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Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Dr. Benjamin Hardy - Scaling.com Founder | The Truth About 10X Goals
01:00:13
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- [00:00]
A
Success story is a Square partner. Now, your favorite neighborhood spots run on Square. You know, I was just at Panther Coffee here in Miami last week. And beyond the incredible cortado, what struck me was watching them seamlessly handle the morning rush. The barista mentioned they've been using Square to manage everything from inventory to building their loyal customer base. It's so much more than just that little white card reader that we all recognize. Square knows that local businesses can be big businesses. And as things get more complex, Square meets you at every opportunity. So whether or not you're expanding, expanding to new locations, building a loyal following, even covering cash flow gaps, Squares powering all the behind the scenes stuff that matters. They knock out today's to dos and they unlock tomorrow's what ifs. If you're ready to see how Square can transform your business, go to square.com go/success to learn more, that's square.com go/success square meet you there.
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B
Psychologically, the future is a tool to shape and direct the present. One of the problems that most entrepreneurs have is that they're actually pursuing their own goals. They don't understand that everything that they do is driven by their goals. Most entrepreneurs, they don't go 10x. They don't have the actual goal to go 10x.
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A
He's not just a psychologist. He's one of the most influential thinkers on the planet today. Dr. Benjamin Hardy has written bestsellers that redefine how we see the future. Books like Willpower doesn't work and be your future self Now. His work has been read by millions. His ideas featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes and cnbc.
- [01:28]
B
Your future is what shapes your present. And that also includes your view of God, obviously, the afterlife, things like that. Those things shape who you are. Now. Say a company's doing 1 million in revenue, so they have a goal of getting to 10 million and they want to do it in 10 years. I would tell them you're never going to hit that goal because you've put it 10 years away, which means you're not dealing with it today.
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A
Behind the titles and accolades is a deeper mission to help people break free from limitation, rewrite their identities and step fully into the lives they were meant to live. This isn't just about self improvement. It's about transformation. This is Dr. Benjamin Hardy understanding your.
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B
Goals, aligning your relationships with your goals. If you have two fundamentally different philosophies about life and two totally different goals about what it means to live, that relationship's probably not going to work. Your goal determines how you approach all these things, you can actually gain trust with people, even if you disappoint them by telling them the truth. So getting really good at understanding what that means and then living in alignment with it, usually that's going to lead to good things.
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A
Ben, so you are making a very bold claim in the science of scaling that 99% of entrepreneurs fail to scale not because they lack talent, but because they optimize for things that shouldn't exist. So talk to me about the idea that separates Companies that grow 10x versus those that kind of just get stuck, which I think is the majority.
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B
The first problem. And so John Doerr, he's a billionaire venture capitalist, he said that a goal properly set is halfway reached. And so one of the problems that most entrepreneurs have is that they're actually pursuing their own goals and they don't understand that everything that they do is driven by their goals. In psychology, our perception, what we filter, what we say yes and no to, is all driven by our goals as well as the systems we build and the companies we build. And so most entrepreneurs, they don't go 10x because they don't have the actual goal to go 10x. And it's not an urgent goal. If they do want to go 10x, it's 10 or 20 years away. And that's a poor rendering of the future psychologically. The future is a tool to shape and direct the present. And the only way for it to be effective as a tool is for it to be big enough and urgent enough that it forces you to hard look at everything you're doing. And so the majority of what most companies are doing, to your point, is optimizing stuff that if they had a higher and a better and a more urgent goal, those things would go away because they're not good enough for the goal.
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A
If somebody is starting a build a business or trying to scale a business, what are some of the most important thoughts that they should have versus what Instagram tells them or what watching a whole bunch of entrepreneur podcasts, you know, all in podcast loves. Tim Ferriss wants to go apply to Y Combinator. All great stuff, but what should they actually be focused on?
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B
So the first thing which is what I already hit is, is what is their actual goal? And the goal actually needs to be bigger than they thought it was and more urgent, right. If they're starting a business. Most businesses are very linear. Like, you know, say I'm doing $500,000, right? My goal might be to get to 5, to get to 100,000, right? So to 2X. Right. But the problem with that is it's going to lead to bad decisions. Right? Because what you're doing right now, the decisions the young entrepreneur who's listening to this are making are the exact opposite decisions that they would be making if they were 10x or a hundredx bigger. Right? And so you want to start with a much bigger goal and give yourself an urgent timeline to do it. No more than three years. So say you're again back to doing 50,000 a year. Your goal should be doing 5 million to 10 or more million in three years or less. And the reason for that is, is because that goal, if you let that goal be the tool that forces you to start looking more deeply at everything you're doing, it's going to force you to start coming to hard conclusions faster. You're going to have to figure out what it takes to build a real business, what it takes to start hiring not bad people, but good people, what it means to actually define yourself as a business and actually have a singular focus versus doing what everyone else is doing and following everyone else's paths. So actually starting with the goal to scale and actually having a massive goal and giving yourself a short timeline is going to force you to start getting answers that you won't get. If your only goal is to get to the next linear step, which is how do I get to a hundred thousand in revenue? That's a bad goal. That's going to lead you to making most of the decisions you're making today, which are all mistakes. They're going to honestly kill your business in the next few years.
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A
There's one idea that I really do love and it, and it's so interesting. There's always dualities in life where two ideas can be true at the same time. Because one idea that I really do love is for entrepreneurs to be successful, they have to find a way to stay in the game. I think it's originally a hormozy idea, but I'm sure it's been repurposed a million different.
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B
Definitely not. Definitely not a hormosi idea.
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A
It's been replaced.
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B
You know, I'll tell you, I'll tell you whose idea that is.
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A
You know that. You know the idea, though, that I'm talking about staying in the game.
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B
Yeah, yeah. So. So, yeah, so stay the game. Stay in the game versus win the game.
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A
Yes.
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B
Yeah. And that goes back to infinite games versus finite games. Even I think Alan Carr, someone. Carr from like the 80s. And then other people have translated it, but it's Semi true, but it also makes for bad strategy. This is what happens when academics and when authors teach people how to do strategy. Because an author, they're focused on process over outcome. But in business, you really do have to focus on the outcome and you use the outcome to shape your strategy. And so rather than saying, I just want to be in the game my whole life, it's what game do you want to play and how do you win? Um, and people don't want to talk about winning when it comes to overly focused on process. Um, but in business you actually have to say, what's the game I want to play and how do I win in that game rather than how do I stay in a game or even stay in the wrong game?
