If you listen to ONE group coaching call in 2026 - make it this one....

Summary

Podcast Summary: Action Academy – If you listen to ONE group coaching call in 2026 – make it this one...

Featuring: Dr. Benjamin Hardy | Host: Brian Luebben

Date: March 3, 2026

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Overview

In this electrifying Action Academy group coaching call, host Brian Luebben is joined by Dr. Benjamin Hardy, renowned psychologist and bestselling author (10x Is Easier Than 2x, Who Not How, The Gap and The Gain, and more). Dr. Hardy draws on psychology and business strategy to help high performers break through their mental barriers, set (and achieve) “impossible” goals, and engineer a career and life defined by purpose, scaling, and happiness. The episode combines mind-expanding coaching, live Q&A with Action Academy members, and practical frameworks for leaving high-paying jobs in favor of entrepreneurship and financial freedom.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Gap and the Gain: Redefining Progress and Happiness

[05:46–12:06]

• Concept Explained: The “gap” is comparing current reality to an ideal, future, or perfection—leading to perpetual dissatisfaction. The “gain” is measuring progress versus your past self, creating gratitude and motivation.

  • “The gap is where you're always measuring what is against what you think should be. And the problem with the gap is that you're never going to be in your ideal... The better approach, which we teach in that book, is that you should always be measuring yourself in the gain.” – Dr. Benjamin Hardy (07:42)

• Takeaway: High achievers often overlook how far they’ve come, missing daily happiness. True progress is visible when measured backward—use your goals to direct, but your gains to reflect.

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2. Impossible & 10x Goals: Why and How to Set Them

[12:06–24:35]

• Framing the Future: Most people set incremental, “past-based” goals (e.g., last year’s revenue plus 20%). Breakout success requires using your desired future to dictate present actions—set “impossible” or 10x goals that force you out of current ruts.

  • “The reason people don't set the massive goal is because they think that they need to have it solved first. I need to know the how, which you won't have with an impossible goal… Instead, goals are simply tools for looking at your life.” (13:11)

• Friction & Letting Go: The hardest obstacle is not just aiming higher, but being willing to let go of everything (activities, routines, even identities) that can't get you to 10x. Identity and comfort with past success can keep you stuck.

  • “You have to let something go in order to go get something 10 times better. And most people won't do that.” (17:51)

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3. Using Time and Urgency as Leverage

[24:35–31:39]

• Compressing Timelines: Taking a longer timeline makes big goals feel safer but kills urgency. Shortening the timeline dramatically (going from a 10-year to a 2-year plan) forces finding radically different, better pathways.

  • Story: Young man with a 33-year goal to buy a soccer team. Hardy challenges: “What if you did it by 30 instead of 55?” — This instantly invalidates most of his original (comfortable) steps, exposing “false requirements.”

  • “The quality of framing your future shapes what and how you do in the present, especially the things you're going to have to let go… A goal that’s far away, or future that's framed poorly, means you’re not even solving the real problem.” (24:35)

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4. Identity Shifting & Integration Challenges

[31:39–37:10]

• Rapid Growth = Rapid Identity Shifts: Shortening timelines and going for bigger goals demand changing who you are much faster. Integration is disorienting, but necessary.

  • “Success, even more than failure, requires change… if it ain't broke, that's when you should fix it.” – Quoting Richard Koch (35:17)

  • “I’m just not a believer that you need the full identity now... Once you start making progress, your conviction skyrockets and eventually you just become your future self.” (36:31)

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5. Live Q&A: Going Deeper with Action Academy Members

a. Focus, Strategy, and Letting Go (with Tim)

[37:18–46:42]

• Tim wants to grow his mobile home park AUM from $20M to $250M but feels pulled by multiple verticals.
  • Dr. Hardy: “Strategy is as much about what you don’t do as what you do... Good strategy is surprising because of how rare it is.”
  • Focus on the most direct path; don't optimize things that shouldn’t exist (Elon Musk quote).

b. Leveling Up with the Right “Whos” (with Jake)

[55:04–62:43]

• When you set bigger goals, the right partners (“super Whos”) emerge and can multiply outcomes by 10x or more, but only if your vision is bold enough.
  • “You won't find those partners if your goal doesn't allow you to filter for them.”
  • Example: Hardy’s business partnership with Blake Erickson—created because of bold, shared vision.

c. Selecting and Abandoning Goals (with Soli, Sarah, et al.)

[65:16–75:34]

• How to pick the right goal? “Once you choose a goal, the pathways start to emerge... It doesn’t have to be a perfect goal. It just has to be a goal that transforms you and your business.” (67:14)
• When to quit or change goals? Signals: (1) Major success (time to stretch); (2) Dramatic lack of progress over time (time to pivot).

d. Reconciling Multiple Goals, Scarcity, and Sacrifice (Jacob & Melissa, Connor)

[75:56–83:21]

• You can have everything you want, just not at the same time (Scott Galloway). Sequence goals, prioritize, and recognize that achieving one (e.g., $500k income) creates conditions (e.g., time freedom) for the next.
• Letting go is essential at every new level.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “We're kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” – Dr. Benjamin Hardy (28:50)
• “The most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing which shouldn’t exist.” – Quoting Elon Musk (17:39)
• “Success, even more than failure, requires change. If it ain’t broke, that’s when you should fix it.” – Quoting Richard Koch (35:17)
• “A goal properly set is halfway reached.” – Quoting John Doerr (68:24)
• “You can’t have a level 100 relationship with a level 10 goal.” – Brian Luebben (54:23)
• “You have to be ready for the opportunity; you can’t wait to get ready.” – Brian Luebben (63:06)
• “Clarity and transparency, personally to yourself, are everything. There’s no competition here, just honesty.” – Dr. Benjamin Hardy (75:56)

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Frameworks, Visuals & Tools Shared

• The Gap vs. The Gain: Framework for tracking fulfillment and progress.
• Floor, Frame, Focus: Your “floor” (minimum acceptable), “frame” (worldview shaped by goals), and “focus” (pathway chosen).
• Linear vs. Focused Path Graph: Shortening timelines creates steeper, more efficient paths—but demands letting go of old habits, routines & identities.
• Who Not How: Building teams and leverage for accelerated outcomes; “super Whos” multiply results by orders of magnitude.
• Signals for Changing Goals: Either rapid success (stretch up), or persistent lack of movement (pivot out).

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Intro & Context: [00:00–03:26]
• Gap and the Gain: [05:46–12:06]
• 10x Goals, Timeline Compression: [12:06–24:35]
• Identity Integration: [31:39–37:10]
• Q&A (Tim/Strategy): [37:18–46:42]
• Q&A (Jake/Whos): [55:04–62:43]
• Q&A (Goal Selection & Quitting): [65:16–75:34]
• Q&A (Multiple Goals/Sacrifice): [75:56–83:21]
• Wrap & Closing Remarks: [85:55–86:19]

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Tone & Takeaways

Dr. Hardy’s approach is both challenging and deeply encouraging: He urges listeners to be radically honest, let go of what no longer serves, and use audacious goals as tools for transformation—even/especially when the path is unknown. Brian’s facilitation brings both humor and practicality, creating a safe space for high achievers to expand their vision, discard limiting beliefs, and focus on high-leverage action.

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Who Should Listen

• High performers “comfortable but restless” in corporate jobs
• Entrepreneurs seeking clarity, focus, and exponential growth
• Anyone seeking practical frameworks for scaling income AND joy

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“You can use a singular goal to simultaneously solve other goals. But question some of your goals—and where they even came from.” – Dr. Benjamin Hardy (79:00)

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Further Action

• Check out Dr. Hardy’s upcoming book The Science of Scaling.
• For live calls and masterminds: ActionAcademy.com

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Set a goal so big it forces a new you to emerge. Measure your gains. Let go of everything that doesn’t serve transformation—and enjoy the ride.

Transcript

[Brian]

What's up Action Academy family? I have a treat for you. My job on this podcast is not only to give you guys the best interviews possible, but to also spend a large amount of my time, energy and effort networking and connecting with the best and brightest individuals, building personal connections, personal relationships so that I can give you guys access to my Rolodex. And guys, I am now honored to call Dr. Benjamin Hardy, one of my favorite authors, a friend and a mentor and give him to you guys live on the podcast today. Dr. Benjamin Hardy is a multiple time best selling New York Times author, authors of some of my favorite books ever written, the Gap and the Gain who not how 10x is easier than 2x. Ben also has a new book coming out soon, so him and I did a full formal podcast episode that we will release closer to the launch date of the book and we will talk

about the book book more then.

But for now, he enjoyed our interview so much that he was willing to give 90 minutes of uninterrupted personal coaching to our Action Academy community. And it was the coolest, coolest experience and I wanted to share it to you guys for free. As always, I put my money where my mouth is. Our Action Academy members got to benefit from this. I want you guys to benefit from this. This was the largest and best received call that we have ever hosted in Action Academy across almost three years of existence. And so I'm so excited for you guys to listen today. If you need to break it up into multiple sessions, that's perfectly fine. But I highly recommend listening all the way through. You're going to hear some Q and A, you're going to hear some wonderful questions from our community members. We had all over 200 people on this call and guys, over 200 people. So again, remember, this is a zoom call. The audio is okay because I did it in studio, but just keep in

mind that it's not going to be

as polished or professional as a typical episode that will be airing about a month from now. So guys, if you are wanting to buy cash flowing small businesses, if you're wanting to buy commercial real estate, if you want to be on these zoom calls live with guys like Dr. Benjamin Hardy here, actionacademy.com go in the show description, click the link. Our team is happy to book a call with you Monday through Saturday. We will hop on walk it through, walk through it with you and see if it's a fit. All right, guys, let's get to Dr. Benjamin Hardy.

Ben, this is how you know it's a Good call. Because we already have this many people early. It's a good call, man. We're excited. I love it. So, Ben, you want to maybe introduce yourself?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Absolutely. Happy to be with you all. I'm fairly known for the books I've written. I've written 10x is easier than 2x. Who not how the gap and the gain Be your future self. Now, I wrote a book called Willpower doesn't work. I've written a lot of books. I've sold millions of copies. I write at the intersection of psychology and strategy. And so everything we're gonna talk about today is better psychology, better strategy, so that you can scale what you're doing 10 times better, 10 times faster. That's what we're gonna talk about. I have a new book called the Science of Scaling, which is right there. Our boy. Our boy has it. But yeah, so that's. So we're going to talk about the science of scaling today and how you can achieve impossible goals. And I'm going to share with you some of the research on impossible goals and how you can use the future and time to simplify everything you're doing so that you can find far more effective, far more efficient pathways forward.

