146: This Is Where Most People Quit

I heard Alex Hormozi say this, and it stuck with me. When things get hard, most people give up. The idea of consistently getting better in all areas of life is not the norm in society. And in some ways, that’s fine—if you’re happy with where you’re at. But the way I see it, most people aren’t happy with staying the same. We want something more for our lives, but pushing ourselves into discomfort is hard. The truth is, doing the hard things is what’s required to make our lives better. Where in your life do you feel like quitting—but know you need to keep pushing?

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I was listening to Alex formosey, and I've heard him say this before, and he said, When things get hard, he tells himself, this is where most

(00:09):
people quit. And
I use that to a certain extent.I don't know if I've like deliberately, you know, put that as one of my tools. You know, when, I find myself struggling
with things,
yeah, I don't know. I have abunch of examples. I wrote a bunch of stuff out here, of times when

(00:32):
I think I had that mentality,but I didn't have, like, you know, I didn't say that to myself, but I've been trying to do that lately.
You know, in most areas in mylife, I don't quit, but where I do struggle the most is with working out. Like, I really hate working out, and
so I'm gonna start using thatwhen I when I'm, you know, because a lot of times I'll work out at home, and

(00:59):
I'll get in, you know, 15minutes, and I'll be like, Ah, that's good enough. But you know, if that was in my head, and I'm like, this is where most
people quit, you should keepgoing. And I think if you have any sort of competitive nature in you at all, and I think most of us have, like, at least a
little of it, whether we want toadmit it or not, I
think it could be very helpful.So if you're, like, for myself personally, if I'm in the middle of a workout and there's nobody around and like, I could just

(01:26):
easily be like, Ah, fuck it. Youknow, that's good enough. I could say to myself, this is where most people quit, and hopefully it'll get me to push
through and and work a littleharder. And what's interesting, and I I've always thought, like, I don't really need accountability. They talk about
accountability partners andshit. When with stuff, like with business, like, you know, moving forward in business and stuff, there's a lot of challenges, or

(01:49):
things like fitness or followinga diet and stuff, they talk about, like, accountability, accountability groups and how powerful they are. And I feel
like I've always been like, Ah,man, I don't need that shit. But now that I'm really thinking about it, I was realizing that like Jesse and I go to
a boxing and conditioning classevery Monday morning,

(02:13):
and
I work so much harder in thatclass than I do when I'm at home. And I made a joke. There was one time where the the coach had us do this like crazy, like,
intense warm up. And by the timewe were done with the warm up, like I was, I was really tired, and we were already we were only like, 15 minutes into like, a 50

(02:35):
minute class, and
I turned to Jesse, and I waslike, that's kind of like a full workout for me, but then we had a whole nother, however long, like 30 minutes more of, like
intense boxing training. So Iguess I do. I could benefit from some account accountability when it comes to working out. And you know, I work much harder in the

(02:57):
group setting, so I shouldprobably do that more, but I want to go through some of these, some of these ideas, or some, some, I have some
examples, and I don't know ifsome of them could apply to you, but
there's some examples where Ifeel like most people would have quit, but I kept going and and I could see this kind of like mantra that you keep in your

(03:19):
head being Something that canhelp you push through the hard times. And so overall, before I get to the examples, you know, when you look at kind of like
the world in general, we'rerewarded, rewarded for instant gratification, and like having patience and outcomes is is pretty difficult. And you see

(03:40):
that in a lot of things, youknow, with like food, for example, you know, if you eat healthy, you're going to have long term benefits, but if you
eat unhealthy, you're going tohave short term benefits. So, you know, obviously, like, you know, like a bowl of ice cream, it'll satisfy you in the moment,
but over the long term, youknow, doing that, nothing wrong with eating a little ice cream every now and then. But like, you know, if every day you're

(04:06):
eating a big ass bowl of icecream over time, that's going to chip away at your health, but if you were to eat healthy every day over time, that's going to
improve your health. So theinstant gratification thing is pretty hard to get over. And sort of, you know, with social media and the way that they
engineer things with with

(04:27):
likes and kind of littledopamine hits, and they, they've studied all these things to, you know, try to keep you on platform and try to reward you
for these little actions thatyou do. So if you post something on Instagram, you're likely going to get some feedback right away and get that instant
gratification. And

(04:48):
the other thing I was thinkingabout when I was younger, you know, I grew up in the, you know, 70s and 80s, and I remember we always had these,
like old school alarm clocks,like with the.
Read digital letters and almostlike a I'm sure everybody's had this alarm clock that's my age, and it's, it has like a plastic, fake wood grain on it, but on

