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- [00:00]
Ed Mylett
So hey guys, listen. We're all trying to get more productive and the question is, how do you find a way to get an edge? I'm a big believer that if you're getting mentoring or you're in an environment that causes growth, a growth based environment that you're much more likely to grow and you're going to grow faster. And that's why I love Growth Day. Growth Day is an app that my friend Brendan Burchard has created that I'm a big fan of. Write this down growthday.com forward/ed. So if you want to be more productive, by the way, he's asked me, I post videos in there every single Monday that gets your day off to the right start. Got about $5,000, $10,000 worth of courses that are in there that come with the app. Also, some of the top influencers in the world are all posting content in there on a regular basis, like having the avengers of personal development and business in one app. And I'm honored that he asked me to be a part of it as well and contribute on a weekly basis. And I do. So go over there and get signed up. You're going to get a free tuition, free voucher to go to an event with Brendan and myself and a bunch of other influencers as well. So you get a free event out of it also. So go to growthday.com forward/ed. That's growthday.com forward slash ed. Advantage Gold is giving away a free copy of Rogoff's book to anyone who schedules a one on one precious metals appointment. You'll discover why gold is becoming the number one hedge against a global currency ship and how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold. Tax and penalty free. Get your free copy today while supplies last text win to 85545 that's win 85545 or go to advantagegold.com data and message rate supp performance may vary. You should always consult your financial and tax professional. If your gut is off, everything feels off. Your digestion, your energy, your mood, your focus. It all starts in your gut. That's why I love Just Thrive Probiotic. Go to just thrive health.com and use code ED to save 20 off on your first bottle. It's time to stop surviving and start thriving. Take the 90 day Just Thrive challenge today at justthrivehealth.com and use code ED. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, cure or prevent any disease or condition. These statements and information are not a substitute for or alternative to seeking care from your healthcare providers. This is the Ed Miler Show. Welcome back to the show, everybody. So my guest today, I gotta tell you, I was telling him off camera when he came on the show, I would say that probably less than 5% of my audience knew who he was. And by the time that interview was over, I was hearing terms like master class from people about our first kind of 10x conversation, 100x conversation, actually. And the feedback I got on the first show we did together was shocking about how over the top it was about how deep and helpful the conversation was in your life and in your businesses. And I've told him privately, I'm talking about household name CEOs that run some of the biggest companies in the world have told me personally how much our first conversation made an impact on them and in their company. Luckily for you guys, he has a new book out and his books are detailed, they're deep and you need to read them a couple times because there's so much information on the new one is the silence of scaling. It's right in front of him here. We're going to talk about business today, all things scaling with a guy that when he writes a book, he goes to levels most people don't. So, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, welcome back to the show.
- [03:26]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Ed, it's really fun. Thank you, man. Just got a great energy, man.
- [03:30]
Ed Mylett
Thank you. So do you. By the way, he's an organizational psychologist and he's like business psychology. But we're not going to hold that against him today. We're actually going to let him talk. So let's talk about scaling. Scaling is this fancy word like grow your business, expand it. That's what we're going to talk about today. Growing and expanding your business. Scaling is like the nouveau terminology. But when we talk about scaling, I always say in life, complexity is the enemy of the execution, of executing. You talk about systems and if you're going to scale, the entrepreneur's tendency is to complicate things. What happens when they do that?
- [04:03]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
You can't scale a complex system. It's just, it just can't happen. So you're going in too many different directions. You've got too many competing goals, often goals you're not even aware of. Right. So I guess to keep it simple, human beings were driven by our future. Like this is one of the big insights in neuroscience. Positive psychology is our future shapes our present. And basically as humans, our present is filtered by the future. That we have so our psychology shaped by our future, but also the systems that we build is shaped by our goals. And so all human systems are driven by goals. And I don't think people appreciate how big that means, because if you set proper goals, you can create simple systems that scale. I mean, this is what all the, the top thinkers, even yourself just said, Steve Jobs. You have to take something that's complex and make it simple. And so the real lever is that it comes down to your goals. And setting the right scale goal that forces you to simplify.