[Brian]

Beautiful. So what's up, everybody? We got a hundred and some odd on the call right now. So that's good enough for me to go ahead and get going and then post in Yalls pods, post in your chats, post in the assets asset chats and let people know to attend the call. Again, if you guys are showing up on the call, you have to be on the call, playing full out to get one of these bad boys. Ben was kind enough to sign an autograph. Two copies. And so at the end of the call, whoever I felt was the most profound and most prepared that asked the best questions, I will be personally sending you two autographed copies of the book. And everyone else would just get the genius that has been in written form. So stick around to the end and we'll. I'll sign those. So I'm super excited for that. First off, the two books that fundamentally changed my life were who, not how and the gap in the gain. And then also 10x is easier than 2x came along when I was doing the same thing, having the same idea, and I finally saw it in written form and it validated what I was thinking. I was like, okay, cool. I'm not crazy. It really is easier to just add a couple zeros to this thing and keep trucking. So, guys, how we're going to Structure this call is. I'll probably do about the first 20, 30 minutes of it. I'll warm us up and start myself with a little bit more of a continuation of our podcast episode. So while we're talking, if anything's sticking out to you, go ahead and take the idea, put it in your pocket, post it in the chat, and then eventually we're going to open up for Q and A for the majority of the call. But first, I want to go ahead and get us warmed up with some good general questions that I wasn't able to ask on the podcast. It's both selfish and serving to all of you guys. But one of those questions that I wanted to ask was in particular about the gap in the gain, because a lot of these people that are on the call today and myself included, will set and pursue very large goals. And one of my favorite quotes is, let's get everyone rich so they can understand it's not the answer to happiness. And so when you wrote gap in the gain, it was the first time in my life that I read in written word what I believe is the formula for happiness in a way that at least I could understand. And I've recommended it to almost everybody on this call, and I want your thoughts on that. As you were taking that idea and you were extrapolating it out, can you describe first about what is the gap versus the gain for somebody that perhaps hasn't read the book and then expand on that idea and what your thoughts are on it a few years later after its release and its reception?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Absolutely. So the gap and the gain is a way to measure your progress so that you can actually be happy while being a high achiever. Everyone here is a high achiever. You wouldn't be. You wouldn't be in this room with this good man if. If you weren't going for massive goals. Right? And so that's not the problem. The problem, at least as it relates to your happiness, is how you're framing your future and your path. Right? And this is something we're gonna go deep into. But basically, your past and your future are tools for making choices in the present, by the way, I don't know if people can hear that, but your past and your future are tools for how to live in the present. And so what a lot of high achievers do is they take their future, say, even a 10x goal, and they measure their current self against it. And what happens is that when you're always measuring yourself against the future, by the way, I'm a believer in letting the future shape the present. And we'll go pretty deep into that. Like, the future is the tool to shape the present. But the future is always a moving target as well, right? You achieve one goal and then you go for the next goal and the next and the next. And that's actually a very healthy thing. We all need a future. Psychologically, you get messed up if you don't have goals. The problem is when you feel like a loser for not being at your goal. That's called the gap is when you measure yourself against the goal, which is a moving target, and you constantly feel like a loser for not being there now. And so, as a high achiever, you probably spend a lot of time living in the gap. But the gap isn't just about the distance between you and your goal. Often the gap is the distance between you and what your ideal is in the moment. Right? So, for example, I might have an idea of how this call is supposed to go, right? And that ideal is in my mind, and I might be thinking, oh, this call's not going as well as I think it should be, Therefore, I'm in the gap. And now I'm upset. Or as a parent of multiple kids, I could look at my kids and I can always look at the areas where I think that they need to improve, right? And I never see their gains, right? And so the gap is where you're always measuring what is against what you think should be. And the problem with the gap is that you're never going to be in your ideal, Right? The ideal is a moving target by nature. How Dan Sullivan talks about it is it's like a horizon in the desert. No matter how many steps you're taking towards the horizon, it just keeps going, right? And so basically, if you're always measuring yourself against ideals, you're diminishing the present and you're also diminishing the past. That's not a. That's not a good recipe for happiness. And it turns out that it's not really a great recipe for success. The better approach, which we teach in that book, is that you should always be measuring yourself in the gain. So the gain is where, just speaking about this call, I could be freaking in the gain. And we all should be that we're here together and that this is how this experience is happening, right? If I'm focusing on what is and what you know, and the benefits and the blessings or whatever, if I'm focusing on that, then things are going to go a lot better, right? If I'm focusing On the growth I've achieved, Right? Think about all of yourselves. I want you to just go back five years. Go back to 2020. Are you guys in the same spot you were five years ago? Shake your head yes or no. Here's a question for you. Are there certain things that you've achieved that your 2020 self, back five years ago, are there certain things you've achieved already that your past self would have thought were impossible? Tell me that if we went and Talked to your 2020 self, are there certain things that you've already done in your life that they couldn't have fathomed, but you've already done it, you've normalized it. Shake your head yes or no if that's true. But then, honestly, let's not go back five years. Let's go back. Let's go back one year. Let's go back to halfway through last year, 2024. How much have you actually grown and accomplished in the last year? How many? Guessing that you've done a lot. I'm even guessing you've done a lot in the last 90 days if you really took the time. Here's the problem with high achievers. They don't take the time. They don't take the time to measure their progress. And the only real way you can measure your progress is backwards. You can use your goals to filter your direction, but the only way you can measure progress is by measuring the gain. And the better you get at pointing out the gains, both to yourself and others, the more progress and the more progress, the more progress you create. Where am I missing? What do you want to talk about with the gap in the game?

[Brian]

I think that, yeah, extraordinarily well said. And when I first read that, I was having this feeling as I was going through all of these transformational moments of my life. And because for people that are brand new to Action Academy, back in 2022, three years ago, I was employed, I had a job, I was selling uniforms. And now we're able to have this economic impact and we're doing almost a billion dollars of acquisition this year in Action Academy. So that's across all of you guys. So it's really crazy when you think about just changing your form of measurement and just making a decision is how you're able to introduce happiness into your lives. Because, guys, I can. I can zoom this out to zeros and commas way far beyond you guys. And I can say that I'm in a lot of masterminds where there are people that are worth fifty million And a hundred million dollars that have never done this work and they've never made this decision or this distinction and all they can think about is my private jet. I can't stand in it all the way. And I'm upset because this person next to me has a bigger private jet. And that's what a miserable existence to live. So that's why this is so interesting and so cool. Because not only did we get to get you guys rich, but we get to get you guys happy in the process. You can learn this stuff and do the pre work right now, today, so that later on it's going to compound alongside you. Ben, I want to take that a little bit and parlay that into 10x is easier than 2x and a specific point of it. Because for somebody that has done that, where I have written a vision down and some of the people on this call have been in the game long enough to write a vision down and see the fulfillment of it. So once you do it, once you become a believer and then there's nobody that can tell you what's possible or impossible anymore. But there's a moment where for the first time in your life, somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, hey, Jake. Hey Mo. Hey, Tim. This is possible and you're not aware of it yet and you don't believe them yet. And there's a large amount of friction that is involved with that first impossible goal that you set on paper. Can you talk to us about facing that friction head on? Especially when you're creating your first impossible goal, your first 10x goal, and how to overcome that friction?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Absolutely. So a lot of people, they don't set massive goals, literally. Like what? So I've already told you this in kind of some terms, but I want to make it very clear that your future as a person, even your past. Right. We were just talking about in increasing the value of your past. Right. Focusing on the gain, focusing on progress, seeing it, squeezing the juice and turning every experience into a gain versus always being in the gap and comparing yourself with what should be blah, blah, blah. That's. That's a devaluation of the present and the past. But the real crucial thing to understand is that the future is the most dominant tool shaping your life. Your future, and more specifically your goals is shaping everything you're doing. The reason you're on this call is because it, to one degree or another is viewed as a pathway. Whether it's in knowledge, relationships or inspiration, whatever it is, you see this community, this group, as a pathway to what you're trying to accomplish. Right. Otherwise you wouldn't be here. Right. And so everything we do is based on our future. In other words, everything we do is based on our goals. And so that then brings up this idea of impossible goals. Why don't people set impossible goals? Because they don't know how to achieve them. And so they only set achievable goals. They set goals that are based on their past. And you can see this when someone says, and this is where they let their past dictate their future, which is very ineffective. But they say, I did X amount of revenue last year, I did 5 million last year, so I'm going to go for 7 this year. That's when you let your past shape your future. And when your past is shaping your future, then you're not using the future as an effective tool. Instead, you want your future to shape your present. You don't want your, you don't want your past to shape your present. You want your future to shape your present. And the beautiful part about impossible goals is that there's not very many pathways to get there. So if I just took any of you, right, I'm looking at, I'm sorry, I'm gonna call people out, right? If I looked at Justin Ward or if I looked at, funny, it says Hardy. Joel, my last name's Hardy. But if I took your nor your current goal right in anyone on this call, whatever your goal is. And I just said, you can't change the timeline, you can only make it 10 times bigger, right? So say you had a two year goal to get to X number. And I just said, Same timeline, just 10x the goal, your goal, your current pathway wouldn't work to get to the 10x goal. And so using the future as a tool, the future is a tool for finding better paths and for becoming radically honest with yourself about the current paths you're on, which have a fast approaching expiration date. So the reason people don't set the massive goal is because they think that they need to have it solved first. I need to know the how, which you won't have with an impossible goal. They also think that they need to believe it's possible, which is also false. Instead, goals are simply tools for looking at your life. If you took your goal and you made it 10 times bigger, and then you use that goal as a tool for looking at your current life, you'd have to start to realize that your current path isn't going to get you to that 10x goal. Doesn't mean you have to get off your current path. But let's just be honest, your current path isn't going to get you there. And so if you're willing, you can use that goal as a tool to find a better path, to find better partners, to find better opportunities, to find 10x better opportunities, which you won't find unless you use the goal as a tool. So people just won't use it as a tool. Instead, they get overly defensive about it, overly emotional about it. They're worried that if they fail, they're a loser. None of that has anything to do with goal setting. Goals are tools for filtering your choices in the present and for finding much better choices. That's the primary purpose.