(05:10):
and I had several of those overover the years. And what's interesting is the the biggest button on the top of that alarm clock is the snooze button. So
you're like, rewarded for notfollowing
or keeping a promise to yourselfbecause you set an alarm, say, for seven in the morning, and then when you wake up and you don't want to get up, that

(05:33):
snooze button is like the wholelength of the whole fucking clock. So it's like they're rewarding you for not not keeping your promise to your
Well, I don't know if it'srewarding, but almost like encouraging you to to not keep your promise to yourself. And I don't know, I thought about
that, and even on the iPhone.You know, when I set my alarm for on the iPhone, I don't really use an alarm that much anymore, but I remember the

(05:58):
alarm would go off and I'd grabthe phone, and there's this huge orange button in the middle of the screen, and you would think that's the one to turn the alarm
off, but it's not. It's thesnooze button, and the button to turn the alarm off is way down at the bottom. And so I don't know, it seems like we're
rewarded for, you know, like Isaid, not not keeping our promises to ourselves. So anyway, that's the general idea. So I just want to run through

(06:22):
some examples of of When,
when, that mantra, that mindset,worked for me, like, like I said, I haven't really been using that, that exact phrase that Alex uses, but, but the
mindset of never quitting hasreally served me well over the years. And so there was a couple, or I have a few examples of, you know, early when I was

(06:45):
building machine, and I'm livingin the back trying to make it work.
You know, that, in and ofitself, was difficult because it was a definite big change in lifestyle. You know, I didn't have any amenities that I was
used to. And so that was prettyhard. But the harder stuff came when
things weren't really goingwell. So it was like, the the machine graffiti side of the business wasn't making near. It was, it was losing money. You

(07:15):
know, it was like actuallycosting money to run this. It wasn't, it wasn't really making hardly anything. And and then at the same time, the motion
graphics industry, a lot of thecompanies that I worked for, they made shows for cable networks. And the cable networks have been suffering for a great

(07:37):
for quite a while, and it'smainly, I don't know. It's mainly due to the streaming stuff. So a lot of people are getting off of cable and going
towards streaming. So all of mycustomers worked in the cable industry, so all of a sudden, work just started drying out there. So now I'm like,
I have my focus is split betweenthese two businesses, which is already kind of, you know, not the, not the best way to do things. If you're trying to grow

(08:05):
two businesses, it's a loteasier to grow one business because you all your focus goes into that, obviously.
And so as the motion graphicswork started to kind of dry up, the machine was still costing money to run. And so
I wasn't, I wasn't doing wellfinancially at all. And there was a point where I was, it was a good, I don't know, probably like, a half a year where I was

(08:33):
like, on the verge of losing myhouse, you know, I would always like, get just enough money to pay the mortgage. And I was like, I don't remember exactly,
but I remember, like, lookinginto it to figure out, how late can you be on a mortgage before they start taking legal action? And I was like, right on the
cusp of that for for a longtime. And it was, like, super stressful. You know, it was like, I probably lost some years of my life during that time

(09:00):
because it was just constantstress. And they would call me every day and they'd be like, hey, you need to make a payment today. And I'm like, I can't
pay, you know, I can't pay youwhat I don't have. And, you know, I'd get frustrated because I'm like, You calling me every day isn't gonna put the money in
the account. Like,
this shit is really stressful.So like, You're the first person I'm going to pay as soon as I have the money. So it was really frustrating. And, you know, so

(09:26):
that
that was, like, one of thebigger struggles and and so even even before that, you know, the motion graphics industry, like I said, was starting to
suffer more and more due to the
the streaming stuff so but thatcame right after the housing crisis, which kind of fucked up the whole economy. And in the beginning of that,

(09:56):
I thought that my businesswasn't going to get affected because it was.
Like, the entertainment peoplearen't going to give up their television or, you know, their TV shows and all that stuff. But turns out, I was wrong, and all
of a sudden, like, work start,started drying up. So even before I even started the machine stuff, like, I think it was around 2012 and then I
started machine a few yearslater, or two or three years later.