- [04:55]
Ed Mylett
You have a process in the book, what do you call it? The scale something Scaling Framework. Framework. We might as well start with gigantic value. One of the things I love about two people I've interviewed today, they give you what's in the book. Not being afraid that somehow you won't get the book because you know what's in it. Because the book's so thick, we can't cover it all in an hour. So what's the framework? Help help all these entrepreneurs out there or want to be entrepreneurs.
- [05:18]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah. So the framework is. It's a psychological model, actually, I call it strategic psychology. But basically it's frame, floor focus. So as people are framing, you and I actually talked a lot about frame before. I know you love that concept. The interesting thing about frame is that our frame is fundamentally based on our goals. Of course, our past shapes our frame. And so I think a really important thing for people to know is that the past and the future are tools for how we operate in the present. And but the future holds 10x100x the weight of the past. And so it is our goals that shape our frame. And so basically your frame in the present is finding signal and noise. Right? And what is signal is things that are based on your goals. And so everything we do is looking for pathways towards our goals. And so our future shapes our frame and it shapes what we see, it shapes what's relevant. It shapes, you know, so anyone listening to this, the only reason they're listening is because this has some relevance to their goal. Otherwise this would be noise and they wouldn't have. They'd be somewhere else. Right. And so it puts a lot of responsibility on us to know that our future and our goals shape our frame. It shapes everything we do and it also shapes the quality of the pathways that we can find forward. So if we can set better goals. And you know, basically in the book I talk about impossible goals, right? Impossible goals and impossible deadlines. The reason that frame is so powerful is that it Forces out all inefficient pathways. So if you have a goal that's 10 or 100x and it's rather than 10 years away, it's two years away. Now, most pathways don't work, so now you have to filter for really effective pathways.
- [06:46]
Ed Mylett
Okay, stay on here. Stay on. Yeah, yeah. By the way, this is why I love Dr. Hardy's work, because it's where psychology meets business and they intersect. Most people don't do both, so let's just slow down a little bit. For everybody. The framework again is bang, bang, bang.
- [07:01]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Frame, floor, focus. So your frame is your goal.
- [07:04]
Ed Mylett
Yep.
- [07:04]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
And when you have a better goal, it raises your floor.
- [07:07]
Ed Mylett
Yep.
- [07:07]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
So your floor is defined by what you don't do. So Michael Porter, a strategy expert, he said. He said basically, strategies, what you don't do.
- [07:14]
Ed Mylett
Okay.
- [07:15]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
So when you have a better goal, almost everything goes away. So for us, you want to raise your floor so high that almost nothing is relevant.
- [07:23]
Ed Mylett
Yes.
- [07:23]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
You can only then focus on the most scalable paths. You create scalable paths, a scalable model. And so the point of the super high frame is that it raises your floor so high that almost everything becomes noise.
- [07:35]
Ed Mylett
This is exactly why I loved our last conversation. It's correlated to the last one too.
- [07:38]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Sure.
- [07:38]
Ed Mylett
Okay. And so this is really critical. I want all of you that think you've got a big vision for your business or you have some goals to like. Now we're going to lean in a little bit. When you say that, I think of Steve Jobs. Okay. So I've got to know Wozniak very well, who was his co founder with him. And then Tim Cook and I serve on a board together. So the guy that kind of currently runs that company. So I got a lot of insight. I'm sort of fascinated with Jobs.
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Dr. Benjamin Hardy
He's awesome.
- [08:01]
Ed Mylett
He's awesome. His personality was awesome. He didn't always shower all the time. It's just a unique, obsessed, crazy person. Having said all of that, what he certainly had was impossibly thinking. I have a chapter in my book called Be an Impossibility Thinker or Achiever and Impossible Deadlines. And so you submit that in the book, you say, there's a big, huge difference between a bold vision and an impossible go with those deadlines. What is the difference? And how does someone distinguish between the two things?