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A
What questions do you have to ask yourself when you're starting that will give you the clarity to figure out which game you should be playing?
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B
I think it's really important to get connected to your own future self as a person, right? There's a lot of research on getting connected to your future self thinking about not who's the default version of your future self, which is the extension of your current self, but who is the future self that you, you feel you actually would love to become. And the answer to that question changes over time. But as you actually get more honest about your future self and more connected to your future self, it becomes obvious which games you shouldn't play. As an example, for me, I was actually growing a big YouTube channel two, three years ago and could have easily had a massive YouTube channel right now. But to me, that game wasn't a game worth playing. For me, to be honest with you, it's a bloody game in terms of a red ocean. There's a lot of competition over there. Could I have succeeded in that game? I think so. I think it would have massively slowed my progress and I think it would have been a dead end game compared to a more efficient game as I got more connected to my future self. So one is really thinking through your future self and getting honest about that. One of my friends who's a mentor and a billionaire said that the majority of reasons why entrepreneurs don't grow and scale is because they lie to themselves. First, they lie to themselves about who they really want to be, and second, they lie to themselves about all the things that they're doing that are counter to that. Counter to that. And so most games aren't worth playing, you know, and I think most, most games are distractions. Most games are not going to take you to where you want to go. And if you're willing to let most of those games go, you can start actually winning the game you really want to play.
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A
How do you wake yourself up? Because again, we're talking about people that don't really have this rule book when they're going into it. Entrepreneurs don't really have a clear rulebook. I mean, you, you studied organizational psychology. You're probably as close as you can get to going to traditional education and learning anything that's useful for business. But I mean, there's no real rulebook. And maybe you can, maybe you can argue there is somewhere, but hopefully the.
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B
Science, hopefully the science of scaling becomes that. Because I think you're honestly right, and I think that it's a topic that has been muddled and distracted and confusing for a really long time.
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A
I want to learn a little bit more about you people who don't know sort of where you came from and how you got into this world. So again, I mentioned you, you actually took a degree, was it a doctorate or a master's in organizational psychology, but that was your focus. PhD, PhD, yeah. That would be where the doctor came from. That makes sense. And what were some of the things that you actually learned in that degree that were useful, applicable to somebody who's trying to build a business right now? And I'm sure there's a lot that wasn't. But what were some of the main core ideas that you actually found quite useful that you still carry through to your work today?
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B
I think that I learned a lot about systems theory, systems dynamics, levels of systems. They call it levels of analysis. So, like, as an example, an employee is a different level than a team. Like an employee fits within a team, right? And a team fits within maybe a sector of the business, which fits within a company, which fits within an industry. So there's levels of analysis and also just realizing that human psychology and human systems are driven by goals and just really being rigorous and honest about that. Um, I think that the main things I really learned was, was being rigorous. Um, you know, my, my. So I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't actually say that any of the actual subject matter that I studied was ground groundbreaking, although it does inform my thinking. It was more just being rigorous, right? Like actually questioning assumptions, asking better questions, you know, having someone give really hard feedback, um, even learning things like statistics, which I'm honestly not that good at, but having to understand how these things work. So it was more about how to think versus what to think, you know, and then obviously being in business and Writing major books, actually like advising companies, those things are very different. But I have learned to have rigor and, and willingness to get hard feedback and willingness to get correction that I think is helpful. And whereas I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, they maintain a kind of a sloppy identity and a sloppy mindset throughout.
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A
When you talk about the science of scaling, you talk about doing things differently than most entrepreneur education teaches. But I would be curious if, when you look at the framework in the science of scaling, I mean, you have a couple different ones. You have frame, floor, focus. That's one. I want to understand what that means. You set impossible goals. You talk about 2x versus 10x, all these different concepts. Do you feel like the entrepreneurs that we look up to the. Or look up to in terms of entrepreneurial success, say, like the Richard Branson's or the Elon Musk's or the Mark Cubans or the billionaires at the world, do they adopt some of the. Are the frameworks that they adopt in line with the science of scaling versus what the average person thinks entrepreneurship is, which I think is completely different than what you teach and should be what people adhere to and adopt?
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B
I think so. I would say that a lot of these people, the big names, the Musks, the Bezos and stuff like that, they apply the type of thinking that I teach in the book, maybe without explicitly knowing it. Like, a lot of them just are naturally, like, Steve Jobs was wanting to put a dent in the universe, right? Obviously he didn't have small goals. He was wanting to take over and reinvent computing, right? And so most of the people listening to this podcast aren't trying to do something that big, right? And so naturally they have smaller ambitions, which would lead them down pathways that they would not be going down if they had 10x or 100x bigger ambitions. And so the people we're talking about have massive things that they're trying to do, and they're willing to figure out how to do it, even if it means going down a pathway that no one else has gone down before. And even if it means risking, you know, you know, how many times has Musk risked not only his reputation, but how many times has he risked his fortune, right? He's willing to let go of the present for the future, even if it's being a billionaire, even if it's his reputation, even if it's Tesla, right? Him partnering with Musk or Trump, you know, whether people agree with it or not, he had to risk an enormous amount to make that bet. Because why? Because he's got an impossible goal of getting to Mars, right? So how many people have a goal of going to Mars, colonizing it, et cetera? But if you begin to understand the psychology of it, everything he's doing, including the unique pathways he's trying to take, all stem from that goal. And so the first fundamental difference between the bigs versus everyone else is their goals are just radically different that they're willing to try to solve versus how do I have the biggest podcast in the world? Right? They're like, how can I change education? Right? It's just a different, it's a different pursuit.
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A
But is there, is there benefit, Is there benefit or distraction to adopting that level of goal, to thinking in terms of impossible goals? Is that a benefit to somebody who's trying to, for example, build a service based lawn care company or build a podcast or build, I don't know, a marketing agency? How do you translate these frameworks into what the majority of the people who are listening are trying to accomplish?
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B
Yeah, so let's just say go back to that lawn care guy, right? Let's say you tell me how much money is he making when he starts?
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A
Nothing. But maybe he's trying to make, you know, 3, 2, $300,000 annually in revenue or in profits and take home for himself.
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B
That's huge. That's awesome.
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A
Yeah, I would say revenue. You're probably trying to put like, listen, I don't run a lawn care company, but I've looked at a few on Biz Buy Sell, and I've watched Cody Sanchez enough to know that I'm sure they're making about, you know, a million and they're trying to take home, you know, 2, 300,000 as a good small business.
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B
Okay, awesome. So the question is, does that business want to stay small or do they want a 10x or 50x or 100x? And if they do, then they're going to have to start thinking about their business differently. They can't keep doing what they're doing, right? Maybe they end up having, maybe they end up becoming the lawn care provider for their entire state or offering something different. And so any company can apply it. But the challenge that almost every company will face, which is exactly what you just said, is sunk cost bias. The bigger goal, even in the same industry, is going to force them to remodel their company in large part or remodel their strategy. And most people aren't willing to do that. And so they end up staying in what they're currently doing versus innovating and doing Something better. But, you know, at some point, that lawn care provider had to walk away from something. Maybe it was their job. Right. Or something. And so they did it before they had a bigger goal. They realized that their current vehicle or their current model wasn't going to get them there. So they went and started something and they grew. And now they've gotten to a point where they're more successful than they were prior. And the question is, are they willing to do that again and again, or are they going to let the past dictate where they're at?
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A
Do you think that many people think in terms of impossible goals, or do you feel like most people let the past dictate where they're at?
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B
Almost everyone lets their past determine their goals. So as an example. Yeah, so as an example, I did 300,000 revenue last year. So I'm going to go for 400,000 this year. Right. Or next year. Right. So they're letting their past performance shape their goal versus letting the goal shape their system, shape their process. You always. And people do that, by the way, naturally, psychologically as well. I think it's how we're trained to think. I call it linear psychology or linear time, where you let the past and present determine the future. But that's also natural. And that's how people have been taught to think even in terms of their future selves. They let their past and their present self dictate the model or the view of their future self. But back to the Buckminster Fuller quote that you just said. You don't change things by fighting the existing reality. Instead, you need a new model that makes your old model become obsolete. Well, that also fits with your psychology, but also your business. And so with your psychology, the new model would be a different future self, and you let that future dictate who you are in the present. And if it's a very different future self, say it's someone who's, you know, built, you know, growing a successful company or someone who's successful or has a family and a marriage. Right. Or whatever. If you let that model of your future dictate your present, which is really what the future is for. Psychologically, the future and the past are just tools for better operating in the present. They're not outside of you. Your past as an idea is in your head and it's driving and it's dictating you, but your future is also an idea in your head that's shaping your decisions. And so if you let a brand new model of the future impact who you are today, it's going to lead you in a very different direction.
- [18:19]
A
HubSpot is a success Story partner. Now think about listening to this podcast. Right now you're probably multitasking. You're probably catching 70 to 80% of what we're talking about. But let's flip that and imagine you're only catching 20%. That'd be crazy, right? It's really not a good use of your time if you only remember 20% of what we're talking about. But most businesses, most entrepreneurs are only using 20% of their data. All the most important details in call logs, emails, chats with their customers. It's just left floating in digital space, not being used. HubSpot it gives you the access to those insights to help you grow your business. Because when you know more, you grow more. Visit HubSpot.com to get the full picture of your business today. NetSuite is a success story partner. Now what does the future hold for business? If you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers. Bull market, Bear market. Interest rates are rising. They're falling. Honestly, at the end of the day, we just need a crystal ball. But until then, over 42,000 businesses have trusted and future proof themselves with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one Cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one cohesive platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control that you need to make quick decisions. With real time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. And when you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. If I needed this kind of business management system, NetSuite is exactly what I do. So whether or not your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges in your business and seize your biggest opportunities. And speaking of opportunity, you have to download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. The guide is free for all listeners. That's netsuite.com Scott Clary indeed is a success story partner. Now say you just realized your business needed to hire someone fast. How can you find amazing candidates fast? It's easy. Just use indeed. When it comes to hiring, indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. And indeed, sponsored jobs helps you stand out and hire fast. And with sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates. So you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Plus with Indeed sponsored jobs, there's no monthly subscription, no long term contracts. You only pay for results. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility, just go to indeed.comclary right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast, Indeed.com/Clary terms and conditions apply. If you're hiring, Indeed is all you need. But when you don't have the role models, you don't have the influence around you. I. Even if, even if you are, you know, a really ambitious person that watches a whole bunch of YouTube videos and listen to a whole bunch of podcasts and reads a whole bunch of books, I think the average person has a really hard time listening to a future self, that they have no tangible evidence this future self can actually exist. And then they default to sort of depending on what their, their past success was. And they say, listen, it'd be great to have $100 million business. But like, in my heart and my soul and in my, in my head, I just can't understand how I can be that person. I think, I think it's very difficult. Like, I don't listen, I don't study this for a living, so you probably have advice on this. But I feel like the average person is going to listen to this, is going to say, yeah, that makes sense. And it's just going to go back to their old ways of thinking, like, how do they actually, actually become this person? How do they actually believe that they can be this future self, this future version of themselves that builds a massive business or achieves massive goals or has a beautiful family or, you know, loses the weight that they want to lose when they've been overweight their whole life.