(10:21):
And so I was kind of like,
I'd get a big job, andeverything would be fine for a little while, and then I'd be out of work for a little while, but I had some money from that
job, so I was able to kind ofmaintain and it was just really sketchy. And I remember my ex at the time was always like, you know, Could you, could you just

(10:44):
get a job somewhere with all theskills you have? And I'm like, Yeah, easily, I could probably make really good money working for a company. And she was just
trying to encourage me to dothat, like, almost give up on, on what I was trying to do, because she, she had a different kind of mindset than I did, and
I was just not, there was justno way I was going to quit. I was just, I was going to figure it out.

(11:08):
And so, you know, that's that'ssome struggles that I went through in business, and I have some more here. But, like, I wanted to talk a little bit
about how graffiti writers kindof play into this. And this isn't meant to be any kind of judgment. Like, if you find, like something isn't for you and
and you want to just move onfrom it, like there's nothing wrong with that, I'm just saying, like, if you're doing something that you know you

(11:32):
should be doing, you know youwant to be doing, but it's hard.
That's that's a reason to notquit. But if you're, you know, pretty far into something, and you're like, This is not what I thought it was going to be, and
I don't really like doing this,and I want to, you know, move on and do something else. Like, there's nothing wrong with quitting in certain occasions.

(11:53):
And even if you quit becauseit's hard, I mean, that's, that's your business. I'm not judging anybody, but, you know, I'm trying to encourage people
to push through the hard times,because you come out the other side of those a lot stronger than you were before. And so when it comes to like graffiti,
you know, it might seem like funand games to like youngsters coming into it, and maybe it is. Now, I don't know. I'm not really, I'm not really as

(12:21):
involved in the and, you know, Idon't meet, I guess I do meet some graffiti writers, but I'm not as deeply involved in it as I used to be. I'm more like
doing machine and likecontributing to the culture in different ways. And I'm not like on the streets with with riders as much as I used to be. So I
don't really know what thecurrent scene is. So I'm kind of like using my own experience from the 90s and early 2000s as as, kind of like my baseline

(12:52):
for, you know what I'm talkingabout here. But, you know, getting into graph, it's sort of like, Yeah, it's cool. I'm going to write on things and do all
these kind of things, you know.And obviously there's risks in terms of getting arrested and stuff like that. And what a lot of people don't understand is,
like, there's a whole lot ofother risks of, you know, different beef and violence and issues with with local gangs, if you're writing in the wrong

(13:19):
neighborhoods, and even being inthe wrong neighborhoods, and there's all these kind of things, and so most of us don't get out of it without getting
arrested. I've been arrestedseveral times, but I never actually served like real time before. But you know, I've been jumped and beat up and all these
kind of things and chased out ofneighborhoods by gangs multiple times back in the 90s when the whole green light thing was happening. So it's like a, it's

(13:45):
a, it's a challenging endeavor,you know, to be, to be a graffiti writer and be an active graffiti writer, and so you you sort of see, if you spend any
sort of time
in the culture and kind ofmeeting writers, there's, there's, there's a couple, like, this is a broad generalization, but let's say there's two
different kinds of writers.There's ones that are going to keep going no matter what. And like, someone that comes to mind is, GK, like, he's done a lot of

(14:13):
stuff, and he's gotten in a lotof trouble and gotten a lot of you know, he's gone through a lot, but like, he never gave up. This is, like, what he wanted to
do. So. But then I also saw alot of writers that, you know, they get caught once, and even if, even if, like, nothing really happened, because most of
the time, if you get caught thefirst time, unless you're like, this crazy, prolific writer that people are looking for,

(14:40):
it's, it's not really that bad.Like I said, I don't know what it's like now, but, like, back then, because I got caught a couple times, and, you know, it
was not that big of a deal. Butyou see those writers that they got caught once, or even, like, when we're really young, like, their parents catch them, and
then they just stop forever, orthey get kicked out of.
Crew, and they get, they justdisappear from the face of the earth. You know,

(15:06):
I'm not laughing at thosepeople. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, it's a different type of mindset. You know, there's people that are truly in
this to be in it, and, you know,whether they get jumped or they get caught, or all these kind of things happen, they're going to keep writing anyway, and kind of
figure out a way to navigatethat. And then there's the other writers that like, maybe they weren't quite as serious, like at the time they're writing, and

(15:29):
everything seems all fine andgood, but then they hit a roadblock, and then you just don't hear from them again, you know? So
I think that could be applied.And I'm not trying to encourage people to go and get arrested and shit I've kind of moved on from.
I'm trying to encourage peopleto live better lives. So, you know, take that for what you will. I just thought it was a good parallel to add here, but I

