than I did.

He put it into words that are clearer than anything I could have written at his age.

And he is giving it away for free on the internet to anyone who will listen.

I have spent forty-plus years reading, studying, applying, and failing my way toward the same conclusions he laid out in under twenty minutes.

That does not bother me. It impresses me.

The kid did the work. He lived the principles. He earned the right to teach them.

If you are in your twenties or thirties and you feel stuck, go watch the video.​

Take advantage of his free book offer, I have all 3 of them and they are well worth it.

Then read this again.

Then pick one step and start.

Not all six at once. One. The first one.

Cut your costs until you have breathing room. Then move to the next one.

The roadmap is free. The work is yours.

He figured it out faster than I did. The least I can do is make sure you hear it.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Fear List

Write down 3 fears you’ve been avoiding.

Take one small action toward one today.

📚 Leader’s Library

Book I recommend this week:

​The Personal MBA — Josh Kaufman​

Why?

Because it's was one of my first and to this day, one of my favorite books, to learn about entrepreneurship, business and how to work on and with yourself and others.
​
(But get the paperback version, not the audio or digital, you will thank me later.)

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck