Build a Mind So Strong It Scares People

You aren't where you want to be in life because you can't withstand the hard times and hard things that happen to you. And it takes you too long to recover. You fall too far when it happens. And then finally, when you do recover, you're worse than you were when you started. I'm Alex Ramosi. I own acquisition.com. It's a portfolio of companies that makes lots of money. But today I want to talk about something that I think is key to entrepreneurship and even just being a human being who gets what they want out of life. And it's a topic that I think a lot about, which is one that's called mental toughness. And so I made this for you guys. What is mental toughness? It's the chance a bad thing changes how you act in a way that's against your goals. Or I'd be like, well, what does it actually mean? It just means the percentage likelihood that when something bad happens, you change the way you act in a way that's not ideal. That means that mental toughness is no longer a, do you have mental toughness or not? But instead, it's how much mental toughness do you have? Fundamentally, what we're trying to get into is how people respond to bad things. And so once we have it defined, which is that the chance a bad thing happens to you, then we have to create an environment in which mental toughness can be exercised and then ideally measured. And when we do that, I can give you a visual so that you can start thinking about your own behavior within this context. So number one here, that's how you'd normally behave. So whatever your normal kind of baseline is, that's how you act every single day. Then at some point, a bad thing or enough bad things happen that it forces you to change how you behave. That's step two. Step three is, okay, once I've changed how I behave, how low do I go or how upset do I get? Right? Number three. Then there's a certain period of time that elapses where you continue this bad behavior and then you start coming up, you start recovering. That's the next period, which is number four. Number five is going to be bi-directional. Either you get better as a result of this hard thing or you get worse. And then number six, the last one there is how much better did you get or how much worse did you get? And so this gives us kind of a framework to think through mental toughness, not as this like amorphous, like rah, rah, rah, like beat your chest, like alpha masculinity thing, but really just how resilient are you as a human being. And to be clear, when I say bad for the rest of our time, or really when you hear me say bad in general, I just mean against your preferences. There's something that happened that you wish didn't happen. And that was, that's what makes it bad for our definition. Okay. And so people mistakenly believe that mental toughness is one thing. And looking at the model that I just walked through, I believe that it's actually four separate components that make up mental toughness overall. So number one is tolerance. Number two is fortitude. Number three is resilience. And number four is adaptability. And so when we draw these out and we look at these visually, we have them looking like this. Each of these is a measured point in kind of this behavior frame. And so let's dive into all four. So the first component of mental toughness in my model is tolerance. And to be clear, I don't think these words matter as much as the thing that they're measuring. All right. So the definitions matter far more than the label I'm ascribing to that. So your tolerance, which is this first part here, this is how much hardship, the number of hardships, or how long you can hard ----. I keep wanting to say hard ----, hard ---- before you have a change in behavior. All right. How much tough stuff can you go through before you crack? And so if you're somebody who has a long fuse, AKA, it takes a lot to rock your boat. You have high tolerance, right? It takes a lot of stuff for before you just say like, screw it. Short fuse, anything can set you off. And you demonstrate low tolerance in that situation compared to the first example. You guys pulling this in? So super long fuse, high tolerance, super short fuse, low tolerance. And so as I'm going through these, I would love you to think for yourself like, okay, do I have high tolerance? Do I have medium tolerance? Do I have low tolerance? Because none of this is perfect. And so if we start measuring the components of mental toughness for our own behavior, it means we begin the process of being able to improve it. That's thing one. Okay. So, and I want to be very clear about this. Tolerance is not about ignoring pain, but about how long you maintain your intended behavior before disruption. As in, how long do you act normally before you stop acting normally? Now, the second element of our little model here is fortitude. All right. It's the intensity of behavior change once your tolerance threshold has been surpassed. Let me translate that. So it's how much you change how you act once you've had enough hard stuff that you snap. How low do you go? How upset do you get? Do you take a deep breath, walk outside for five minutes, and then you come back? Or do you quit your job, get divorced, and get into hard drugs? Right? Look at the difference between these two things. So if you have low fortitude compared to the high fortitude example, you have a way steeper drop, a way larger change in behavior as a result. And the third is resilience. And this one's a really interesting one. And I want to, like, if there's one of these that I think is one of the most workable for many of you, and also probably the one that I would encourage you to work on the most if you don't have what you want in life, it would be this one. So after a change in behavior has occurred from a bad thing, how long it takes you to return to a new baseline. So once bad ---- happens to you and you start acting out, how long does it take you to stop acting out? That's what resilience is. It's a measure of time. So do you bounce back in five minutes? You take a couple breaths, you walk outside, you come back in, you're good to go. Right? If so, you have high resilience. Even if it's, now mind you, even if it's really steep, even if you like go crazy, but then you come back real fast, you still have high resilience. You might have low fortitude, but you have high resilience. You're back. All right? Or does it take you five years to bounce back? Compared to the five minute person, you have low resilience. Look how long it takes you to come back to normal. And so as you're thinking through this, I would encourage you, one, you can think about yourself, but also who are the people in your lives who are like, man, something throws so-and-so off. And it's like, they're in a funk for months. That person is low resilience. Right? If you have high resilience, what's interesting about it is that even if something completely rocks you, you can come back. And it doesn't massively affect your life because you're like, I'm already back. I already recovered. The fourth of these, and this is the final component of mental toughness, is adaptability. So how your new baseline compares to your old baseline. As a result of this hard thing, are you better for it? Are you worse for it? All right? So if you stabilize after a bad thing happens, which you will eventually, at a higher new baseline, then you have high adaptability. You let the hard times beat the strength into you, not out of you. If you stabilize to your former baseline after a bad thing happens, you have medium adaptability. So you're acting normally, bad thing happens, you come back and you're back to the way you were. You have medium adaptability. You didn't let it affect you. Fine. Great. The last version of this is that you stabilize below your former baseline after a bad thing happens. And I'm going to talk about this for a minute, because this is going to affect more than one of you, and certainly somebody you know. If that happens to you, it means that you have low adaptability. It means the hard time beat the strength out of you. In this little visual here, you can kind of see the three versions of this. Either you adapt above, you got stronger from it, you stay the same as you were before, you didn't let it affect you, or you're permanently worse off as a result of the bad thing that happened. And so if the new baseline changes in either direction, positive or negative, then the experience traumatized you. And I want to use the actual definition of trauma here, is that you have a permanent change of behavior as a result of an aversive stimulus. And I'll translate that in a second. All right. So that means that you changed how you acted from something bad that happened to you. So just think about that. So whenever you hear people do like, ah, she traumatized me, I would then respond, in what way did you change your behavior as a result of the bad thing? And if someone doesn't have an answer, it's like, no, she just did a bad thing. But guess what? You showed resilience, you showed fortitude, and you showed adaptability. So it didn't actually permanently change your behavior. Now I'm going to give an example of trauma, bad thing, that creates a positive change in behavior. Is it still trauma? By my definition, yes. But was the trauma bad? Ah, interesting. So let's dive in. So if the behavior change is positive, then it means you got better from a traumatic experience. That seems antithetical or against what most people would say about trauma. Trauma only makes you worse, right? It happens to you. You're a victim, right? What if it happens for you and you get better for it? If it's against your long-term goals, then you got worse from it, and you had low adaptability. Now I want to be clear, both outcomes mean you were traumatized. You had a permanent change of behavior from a bad thing. You learned to do something different going forward. And so people who take my words out of context make it seem like I justify trauma when it couldn't be further from the truth. All right, I hope no one has bad things happen to them. But I see bad things, things happening against our preferences, as a fact of life. The only thing we have is our response to those bad things. And so at one extreme, you have someone who has maxed out stats of mental toughness, all four, right? They are perfectly mentally tough. So how does this ideal person behave when something bad happens? They have huge tolerance, so almost nothing bothers them. If something does bother them, then their behavior change is so small, it's imperceptible, it's unnoticeable. No one can even notice that they're acting any different. And then they recover immediately because they have high resilience. So even that tiny imperceptible change, and then boom, they're back within a second. They came back. And then not only that, they use that experience, that bad thing, to get better. So they have high adaptability. And so the end result of that is someone who just keeps getting better. They just keep getting stronger. They just keep improving. And life happens for them, not to them. On the other hand, if somebody has, let's imagine an imperfect person, all right? Let's somebody who's 0 out of 10 mental toughness. They're a mental weenie. They're a little ninny, all right? Some of you know these people as well. Some of you may be these people. And so for you, it may take almost nothing to throw you off your game. Maybe it's bad weather. Maybe you got a little bit of traffic. Maybe the Wi-Fi is slow today. A tiny inconvenience sends you spiraling. Low tolerance. Think weenie tolerance. Itty-bitty-bitty-bitty tolerance, all right? The next element of this mental weenie is that not only does it take almost nothing to throw them off their game, they drastically change their behavior. They go super deep. They massively change how they behave as a result of this tiny little thing. And then, and here's where it gets nasty, this is the third point of their mental ninnyness, all right? Is that once they've massively changed their behavior, they stay down for a long time. It takes them a super long time to re-stabilize their behavior. Like that tiny little Wi-Fi being so, that tiny little comment that someone said forever. They just, it just keeps bothering them. Keeps bothering, keep replaying in their head. They said this thing at this party and they think people laughed at them and they just keep replaying it, right? And not only that, when they finally stabilize, this is the fourth element, right? When they finally stabilize at this new lower baseline, they now are permanently worse as a result. And so of course, people in the real world like you and me, right? We sit somewhere between these two extremes, between maxed out stats and ninnyism. And so I see being able to describe the components of mental toughness as the first step to improving them in yourself and others. So just telling yourself or others to toughen up, for example, doesn't help anyone. But giving them clear instructions that they can use to change their behavior over time can help them improve it. And if you can improve it, it no longer means mental toughness is a trait that you're born with, but it's a skill you can develop. So if you have a short fuse, then you need to practice not giving power to something to ruin your day or ruin your moment. I'm not saying don't be upset. That's not my point at all. You just want to allow yourself to be more upset about letting something change your behavior than about the thing itself. So for example, I can't believe that person said XYZ to me, right? Rather than lashing out, you think, I don't want to give them that level of control over my behavior. I want to be bigger than the pain. Simply put, just continue to behave as normal despite the fact that something bad happened. And the only way you can do that is by first recognizing that you diverted from your normal behavior. You have to recognize, you know what? I got in a bad mood and I started acting differently, right? Now you can be in a bad mood, but if only you know and no one else knows, great job, right? You change your behavior. Like what would I normally say if I walked in the room when I'm not in a bad mood? Okay, well then why don't I say that even though I'm in a bad mood? And I think that the more you practice this, the faster you catch yourself from spinning out. You're like, okay, I just changed my behavior against my goals. Okay, let me come back up, right? Like as soon as I can recognize it. And so on a personal note for me, I think that this one actually hurts the worst, hurts the most, right? Trying to fix fortitude because I have to admit that I was too weak to control my behavior to begin with. I have to admit that my tolerance was not sufficiently strong to withstand whatever hardship I went through that I did end up reaching past my max, my theoretical max of hard stuff that I was able to to withstand, that I did change my behavior. But at least once you recognize it, right? You can give yourself the opportunity to demonstrate strength. And so that's the, in some ways, that's the silver lining. When you do act out, you're like, wow, this is actually an opportunity for me to stop acting out and demonstrate to myself that I have higher fortitude than I thought I did. And when you do that, you have the strength to change it. And so this action or this decision reverses the momentum of the bad decision, of the bad behavior that you did. And I say bad again, against our preferences, against the goals you have, right? And it begins the ascent back to baseline. And so I want to be clear here. This does not invalidate your feelings. It simply breaks the direct link between how you feel and how you act. The goal is to return to baseline as fast as possible. And over time, you can act like normal, faster and faster until eventually it's almost as if you were never upset to begin with, AKA your behavior doesn't change at all. And on a personal note, this is one that I found one of the easier ones to improve. Once it's like, okay, I messed up. I've acted this way. How do I jet pack back to normal as fast as possible? So as soon as you hit your rock bottom, whatever that is for you of this upset period, you reverse course, hardcore, full 180, full throttle forward, back to normal, right? Because then you get to say like, it only controls me as long as I allow it to control my behavior. If you realize that you are worse off than you were before the bad thing happened, we're getting into adaptability, then you have low adaptability, right? And now how do we reverse this, the fourth component of mental toughness? Then you have to ask yourself, how can I let this bad thing serve me? In what universe would this bad thing occurring actually be the beginning of something better? And so no matter how bad it is, our moments of greatest growth typically come after our biggest upsets. I don't know about you guys, but for me, this has totally been true. Like a lot of my greatest growth has come from like very periods where my fortitude was tested. I acted worse than I would like to. And then at that point, you come back to a baseline, but then you look back on the whole experience and you're like, how could this have served me? In what universe would this actually be in a story where the protagonist grows from this? So I love this. I think like I heard this first time on Joe Rogan, but I love the frame, which is that if you were to wake up right as the main character in a movie and you know that that movie has a happy ending and the character gets passed up for the promotion, doesn't get the girl, you know, the person they cared about most dies. What would the character in the story do to move the plot along towards the happy ending? As soon as you recognize it, what would that character do? You do it. And to be clear, guilt means that you broke your own rules and shame means you broke other people's rules. And those things are only useful as long as they get you to change your behavior for the better. You just simply feeling bad for the sake of feeling bad and not changing your behavior serves no one. So to be clear, I am not saying that you're supposed to numb yourself at all. I'm stating that you do not need to act out your feelings. In other words, just because you feel like ---- doesn't mean you need to act like ----, treat other people like ----, or treat yourself like ----. I think separating our feelings from how we behave is a sign of maturity, which has almost nothing to do with how old you are, only how skilled. And that means that you can work on it. And if that's not a hopeful message, I don't know what is. So hope you guys enjoyed that. I wrote that obviously in the lieu of my mom's death. And I wanted to better understand the feelings that I was going through and the behavior change as a result. And I was thinking to myself like, okay, how can I use this to make me better? How can I become better as a result of this? No one wants to think, man, my parent died. How do I get better from this? It feels like an almost uncomfortable thought. But if you think about your parent dying, your dog dying, or you