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B
It's beautiful questions, incredible questions. There's a few different ways of answering that question. I'll go the, the. The faith side first, and then I'll go the practical psychology side second. So the faith side is. Is. And not everyone listening to this has a relationship with a higher power. But the more relationship you build with a higher power, the less constrained you are by what you think is possible versus impossible. The scriptures or the Bible or whatever says nothing's impossible with God. So one of my viewpoints is the more close you get with your relationship With God, the less boundaries you put on your own potential. When it comes to psychology, my view is that you don't necessarily need to believe you can achieve it before you start doing it. So Dan Sullivan, who I wrote 3 books with the gap and the gain 10x is easier than 2x as well as who, not how, he has a little four step model that I think is very accurate. He calls it the four Cs formula. And so the four Cs formula is first, you have to make a commitment. Second, from commitment that takes you to courage because you're making a commitment. You're making a commitment beyond what you actually know you can do. And in fact, when you set impossible goals, part of their value is that you don't know how to do them right? That's actually the point. If you only set goals you think you can accomplish, then you are operating linearly and you're unwilling to find new ideas. You're operating based off false assumptions. And so one of the actual strengths, again goals are tools, right? People have a lot of negative emotional baggage towards goals because they think if they don't hit it, they're losers. Like there's all these false premises even if you do hit it right? So, so people approach goals ineffectively. Goals are psychological tools for evaluating your present, for evaluating what you're spending your time on, for being more honest with yourself about what you're doing, and then for if you choose to begin filtering and finding other pathways to getting there. Your brain is a natural tool at filtering. It won't filter effectively though if you don't actually commit to a goal. So back to Sullivan. First commitment, then, then what happens is courage. First off, the courage to start letting go of the things that you know are counter to the goal, right? That's the stuff that we were talking about with Sunk Cost bias. Begin to actually be honest and with yourself. Honesty even starts to take a little bit of courage and start eliminating the stuff that you know has no bearing on that bigger future. The third is capability. You start to build knowledge and capabilities and pathways and relationships about that goal, right? To the idea of the person with 100 million. Okay, cool. You don't have the knowledge about it right now. You have no capability, you've got no understanding of it. But that goal is going to force you to start learning about that world, right? There is a world over there. We know that there's a world. All these worlds, you just don't know about them. So your ignorance is slowing you down and stopping you. So you're Gonna have to start to develop some capability, some knowledge, some context. Then the fourth is what he calls confidence. Right? What you're asking for and what a lot of people are asking for is give me the confidence before I do any of this work. Give me the confidence before I make a commitment. Give me the confidence before I deal with any courage. Give me the confidence before I start being honest with myself about all the stuff I'm doing. That's a waste of time. Give me the confidence before I start gaining knowledge, education, relationships and experience in that world. And so, yeah, if someone wants confidence before they're willing to make commitments, act, exercise courage, and develop capability and knowledge, they're screwed. Because you, you, confidence is earned. You can't have it. But if you're willing to exercise some faith, set. Use a goal as a tool, not a tool as a way to make you feel like a loser. But use a tool, right? A bigger goal. Use it as a tool to begin exposing and examining yourself and examining your current thinking. This is what I do when I work with companies, and I'll just use it as an example. Say a company's doing 1 million in revenue and they have a goal of getting to 100 million or even 10 million. Say they have a goal of getting to 10 million and they want to do it in 10 years. I would tell them, you're never going to hit that goal. Why? Because you've put it 10 years away, which means you're not dealing with it today. Remember, the future is a tool. And if you've put it 10 years away, what that means is you're not doing anything about it right now. And what you're actually doing is you're trying to get from 1 million to maybe 1.2 million, which means you're not solving 10. So what we want to do is we want to use the future as a tool and even your goal as a tool to start using it to more effectively examine your present. So let's take that 10 million, let's move it to two or three years, and start using it to genuinely looking at your current path, because your current path is nowhere near 10 million. You don't even know what 10 million means. And that's okay. But what we do know is that most of what you're now doing is nowhere near that. And so can we at least start being honest about that and start developing a plan to 10 million and start developing a knowledge of what that means and who you'd need on your team and what you'd need to do as a business to get there. So again, the goal just simply becomes a tool for higher levels of honesty and then for beginning to solve it.
- [27:13]
A
This turns into a forcing function. And also, I guess this then forces you to examine all the tasks that you're doing every single day. I'm assuming that really makes you aware that a lot of the stuff that.
- [27:23]
B
You do is not optimizing stuff that shouldn't exist.
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A
100%.
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B
The goal determines this. The goal determines what you're optimizing that shouldn't exist. Anything you're optimizing that shouldn't exist fits what we call below the floor. So the frame determines the floor. The floor defines what you don't do. As Steve Jobs said, focus is defined by what you don't do. Strategy expert Michael Porter says strategy is defined by what you don't do. So, and most people don't have good strategy because they're operating linearly, letting the past dictate the future. And so they're doing 100 things that are optimizing what shouldn't be done. And that's why I shared the quote from John Doerr at the beginning that a goal properly set is halfway reached because it allows you to begin honestly examining that the majority of what you're spending your time on right now is great from the past, but it's not great from the better future. And so the sooner you can just be honest about that and let that stuff go, the sooner you can go and find better paths that will get you 10, 100x the distance in the same amount of time.
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A
Talk to me about your relationship with the traditional 80:20 rule from the context of how do we get to 10x?
- [28:25]
B
Yeah, it's awesome. So me and Dan Sullivan wrote a book called 10x is easier than 2x. And Dan's 80 years old, been coaching entrepreneurs for 50 years, personally coached 20,000 plus. And, you know, while we were writing 10x is easier than 2x, part of me, my process of writing books is that I have to really get into the weeds, right? And I have to really understand something. And he had a lot of good insight on 10x, but I still felt like we needed to drill a little deeper. And ultimately he's really good at making frameworks. And so, you know, we had spent a lot of time talking about the 8020 principle, but he basically, I'll give you the simple framework, but then I'll tell you how I really think about it. So the simple framework from that book using the 8020 principle and the idea of the 8020 principle, which they sometimes call the power law, is that 80% of results comes from 20% of inputs. In other words, 80% of outputs comes from 20% of inputs. And so if you look at 100% of what you're doing or 100% of your relationships, almost all the progress, the results, the success is coming from a very small amount of it, say, 20% or less. And so the model that we came up with in that book was if you want to go for 2x growth again, you're that, that lawn care company doing 200,000 a year. If you want a 2x, you can actually keep 80% of what you're doing. You don't have to transform that much to go 2x. All you have to change is 20%. Maybe you need more marketing, right? Maybe you need, you know, so you only have to tweak your company to go 2x. You only have to change 20% of it. You can keep 80% of what you're now doing, which means you're fundamentally operating from your past. You're letting the past dictate your growth, you're letting the past dictate your strategy. You're keeping 80% of who you are now, whereas having a 10 times bigger future is so big and transformative that 80% of what you're now doing is noise. 80% of what you're now doing is fundamentally a distraction. And so it forces 80% of what you're doing away, and it forces you to find what's the 25, what's the 20% or less of what you're doing right now, that you've got a 10x that you've got to actually focus on and scale. And so what that means in some companies is that I was just talking to a guy right now who has a small business. I mean, they're doing $2 million revenue, but they're awesome. And he does Windows. And we started to talk about the different projects they're doing, and he said they do maybe 70 projects a year. Some of them are $10,000 projects, some of them are 30, some of them are $50,000 projects. But once or twice a year, they do a project that's a couple hundred thousand, you know. And so using the 8020 model on that, my question for him was, well, how would you. What would happen if you just optimize your business around those. Those opportunities, right, which are like the 1% of opportunities for you where you're only doing. And they're a little bit more specific gigs, right? But like There are these jobs that are a couple hundred thousand. What would happen if you just 10x to those and forgot about the rest? Right. That would be raising the floor and stripping away the 80% of stuff. Right. And he realized like he could 10x his company, he could get to actually 50 million if they only did those jobs. But right now their system isn't optimized for those. They're not even looking for those jobs and they're still saying yes to all the little jobs. And he, out of fear of disappointing people, says yes to things all the time that he knows are projects they shouldn't be doing. But he doesn't want to disappoint people. He wants to have a good name, a good reputation in his environment and stuff like that. But what he doesn't realize is the whole environment sees him as the guy who takes these little jobs because of the things he does.