(15:55):
want to just run through a fewmore business challenges
to where this kind of mindsethas helped me push through. But so the stuff I was talking about where I was going to lose my house, it was like between 2015
and maybe like 2019
but, you know, obviously 2020was very challenging for all businesses. And I saw lots of businesses. And I'm not saying these people gave up. A lot of

(16:18):
businesses went under through.You know, there was really nothing they can do. Like, a lot of restaurants got shut down and all this kind of stuff. And so
when the when the 2020, stuffhappened, and there was the mandatory lockdowns, and you weren't even allowed to have
people in your business, that

(16:40):
I did that for like, two weeks,and
I was just, I was living at theshop, so I was just like, at the shop with me and my dogs. And I was just like, What the fuck man, what am I? What am I
supposed to do with my time, youknow? So I was like, I was thinking, like, well, the, you know, obviously, the

(17:01):
a lot of the science, I don'tknow if science is the right word, but a lot of the information out there was pointing to
certain like health issues, uh,obesity and stuff like that. Were,
you know, a comorbidity of CO COmorbidity of that thing. And I wasn't overweight at all, but at the same time, I was like, Well, I'm gonna use this opportunity

(17:24):
to get in better shape. So I wasworking out a lot, and so for about two weeks, we just weren't really doing anything, and
I was fulfilling online orders.But this was we weren't doing a whole lot of business back then, so I called Adrian, and I was like, Hey, man, like, I kind of
want to work. Like, if you'renot comfortable with it, that's cool, but

(17:48):
if you want to work, I'm down towork. And he was like, Please, man, I want to want to work. I'm dying to work, you know. So he and I just decided that we were
going to just push through thisthing. And at the time, cub was working for us too. So, or I think cub, like, started
a little after, but it wasduring 2020, when he started working for us, and so, and I don't remember, I think Ricardo was there too. I don't remember

(18:14):
that the timeline is a littlebit iffy, but I know it was Rick, it was Adrian and I that decided to get back to work, and so we started doing pickup
orders. And, you know, so wesort of overcame that setback and kind of adjusted our business so that, you know, we could fulfill orders for
customers, because most of thegraph shops were all shut down.

(18:37):
And, you know, you see all theseposts of people saying, you know, we're going to be safe, so we're not gonna, you know, we're not gonna sell anything, and
we'll get back to you. And soI'm like, Well, if they're doing that, that's cool, but you know, we still want to provide for riders and do what we can.
And I get people were nervous,because it was, it was pretty scary in the beginning, but I don't know I want to get too far into that, but anyway, so we

(19:03):
started doing that, and it wasinteresting, because, like, we would see new faces, and I would be like, Oh, where are you guys coming from? And people were
coming from, like, two and ahalf hours away to get to get supplies, you know, because their local graph shops weren't, weren't open anymore. And so
what started out as a challengeand and we decided, you know, like, we're not going to we're not going to stay shut down, we're just going to kind of do

(19:30):
this pickup order thing. Andactually turned into a good opportunity for us to reach a whole bunch of new customers. And so obviously, there was a
lot of financial instabilityduring that time, but we started growing pretty fast, and so things started to kind of turn around for us. But then, you
know, the lockdowns got lifted alittle bit, and then the all the riots started happening. And those were, like, right nearby, and there was like, little

(19:56):
flyers popping up here and therewhere they were going to have some kind of.
Uh, event at in in San Pedro.And so we ended up, like, boarding up the whole business. So it kind of made
the pickup stuff a little morechallenging. We had to have customers come around the back and do all this kind of weird shit. And then there was this
uncertainty, because you'reseeing on the news, like, I don't know, probably like, a mile or two away,

(20:23):
there's buildings getting burneddown and fucking broken into, and we're like, Fuck, man, I don't, I don't know what's gonna happen here. And my whole front
of the whole front of ourbusiness was these huge windows, and I was just like, man, even if somebody broke, like, a couple of these windows, I can't
afford to fix those, you know,it was crazy. And so then after that, there was, like, massive supply chain issues, so

(20:51):
we were having a hard timegetting all the stuff that we needed to stay in business. And, you know, we had,
we had the drip machines at thetime, and that was like our biggest selling product outside of stickers. And we could not get bottles from anywhere,
nobody, nobody had bottlesbecause they were all getting sold for hand sanitizer. And so I think it was like almost two years where we we, we just