- [08:31]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
So I'll give an example. There was a lady who we were advising, and she's in the credit industry and basically she has a software. She was trying to get it out there. And so she set what she felt was a bold vision. It was a 10x of her current clients. She had 10 clients, she wanted to get 100 clients. The problem with that vision was is that it, it basically enabled her to continue doing everything she was doing before. It was very linear. And so we said that goal is not impossible enough to shatter your assumptions, to shatter your thinking, and to force you to find a new pathway. So she's like, okay, I'll try it. So she basically said, I'm going to go for a thousand clients. She had no clue how to do it in 90 days. And she realized there was no way she knew how to do it. And so that was an impossible goal. It was to basically a hundred extra clients in 90 days. And so going back to pathways thinking, which is a core, it's a core framework in psychology that everything we're doing is pathways to a goal. So with a thousand clients in 90 days, she was basically just thinking, I have no clue how to do it. And so she sat, journaled, pondered, prayed, and I know you're huge on prayer. And basically a thought came to her that why am I not partnering with software companies who already are serving tens of thousands of these clients? And so basically she reached out to a software company and a day later she went from 10 clients to 8,000 clients.
- [09:41]
Ed Mylett
Hello.
- [09:42]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
And so it was like a, it was an 800x jump in a week because she went for an impossible goal.
- [09:48]
Ed Mylett
Would you call that like asking a bigger question? Is that part of the training or.
- [09:51]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
No, no, no, no. The point of the impossible goal is literally again, to force out all bad paths. And so like, for her, she was pretty much door to door selling. She was going to every single one of these credit repair companies, there's 50,000 of them, and she was knocking them one at a time. And so when you go for the impossible goal, literally you don't know how to solve it. So there's actually a lot of research on this. In psychology they call them stretch goals. But the actual definition of a stretch goal is it's an organizational goal with an objective probability that's unknown, but is basically impossible according to your current knowledge. And so you don't know how to do it. And so the whole point of her thinking about, in this case, I want to get a thousand clients in 90 days, is she couldn't get there by knocking on doors. She couldn't cold call her way there. And so it forced her to find better paths. And so it forced her to, you know, and it's always going to be through a different. Who. Right. It's always going to be through a different distribution partner, a different strategic partner. And so rather than going directly to, in this case, rather than going directly to the companies, she now went to software companies that serve those companies, but serve tens of thousands of them. And so when you go for the impossible, it forces you to find much more efficient paths that you couldn't be finding otherwise.
- [10:57]
Ed Mylett
It's interesting. Again, I reflected Jobs, I'm giving a talk right now where I play a clip of him and it's basically him describing the iPad before it existed.
- [11:08]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah.
- [11:08]
Ed Mylett
And it's him saying, here's what we got right here. We got this thing. It's going to be a book. You'll be able to open it and it's going to be this. And it's going to cost us $10,000 and it's going to cost us $3,000. And our competition is doing something like it right now, but they suck at it. We're going to do it right. But it's this whole thing of him laying out this impossible vision and then compressing the timeframe that's the big thing. There's these hilarious clips on social media of me, we've been laughing about them, where I misspeak in an interview and I say, you know, you manipulating time and, and you know, cavemen live 300 years ago. I just conflated a sentence on an eighth interview of a day. But the point I'm making in that is condensing time frames and shrinking your time horizon. It's why I own an island, it's why I'm wealthy, it's why you're sitting oceanfront here today is my proclivity to look in shorter time frames, what people would call unreasonable windows of time. So what's new to me about what you're talking about is not just this bigger idea, but then also the unreasonable timeframe as well, or impossible timeframe. Right. So talk about that. Why is that a critical part of. It's not just the big 100x goal. It's now attaching to it an impossible theoretically.
- [12:12]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Timeframe is very critical. So Elon Musk said, if a timeline is long, it's wrong. I don't know if you've ever heard of his five step algorithm.
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Ed Mylett
No.
- [12:18]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Basically his algorithm is you always want to question requirements because most people have very false requirements to a goal. So if like for example, someone was thinking about how, how do I get an island right, they might think there's 50,000 steps to get There you might say, well, if you actually just went for the island, there's probably three. So like, let me give an example. There was a 22 year old guy who I was talking to and I said, what's your biggest dream? And he said, I want to own a European soccer team, right? And I said, well, when are you going to do it? He said, age 55. Okay. I said, cool, you got 33 years to do it. I said, what would happen if you went for it by age 30? So now you got eight years. And he said, well. And they started getting nervous. He's like, well, I feel like I got to do this, this and this to get there. I want to get a PhD, I want to run a firm first. And he starts laying out all these false requirements, right? And I said, well, if you just went for it at age 30, how much of that stays relevant? And he's like, I don't know. Right? And so what the, what the compressed timeline does. And by the way, again, back to the idea that the future is only a psychological tool to shape the present. Like basically the old linear model of time puts the past and future outside of yourself, right? But like psychology, neuroscience shows these things are just in your head, they shape your frame. And so the future is in your head. And it's a psychological tool for stripping out the nonsense. And so for him, age 30 is really arbitrary. Like, it's just it. But if he moves the goal forward now, all of these false steps that he really didn't need go away. And so he's forced to find just a direct pathway to his goal. And so what we all do is we end up having a lot of false requirements to our goal. And so that makes a complex system. Now we have five goals that we have to achieve in order to get here, whereas the point is to strip all those out. And so the short timeline literally forces out all false paths.
- [13:56]
Ed Mylett
Oh my gosh. And it forces out complexity.
- [14:00]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
That's the point.
- [14:01]
Ed Mylett
So that's the cause.
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Dr. Benjamin Hardy
By the way it sounds, complexity comes from false goals.
- [14:04]
Ed Mylett
Oh my gosh. Because that idea of making things less complex is so difficult for most leaders because the longer you do something, the more you know, the more you want to add to your presentation. One more thing. And here's another thing, and here's another step, and another step. So that's how you actually force out complexity.
- [14:22]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Extreme frame. So the extreme, the extreme frame of him going for that impossible goal, he's going to own a European soccer team, but in an extremely unreasonable timeline forces out complexity. Because now all of the false requirements, the false steps, the means, goals. So, like, one of my favorite quotes, and I think I even possibly shared it with you last time, is we're kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. So for him, a PhD is a lesser goal. For him, running a firm's a lesser goal. He really wants the one goal, but he's laid out all these requirements of lesser goals, which, you know, this is why people have complex systems, is because they have too many goals. And, and they're, and a lot of their goals are hidden to them. Like as an example, we were, I was recently talking to a guy running a great firm, you know, 31 million in revenue. But he realized that he had a hidden goal to himself. And it was an avoidance based goal. He realized that his goal was to avoid what had happened to his father. His father had a big firm and it sank because he had made some bad decisions. And so he realized in thinking about that his past was shaping his goal, which you don't want. You don't want your past to shape your goal. You always, I think we talked about this, but you always want your present to reshape and reshape your past. But the future is really the tool you want. And you always want to be approach based. You always want to be on offense. But for him, he realized, I have this hidden goal that I didn't realize, which was avoidance based. I was trying to avoid what happened to my dad. And so he had one goal over here, which is his company goal. And then he had this hidden goal of avoiding what happened to his dad. That's complexity. So anytime you have multiple goals, the point of a goal is to simplify a system.
- [15:46]
Ed Mylett
Yeah.
- [15:46]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
So you want one goal that essentially derails all your other goals so you can actually focus.
- [15:51]
Ed Mylett
That's brilliant. The fact that you take this off ramp because of the clearer path to the easier goal. It's brilliant. I was thinking of, I'm just thinking of, you know, people I've been blessed to be on. That same board I'm on with Cookie is also. Jerry Jones is on that board.
- [16:03]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah.
