While scrolling youtube shorts lately, Alex Hormozi has been on my feed a lot. When googling him, he comes up as a YouTuber, which says a lot about what people think. Because Alex wouldn’t be the kind of YouTuber he is without his portfolio and his net worth. YouTuber doesn’t quite describe Alex entirely, but it does represent what people know of him.

He touched on a subject: why do we start so many new things but fail to finish them? The answer is the valley of disappointment.

This graph labels them as Expectations and Reality, but Alex phrases it as uninformed optimism and informed pessimism. These terms carry a lot more weight to me even though they convey the same meaning in this analogy. We want something to happen and we experience something different. In between those places lives the Valley of Disappointment. It’s why we avoid finishing new exciting things we try out. We learn that the nice, attractive elements we once sought have a lot of tough, unattractive qualities that we had overlooked.

When navigating the Valley of Disappointment, most people either quit due to the frustration or lack of progress, or people stagnate and sludge through their progression, taking far longer than they had ever imagined. Granted, many things take years of experience and effort before results come in. And as the graph shows, our reality can dramatically improve if we give it enough time.

Time is the enemy of many. Especially when it comes in the form of delayed gratification. How many times has something just gone away if you gave it a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, or just let the time slip by until it was forgotten?

Many recognize time as the enemy and very few are willing to look into the mirror to see an antagonist of their dreams. It’s why we want to get results quickly. Because we believe that if only we had more time we could get over this disappointing period of return.

We’ve seen get rich quick and lose weight fast. While researching for this post, one thumbnail I saw was end your laziness in 1 day. These titles are attractive not only because they promise immediate results, but because they combat our negative experiences with time being the enemy. If we removed time as a factor, if we could just get the shortcut and figure it out just a little quicker, we could finally get over the Valley of Disappointment we had experienced before.

This realization made me understand that if we can always frame something aside from ourselves as the culprit, we will always find it soothing, comforting, reassuring, and simple. We like to think that we perceive the world around us so clearly, which means that we must perceive ourselves with that much clarity. But we all know that’s a lie we tell ourselves. It’s why I believe social pressure is so high, because as societal creatures we must understand our position in society as others see it, not only as we see ourselves. It’s much simpler to have everyone around us give us indirect or direct feedback than it is for us to examine ourselves the way we examine the world.

What’s most interesting to me is that the graph above is quite modest in its expectation levels. There are much greedier, more unrealistic versions of what our expectations could be. In reality, we optimistically believe that the 45 degree angle is the baseline of how progression should work. We really never dive head first into something thinking it will be much worse than that baseline. It’s why all these shortcuts are sold and why very few talk about the long-term, delayed growth. It’s just a lot sexier to talk about the immediate wins than it is to say another day went by and it was difficult to see a difference.

There are a lot of interesting topics I’d like to further expand in the future, like self-examination, pointing the finger to others, and short versus long term gratification. You can check out the Alex Hormozi video here.