getting broken up with, or whatever the bad thing that happened to you, what other frame serves you? And do you think that that person that let you down would want you to be worse off? No. I know for me, for sure not. That person would want me to be better from it. They wouldn't want me to be permanently traumatized. They wouldn't want me to be permanently changing my behavior in a way that is antithetical to my goals, is against my goals, makes it less likely that I get what I want out of life. Why would they that for me? Why would they want that for you? And so I think one of the things that's very important that I also had to break in thinking through this is that how long I mourn has nothing to do with how much I loved, period. If you get broken up with, if you're like, man, it takes half as long to get over somebody as you were in a relationship. You guys ever heard that before? Why can't I get broken up with today and be better immediately? Why not? What stops me? What rule of physics prevents me from behaving in a certain way? And I want to be clear, there are biological things that can affect this. If you're low on sleep, if you haven't eaten, but like on the flip side, it's like, if you slept really well, you, uh, you know, you have a full stomach, like you are more resilient. All of your mental toughness stats will go up when you are biologically, uh, in a better, um, situation. I only, and I only say that because they've measured this. People are less tolerant when they haven't slept. They're less tolerant when they haven't eaten. Right. And so I don't want to say that these things happen in a vacuum. Absolutely not. But when the bad thing happens, typically you don't expect them and you have to deal with the cards you're dealt, right? We have to, we have to take it within the fact that maybe we didn't sleep that much the night before or we haven't eaten in six hours. We still have that, that moment. And Victor Franco talks about this in man's search for meaning is that there's this, this gap, this moment between stimulus and reaction, where we have a choice. We get to act how we want to behave. And I think that that is where we get to live out our ideals. And I think if there's anything that's eternal about the human life, it's about the values that we choose to live by. And as someone who recently wrote a eulogy about this, I find it interesting when I think about what things we use to describe other human beings at the end of their life to summarize everything that happened. And what's very interesting to me is that the accomplishments that the person goes through is about one to two sentences. No one cares. No one cares if you were the richest man in Babylon. No one cares if you built a bunch of skyscrapers. No one cares if you invented some new social media app. And what I did find that was interesting is that there was two things that persistently come up as the things that people talk about, which is number one, service. What do they do for other people? And number two, character, which I, I see character fundamentally as skills, but skills in behavior on how we treat ourselves and others, which you could maybe just say are also service, right? But it's how did they behave? And what did they do as a result of this, this idealistic behavior in thinking and unpacking all this stuff while I was going through it, it was super elucidating. It was illuminating for me. It helped me understand it better. I write to understand, trying to take what you have in your head and write it out. We'll show you how many gaps you have in your thinking. It forces you to learn because there's no hiding from the words on a paper. This was super, super valuable. My, uh, I told Layla, uh, I sent her the, the, the thing that I wrote about this. And she was like, I think you might have a non-business book in you. So if you guys would like a non-business book, let me know. Cause I haven't started what my next book's going to be. I'm having an increasingly difficult time separating out some of these, I would say behavior sets, interpersonal skills, self skills, um, from it because so many things in business rely on you having this. You can have the best business strategy in the world, but if you have low tolerance, if you have low fortitude, if you have low resilience, if you have low adaptability, you will fail. It doesn't matter. And what I find interesting about this is that so many people are looking for the latest tactic when most of the time they can't execute anything for a consistent period of time because they get in their own way. They allow the world to dictate how they act. I think that there's a certain amount of inner strength that you experience or this feeling, maybe peace, if you want to call it that, where you're like, I know I'm in a bad mood right now. I know bad things have happened to me, but I'm still going to behave as though this person deserves my respect. They deserve my love. They deserve my appreciation. They deserve my gratitude. And if I can get through this day just today, or even just this conversation without them knowing that I was off or that I was in a bad mood, that's a W. And what happens is that as time passes, as you give time, time, one, that skill reinforces, you get better and better at it because you keep practicing it. But on top of that, you start to develop a reputation for being someone who's unshakable, unmovable, who's consistent, unbreakable. And then what happens is people begin to reinforce that identity with you. They start to tell you those things. They start to tell, well, he's, dude, he's a rock, man. That guy, that guy keeps going. That guy's, you know, he's a maniac. He doesn't stop. And you start to believe it. And you start to act in a way that confirms their positive suspicions, the traits that they choose to name you, they label you. And so that begins and kicks off the virtuous cycle. But some of you guys right now are, are in that, you're in that, that valley of despair, right? You had, maybe you had low tolerance, maybe you had high tolerance. I don't know. And something bad happened and you changed the way you behaved. And maybe you're in the low, low resilience. You're just like, you're just still kind of puttering along. And I would encourage you that like at the end of your life, the only thing that people will talk about is how you helped other people and how you behaved.