(21:21):
didn't have drip machinesbecause we couldn't get the bottles, like we had nibs, we had caps, we had paint, but the bottle part of it, we just
couldn't get them. And so thatwas really challenging. And also with materials like the cost of vinyl and ink and all these kind of things, and the cost of

(21:41):
everything just started going upand becoming harder and harder to get.
And so, like, you know, therewas one time I needed a new cutter, and I think it took like, four months to get it, because there was that time when
all of the the boats were juststuck out there in the ocean, like they couldn't come in. Because I don't know, I don't remember what it was. It was

(22:03):
some kind of
protests or something going onthat the boats just couldn't come in. So we had, like, supplies that we needed, but they were just sitting on a boat
in the ocean, you know? And itwas like, super,
was really stressful. And nowthat I'm thinking back, like, I kind of just go along with the punches. But, like,
those were very, very stressfultimes.

(22:25):
And then not, not too long ago,actually, we moved to another building in Vegas, and
one day Arman called me, and hewas like, hey, the the far Fire Marshal's here, and he's got questions, you know. So I get on the phone with the guy, and he's

(22:46):
like, Hey, you're
your floor plan doesn't matchwhat I have on record. So, you know, you you're technically not allowed to operate, and you can't have a license to operate.
And the reason that happened wasbecause the the guy that I rented the building from, they did a bunch of work, you know, they said, hey, you know, we

(23:07):
could, we could change thisplace around and stuff. They were supposed to submit the new plans
to the city, but they didn't dothat. And
so they, they shut us down for,I don't remember how long it was. I think it was like two months. And so I was, I asked the guy, I'm like, well, so can

(23:28):
I not do business at all? Andhe's like, Well, I
don't remember how he said it,but it was like, kind of this little sly, like, you're not supposed to do business. So I would close up the the gates and
all these kind of thing. And,you know, try not to have people visible
in case somebody comes lookingto see if we're actually operating, because we technically weren't supposed to to operate. And it was like

(23:55):
that, the daily stress, just ofthat was so crazy, because I was like, man, we have all these orders coming in. You know, at any time, somebody from the city
could come and say, Hey, youguys aren't even supposed to be operating, and actually shut us down to where we couldn't even print stickers or do anything.
And if that happened, I honestlydon't know what I would have done, like I had a whole I still do. I mean, we have a whole team of people that have jobs

(24:25):
that rely on us doing business,and like, technically, we weren't even supposed to be doing business. So
there's lots of other things,like employee issues. I had a guy break into the shop and steal some shit because he showed up to work. It seemed
like he was on drugs, or, Idon't know it was fucking crazy. I have surveillance footage of him during the day, and the dude was just like laying on the

(24:48):
floor and fucking disappearinginto the bathroom for like 30 minutes at a time, and then eventually,
every time he came out of thebathroom, he seemed like to be in worse shape. So I.
I don't know what this dude isdoing, and so I ended up telling him he had to leave. And then he came back and broke in the shop the
next night, $1,500 window hebroke. It was just fucking stupid man. I don't know, so I don't know. It's challenging. Everything's challenging. Life

(25:17):
is fucking challenging, youknow, so. But you know, as it gets hard, I think this mantra, you know, this is where most people quit. And I don't know if
I would have quit over a bunchof these, well, I don't know people, probably people probably would. That shits fucking stressful, man. It's like, it's
hard, you know. So as far as,like, the working out thing, I'm definitely gonna, gonna keep that thing in my in top of mine. So I don't know for you, what

(25:43):
are, what are the things thatthat you know, you know you need to be doing that.
You know you could use this. Andif you're at all competitive, if you're like, I know I need to be doing this shit, but like, it's the last thing I want to do this
is where most people give up,like, what is that thing for you? And another thing before I go, there's a there's a book called The War of Art. It's a

(26:06):
really good book, not the art ofwar. It's The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I recommend everybody reads that, especially creative people, because he
talks about this force calledresistance. That's what he calls it.
And he says resistance pops upanytime you're doing anything of of you know, I don't remember, I might not have it right, but anytime you know you're trying

(26:29):
to do something creative thatyou know you're supposed to do,
anytime you're you're changingyour life, or you're trying to do something that's going to change, you know, the world or culture, or something like that,
that's when resistance pops upthe most. And
I think when that resistancepops up, it's also a good indicator that you're doing something that's important. And those are the times when you

(26:54):
could say to yourself, This iswhere most people quit, and I'm gonna keep going.
S
all right,
appreciate each and every one ofyou guys who are supporting the cause and continue to spread the love and yeah, stay up.