[Brian]

So where do you think the friction comes from that, Ben? Especially when you're doing it for the first time? Because I will say over time, when you do this again and again, it's a muscle that's built where it becomes easier and easier. And then now it's just, am I going big enough? Am I going big enough? Let me add two or three zeros and see if I can do this. Where do you think the friction comes from for the first time setting this goal setting process for additional context. A lot of people on this call are the top of their field in corporate America. We have the top engineers, we have data engineers, systems engineers, VPs of ops, VPs of sales. These are the top people in their field. And now they are going through a fundamental identity shift to where now a goal of financial freedom, perhaps 10 years from now, or maybe financial freedom in their lifetime has now shrunk to financial freedom within two years. And they feel this friction associated with that. Where does that friction come from? And what's some advice that you could have to push through that regardless of the fear?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Do you care if I share my screen and just show the framework? Real simple? No. So check this out. This is frame. Yeah. Yeah. So this frame right here, Frame represents what? Right. So this represents information, data, pathways. And so your frame as a person determines how you see the world. Right. None of you see the world as it is. You see the world through your frame. And as I've already said, your frame is based on your goals. And so what happens when you move the goal to a higher level is it creates what I call a higher floor. Your floor is the dividing line between what you say yes and no to. And so your floor really represents what you say no to. So a lot of the things that are acceptable for a small goal, all of these things that are pathways to a goal. Once you make the goal 10 times bigger or a hundred times bigger, whatever it is, all of these pathways that were acceptable before go below the floor. Now you can keep going below the floor and you can keep contradicting the goal. So this is where the real friction comes, is that in order to go for the bigger future and actually start to strip out the stuff that is acceptable now, but can't get you to 10x or a hundredx, you have to raise your floor. And I'm going to just share a quick quote and then I'm going to go really deep on this because this is the biggest friction point. So Musk said, and this is when he's talking, he said this years ago about how he engineers systems, right? He said that the most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing which shouldn't exist. And so the whole point is to actually create a focused path to the goal. And so the biggest friction comes when, and this is, by the way, the biggest friction of all, change. If you think about addiction, right, if you think about any form of change, one of the, one of the great quotes from Alcoholics Anonymous is all progress starts by telling the truth. The next piece of that is that you have to start letting things go, right? And so you all, as I've already heard, are at the top of your fields. If you Want to go 10x from where you're at right now, a lot of what you're currently doing would become optimizing things that shouldn't exist. A lot of it would fall below the floor. A lot of. And so the question then becomes, are you willing to let that go and strive to go from good to great, and strive to actually become maybe game changing in what you do? Or have you reached a point where you had a lot of goals, you've hit them, and now you're comfortably complacent and now you're good just doing what you're doing. So the hardest part is that you have to let something go in order to go get something 10 times better. And most people won't do that.

[Brian]

How do you balance the enjoyment of today with the pursuit of a better tomorrow?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

So this is going back to the psychology of time, that the past and future are not actually separate from the present. The past and the future are how you frame and operate in the present. And obviously we've talked about improving the past by emphasizing the gain, right? But the future, as I've already said, is the primary force shaping your present. But the thing that you all have to realize is that the future is in your head. I know it might feel far away, and I know that it feels like there's a massive distance to cover and there are things you've got to do, but the future is simply a tool for choosing who you're being in the present. I'm actually going to show just one more picture here. I think I can find it. Let me come back here. I'm sorry. So this is just an example. This is a representation of the future being the tool through which you filter in the present, right? These are the ideas of signal versus noise, and these are also the ideas of pathways. And when you move your future higher, it allows you to start finding better pathways than you could. You couldn't see them otherwise. You know, I could give you case study after case study and you might even think about your own. But until you have the bigger goal, there's no need to even filter or find certain pathways, right? The reason you're in this room is because you're looking for pathways to big goals. You're looking for knowledge for big goals. If you had small goals, you wouldn't be in this room. You'd be watching Netflix, right? Or you'd be at your 9 to 5, right? Or something like that. And so having big goals doesn't need to take away from the present. You can be extremely present. I actually am looking at you all and you look very present here, even though you have big goals.

[Couple (Jacob and Melissa)]

So.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

So there's no contradiction there. And to the point of happiness. We've already talked about being in the gain and appreciating the gains and seeing the progress. But also, I'm gonna just go back one more time here. I'm gonna go to this guy. This is a guy named Viktor Frankl. And I know that you and I talked about him, Brian, but Viktor Frankl was in the concentration camps of the Nazis. This guy was a Jewish psychiatrist, and he wrote about this. He wrote about his experience in the concentration camps and the psychology of the concentration camps in man's search for meaning. Very foundational book, beautiful book. And the thing he wrote about was, how does someone maintain happiness and sanity when everything has been taken from them? And in his case, literally everything was taken from him. He was taken from his home. His wife and his pregnant daughter were taken and killed. His parents were killed. He's sitting there with people shooting, shooting people right next to him in the head. Like in those concentration camps. It was the worst of moments. And so he gained sanity in the present when everything's been taken away from you. And this was his thesis right here. It says any attempt to restore a man's inner strength, meaning, like his resilience, his meaning, his happiness. Any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. So this is like the, just like a fundamental psychological insight which I'm trying to help you understand is you can't actually have meaning and happiness in the present without a future. I know that in the present you can just chill and it feels like you're just chilling. But even right now, you actually have a goal. Maybe it's to listen to this, right? Maybe it's to do something else. But like humans are goal oriented beings. We need a future. Without a future, our present starts to get really hazy and muddled and, and so you can have a future and actually you need a future. You need a goal as what Victor Frankel just said, you need a goal. What happened for those people who actually did have a goal, not only could they get that inner strength, not only could they actually have meaning through their suffering is what he said, but they could also honestly have meaning and joy. They started to notice things. This is what happened. When people actually started to have a goal beyond the concentration camps. Not only were they able to handle and filter and just experience the present. Even though it seemed ridiculous that there's these people screaming and yelling at them and there's people getting killed in the gas chamber, but they literally could become selfless. This may sound strange, but the people who stopped having a goal and became way more focused on like how painful the present is and how awful it is, those people started to withdraw from other people and they started not sharing their bread. Like they'd get a little piece of bread and they, they started, ultimately they died very quickly. Without a future, you start to shut down with the people who had a massive future even beyond the concentration camps. Like they were willing to literally share their one piece of bread. Like they, they operated differently in the present. They could notice, as weird as this sounds, they could notice like the beautiful tree where someone else who's just, there's no reason to be here. And so I'm only saying all this to say you can be phenomenally happy and phenomenally present while striving for a future. The future is a tool to operate in the present. And the better you get at shaping the future, the better you get it. Operating in the present,

[Brian]

I think summarized it. It's such an interesting concept because you and I spoke so much about what ideas are worth digesting and how I'm digesting that idea is simply using the future as a tool and viewing the future as a tool. And then the. So the vision yields the goal, the goal yields the present, and the present yields the day to day decisions and relationships made that would then warrant the future. So then it's a feedback loop. So the only way to create the identity that you want is to have a strong enough vision and a strong enough goal that will actually pull you and yield you to said identity, Correct?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Absolutely. Your future is the thing that you use to filter your present. And when you start having a bigger and even a more urgent future future, say you, you take your goal and you 10 exit, right? You're forced to filter things a lot more aggressively. You're forced to, you're forced to make better decisions, including letting go of certain things. I'm going to give you guys an example. I want to. I'll just. I think I shared this with you, Brian, but I'm just going to share this very briefly. So I was, while I was writing this book, the Science of Scaling, I was talking to a young man who, he's 22 years old and he wants to own a European soccer team, right? So this is his goal. This is his like super impossible goal. And usually with goals, we place arbitrary time frames on them. Time is a big part of just how we think about the future. In his case, I said, okay, so your goal is, he's 22 years old. Your goal is to own a European soccer team. That's crazy. I don't know very many people who have such an insane goal. When are you going to do it? And he said, I'm going to try to get there by age 55. That seems very reasonable considering he probably has to figure out how to get a billion dollars. But I then just asked him, I said, okay, you've given yourself 33 years to do this to age 55. What would happen if we just moved the timeline forward and you tried to get there by age 30, what would happen? And so essentially I was saying, what if you just took the same goal, owning the soccer team, but you move the timeline extremely far forward. You would have to change the path. Like in this case, and this is an example of someone who takes a 10 year goal and moves it to a one year goal. In his case, he's taking a 33 year goal and moving it to a six year goal. But the pathway would be really different. And what happens is when you go for an Impossible goal. Or when you use the a better future to filter the present, it forces you to start to really grapple with a lot of your assumptions. In his case, with his 33 year path, which, by the way, he was very attached to, he was very committed to his 33 year path. It was a really beautiful path in his mind. And me saying, what if you just went for it by age 30, that really started to mess up his very beautiful, articulate plan and path that he was very attached to. And so what happens is when you move the timeline forward, it forces you to grapple with what are called false assumptions or false requirements. In his case, he told me, but Ben, I really want to get a PhD. I want to run a firm. I want to do, I want to do a lot of important things over the next 20 or 30 years that I feel will help me get to that goal. And the problem with all of these false requirements and false steps is that when the goal is that far away or when the future is framed that poorly, then you're not really solving the goal. In his case, he's not really solving what's called the crux. If he actually just went for the gold, how do I get a European soccer team? He couldn't actually, he probably couldn't go get a PhD. I'm not saying he can't. But the problem with a goal that's that far away or a future that's framed that poorly is he's not actually solving the goal. Guess what he's solving? He's right here, right now. He's spending the next five years, seven years, trying to get into a PhD program. And then, and so he's not solving, how do I have a European soccer team? He's solving, how do I have a, how do I get a PhD? And this is what happens when your future is poorly framed is that you optimize things that shouldn't exist, right? Once you actually frame the future better, you can start to find that crux. You can actually find the most direct path to getting to the goal. I could give you many examples, people who take a massive scale goal. I'm gonna get to 100 million in 10 years. You move it to three, and all of a sudden they realize, oh, I was never actually really solving a hundred million. Guess what I was solving for? I was solving for how do I get to the next step, which is totally a different game. So how you frame the future, the quality of which, how you frame your future, shapes what and what you do in the present and especially As I already said, the things you're going to have to let go, you're going to have to let go of a lot of those. Whether they're vanity metrics or whether they're lesser goals. There are things that you think are required that are not. And they're stopping you from just moving forward very efficiently and very aggressively. So that's part of the beauty of using a bigger future to filter the present. It forces you to start to be honest with yourself. Why do I think I need the PhD? What if you just let that goal go? I'm going to show you one more thing and then we'll keep going, right? I just want to throw you guys this quote. This quote is beautiful. I'm so. By the way, people think focus means saying yes to the thing you got to focus on, but that's not what it means. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas there are. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things, right? And so this is the idea of your floor represents what you say no to. And strategy, strategy is what you say no to. But this is just a really. If you really let it. This should be a hard hitting quote, which is that we're kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. So in the case of that young man, he's not kept promoting the soccer team by the difficulties of that, of course that's gonna be hard. He's kept from it because he's still pursuing the wrong goals and so he can't scale. And this is what happens in companies. They're pursuing too many things, the wrong things, they're optimizing things that shouldn't exist. And they're. And their present is complex and they're not finding a scalable path, not because they can't, but because they're literally their future was framed inappropriately.

