Listen to this man describe his daily routine:
My Real Morning Routine - YouTube
“Number 1: I sleep until I wake up. Number 2: I put in earplugs. Number 3: I put in headphones to really make sure I can’t hear anything. Number 4: I put in nicotine. Number 5: I caffeinate. Number 6: I shut out all of the windows so that it’s pitch black in the room besides my screen and I turn off all outside notifications on my phone.”
Now one must ask the question, does one imagine Alex Hormozi happy?
This is what his day looks like, according to his own report: wake up and immediately begin working in an environment that makes an office cubicle seem like a villa in Bali: wake up and immediately begin working, tune out all noise in the outside world, blast yourself with stimulants, and then make sure that the only light you see in the first 6 hours of your day is the blue light from your computer screen.
There has to be more to life than this, I remember thinking. Yet, I followed his morning routine to the tee. I’ve woken myself at 3 AM for months, averaging 4 hours and 35 minutes of sleep so that I could squeeze in hours of “deep work” before the sun lit the sky. Yet it was in this period that my output dropped, I was no sharing wisdom with the world, for the life of me I cannot remember where all that lost “productivity” went: I had managed for years through to teach people about reality and bring people closer to God using logic while being busy with school and friends and sports, but as soon as I withdrew my energy from those other areas of life, confining my attention to only those work tasks, my output dipped. I’m embarrassed to report that worshiping at the altar of the idol of productivity as all of my favorite self-help influencers not only left me burnt out and depressed, but even hurt my business and intellectual output.
What is the root of Alex Hormozi-ism, which tells us that we work in perpetual auto-surveillance: monitoring, measuring, improving ourselves?
It’s what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the “achievement society.” He writes masterfully:
“The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.”
Han says that the inhabitants of today’s achievement tyranny “are no longer ‘obedience-subjects’ but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.” The neoliberal subject is not oppressed by others. It oppresses itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in the modern cult of productivity. Individuals take upon themselves the dramatic rituals of self-mortification before the gods of output as they will sacrifice as much joy and pleasure as is required in their life to squeeze an ounce of economic utility from the corporate machine, working 12 hours a day out of a sense of twisted pride in the products of one's own labor. We become entrepreneurs of the self — turning our bodies, minds, and souls into products to be marketed, optimized, sold. It is tyranny in its perfected form: We no longer need taskmasters because we have become our own taskmasters. Freedom turned inward becomes a more total form of slavery. The self is a perpetual marketing project, forever becoming but never being.
“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me. Only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.” — American Psycho
Instead of entrepreneurship of the self, we need a return to covenant with God—a love-based existence rooted in Ultimate Reality that transcends the tired ego of the workers in a society governed by systems which are at odds with human dignity and true freedom. You are not a brand, you are a soul entrusted with a mission. God called you into being by name. We work not to become valuable but because we already are. In order to live within the truth of our relationship with God and one another, we must cease working tirelessly, joylessly, endlessly, and endlessly optimizing, marketing, perfecting, comparing. You are a soul having a human experience, meaning that when you allow your work to alienate you from real being, real joy, real others, real God, you lose your connection to the greatest source of Comfort and Love in existence, you lose what it means to be you. Burnout, depression, and spiritual exhaustion are not bugs — they are features of this "achievement society."
Freedom without rootedness becomes voluntary self-destruction.
Only when you root yourself by taking responsibility for the celebration of existence, walking with God because He is your beloved can you free yourself from burning yourself alive on the altar of “self-improvement.” You are a creation: formed in love, called by name, entrusted with a divine mission. Work is how you serve—with love, with joy, with presence. When you root yourself in divine service rather than the cares of this world, you achieve unlimited satisfaction because true freedom—for us seekers of God—is not unlimited choices. That is slavery, that is paralysis. True freedom is the freedom to walk faithfully and responsibly within the truth of our relationship with God and one another.