- [31:54]
A
Yeah. So he's created this, this image and this Persona for himself. And it's probably just as, it's just as damaging the way the customer sees him as the way he sees himself 100%.
- [32:05]
B
I asked him, I said, how do you, how do you think you're defined in the marketplace? And he, and he didn't really know. And I said, well, we know that they see you as the guy who takes these little jobs because those are the ones you get, those are the ones you take.
- [32:17]
A
How do you manage all the other things outside the business that are not incongruence, they're not helping, they're not sort of moving the needle forward? What's your framework for that? Because that's the human element of business that is not so easy to figure out.
- [32:30]
B
Like I said, everything is driven by goals. And back to the idea of levels of analysis, some goals are higher order than others, right? Speaking for myself, my own faith, my family, are higher order goals than my business. Therefore, if I needed to, I would sacrifice my business for my higher order goals. And so understanding your goals and aligning those, and even Viktor Frankl talked about this long ago in man's search for meaning, right? Aligning your relationships with your goals. Right? So the person you're married with, if you have two fundamentally different philosophies about life and two totally different goals about what it means to live, that relationship's probably not going to work. Right. Like those could be, you know, spiritual alignment or things like that. But honestly, you know, to the very practical level of when you want to start making improvements in your life and when you want to start actually living like As I call your goal your frame. And your frame determines what you see as a person. We all see the world through a frame, and our frame determines what we notice, what we care about, what we see as relevant. And so it determines what we view as signal and what we view as noise. And so if you're trying to become the world's best player on World of Warcraft, right, then you're not going to listen to this podcast, probably, unless this podcast can help you do that. But you're going to be studying how do I become the best player in World of Warcraft? And so your signal and the pathways you're going to be looking for and everything in your frame is going to be based on that. And so your goal determines what you see, what you look for. And so the reason I'm saying set higher goals is because that forces your floor to go up, meaning that a lot of the things you could say yes to for a low goal, you can't say for a higher goal. Right? And so your goal determines how you approach all these things. But the easiest, in my mind, the easiest way to do it back to all progress starts by telling the truth and that most people are lying to themselves is you can actually gain trust with people, even if you disappoint them by telling them the truth. Right? And so if you're wanting to grow and succeed and put yourself in new environments and learn new things, and that means decreasing what you're currently doing, such as spending time with ex friends doing ex activities. The most healthy approach, even though it still disappoints people, is being honest, like being transparent, not making it about them, not saying you're a bad person and that the activities and behaviors we're doing are below my floor and they're loser activities and I want to go be successful. That's not how you do it. It's just saying it's not making about the other person at all. It's literally about, this is the direction I want to go. I feel like I need to focus in these directions. And that therefore means we're not going to be able to spend as much time doing what we're doing. And so this is just the direction I feel I should go. You don't have to actually apologize about it. Even with this guy with the window company, in order for his company to scale and grow and get to 50 million in three years, which he wants it to from two, and he can. He actually knows the pathway, he's going to have to disappoint his current a lot of his current client base and start saying, we don't do these projects anymore. And he can do it in a way that builds trust by saying, look, this is the direction our company is going to go. You can go work with other people and if you start to want to come in this direction, you know who to come for us for. So you can gain and build trust, even if it means disappointing people by being really honest.
- [35:57]
A
The HubSpot Podcast Network is a Success Story Partner Now a quick podcast recommendation. I've been listening to Truth, Lies and Work. They're in the HubSpot podcast network. Just like Success Story. It's this husband and wife team, Al and Leanne Elliot. They break down why people actually do what they do at work. So if you have a business, if you manage people, if you have to hire people at any point, you have to listen to their show. I just listened to an episode on why good employees suddenly quit. That's an issue that we all have, and it totally clicked for me. One of the reasons they explained is why it's not usually about the money. It's about all these little promises that we as founders, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, we break without realizing it. Like when you tell someone you just hired that they're going to learn all these new skills, but you just keep giving them the same tasks over and over and over again. It made me realize that I probably lost a lot of good people for dumb reasons that I never noticed. And hiring is one of the most important things you can figure out. So if you manage people or if you just want to understand what makes your coworkers tick, it's worth checking out. Listen to Truth, Lies and work wherever you get your podcast. ChipStation is a success story partner. You know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else? It's not just having great products. It's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back. All of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies, they use ShipStation and it has completely transformed how they handle orders. They save thousands on shipping costs thanks to the Rate Chopper tool that finds the best discounts and what makes Shipstation brilliant. You never need to upgrade because it grows with your business no matter how big you get. And they offer discounts up to 88% off UPS, DHL Express and USPS rates, and up to 90% off FedEx. It integrates seamlessly with every selling channel you're already using. And your customers get branded tracking updates that keep them happy and informed. When shoppers choose your products, you turn them into loyal customers with cheaper, faster and better shipping. No credit card required. Cancel anytime. That's shipstation.com code success story HubSpot is a success story Partner now. The future of business is happening right now and you don't want to miss it. That's why you have to be at inbound 2025. They are bringing together the brightest minds in marketing, sales, business, entrepreneurship, AI for three incredible days in San Francisco, the global epicenter of innovation and technological disruption. Picture this. You are learning directly from Amy Poehler about creative leadership. You're getting AI insights from Dario Amodi, who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence. Here's what makes Inbound special. It's not just the great keynotes. You're going to dive into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn. And plus, San Francisco's legendary startup ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with all these great entrepreneurs, decision makers, industry leaders, peers who are actively shaping the future of business. From September 3rd to 5th at the Moscone center, you're going to be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs. Don't just watch the future unfold, be part of creating it. Visit inbound.com register to get your ticket today. I think that's very important because we always speak about, we always speak about scaling and business strategy, but there's so much more to it that like even a lot of the things that you're discussing today, it's, yeah, there's some tactical items that you can sort of pursue, but a lot of it is, is you're talking about different mental models, different frames. We're talking about future and past self. Like a lot of the things that actually are sort of leading indicators of success are less of, you know, the strategy that you use and more of the mental model or the mindset that you adopt.