[Brian]

Man, I love how your brain works. I didn't like. We have so many similarities. Let's just disappear for a weekend together and change the world, brother. This is fun. This is a good time. Can you pull up the slide of the graph again, please? I wanna, I wanna, I'll go here.

[Tim Woodbridge]

Yeah, the focus path.

[Brian]

Linear path. Yes, that one. Cool. So yeah, for this one, I've used the same path before, but in a different context. And I'm curious about your perspective on this because I have done this. So exactly what you're saying, like years ago I did this and guys, we're coming up on 30 minutes, so this will be my last point, so go ahead and start to think about questions and raise hands. And then we'll call on sequential hands raised, or at least I'll try my best to. But for this, I had the linear path of 10 years. I'm gonna be financially free. And then a coach asked me, how do you do it in six months? So the same thing that you're saying. So to take everything that you're saying, it's basically the two most valuable and important tools that we can use for our own success are the vision and the goal that we set in the timeline within which we give it for the accomplishment.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

That's very correct. Those are the ways that the future is framed, the goal and the timeline.

[Brian]

So when I see this, I am a person that has done this, where I took the linear path and I created the focused path. But when nobody was around to tell me while I was going through that was that really sharp ascent. What happens there is you have to integrate the 10 years worth of knowledge, and the 10 years worth of identity shifts into the. Into one year. And so while I was going through that, and I'm going through it today, where we changed the goal from, how do we help a thousand people? How do we help a million people leave corporate? It's a very uncomfortable position to be in because you're constantly shifting identities and you're level jumping identity after identity.

So how do you.

What's some advice you can give on kind of the integration process of identities as you're going through this? Because that's the whole. That's the whole thesis of what you're talking about is adopting new identities that are required for you to hit the new goal, because you need to adopt the identity of the soccer team owner today. But then you need to integrate and remove 10 years worth of patterns to be able to pull that off in that shortened timeframe. Does that make sense?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

It does, yeah.

[Brian]

So the beauty is a bitch. It's a lot.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Yeah. So speaking to this young man, right. Like, he's overly identified and overly attached, right. To this idea of these goals. Yeah. These things that he thinks are defining him. Right. And this is really important, is that we're largely defined by our goals. And so, like, he's being defined by these things that's shaping his path, his process, what he's focusing on, what he's thinking about. And so if you study any form of growth, whether it's spiritual growth, whether it's personal growth, like, one of the themes you will find over and over again is that the fundamental aspect of growth is letting Things go, right? You have to let go of your definition of yourself, right? You have to let go of certain things. And so the faster and better you get at letting things go, the more you can then open yourself up to maybe something better. Right? Often, though, the problem with identity is that identity, just like goals or just like even the past, identity can become a trap as well. And people can get really trapped in identities, especially if they've been on one extreme of the bell curve. Whether they've been extremely successful or they've experienced some extreme trauma, then they can hold onto that. But with success, you can really get stuck. You can really get stuck doing what you've been doing. I've seen this a lot lately. I think about the concept of riding the wave, right? There's people I know, and the older you get, the more you will see this where they had something and they were successful at it and it was working, but then they stayed on that train way too long. And like, life will require you to jump off that onto a new wave. And if you don't hit the next wave, you're gonna hit the shore or something like that. And so I've seen people who. They got stuck on an identity, on defining them themselves a certain way, and eventually it really cost them. In fact, it almost led to their failure until they actually went to a new future and they moved on and they jumped on a new wave. But sometimes if you miss a wave like that, next one might not be for five years, right? And you might then have to go through a cycle and a path pattern where you're just like literally in linear mode, right? And so you have. One of my favorite books is called the 8020 individual by Richard Koch. And he says that success, even more than failure, requires change, right. Oftentimes when something's working, you're like, I'm just gonna keep this going. But like he actually says, if it ain't broke, that's when you should fix it, right? Not that you should like that, not that you need to, like, always fix it, but if you're stuck on this one path rather than jumping to the next one, it's time to. You're going to literally plateau out, and if you stay on it, you're going to crash. But to. To a final piece of what you were saying with just the acceleration of the identity, just like goals, I view identity as a tool. I don't necessarily need to fully absorb my future self this second. What happens when you're moving towards, when you actually move this forward, there's A framework that actually is called thinking to feeling to knowing, right? And so what happens is, as you begin to think about this, as you begin looking at the current path or the current complexity that is your current journey, and as you begin to actually let some of these things go even right here, this is just an example of. This is just a different form of this picture, right? This is just a very complex system that can't scale versus this is a simple focused path. But what happens is, and you can't scale a complex system, right? This is a system going in a thousand different directions where this is a focused path, right? To the idea of raising your frame, floor and focus. But in my opinion, you really don't need to perfectly. You don't need to fully commit this second. What happens is once you start stripping out some of these things, your commitment to this grows, right? A lot of people, like I said earlier, they want competence, but they don't want courage and commitment, right? And so you can't actually have confidence on this path or a level of knowing until you started to strip some of these things out and started to let them go and then started to start to identify the pathways towards this. Once you start making progress towards it, your commitment, your conviction, it's gonna go skyrocket and eventually you'll reach a place of not only feeling an emotion, you'll reach a place of knowing. And so I'm just not a believer that you need the full identity now. You have the future, you use it to frame the path. You start to identify that there's many things you're currently doing that are below the floor. There's a lot of things that are false requirements and that are going to slow you down and ruin your growth and make it really unlikely that you'll ever hit the goal. If you just use this as a tool and start being honest about it and start stripping things out and start trying to find that path. Eventually you're just going to watch yourself making the moves as you watch yourself make those moves towards your future self, eventually just realize you became your future self. It's just a. It just naturally happens. But the crazy part when you go for the bigger goal is that you save yourself decades of bad choices or even years of bad choices. Like, you start making really phenomenal choices now, like for anyone in here, if rather than getting to a hundred million in one year or in ten years, you go there, you go for it in the next, call it two, right? Or three, you're gonna have to start making far more mature decisions you might need to go get a CEO. You might need to like really get your business and systems in place. Like, you'll have to start making more mature decisions. And if you actually start doing that and watching yourself do it, including watching yourself let go of some of the bad stuff, the bad paths. Ineffective. Maybe bad's the wrong word, but ineffective. Just watching yourself do it. You just lived the identity so you can just watch yourself do it. That's how I see it.

[Brian]

Beautiful. All right, guys, we're going to open it up to questions. I've got Tim, Trevor, then John, then Jake.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

My man, Tim Woodbridge.

[Tim Woodbridge]

Hey, man, what's up? Ben, first of all, I love your books. I like every one of them has pushed me into uncomfortable growth and I really appreciate it.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Good for you for being someone who's willing to do that, man.

[Tim Woodbridge]

Thanks, man.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

That automatically makes you an outlier, literally. Kudos to you, Tim.

[Brian]

Do you want to say a little bit about your journey so that Ben has context and also for maybe new members on here?

[Tim Woodbridge]

Sure. So I am the mobile home park ace asset class expert in action Academy. I am a retired nurse. So what? Three and a half years ago I was a nurse. I bought my first park.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

You had to let that go? Is that what happened? You had to let that go?

[Tim Woodbridge]

Yeah, that was a good let go. That was a really good let go. Bought my first park five and a half years ago and now own 16 and have a whole team of people. Honestly, props to Brian for pushing the like me to we to them business because I'm like solidly went from me to we, but yeah, so my question is I want a really big mobile home park company. So I want like $250 million assets under management and I want all these verticals that feed in again. That's also ripping Brian off for his action academy thing where everything's feeding into. There's all these different verticals feeding into that. Am I like distracting myself by wanting too much in, in all of these, like property management, vertical, home infill, vertical, blah blah, blah. Everything that's business related.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Let's just mess with this for a second. What is the current properties? What is the current assets under management?

[Tim Woodbridge]

20.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

20 million. Beautiful. So if we are going to go for 250 in the next three years rather than 50 paths, let's just think about one or two. What's the most efficient path and model that could get you there?

[Tim Woodbridge]

Going after bigger properties which we're doing.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

I'm not saying you can't, by the way. I'M not saying you can't have all the different distribution paths, but I'm just saying what's the most clean, direct path to getting to 250 million under management in three years?

[Tim Woodbridge]

Yeah, going for just bigger properties.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

And what's your emotion on that? What's your opinion on just maximizing that? Not that I'm saying you have to. I'm just saying what's your emotion on maximizing that path? And becoming phenomenal at that.

[Tim Woodbridge]

So when I think of, would you

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

have to redefine yourself? Would you have to redefine who you are and what you do?