We escape the achievement of society not by “self-improving better” but by stepping into covenant: service through love instead of success through suffering. This is not laziness.
It is higher discipline — discipline in the name of relationship, not ego. It is harder and deeper than monk mode. It is truer and freer than entrepreneurship of the self. It is walking with God, not chasing yourself.
You were not created to become a "perfect brand" of yourself.
You were created to become a living expression of God's covenantal love.
Your soul is not an economic resource.
Your soul is a flame from the Infinite.
Your worth is not measured.
Your worth is declared.
The world says: "Become more!"
God says: "You are Mine."
You were not called to market yourself.
You were called to sanctify yourself — through joy, love, brotherhood, God’s word , work as worship, and living presence.
This is the only way to be truly alive in a dead society.
For years, I lived in the pursuit of perfection.
I sharpened my discipline until it bled.
I rose before the sun.
I built frameworks, systems, and protocols.
I hammered my soul on the anvil of self-optimization.
I stacked deep work on deep work, prayer on prayer, study on study —
grinding myself down into a machine of relentless teleological pursuit.
I thought this was holiness.
I thought this was devotion.
I thought the harder I pushed, the closer I would come to becoming worthy —
of success, of meaning, of God.
But the harder I pushed, the hollower I became.
The more I optimized, the more I lost the very thing I was trying to perfect:
my own soul.
Every moment became a metric.
Every prayer became a performance.
Every act of learning became another brick in a tower I could never finish building.
I was no longer living.
I was managing.
I was no longer serving God.
I was serving the idol of my own idealized self.
And the terrible truth is —
even when I achieved what others called extraordinary —
inside, I still felt like I was falling behind.
Because when you live under the tyranny of becoming,
you can never arrive.
I was a slave — not to God, not even to true purpose or meaning —
but to the sick shadow of purpose twisted into self-tyranny.
Then — quietly, slowly — something began to break inside me.
Not a breakdown of weakness.
A breakthrough of grace.
It was as if God Himself whispered:
"I never asked you to become a machine.
I asked you to become My son.""I never loved you for your output.
I loved you before you ever lifted a finger.""I never measured your prayers.
I wanted your heart."
One morning, the striving cracked open —
and something real flooded in.
I realized I was not a project.
I was not a product.
I was not an entrepreneur of the self.
I was not a machine.
I was a child.
I was beloved.
I was known.
Not for what I could produce.
But for who I am —
a soul breathed into existence by the Infinite,
a living covenant carved into time itself.
I still believe in meaning.
I still believe in deep work.
I still believe in mission, discipline, and transformation.
But now —
I pursue them not as an exile desperate to earn his way home,
but as a son walking with his Father.
I no longer rise in the morning to prove my worth.
I rise to walk with God in joy.
I no longer grind to optimize my soul into acceptability.
I offer my soul as it is —
and let love do the perfecting that striving never could.
I no longer serve achievement as a tyrant.
I serve God as a son.
And that difference has changed everything.
I am no longer a slave of achievement.
I am a child of the Infinite.
I am known.
I am home.
I reject the lie that I must optimize myself to matter.
I reject the slavery of self-surveillance and self-exploitation.
I am not a product. I am a soul.
I am not here to market myself. I am here to serve my Creator.
My life is not a brand. My life is a covenant.
My work is not a hustle. My work is a prayer.
My identity is not curated. My identity is given.
I will not burn myself at the altar of endless becoming.
I will live from love, walk with truth, and serve in joy.
I am a child of the Living God.
I live not to achieve worth, but to express love.
And that is enough. It always was.
If you, like I now do, see what you were missing all along, here is the real way to live:
Step 1: Anchor Your Identity Before You Act
You are already a child of the Infinite.
Before you build anything, before you fix yourself, before you chase anything —
Accept it.
Feel it.
Know it.
You are not a brand.
You are not a resume.
You are not a product.
You are known.