- [39:22]
B
Yeah, my view is psychology. Psychology always shapes strategy and strategy always determines time management. The sad part is people talk about time management and productivity without first starting with psychology or strategy. And the fundamental root of both psychology and strategy are goals. Honestly, Honestly, like humans are driven by their goals. They may not be aware of those goals. They may have past based goals that were provoked by traumas or that they're unaware of. But humans are driven by goals and so is strategy. And so the reason people are listening to this is because they see this as somewhat relevant to the goals that they're trying to set or pursue. Otherwise they wouldn't be here. And so yeah, people think very tactically first and I think that the world's taught us to think tactically in terms of productivity and time management and even things like habits. But all of those things are fundamentally secondary to psychology and strategy.
- [40:17]
A
But are there any other ideas that somebody should implement as they raise their floor and remove some of these relationships in their business or remove some of the activities they're doing? Is there any other framework on how they think through new ideas that they should adopt or new ideas they should bring into their business? Like when they look at their future version of themselves? Fine, you want to make $10 million in three years, great. But there's a million and one ways to achieve that. So how do you. Without going through every single tactic, strategy, customer type, new product that you can bring to market, how do you figure out what would be the quickest path to actually get there? Because we said we want to get there in three years, but now we have unlimited things that we can take on. And that can also sort of be a distraction, shiny object syndrome. We don't know where to spend our time on going forward. So how do we, how do we rank some of these opportunities or ideas?
- [41:13]
B
The beautiful part about framing the goal properly, back to John Doar. A goal properly set is halfway reached is that if you set the goal properly, most of the options disappear. You don't have infinite options to go from 1 million to 10 million in three years. You actually have very few. And so you have infinite options to get from 1 million to 2 million. You don't have infinite options to get to 10x in two or three years or more. Most paths won't work. That's why the framing is so powerful, is because it forces out dead ends. It forces you to be honest that most of what you're doing won't work. It forces you to find better paths and better solutions that you wouldn't be looking for. There's very few paths to massive growth. There's infinite paths to small and linear growth. And so it forces you to find the best path, the best model, the best team, the best people. If you're really rigorous and honest about it, I'll give an example and I share it in the book. But, you know, one of the ladies that we worked with, her name is Alicia Alt, and she had a software company called Level Up Score. And she, she was in the credit industry. She'd been a coach for 20 years in the credit industry. And she had built a software. Not her, but she had hired someone and had a partner with someone who built a software that she felt was incredible. And she wanted to get that software into the credit industry. And in the US the credit industry, there's 50,000 credit repair companies in the US alone, people you can hire to help you dispute claims or raise your credit. And so she wanted to have those 50,000 companies using her software with their clients because it was very valuable at helping them along that pathway. And anyways, so she began cold calling those credit repair companies and every time, every time she talked to them, they fell in love with the product and they said yes. And so over a 90 day period of time, this was in Q1 of last year, 2024, over 90 days, she had 10 of these calls, created a deal where these 10 different companies were using her software and they had a little bit of a rev share. Well, she met us and we said, Alicia, we want you to set an impossible goal so that you can actually start to scale this company because right now you're on a path that's going to take you 20 years to make a lot of progress. And so she said, okay, I'm going to go for a hundred of these companies. She was at 10, I'm going to go for 100 of these companies using the software in 90 days. And obviously that was a stretch. That's a 10x in 90 days. But it was still not a new model that made her old model or her old thinking obsolete. Right. And so she figured even though she was really busy, she had a full time job as a coach, she also had kids she figured she could squeeze in over the weekends and stuff. Even though it was still lying to herself, there's no way she could fit in 90 of those hour long calls. She was already booked to the guilds, her plate was already full, but she was lying to herself and she thought, I can maybe have 90 of these calls. And so we said, Alicia, your thinking is bad and it's gonna hurt you and it's gonna, it's not gonna work. And so he said, we need, you need a bigger goal so that you can find a better path. And so she said that's what's interesting about what I'm talking about is by actually setting a more impossible goal, she found a more streamlined path. What happened was she said, okay, I'm gonna go for a thousand of these credit repair companies using my software in 90 days. And she said, as soon as I set that goal, like my mind went completely blank. I had no clue how to do it, like, and that's exactly where we wanted her. And so, and then, and so essentially a big part of what we call pathways. Thinking in psychology is thinking from the goal. You always want to think from the goal, not toward the goal, rather than thinking, oh, here's business model. You know, business model X, Y, and Z. Maybe I should pursue all those. No, let's set the right goal, and from the goal, let's start to develop a model and a path. And so for her to get a thousand software or a thousand of these credit repair companies using her software in 90 days, she realized she had no clue how to do it. And so she began just thinking from the goal, what are some possible pathways to do it? And ultimately what came to her. And this is one thing that people don't do. I spend a lot of time advising business owners. And even when I'm sitting on a call, like, I'm on with you, and I ask them to do something that takes them 30 seconds of thinking and literally 30 seconds of quiet, they don't do it. And almost every time when I say, I'm going to sit here quietly and I want you to just think about it for 30 or 60 seconds, it's hilarious. They start getting answers. Like, literally, people start coming to their mind and stuff, but they won't do that. And so I forced them to do it. But in the case of Alicia, she sat for literally three hours, she journaled about it and thought, how could I get to a thousand in 90 days? And the idea that came to her mind, again, thinking from the goal and giving herself space for meditation, prayer, journaling, is she realized, there's already software companies in my industry that serve thousands or even tens of thousands of these credit repair companies. If I just partnered with even one of these, I could probably have over a thousand of these companies using my software. She never had that thought. It was completely different from what she'd been thinking before. And so ultimately, within a week, she was having a conversation with a guy who owned a company called Credit Repair Junkies. He had a software that helped these 50,000 clients with their client experience. And he actually had 8,000 clients using his software, these credit repair companies, 8,000 of them, she explained to him, level up, score her product. He fell in love with it, they formed a partnership. He white labeled it. And she went from 10 of these software or 10 of these companies to 8,000 from one partnership. Literally from one partnership. But she would have never gotten there on her old thinking, on her old pathways. And so she had to go from a different. The goal took her down a different path and to different partners and to different people. And it took her, you know, that, that, that, that strategy is thinking differently.