[Tim Woodbridge]

Yeah, we'd have to get a lot better at capital raising and stuff like that. And so, yeah, it's uncomfortable, but good uncomfortable.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

So let me just show you something. I think I actually, sadly, I think I deleted it.

[Brian]

Oh, sorry, Tim. You're screwed. It's over.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

I can pull up a different slide deck. Let me just grab this. Let me just grab this. I want to show this. Let me show this real quick. I'm an act. Okay, you take this for what it's worth, Tim. All right. I'm not saying you have to do anything. I'm just saying use the future as a tool. First off, this is Peter Drucker. He wrote the Effective Executive. He essentially invented the field of productivity and management. So most of the people that you've heard of, Tim Ferriss and others, they're just aggregates of Peter Drucker. So he says, even today, few businessmen, obviously businessmen and business women, understand that research, by the way, is everything you're doing in the present, Right. You're researching right now. You're trying to think about how do I solve my goal. Right. So even today, few businessmen understand that research, to be productive, has to be the disorganizer, the creator of a different future and the enemy of today. That's rough. In most industrial laboratories, defensive research aimed at perpetuating today predominates. So to this idea of impossible goals, I just want to show you. Yeah. One or two things. In the psychological and in the management literature, they actually call it stretch goal, but this is how they define it. We define a stretch goal as an organizational goal with an objective probability of attainment that may be unknown. So the probability of attainment is unknown, but it is seemingly impossible given your current capability at your current practice, skills and knowledge further down. Because stretch goals involve extreme. There's the word, redefinitions of what an organization is capable of being or achieving. They can capture shift and refocus attention. That attention by the way, is the pathways and the research that you're doing. According to drucker, according to Dr. Denise Russo, where performance expectations are elevated well beyond the limits of past experience and where previously successful frameworks are questioned, revised, or discarded, prior experience is often a poor guide for stretch goal achievement. And this shifts the performer's attention away from old routines and assumptions toward novel and creative approaches. So the only reason I'm bringing this back up, I don't. I forgot where he went. Where is he?

[Brian]

He's right there.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Oh. Oh, there you are. Tim is. Yes, you're. By the way, if you're at 250 million in three years, you're slightly, slightly, or maybe even extremely redefined than who you are today. I'm not saying you can't do it with mobile homes. I'm not saying you can't do it with commercial. I'm just saying choose your path. Let me just show you one more thing. I'm just using this as an opportunity to also, like, educate you guys, because I want you guys to understand good strategy. And so let me just show you guys something real quick. This is a really good book. Again, I'm dissecting this for you. You can go read it if you want, but you don't have to. This is Dr. Richard Ral. He says having conflicting goals and dedicating resources to unconnected targets and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and the powerful, but they make for bad strategy. He said strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does. Strategy is scarcity's child. And to have a strategy rather than vague aspirations is to choose a path and to eschew others. Unfortunately, good strategy is the exception, not the rule. One of the other things that he said in that book is he said that good strategy is surprising because of how rare it is. And so good strategy will be surprising. It'll be surprising to you and to others if you go a different path and go on a much more scalable journey. But. But it's going to force you to redefine yourself. You have to let go of a lot of your existing assumptions, a lot of your existing lesser goals. You're going to have to find a more direct, scalable path. And if you want to be at 250 million in three years, you could get there. It's just going to be a different path, a different definition. Awesome.

[Tim Woodbridge]

Thank you. I'm definitely going to blame you when all my partners get pissed at me for going a little bit chaotic and going really good. Appreciate you.

[Brian]

It's about setting the standards. It's just now your list of nos just gets exponentially larger. That includes coffee meetings and includes lunches sometimes. Now it's if it's not at a certain level, you just have to say no. So every yes has to be justified by a thousand no's. So in the beginning, every yes maybe is justified by 10 nos. Then it's a hundred no's, then it's a thousand no's. And for Ben, it's probably 10,000 no's has to justify him being on a call like this. So it just increases and increases.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Only for you, Brian. No. Brian. Brian, no. Brian blew my mind when I was on his podcast and I was like, this is one of the most really interesting conversations I've had in a really long time. And so it was like it was an obvious yes, but no. It is true that when the floor goes up, most things become noise, right? Most things can't get you to 2,50 million in three years. I'm not saying you have to do it in three years. You can go get it in 10, Tim. But that there, there also goes 10 years. And there's no. The thing that I want to show you about the longer time frames, it is that having an increasingly long timeframe dramatically decreases your likelihood of success. Because back to the example of the kid with the soccer team, you are not actually optimizing for 2:50. What happens if you go for 2:50 in 10 years, Tim, is that you're actually optimizing for how do I get to 40, 40 million? From 25 to 40 million. And so you can make. Keep making the same decisions, largely from 25 to 40, but those are usually not the best decisions for getting to 250. At a certain point, you're going to cap out or you're just not going to get there.

[Couple (Jacob and Melissa)]

Beautiful.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

What's beautiful is that with moving the timeline forward or making the goal bigger, it forces you to execute differently. In the case of. Often I've worked with companies that are actually doing hundreds of millions in revenue. I've consulted these companies and they have either small goals, and it sounds small, but if you're doing 100, like 200 million and you're going for 220 or 230, that's actually a small goal. Or if it's 10 years away, you're not actually executing on the right thing. Right? You're optimizing things that shouldn't exist. And so the getting the frame right is making the most efficient execution as well as the most effective execution. You can be really good at being busy and building systems that are optimizing the wrong things, right? And yes, it's important to focus, right? It's important to. But it's also important to focus on the right thing. A lot of times people are. They spend a lot of time teaching how to get into flow and how to focus and stuff like that. But so much of it is focusing literally on the wrong thing. And so it doesn't matter how well you can execute the wrong thing. To be honest with you, it doesn't matter how well. I hate to say it, but some people, like you flipped burgers, right? Like, you can be really good at optimism. Some people are really freaking good at creating Pokemon cards, right? And I'm not against any of that stuff. I'm just saying you can be phenomenal at executing trash.

[Brian]

So don't over optimize. Don't over optimize the wrong thing that shouldn't even exist. Like the Elon quote, Correct?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Yeah. Let me just show this. Let me just show this story. I'm gonna be super quiet quick because I know that there's a lot of questions, but this is a woman who has a software company. I wrote about her in the book. And essentially she wanted to get this software into. This is called Level Up Spore. She's in the credit industry. She wanted to get this software into the hands of the 50,000 credit repair companies in the United States. In the United states, there are 50,000 credit repair companies. She wanted to get this software into their hands so that they could use the software for their clients. And so her pathway, her execution, was calling those 50,000 credit repair companies one at a time. And she would call them, she'd get on the phone with one of the people that worked there and she would explain her software. It's a brand new software. And they were like, this is amazing. We need to use this. And so then they would create a small revenue share deal. And then she had a client, right? And so she did this for three months, and she got 10 of those clients, right? 10 out of those 50,000 credit repair companies. And then I said to her, I met her and I said, alicia, you need to set an impossible goal, because right now you're on a very linear and slow path. It's going to take you a decade to scale this software. We don't have a decade. This is too important. The software is extremely important. It's going to change the industry, if you let it. And so what happened was I told her, I want you to set an impossible goal so it'll force you to change your path. And she said, okay, I'm going to go for a hundred of these credit repair companies using my software in 90 days. That's a 10x going from 10 to 100 in 90 days. That would be really fast growth considering for the first five years she just sat on it and she didn't do anything. But I told her that goal is not good enough because that goal is a cop out. And actually she came to this conclusion herself. She realized it's a bad goal because I can just simply keep doing what I'm doing. I know I could probably find. Actually, it was not. She figured she could find time to make 90 cold calls during those 90 days because she'd already had 100% success rate. And so I said, alicia, I want you to set a real impossible goal. And so she said, okay, Ben, I'm going to try. Not for 190 days. I'm going to try for a thousand of those credit repair companies using Level up score in 90 days. And once she did that, she realized she had no clue how to do it. She absolutely couldn't cold call her way to a thousand people in 90 days. And so it forced her to find a different execution path. Right. In her case, after really thinking from the goal. And you always want to think from the goal, never toward the goal. Thinking toward the goal means you're taking your existing system and trying to force it into the future. Instead, you want to take your goal and think from it. And when she thought, how do I get a thousand of these credit repair companies using Level up score in 90 days? There was only really a few pathways that could get her there. It dawned on her when she was thinking from the goal. And she had never thought about this before, by the way, this is why you want to use the future to frame your present. She never thought about it, but she realized there are other software companies in this space already that not only serve thousands, but some of them serve tens of thousands of these companies. There's other software companies already there. And so rather than trying to individually get a thousand people to say yes, is all she needed to do was get one person to say yes. She thought, if I just partner with one of these other software companies and they let me distribute to their people, then I'm there. And so that's, that's thinking in terms of leverage. What happened was one week later, she created a Partnership with someone who had a software company and they were serving 8,000 of these credit repair companies. The guy fell in love with her software and she went from 10 people using 10 of these companies using her software to 8800x in one week. One week, boom. But she had to use the bigger goal and she had to find a better path. And so the only reason I'm saying all this is execution is important, but execution on what?

[Brian]

And had she not had a level hundred goal then that conversation would have been a level two conversation with a level 100 person and it wouldn't have translated. So when she came to the person and said I want to do a thousand, not ten, they were like we speak the same language, come hang out with us. I love that. Let's, let's keep it going. Let's do John then Jake and I'll

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

be a little quicker now. Go ahead John.

[Brian]

Okay, I love you.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Hey man, just call me out, say Ben did. You're taking too freaking long.

[Brian]

I don't think anyone's complaining on this.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

I doubt. Go ahead John.

[John]

Yeah, I'm not complaining. Keep on talking. Anyways, I am one of. I'm a younger member so I'm in the starting stages of building basically my entrepreneurial business and my brand plan just short sweet. Want to build a short term portfolio and then grow a husband. I can't speak. This is the engineer in me, the hospitality brand. Working with a fellow members in this group. We're building something called branch hospitality. Wanna grow micro resorts and motels basically.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Love what you're up to by the way Brian. I'm in love with this group, dude. You guys are.