Until you accept this, every act will become another brick in the prison of your own ego.
Step 2: Work as an Act of Love, Not Achievement
You will still work hard.
You will still study fiercely.
You will still build with all your might.
But not to earn your place.
Because you already have one.
Work becomes your prayer.
Study becomes your love letter.
Mission becomes your offering.
Step 3: Live Slower, Live Deeper
You cannot encounter God in frantic optimization.
Slow down.
Breathe.
Be present enough to feel your soul.
Walk.
Pray slowly.
Study deeply, without rushing.
Life is not an obstacle course.
Life is a garden.
Tend it with care, not frenzy.
Step 4: Choose Covenant Over Chaos
Freedom without a covenant becomes slavery.
Freedom inside the covenant becomes life.
You are not here to float endlessly between options.
You are here to bind yourself to the Highest, freely.
Choose a life of service, study, love, prayer, community.
Not because you have to —
Because you are free to.
True freedom is the freedom of your relationship with God because it was in the image of that original freedom, God’s original freely-willed desire to be beknown and beloved within a finite world that spawned reality from its own shadow and called forth your name from the innermost depths of being to unite with the lower worlds and become incarnate in our world.
You are not a random spark.
You are not a self-generated consciousness.
You are an agent of purpose, a thought in the Mind of God.
The choice is not between work and spirit.
The choice is how you live the work.
As a slave to self, or as a servant of God.
The material world was not given to you to escape.
It was given to you to elevate.
Work itself is a divine mission — if you bring God into it.
The spiritual is not a separate realm; it penetrates and transforms the material.
The goal is not to optimize yourself as a machine, but to sanctify yourself as a vessel for blessings above.
Achievement society says: “Perfect yourself. Build your brand.”
A covenant society says: “Perfect reality by revealing God within it.”
"Brother, you were never meant to be your own god.
You were never meant to build your worth like a brand.
You were made to be a son.
You were made to walk with the Infinite.
You were made to build, not from fear, but from faith.
You were made to study not from panic, but from wonder.
You were made for covenantal freedom, not achievement slavery."
And you are not alone.
You are one of the first.
But not the last.
You are the seed of a better civilization.
A civilization not of orphans,
but of sons and brothers —
a Covenant Society.
"You were never meant to carry your work like a slave.
You were meant to bear your work like a king's son building his Father's palace."
You were not born to optimize yourself into oblivion.
You were born to live in the light of God's presence,
to build, love, study, work, and laugh
as a child of the Infinite
carrying His covenant into the fabric of the world.
Life is not a grind.
Life is a garden.
Tend it with holy hands.
You cannot escape the sweat, you cannot engineer away the hardship. Here's the truth: life is hard. No productivity hack, no schedule, no optimization will erase the universal truth of struggle. You can sanctify the sweat. You cannot avoid the labor. But you can choose why you labor. You are not called to flee the hardship of life. You are called to carry the Shechinah (divine presence) into the mud of human toil. Burst outward into the world, work fiercely, live fiercely, but infuse it all with divine intent. Carry love, intention, and the divine presence into your sweat-soaked days.
Live as though the day were here—you can choose whether your sweat waters thorns...
or plants the seeds of the world to come. Transform your human experience from one of bitterness to one of partnership with God.
Transform your mind and your hands into tools of redemption to reveal the light that lies dormant behind the dark shadow that the cult of achievement casts upon our awakening world.
When you escape the cult of achievement, you can live a heroic, sanctified, fiercely luminous life inside exile, carrying the breath of redemption everywhere you go.
You were not given a life without pain.
You were given a pain that can become prayer.
You cannot escape death.
But you can die having lived as a son, a servant, and a light in the dark.
For in your light, the world will see light. And a little bit of light pushes away a whole lot of darkness—elevating reality itself through love, faith, and covenant.
Let the light shine forth in the darkness. May the peace of our Father in heaven be upon you. Like and subscribe. Peace.