The 10 Things That Winners Do That Losers Won’t
The secret list of shortcuts in a world without shortcuts
There has to be a formula for winning.
Sure, some people have unfair advantages. But winning can’t be so unique that there’s no pattern to it. If you look back at all the winners, all the people who won outside of their unfair advantages and unique circumstances, they probably did something. There was probably a common thread.
The question is, what is that common thread?
I’ve had a chance to build two billion-dollar companies, invest in over 100 deals, buy over 3,500 units of real estate, and I’ve been searching for this commonality.
Some of those experiences are mine, some are with my partners, some come from books I’ve read and videos I’ve watched. But isn’t it our responsibility to find this formula so we can make our lives just a little bit easier?
Why should we always go down the uncharted path? After doing all of this, here’s what I found out.
Here’s what winners do that losers won’t:
1. The Effort Equalizer - Making failure statistically unreasonable
2. The Proof Stack - Earning confidence through repetitions
3. The Invisible Work - Executing without needing credit
4. The Obsession Advantage - Winning through focused seasons
5. The Doubt as Fuel - Converting criticism into momentum
6. The One More Principle - Compounding slight advantages
7. The Intentional Suffering - Choosing pain that moves you forward
8. The Invisible Scorecard - Tracking every decision honestly
9. The Boring Battleground - Loving the mundane work
10. The Work Before the Reward - Doing before feeling
1. The Effort Equalizer
Success has nothing to do with fairness.
Of course, some people start with unfair advantages like the right network, abundant capital, perfect timing.
For everyone else, we win by making failure statistically unreasonable.
Meaning: The reps are the fairness.
If you made 100 outbound calls to qualified prospects, would zero appointments be reasonable?
If you knocked on 50 doors, would zero conversations make sense?
You don’t need lady luck in your corner every day.
You need enough clean repetitions that the odds become so stacked in your favor that failure requires a statistical miracle.
2. The Proof Stack
Confidence doesn’t come from shouting affirmations in the mirror.
My partner Leila Hormozi has this right: you can’t think your way into self-confidence. You earn it by stacking proof that you are who you say you are.
You feel confident hitting a golf ball because you’ve hit 10,000 balls, not because you stood in front of a mirror and yelled into being possesed by Tiger Wood’s muse.
You feel confident closing sales because you’ve closed 50, not because you “got into alignment.”
Every night I ask: “What do you have to show for today?”
Some nights, I’ve worked 14 hours and have nothing material to show. Those are the nights I realize I was mired in busy work instead of being focused and productive.
When you calendar is filled with reps and proof, it makes it logically undeniable that you are who you say you are.
3. The Invisible Work
When you reach a certain level, people only see outcomes. They see the exit, the sale, the partnership.
I remind myself of this quote: People only see the decisions you made, not the choices you had.
What they also never see is the invisible work: the extra call at 8pm, the difficult conversation, the person you fired, the candidate you recruited for six months, the spreadsheet you rebuilt four times.
You’ve arrived when: you don’t need credit to do the work.
You take professional pride in the work that you did:
The detailed memo you wrote
The workflow you built that saves everyone time
The template you created so that nobody has to find the format
The notion board you created that that took you 20 hours
Or the GPT you built that took a week but now makes your life easier
All growth hides in the unsexy places nobody even knows about, let alone applauds.
4. The Obsession Advantage
Every time I’ve gone all-in on something, obsessed for a focused season, I’ve won in some way.
Every time I’ve half-committed, I’ve gotten beaten.
I know that makes sense when you read it, but it sucks when you look back and think about it.
This is what I have found: You can’t sustain obsession for eight years without seeing massive progress, but you absolutely can sustain it for eight weeks.
Life isn’t a marathon or a sprint.
Life is a series of sprints.
And that is why I have found that it is very hard to continuously be obsessed without seeing progress.
You run hard, rest intentionally, run harder, rest again.
Nobody loses 40 pounds over eight years with casual effort. They lose it over eight weeks with focused obsession.
5. The Doubt as Fuel
Nobody criticizes people doing nothing worth noticing.
Haters show up when you’re visible enough to threaten their comfort zones.
If you’re getting criticism, snarky comments, or attacks, it means you’re doing something valuable enough that people need to tear you down.
They are not doing this to hurt you per se, I have learned they are doing this as protection mechanism so that they don’t have to change because you challenged their model of the world.
I used to let this bother me. Now I treat every piece of doubt as additional fuel.
When critics take shots at you, it means you’re finally visible enough to matter.
6. The One More Principle
Ed Mylett captures this perfectly in his book The Power of One More.
Make one more call than you feel like making.
Do one more rep when your muscles scream to stop.
Have one more round of edits even though it’s already good enough.
Life gets won in the inches.
The compounding happens in that little bit extra most people skip.
The edge doesn’t come from doing twice as much. The edge comes from doing slightly more, every single time, until those advantages compound into an insurmountable lead.
7. The Intentional Suffering
You’re going to experience pain regardless.
So I have found it helpful to choose pain that moves you toward something instead of pain that keeps you stuck.
Think about this: What is every single thing you’re not willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals. That exact list represents what someone else is willing to give up.
Which means they’re going to beat you.
Which sucks. But at least you know why.
You remember the best moments of your life because they came through discomfort and growth. You don’t remember the 15 days on the couch eating potato chips.
You get to choose your pain.
8. The Personal Scorecard
I keep an invisible scorecard for every decision.
The scoring system is based on this one question: Does this action either moves me closer to my goals or further away?
There is no neutral ground.
Alarm goes off: Do I hit snooze or get up? Closer or further?
Restaurant choice. Salad or burger with fries? Closer or further?
Unplanned meeting request. Closer or further?
You can rationalize individual decisions, but eventually you run out of explanations for why you keep choosing the thing that moves you away from what you claim to want.
If you just make these micro-choices decisively, you have a much higher likelihood of being closer than farther away from your goals.
9. The Boring Battleground
All significant victories come from doing simple things repeatedly without burning out or checking out.
Everyone handles the exciting parts of life with ease. Generally, nobody struggles with vacation, food delivery, or binge-watching.
The actual battleground is the boring work nobody celebrates.
The fourth rebuild of your sales process.
The daily content that feels repetitive after 200 days.
The prospecting calls that all sound the same.
The coats of paint are boring.
Most people quit because they can’t find satisfaction in the mundane. Winners learn to love the boring parts, because that’s where compounding happens.
The boring is the battlefield. Most of your competition will abandon it long before you do.
10. The Work Before the Reward
You don’t have to feel motivated to do great work.
My partner Leila Hormozi: “Fvck your mood. Follow the plan.”
Most people think: feel great, then do great work.
Actually: do great work, then feel great as a result.
You don’t feel motivated before working out. The workout creates the motivation, the endorphins, and the accomplishment.
The work always comes first. The feelings always come second.
If you sustain this for enough consecutive days, your results stop being random and start becoming pretty formulaic.
I’ll leave you with one my favorite quotes by Aquaman that I incessantly repeat to myself when I get stuck:
“Not giving up is the most heroic thing you can do.”
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