[Brian]

Told you, told you they're coming in man. Yeah, y' all brag on yourselves by the way when you come up to speak. Same with your chest.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Yeah, basically I love what you're doing, man.

[John]

I always tend to live in the gap, always chasing the next goal. That's how I've been. I grew up that way, do it all the time. And obviously there's 400 other people in this group that probably do the same exact thing. And I just want to learn how to stay grounded, trust myself more and build a business that's sustainable and aligned with my future self. My question goes back to what you said. You said getting stuck and staying on the current wave you were on. When you are stuck on that wave and start living in the gap, what question do you ask yourself or small habit do you implement to get back into alignment with your goal and the future you want Great question,

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

John. You're a genius.

[Brian]

Great, fun question.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

All right. No, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. So you've seen a bell curve before, right? Yep. Too many times. So what I'm. What I'm teaching you is how to be at the extreme tail so that you can get exponential results. Everything in your life is gonna pull you back to the mean. Your past is gonna pull you back to the mean. The gap's gonna pull you back to the mean. Your team's gonna pull you back to the mean. And so it's important to always obviously remind yourself of the goal, right? You don't need to be perfect the. The easiest that I don't think that there's like, a small habit, honestly. I think that it's just being honest with yourself. That's the habit, is being really honest with yourself when you're below the floor. Being honest with yourself if you're optimizing something that shouldn't exist, telling people about this, having really good people around you who are willing to call you out. The question I have for you, John, is like, why don't you just try to, like, scale the hospitality business right now? Start getting, like, why don't you to the idea of the kid with the soccer team? Like, why don't you start, like, making that your brand and figuring out how to start getting those properties and start, like, maybe getting funding partners, right? There's different people who can get you to that goal, but you can't think about it the same way you're currently thinking about it, right? You would need different who's just Alyssia needed a different who when she wanted to get to a thousand. You would need different who's a different crux. If you wanted to start making that hospitality business now, you might need a really good funding partner, right? You might need. You've got a lot of the really good juice and the ideas. That's worth a lot. You might not realize how much that's worth, right? But that's a lot of juice. So I'm just inviting you, maybe you should go for the bigger goal now. Strip out the lesser goals, the false requirements that you've placed upon yourself and start finding different who's that have a hundred x, the leverage, whether it's money, et cetera, and start going for the bigger goal now. Gotcha.

[John]

That's sweet. Goes back to what Brian said about the triangle of knowledge, the hustle, the money.

[Brian]

Yeah, yeah, Makes sense.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

See, this guy's making. This man's making. This man's making Crazy connections left and right.

[Brian]

Crushing it, man. Yeah. I mean, it all comes back down to again, like, Dr. Hardy saying, like, the vision, the goal, and then the goal yields the who's the biggest thing I'm just going to keep saying over and over again is you can't have a. A level 100 relationship with a level 10 goal. So if you come in, like, even me doing the $14 million hotel, like, I skipped the $140,000 Airbnb that I was looking at in Atlanta in 2019, granted, those don't exist really anymore. And Now I'm doing 14 million because I have the right who's. So that's just a few relationships, man, and you've got them all here. So crush it, dude. That's awesome. Let's go, Mr. Harrison. And then solely both of you are doing amazing things. I'm excited to hear Yalls.

[Jake]

Awesome. Glenn. I'll speak for everyone here. I appreciate your time and appreciate you being here. This is fantastic. I'll jump to my question. It has to do with working on acquiring my first business right now. And so my question, Brian, kind of like you mentioned here, it has to do with the who's so something as an entrepreneur and business owner, as we go and that complexity really increases. How do you know when personally, what who's to bring in? When that vision kind of catches up and or outpaces your current capacity in

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

terms of the who's so said again, when the goal is so big and you don't have the current capability or the current who's to do it? Is that what you're really saying?

[Jake]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Personally and professionally, when we were saying earlier, saying no a thousand times.

[Brian]

Right.

[Jake]

How do we really know at what point when you personally decide what who's to. To bring into your personal and professional life there?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

So the goal shapes the who's. Right. In the case of Alithia, when she moved her goal, the who's became other software companies. Right. And this is the really again, I'm showing you guys a lot of books, but I'm just also showing you, like, I read, like, a lot so I can learn this stuff and make it simple for you guys. This is Reed Hastings. He took. He. He bought Netflix when it was like, a very small company and there were like, little red weird containers outside of Walgreens. And then he transformed the company into a digital company. Right. But one of the things he said and he was talking about, like, they had a small amount of money in the beginning and they almost failed and he said he had to make a choice. Look, he said I could hire 10 or 25 average engineers or I could hire one rock star and pay significantly more than what I'd pay others if necessary. So you basically had a choice. Since then, I've come to see that the best programmer doesn't add 10 times the value. She adds more like a hundred times. Then he says. Bill Gates talks about how a great. He says a great software writer, a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer. So basically, what I'm saying is back to. Sorry, who was it? Who was it that just asked the last question? Not this one, Jake.

[Brian]

The last question, John.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Come on about John. And I'm sorry, Jake, I'm now answering John through your question. But there's a concept called the power law. And the power law is that certain people produce not 10 times as much as other people. They produce 10,000 times as much. And so when you start going for bigger goals, you have to find very powerful partners. And you can do that if your goal requires it. Back to what Brian's saying, if you're having the conversations at that level. So there's two types of who's, as I see them. One is what we're calling super who's that change the game. Those are people that can produce 10x the result, or 100x the result, or 10,000x result. These are people that change the game for you. And then there's just who's right. These are people that you actually pass off tasks to so that you don't have to do it right. I wrote the book called who Not How. I wish I had known about this concept of super who before, because often you can get one who, like Reed Hastings was just talking about, that's worth a hundred. But you won't find those. I'm telling you this, Jake. You won't find those partners. And everything Brian has said is true. You won't find those partners if your goal doesn't allow you to filter for them. It doesn't allow you to talk to them in a collaborative way where there's a really shared future for both of you. I'm using myself. The guy who. The guy who is on this book, Blake Erickson, we created scaling.com together. Literally, he's 10 years younger than me. He's 27 years old, 26 years old. He came to me and he gave me a vision of the future that not only aligned, but was 10 times bigger than what I was thinking for Myself. And I was like, holy crap. He's like, let's transform the whole game of scaling, right? I was already, like, reframing so much of the field, but he's like, let's just own the topic of scaling. Let's reframe and let's totally reinvent the whole space. He didn't. We didn't. Now we didn't have the concept of scaling.com like, when we did that. Pathways emerge and evolve as you progress, right? But he walked up to me and he. And then he was so bold. He said, I'll do the training, Ben. You keep writing the books. You don't even have to worry about the training company. I'll do that. And he said, but this. And this is when I knew he was a dog. Like, in a good way. He said, people won't trust me. They'll just want to learn from you. And I said, okay. And then this is where he showed me good strategy and good pathways thinking. He said, if you put my name on the book, they'll trust me more and they'll be willing to learn from me so that you don't have to get into the weeds and you can keep doing what you do and I'll grow the coaching program. And I said, holy crap. I said, that's a really good strategy. I said, but I'm not just gonna give you this book. I've sold millions of books. I'm not just gonna put your name on one of my books. Like, I've worked a decade to do this. But then I see I'm starting to get selfish now. I'm starting to make it about me rather than trying to create an abundant, bigger future for everyone. And then I catch myself, oh, this is the same thing that's happened to me where other people had too small of a future and I had to leave. So I said, I'm not going to make that mistake. And then I said, but I'm not going to just put your name on my book. We set up a business so that I get a huge amount of money before he gets any form of ownership. But I said, you have to give me a million dollars in order to get my name. Your name on my book. I said, if you're not willing to do that, then we don't have. And I'm not saying you have to do this, by the way, Jake. I'm just saying this is a different game. And he said, let me call my wife. He calls his wife. They sold a lot of their real estate, and he. He paid me to be on the book. But now he's gonna end up having more ownership in scaling.com than me in the future. Again, I'm just saying. What are you deducing? What are you learning from this story in your own way? I'm teaching you principles. What are you grabbing from this story, Jake, in your own way? And you're thinking about how as you're thinking about getting who's for your own goals. What are you grabbing from this story?

[Jake]

That I think for me personally, it's really taking advantage of an opportunity in front of you.

[Couple (Jacob and Melissa)]

Right.

[Jake]

If you have a opportunity that's way bigger than even what you initially had in your vision, don't be afraid to run from that. And if it means giving up parts of your past experiences, past life where had initially had in your vision, but it allows you an opportunity to scale that much quicker with a certain person, run with it.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

And one of the things I really like about Brian and just this whole group in general, is I think it's arrogant to think you've got 10 years to do something. The world's gonna be very different in 10 years. God willing. We're all still alive. But I think it's very arrogant to think you've got 10 years to fiddle your thumbs. Let's go for the bigger goal. Let's find the more direct path. Let's start being approach oriented. In psychology, they say that all goals are either approach or avoid based. And so once you become more approach oriented, you become willing to actually go for the big fences, go for the no and like actually try. And it's okay if you get rejected, right? It's all a tool. Like, I think we've played too many head games with ourselves. We're like, oh, if I get rejected, I'm a loser. No, you don't. You're actually phenomenal because you wouldn't try for it. If Blake, if I said no to this, does that make him a loser? No, it makes him freaking amazing that he even tried. But he wouldn't have gotten his name on this book now, which is going to be one of the biggest business books in the world at age 27, his first book, if he didn't ask and if he didn't create a great, phenomenal future for all of us now that it's growing. And so the worst thing that could happen is that it's a no. That's not that hard.

[Brian]

You're just. You're living your same existence that you're already living today. So it's like the Worst thing, I

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

would say you're actually living a better one, dude. I would say you're actually living a better one, Brian, because now you're watching yourself freaking swing to the fences. Like, you are. You're exercising a muscle, like, for trying to. The worst thing, that honestly, getting rejected is better than never having tried. Because now you're actually operating toward the future. You're, like, exercising your courage and commitment muscles. Jake, you got this, man.

[Brian]

Absolutely.

[Jake]

I appreciate that, Ben.

