What Is Trauma?

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)
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.

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.

[pmbento]

The way we view things is often more important than what those things actually are

[kekulanaokalani]

Always look to Win. And it starts with your perspective…. Great video.

[zero_linez]

Epictitus talks about that in the Endochiridian. He talks about self-defeating fear and self-fulfilling fear.

[fredrikandersson]

Trauma can change your brain, it's not something you can out think.

[thestaticisreal]

I’ve gotten in an accident after going 120 and honestly, I wasn’t traumatized at all because it was the other person’s fault

[isekifarm]

I was once in a car crash on my way to selling boxes of tomatoes, got everything organised from the crash, towing etc. I was selling tomatoes an hour later, and it made them really easy to sell

[Open-ocrs]

Assuming you’re being attentive on the road 9 times out of 10 the car accident is out of your control and due to the negligence of other drivers. No point in fearing something out of your control.

[WEALLSHINE]

LMAO ALEX IS SO FUNNY BUT I GET HIM HOW HE EXPLAINS THINGS. KEEP IT UP DAWG. 😄💪

[leeali]

Alex is a great great grandmaster of frame control. 🤣🤣🤣

[caiden]

Trauma as clinically understood differs from trauma as the word is colloquially used, though. Homeless people and war vets have trauma as clinically understood. That car accident could be traumatic or could be fear conditioning. It depends. And not everything has to be viewed or thought about through a lens of function or usefulness.

[NupeWoop]

How about we put our phones down while driving, look over our shoulders instead of our mirrors-even twice sometimes and chill out on the highway when someone slow is in the fast lane to get around a semi or slow car? Oh, blinkers… not seeing a lot these days.

[randommechanical]

By the same logic, we all eat, if you seriously choke one time, are you going to quit eating?

[YouTubeUserToo]

You’re talking like people who experience trauma “wanted to learn” trauma.

[randommechanical]

We're all going to die. But fewer and fewer of us actually live. Greatly due to fear of the possible and sometimes unlikely.

[mitchelllambaiso]

Almost flipped off a bridge at night in the rain in a Nissan 350z and I’m still drivin