- [46:36]
A
That's so powerful because. Yes, I think the, it's so funny. So the average person listening to this, they're, they're so crazy that they, they would for a moment pause and think, how do I make a hundred calls in 24?
- [46:51]
B
How do I make up a thousand?
- [46:52]
A
Or a thousand?
- [46:54]
B
Yeah, I meant. Well, I'm make a thousand calls over the next 90 days. Okay, so that's 10 a day. You know what else you know, you got a full time job, you got kids. How are you going to do that? They try to 10x the current path rather than taking a 10x goal and finding a better path.
- [47:08]
A
So they're attached to the path so wild, so incredibly insane that it's now impossible. So now you got to figure it out. And I think that, listen, remember, the.
- [47:19]
B
Goal is just a tool. It's just a model for disrupting your existing thinking. Peter Drucker said this 50 years ago. It's just a tool. It's not something to get emotional about. It's a tool for analyzing your present, your paths and looking. I did this just barely. So I was scheduled, to be honest with you, to do 50. I was actually scheduled to do about 70 podcasts this year.
- [47:40]
A
Oh my God.
- [47:41]
B
And guess what? I literally just unscheduled all of them but five. One of them was yours because you're a great podcast. But like, the reason I let those go is because I wasn't dumb. If you Talked to me 30 days ago, I was gonna do podcasts and I was gonna do a lot of keynotes, and those were related to my old type of thinking to spread a book. Right. I have this new book called the science of scaling out. But when you begin operating from a much bigger goal and when you start bringing on what we call super. Who's super? Who's are people that can make the 10x goal possible. They bring capability and knowledge and they bring pathways with them that you didn't have before. So in our case, you know, because our goal in scaling.com is to have 5,000 members and, you know, to be helping 5,000 companies scale. The easiest pathway for us to get there is to have a million people read our book or less. Right? Or it doesn't have to be a million, it could be a couple hundred thousand. But because of a guy who we brought onto our team, Joseph Wynn, he wrote a book called don't believe everything you think. He's, he's self published. He sold millions of copies. He's a genius. We brought him on. He's got phenomenal marketing capability. He taught us things that are going to make it 10 times easier for us to get our book out there, such that I don't need to go on podcasts or do keynotes like I thought I did. We have a far more leveraged path because of the people we've brought on our team. And so our goal is going to be a lot easier to get to. Plus, it forces me to start letting go of the pathways I thought were relevant. And so literally last week, I was sitting in an event and I realized half of my schedule for the rest of this year is a waste of time. It's below the floor. Not that doing podcasts isn't awesome, but for me and for my goal, I can't actually spend the majority of my time doing podcasts. We actually have already developed a better pathway because of Joseph on our team, where we can actually reach 10x the audience, 100x the audience without me doing podcasts. So now I have to let that go, which is hard. And I've got to go think about where is a better use of my focus. Right. Because the model is frame, floor focus. And so the question is, where's the most important thing to focus on? To hit my goal or to move the needle? And I gotta be honest, that at least half of my year was gonna be focused on the wrong things. And so the willingness to let go of old pathways or to even let go of old goals. You know, I used to have the goal of selling millions of copies of the books. That's no longer a relevant goal. That's optimizing the wrong thing for me and for my higher and better goals. That allows me then to focus the system in a different direction and make better decisions. And people often don't want to let go of goals.
- [50:13]
A
I think also because people will lie to themselves and say that the goals are serving their business objectives, but I think more often than not, it's just serving their ego.
- [50:21]
B
You're so right. You're so right. They want that New York Times bestseller, or they want to have been on that show, or they want to have X, Y and Z. And those are optimizing things that shouldn't exist. And those are actually optimizing things that are counter to their goal. And they hold them back. They literally hold them back.
- [50:38]
A
Is there anything that you've seen as a major indicator of lack of alignment in someone's life? Like when you think about burnout or you think about. I don't know, like, some people talk about how they always get sick and they're always tired or they're just, they have so much anxiety or depression or they just hate the work they're doing or like, what's the signal that you need to really shake up your life and start to apply some of these ideas? I think you should anyways. But people always, it's so funny. People always sort of ignore what they have to do until usually, usually something happens. And I'm curious what that thing is. When you talk to these business owners, why do they reach out to you? Finally, after X amount of years of not listening to your advice?