[Brian]

Thank you. And, Jake, also, you can attract high performers. Before you can pay them with compensation, you have to pay them with the confidence that they can accomplish their big vision within yours. So when Caitlin Mackay started with Action Academy, I paid her $2,000 a month. When Estefania started with Action Academy, I paid her $2,000 a month. They're both going to 10x that easily. And Caitlin's going to. Caitlin has equity in the company now. So I'm going to make Caitlin a millionaire, Like, Caitlin's a millionaire, like, without doing anything else. So you have to have a vision. So if you don't have the bankroll to pay those top people, like Reed Hastings did in the quote, you need to have a vision which is completely within your control. That is so large. Blake here in the book, he had the vision and he was able to back it up. And then when he went to Dr. Hardy, he was like, you were able to see that, and he recognized him as an equal. So you can't get ready. You have to stay ready because you can't have an opportunity to hit you, and then you have to, like, fumble around and get ready for it. You have to be freaking ready for the opportunity. When I went to interview Ben, I was ready. I put my four years of work in. Had I fumbled around the interview, he wouldn't be here today. You have one shot, and you can't wait to get ready. You have to stay ready. Great frigging question, dude. Let's go to Soli and then Sarah and then Jacob.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Can you hear me?

[Brian]

We can.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Sick. Amazing.

[Brian]

Sick.

[Soli]

Great. Thank you so much for being here, Ben. I really appreciate it. I've been with this group for about two months and a week now, and it has been crazy. Every single person recommended that I read the Gap in the Gain. I'm about halfway through, and I tell people it's my new bible. For me, a little bit of my intro is I know I'm really good at helping others, seeing their purpose and their potential. My biggest struggle is identifying my own and identifying what goal it is I am supposed to work on. I know a lot of this conversation is, once you have that goal, here's how you 10x it. How do you recommend I and others identify what our true goal should be?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

I have to give you credit solely.

[Soli]

You hear that, Brian? Sign book.

[Brian]

I heard it.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

You asked the question that Bob Gay, who created Bain Capital with Mitt Romney, he invented private equity. You asked the same question he asked when he read an early copy of the book. This is a man who has scaled many of the biggest businesses in the world, literally. Bain capital, they manage $30 billion in businesses right now. He asked the same goal you asked. Solely he said, ben, I agree with everything you said. The hardest part for anyone is how do you choose the right goal? How do you know what to scale? Once you choose a goal, the pathways start to emerge and you start to have to simplify the system and. But choosing what to scale, that's extremely difficult work. Let me use back to Elon Musk, who knows what his impossible goal is?

[Brian]

Mars.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Boom. Hey, he wants to go to Mars. Am I going to be the guy who's telling him, elon, why do you want to go to Mars? No, I'm just going to say that's super interesting, right? Like, maybe one day he'll choose a different goal, right? I can't know, right? Maybe one day he'll say Dakville is a not. Is a vanity metric. Maybe I should just focus on being the best dad in the world. I don't really know. Right? With the young man who wants to own the European soccer team, right? I'm not going to tell him that's the wrong goal. In the future, he might realize that goal's worn itself out. I'm going to go do something different and better. The thing that I'm teaching you here is that how you shape your goal is going to shape your psychology and the systems you build. How you shape your goal, both in scale and timeline. Everything we've been talking about so far is going to determine how well you can advance. And so I really can't tell you how to choose the right goal. You know, there are some goals that are more noble than others, but that's all from a subjective standpoint, right. For me, just as an example, and I think one thing that's really important to note is that all goals are means. They're means to other goals. And so there's never gonna be a point in time when you don't have a future. Remember the quote that I gave from Viktor Frankl, even There's stories about the astronauts who went to the moon and they spent their whole life going towards that massive goal. And then they came back and what happened? They all became depressed and devastated. Why? Because they didn't have a goal beyond the moon. And a lot of goals can save you. A lot of goals can save you from wasting time on other goals. A lot of goals can. Like what I've been talking about. You can save yourself decades of pursuing ineffective goals. What I want to tell you is that a goal properly set. Actually, there's a quote on this, literally by John Doerr, who is the billionaire venture capitalist. He said, a goal properly set is halfway reached. The reason is because when you set a goal effectively, it allows you to get rid of all of those false assumptions, those lesser goals. It allows you to start being more honest with yourself. The main thing I want you to do, I don't really care what the goal is right now. If it's in your business, if it's just. Let's just go for revenue, that's freaking fine. Revenue is a great goal. Use that goal to shape a better business. Use that goal to strip out the complexity in your life. Like, it doesn't have to be a perfect goal. It just has to be a goal that starts to transform yourself, your team, your business, and start to find those better paths. That's all I'll say.

[Brian]

Solely. A frame that I use when I'm setting a goal is I ask myself, what would the a hundred x version of me. What's the goal that the hundred x version of me would set? So who would you.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Or what's the goal that your future self would set?

[Brian]

Yeah, what would she set? If you're. Or if you're on your deathbed at 80 years or 85, 90 years old, 110 years old, you're like, oh, okay, I'm glad I gave this a shot. What goal are you glad that you at least attempted? That's a great freaking question, Ben. 1 like inverse to that. And then we'll go to Sarah and Jacob here and then Connor. The inverse is at what point do you know when to cut bait? So you are work. You are working on a goal and now you are looking for signals within which you can say, okay, actually it's time for me to cut this. I don't need to work on this anymore. So instead of the selection process, what's the removal process?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Are you talking about the removal of goals or the removal of.

[Brian]

Yeah, removal of goals. Say that I'm a. Say that I'M a year or 18 months deep on a goal and I am now presented with new information. At what point do you know, okay, the goal that I'm working on today is adequately sized to where I want to go versus okay, actually this goal no longer serves me.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

What are some good signals for that one signal? There's two signals. One is that you're already succeeding very well. So you're already succeeding very well. It's time to change the goal. Right. The other one is that if you're just failing dramatically, say it's been a year, a year and a half, and you're literally making no traction. Like you might probably want to set a different goal, you might be playing the wrong game sometimes. People like one of my favorite, there's a book called this is Strategy by AG Lafley. And he says that a big part of strategy is tooting the game and knowing how to win. Right. It's similar to Blue Ocean strategy. But if you're growing really slowly or just banging your head against the wall and you're not making progress and it's been a long time, you're probably playing the wrong game or you have a really bad path. If you're already succeeding, like you're. You've already gotten the major juice out of the goal. You're probably. Unless you want to just see it through to the finish, which is cool. And you. And there's a lot of beauty in seeing it through to the finish. Sometimes it's good to just say, I got the most out of this. Let's now see what we can leverage this into.

[Brian]

Beautiful. For the sake of time, I'm gonna go through the rest of these questions. I wanna make sure to get as many of these people as we can. Let's go, Sarah. And then see Jacob.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Awesome.

[Sarah]

Which Brian, you actually just stole my question which was going to be how do you know when it's time to shrink or move out? Shrink your goal or move out your timeline. So maybe a follow up to that and some context. I'm currently at my W2 job and pursuing my first small business acquisition. I also have a side hustle where I flip clothes on Poshmark and ebay. And my big audacious goal is to quit my, I guess my full time job and take my side hustle full time by my birthday, which is July 7th. But my employer just got acquired and they essentially said that they are going to announce layoffs mid August. So I'm considering pushing out my timeline for the chance of leaving with severance. Instead of just leaving.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

So we're talking about, we're talking about the difference of a month, right?

[Sarah]

Oh, yeah, yeah. A month and a half. So I guess my question is when it is time to shrink or move out your goal, how do you do so without feeling like you are failing

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

to meet your original goal? There's no failure. The only failure is going below your floor. And so what I would do if I was you is go have a conversation. Because information precedes inspiration. So they'll actually have a conversation rather than having false assumptions and asking if I stay until August, can I get a severance package? They say, heck no, we're not offering that to anyone. True. Let go of the conversation. If I crush you with you guys and help you finish this until August and I get a severance package, then you weighing that it's worth losing a month to get that severance package. That's going to really. If you weigh that as more important than making progress on your scale goal, then do it. That's just making good decisions.

[Brian]

And also, Sarah, why even buy a business? Why not just scale what you already have and just put 100% of your effort under that if that's the goal?

[Sarah]

Yeah, it's something I considered. What I don't really like about my side hustle business is that it's inventory based. So like I'm tied to my inventory. So I think I still want like a more service based based business long term, but I definitely think it will support me in the near term. Okay, but open to if I need to adjust that goal too.

[Brian]

Yeah, no, it's. I, I won't double click on this. We can have a side conversation on this because I want to get to the rest of the questions, but that was a wonderful question. But I would ask the question you started the question with. I want to take my side hustle to my main thing. And then I said, why don't you just take it to your main thing? You said, I don't want to. So then why is it even a side hustle?

[Sarah]

Yeah, that's fair.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Yeah, yeah, I'll.

[Brian]

Let's talk off offline about that.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

That's so. It's a gorgeous one. So Sarah, the beauty of all of this is clarity and transparency personally to yourself. So remember what I said, Use it as a tool. There's no competition here. Just so you know, right now it's just me and you, Sarah. There's no one else here. Maybe Brian. I'm just kidding. Everyone's here, but there's no One else that's competing with you. Everyone is only here to support you. The whole purpose here is clarity and transparency first with yourself. And so if you take these two pathways, having the service based business and scaling that to a beautiful level and having this and trying to do both. Right. If you just scale one up and say what this may, you know, is this what aligns with my future self and is this something that I want to do or could I scale up this thing? I'm not saying you have to do either. I'm just saying use them as tools. That was how it became very obvious to me that I wanted to get rid of my YouTube channel was by scaling it even a hundred X. I realized I really. That doesn't get me very much of what I want. It was optimizing for the wrong thing. And so you can use these concepts as tools. Right. Just use it to be honest with yourself. Why do you want that clothing business? I think you said clothing. If you really want it, that's awesome. If you want just as a hobby. Let's not talk about it as a business. Even though it might give you a little business. If you want to scale something and it's not this hobby, let's not, let's honestly like almost leave that out of the conversation. But if you really want to do this as you told Brian you did, let's figure out how could you do this in a way that it could really be something special that you build and focus on rather than just as a side hustle.

[Brian]

Yeah. It's just two focuses are going to be really hard. They're both hard, so choose the hard. That sounds most fun for you. They're both hard, but I can tell you the hardest path is trying to do them both at the same time. Don't do that. Sweet. Thanks, Sarah. Let's go, Jacob. We'll try to get Jacob, Connor and Andrew and then we'll probably. I'll try my hardest to get Grov too and then we can finish this up. I want to be tight with time.

[Couple (Jacob and Melissa)]

Great. Sounds good. My wife's on the other line. She's also listening and I'll do the talking.

[Brian]

Sup, Melissa?

[Couple (Jacob and Melissa)]

We are five. We are five weeks in. So we're setting our buy box and making sure that our vision is set. And it's easy for us to know. We definitely want to hit 500,000 a year is our goal. But that somewhat conflicts with our other goals, which are we want to be working 10 hours a week or less. So if we're spending Time with kids. And we want to make sure that we just are generally happy in life. And our concern as we are selecting what, what small business do we pursue? Are they going to conflict and how do we avoid that? So when we're setting our goal, how do we choose something that does not conflict?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

All right, so I'm going to have you ask it just one more time. I apologize. Okay, what's the direct question?

[Couple (Jacob and Melissa)]

So we have several goals and we would like them to align. And we're not sure how to align them. Well, high income, so 500,000 a year, low hours once it's gets up and going. So 10 hours a week and then just over overall happiness, time with family, passion. So this 500,000 goal could easily overcome these two and conflict those.

[Brian]

I think that's just a story you're telling yourself. I'm curious, Ben.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Yeah, I. I would say that often it takes a lot of energy to scale one thing, but once you get it, you honestly have a lot of things. And like I would just ask what's the one goal that actually solves all of them. Right. I think that, I don't think, I don't think in the beginning you're gonna have a 10 hour work week while trying to get to that goal. You might if you have really good hoos, but it's gonna take a lot of work. Right. And that might be one you let go of for a while. Doesn't mean you can't optimize for that into the future. But you're probably not gonna get to 500,000, 500,000 or 5 million or whatever with a 10 hour work week. Right. So the question is, can you be happy without that? And yeah, I think that you're trying to solve way too many things at once. And I agree with Brian that you probably have false assumptions about some of these things. Ask back to the idea of honesty. Why is 500000 important? Is that more important than your 10 hour work week? If you want to work just 10 hours a week, maybe just go for 50. Yeah. I'm not saying I'm just pushing you.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Why is the 10 hour work week so important?

[Couple (Jacob and Melissa)]

10 hour work week is I could keep working at the 2 job and find ways to make money. But we're not with kids.

[Brian]

So wait, why are we even doing this? If we're still wanting to work the W2 job, then why not just work the W2 job?

[Couple (Jacob and Melissa)]

No, the main goal is to reduce time and then shoot high for income so that if we fail, we are still way ahead.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

So do you have kids yet, by the way?

[Couple (Jacob and Melissa)]

One and three years old. Yep.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Cool. I have seven, by the way. So I understand the challenge of having kids. Holy cow. Yeah, I understand what it takes. So I would invite you to have a goal, whether it's 500,000 or something else, that allows you to simultaneously realize the other goals.

[Brian]

I think that 500,000 is the goal that yields the other goals.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

It is. If you just achieve that goal, you'll have the other goals. You just might not have them today. So for me, as an example, when I wanted to become an author, I did not set the goal, how do I write a book? I set the goal. And this was when I was a PhD student with three foster kids. Right. Full time PhD student. I said, how do I become an author in such a way that I can provide very well for my family? It became obvious I need a six figure book contract. And so once I set that goal, it's not like I automatically had the six figure contract. And all of a sudden I had zero, zero work. And now all of a sudden I can hang out with my family. No, that big goal gave me a beautiful path that in achieving it, which I did in like a year and a half, I achieved it. I was now being paid six figures now seven figures plus to write books and have seven kids. And so you can use a singular goal to simultaneously solve the other goals. But I would question some of your goals and where those came from and why they're so important.

[Brian]

You can have everything you've ever wanted, just not at the same time.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Yep.

[Brian]

So the profit, so to close it, and then we want it, we'll get one more here, Jacob, but for you guys, it's what will yield the other one. So if you have to do a goal for a season, and sometimes goals, you can wear a goal like for a season, like a coat or like a jacket. And so if you're having a temporary goal that you can let go of, you working 10 hours a week, you can do that right now, but you're not going to yield the 500,000. Whereas if you go for the 500,000 right now is coming from somebody that we're shooting for 500,000amonth right now. And then Ben's doing, aiming for 100 million a year. So just for context, like that's 10 million a month. And so when you're, when you have that, then you have the profit to distribute into processes and people and, and then the processes and people, you know, the passivity that you're looking for. So it's sequential so you can have everything you want, just not at the same time. And that's not my quote. That's Scott Galloway. I freaking love Scott Galloway for that one. Okay, awesome.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

I would also do is I would, I'll just also add who, not how. The more you get better who's the more space you can have? I have the space. I'm here in Cancun with my wife. We're going to go to Mexico City because I have a really good team. Not that, not to say I don't work hard. I think that anyone can have their own goals. I personally don't aspire for a 10 hour work week. I aspire to be very useful, whether it's myself or to others. I'm fine with time freedom by the way, but if you have a really good team and really good who's it affords extreme ability to not have to be there every day and all the time. Should we go to Connor real quick? Connor, what's your question? I know we got just a minute or two, but Connor, what's your question, brother?

[Connor]

Yeah, sorry, I'll try to be real quick about this.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Don't apologize, man.

[Connor]

No, I honestly thank you for taking the time to hear our questions. And my wife and I, we feel like when it comes to all of these hard working professionals in the group that work on the lower end, we're Both working hourly W2 jobs. We don't have the flexibility of a salary salary like most people. And there's a concept that's popped up and I don't know if the words actually been mentioned throughout this whole time, but I think about sacrifice when it comes to this process. There are a lot of sacrifices that you will probably have to make along the way to achieving this goal.

[Brian]

What?

[Connor]

So I'm trying to think about how I was going to word this because I kept hearing different things.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Go ahead, just ask as cleanly as you can. You're fine. I won't call it a sacrifice. What I'll say is you're letting you're choosing something better versus what you already have.

[Brian]

What are you willing to let go of to accomplish a goal? Is that what you're trying to ask?

[Connor]

Yeah, exactly. What do you have to be willing to let go of and at what point is it too much? When do you have when or at least what level do you have to realize maybe it's too much that you're letting go of?

[Brian]

You're never going to stop asking that question for the rest of your life. But you're asking the right question, Ben.

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

Yeah, I just think that over time, you either say, this is where I'm at, or you say, I'm going to try for something more impactful and more meaningful. And to do that, you have to let go of a lot of what you have. That is just the essence of growth, learning, and progress. And a lot. You're never going to reach a stage where you're like, okay, I've learned everything there is to learn. I haven't. Like, at a certain. If you want to keep learning and growing, you're going to have to let go of much of what you currently have in art to go for something more meaningful, more impactful. That's just. That's the name of the game. As much as people want to avoid it. Yeah.

[Brian]

It's water skiing, Connor. It's water skiing. You can't just stay still. You're going to be vibrating and constantly shifting your movement. So as you're skiing, you're realizing, like, okay, I need to go a little bit to the right, a little bit to the left. And then that's the balancing act that you're going to be. So every year, if you're not asking that question, hey, is this even worth it? It's a good frame to. To make future decisions. But, guys, thank y' all so much for coming on. This has been absolutely awesome. We need to shut it down here now because Ben's been with us for 90 minutes now, and I want to be conscious of his time. I want to award the two signed copies to Mr. John Cook and Ms. Sully. So round of applause for John and Sully. You guys ask wonderful questions. And Jake, Sarah, all the rest of you guys, thank you so much as well. Andrew, Garav, and Hayden, please email me your questions and I will email them to Ben to make sure that you guys still get an answer. But I want to be conscious of his time right now. So if you guys please remember to email me and Stephanie, if you can make it a point for them to email and remind me, I'll make sure that you guys get it answered. But, Ben, did you have something that you wanted to do with the audiobook?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

If people wanted. I'll just throw that. It's literally a direct link. I just threw it in the chat. Although there's a thousand. Thank you. I think if people want to. Brian was so phenomenal. He loves you guys so much of these. I'll send you guys a physical book. I'm happy to send you guys These galleys that he has, he's sending two signed ones. You want this? You can have it. If you just want the full audiobook, we've been given permission to give the whole thing away. So I just stuck it in the chat. So if anyone prefers an audiobook, it's right there. You can listen to it on your phone, listen to the whole thing. Brian's rad enough to say he'll send you one of these copies, which we sent to him, if you prefer. A physical copy.

[Brian]

Yep. So anybody that wants a physical copy, what it's going to be looking like after this is we have a list of everybody that's been on this call, and we will send you a form to fill out so that you guys get a physical copy sent to you. Because Ben was going to do this for free, and that was too nice of him. So I was like, either let me donate to a charity of your choice or let me get my people books. So now you guys get the physical book and you get the audiobook. So my ask of you is, if you guys are audiobook people, please listen to the audiobook, but gift the physical version, the physical copy to somebody else that you know is going through the scaling process and needs it, actually go and hand it to the person. Because when we need to share this and be able to add as much value to Ben as he added tonight. So, Ben, thank you so much. From the bottom of my heart, man, this has been absolutely phenomenal, and I haven't been able to see the chat, so I'm assuming it's been blowing up. Guys, this has been so much fun, and I'm so honored and blessed. Thank you guys for showing up, playing out, and I'll let you get back to your evenings. Ben, thank you so much. Any closing words?

[Dr. Benjamin Hardy]

I just want to say, Brian, you've surprised me a lot. And being surprised is a good thing, right? Good strategy. Surprising. I'm excited to get to know you more, Brian, and to watch what the heck you're doing, because this is special and obviously this community is special. I just want to say to all of you, kudos, and you're in the right place. You're with the right guy. He's a dog. He's a good guy. He's a studs. No, Brian, this is just surprising in a very good way. So just thank you and thanks to all of you guys. Have a beautiful night.

[Brian]

Thanks for the wonderful words, man. All right, guys, have a great evening. Go set some big old goals. See you.