- [51:25]
B
You're absolutely right that people don't raise the floor. They raise their floor as they wait as long as they possibly can to raise their floor. Whether that means on bad habits, whether that means on staying in a bad job, whether that means on keeping a bad employee, whether that means, you know, again, back to the guy I talked to this morning. He said that the biggest thing he did in the last 30 days was literally let go of someone who's been on his team for 10 years, even though, like, it's been five years too long. And now his system has been built around this, this bad actor. And now it's going to be a long cleanup because he waited too long. So it's pretty obvious when someone is out of alignment, when they're, when they're not growing very fast, to be honest with you. Like when, when someone's not growing fast, there's something wrong. What? You know, whether they're in a business and it's growing at, you know, less than 50% a year, there's something wrong. I'll be honest with you. Like, there's, there's something wrong. They're either caught in the weeds, they're doing too many different things, they're distracted, they're optimizing the wrong things in a person's personal life. Again, if they're not growing quite fast and quite well, then they're, they're stuck either in, you know, past patterns, sunk cost biases, you've already said fear of failure, not getting connected to a better future self. And so the most obvious thing is just if a person's stagnant, frankly, if a business, if a person or a business is stagnant, there's fundamental reasons why. And you know, back to the quote, you can't change it by fighting the existing system. Right? You can't just, you know, willpower or, or, or force your way out. You, you need a new and better model that forces you to really start letting go of your old model, including mental models, your old identity, your old way of thinking, but also face the, face the grips that you're on a dead end path. You're just not willing to admit it yet. And the sooner you admit it and get off that path and get onto a better path, right? You know, Guy Kawasaki was on a bad path. Like he was on a path that was, that was not optimal. And he found a better vehicle, a better pathway to equal the result, if not better the result, plus tons of other benefits. And so, but he had to let go of that path, including the identity and the dopamine of him being the one of the top speakers, et cetera. And he had to let go of all that. And you know, it's the same with the $200,000 a year lawn care person, if they want to let you know they're on their own version of guys, guys, hard path versus a much easier and a better and a more scalable path. But they're going to have to let go of the current path and model to go find the better and more aggressive one. And then they're there. They're all over the place again. It's called pathway sinking. The problem for most people is they don't have a goal that forces them to go find that path. And so they just stay stagnant.
- [54:19]
A
Fear holds people back. Do you believe that there is a fear element in pursuing impossible goals? Do you feel like there's fear of. You mentioned maybe fear of failure? Is there a fear of becoming somebody who you don't want to become? Like, is there a fear element that you encounter when you speak to some of the people that come and approach and want to work with you?
- [54:40]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. No, absolutely. Fear is a. Fear is a big thing that holds people back even from small things like saying hi to a stranger. Right. So, yeah, but the fears are just misplaced. They're misframed. A lot of it comes down to two types of fear. One is what if I don't hit the goal? Right? And so then they feel like a failure or they define themselves as a failure even though the goal is simply a tool to make better decisions. Um, I myself don't think it's useful to overly attach to your identity to the achievement of a goal. I don't think that that's useful. Um, but, but the goal is a powerful tool for shaping your focus, direction and the, and the pathway you take, such as Guy with the better path. But the, the second Fear that kicks in is, is that they don't know how to do it. And they, and they do know how to do what they're currently doing, right? They know how that lawn care company knows how to get 200 a year revenue. They don't know what it's going to take or who it's going to take to hire. They don't know the path to get to the next 10x jump or whatever. And they also know that in order to go figure that path out, they're going to have to raise their floor and start letting go of a lot of what they're now doing. And they're afraid of the consequences of that, both socially and economically. They're afraid because that they don't know how they're going to make it. And so they don't give themselves the time or the energy to actually start solving the new goal. Which when I gave you the Alicia example of getting to thousands of software, you know, thousands of people using our software, or I gave you the example of people just don't even give themselves 30 or 60 seconds to think about it, right? People don't realize that solving the goal isn't as complex as they think. They just don't actually solve it. And they just anxiously fear and stay on their path. And months go by and years go by and they never really actually spent the time to actually solve the goal, go ask people questions about it, actually learn and figure it out. You know, what I have found in my own self is every time I've made a big, big jump in my life and gone a different direction than what I was previously doing for a much bigger future, there is a challenging couple months or a year even, that goes by of uncertainty. And if you're not sure if you'll be able to pull it off, to be honest with you, and a lot of people don't want to deal with that that few months or that year, and so they just don't do it. And so they stay on their, their path and they've just chosen their fate, that they've reached their peak, they've reached a lower peak even though they didn't have to do that. But what I have found in myself as well as advising others is, is that if you actually do make the commitment and if you actually start to really work on it, you will like, you will figure it out like it's figureoutable, you know, to, to the idea of that quote. It, it will not. It might look a little different, it might look scrappy for a while. But you can figure it out and find it. And going through those processes is somewhat what they call the hero's journey. You know, it's how you evolve to a higher plane. And it's only for people who are willing to go through that process. And very high levels of achievement and becoming and meaning and purpose. Viktor Frankl, back to him, said that, you know, what man needs is not a tensionless state, but the striving and struggling for a worthy goal, a freely chosen task. Right. So that's how you get meaning, that's how you get purpose. That's how you stretch and grow. That's how you experience significance. And. Yeah. Does it sometimes mean. Does it mean sometimes going through some dark tunnels? Yeah.
- [58:28]
A
Where do you want people to connect with you? Where do you want to send them for the books, socials, all that?
- [58:33]
B
Yeah, no need for socials. I would just say scaling.com audiobook, um, we've gotten permission from the publisher to give the audiobook away. Um, obviously, if you want to just read the physical copy, go, go grab it on Amazon. But for scaling.com forward/audiobook, you can give. You can listen to the entire book for free. Uh, we actually want to give away a million copies and so feel free to share that as widely and abundantly as you want. We don't care. We. We just want people to listen to it or read it.
- [59:01]
A
You've given over a lot. But if you could pass on one lesson to your kids, all seven of them, one of the more important lessons that you've learned over your life that you think would, maybe it's been a hard lesson that you wouldn't want someone else to learn, or maybe just something that you think is one of the more impactful ideas that's changed, changed your life or your outlook, what would that lesson be that you'd want to pass on to them and why?
- [59:22]
B
Yeah, so I think it really comes down to, as people, our future and the view we have of our future is what shapes who we are in the present. Right? That includes your future self. That includes your view of God. And so, you know, and Viktor Frankl literally taught the same thing. It was his core thesis in man's search for meaning, that, you know, what, what human beings need is, is a future and a goal. And where I see people struggle is when they stop having a big meaningful goal that stretches them and forces them to grow. And so your future is what shapes your present. And that also includes your view of God, obviously, the afterlife, things like that. Like, those things shape who you are now and so getting really good at understanding what that means and then living in alignment with it. Usually that's going to lead to good things.
- [60:11]
A
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