- [16:03]
Ed Mylett
And he's such a great example of what you're describing. He's a younger guy, doesn't really have the wealth, and there becomes this opportunity, this crazy goal in his mind, I'm going to buy the Dallas Cowboys. Right. He doesn't have the money. He doesn't have anywhere near the money to buy the team at the time. But what ended up happening was he could have bought an Arena League team, He could have bought a Canadian Football League team. He could have just supported Arkansas where he went to college and been a big donor there like a lot of guys do. But he had that one clear goal when it happened. He found a way to borrow this, put that together, pathway thinking, pathways, right? And then it ends up being that. I mean, I'm probably off, but I think he paid 100 million for the team and it's now probably evaluated 8 or 10 billion dollars. But that's the framework in the book is how the Musk's, the Joneses, the jobs is the people that end up ruling the world and changing their bloodline forever and becoming the one in their family. This is how they actually think. How did, speaking of iconic people, this is in my notes to ask you, so I'm going to ask you. So hey guys, I want to jump in here for a second and talk about change and growth. And you know, by the way, it's no secret how people get ahead in life or how they grow. And also taking a look at the future, if you want to change your future, you got to change the things you're doing. If you continue to do the same things, you're probably going to produce the same results. But if you get into a new environment where you're learning new things and you're around other people that are growth oriented, you're much more likely to do that yourself. And that's why I love Growth Day. Write this down for a second. Growthday.com forward/ed my friend Brendan Burchard has created the most incredible personal development and business app that I've ever seen in my life. Everything from goal setting software to personal accountability, journaling horses, thousands of dollars worth of courses in there as well. I create content in there on Mondays where I contribute as do a whole bunch of other influencers like the Avengers of influencers. And business minds in there gets the Netflix for high achievers or people that want to be high achievers. So go check it out. My friend Brennan's made it very affordable, very easy to get involved. To growthday.com forward slash ed that's growthday.com forward slash ed. All right, let's be real. If your gut is off, everything feels off. Your digestion, your energy, your mood, your focus. It all starts in your gut and you know it. It's just you just don't feel like yourself, right? And doesn't have to be that way. That's why I love Just Thrive Probiotic Most probiotics never make it to your gut alive. Just Thrive is clinically designed, derive in your gut 100% alive and actually work. So here's my challenge to you. Try Just thrive probiotic for 90 days risk free. If you don't feel a difference, they'll refund every penny. Just pay for shipping. Go to justthrivehealth.com and use code ED to save 20 off on your first bottle. It's time to stop surviving and start thriving. Take the 90 day Just Thrive challenge today at justthrivehealth.com and use code ED. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or or prevent any disease or condition. These statements and information are not a substitute for or alternative to seeking care from your healthcare providers. So hey guys, you may notice I've been standing a lot more during the podcast and one of the reasons that I'm doing that, thank God, is uplift desks. I've got one right here with me right now. You know, your daily work routine can really make you fatigued and that's because you're sitting the whole time. With an uplift desk you can stand more often. Also, you're going to bring better energy to the work you have when you're sitting standing rather than sitting all the time. And I didn't realize how much sitting all day was hurting my back and just dragging my energy down, dragging me down physically and mentally. So great work starts with a great workplace. Your workday does not have to make you feel all worn out. Just go to upliftdesk.com ed and use our code ED to get your free accessories, free same day shipping, free returns and an industry leading 15 year warranty that covers your entire desk plus an extra discount off your entire order. That's upliftdesk.com that's up L I F T D E-S-K.com ED for this exclusive offer. It's only available through our Link. How did JFK's moonshot affect your thinking for this or, or, or sculpt it at least?
- [20:13]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
So I was, I admittedly I started the book with Musk. Everything that was going on with Musk, he obviously has an impossible goal. Go to Mars. And if you think about pathways and partners like he did not want to get involved in politics and I think the further, the further along in the story he gets, the more we realize like you know, it was very costly for Musk to get involved with Trump and obviously hello you know what I mean? And so I started the book with that story and talking about how like, in order to get to an impossible, you've got to go very unlikely paths and you've got to have very unlikely partners. And that, that ended up just being pretty crazy with where things were at. And so I was thinking about, about the, like the, the moon mission. And that's obviously like a really clear cut example of a seemingly impossible goal, a really seemingly impossible deadline, which was seven years. But the funny part was like, that was a very linear process. Like basically what I lay out in the book is, is that Kennedy probably could have done it in three. Like if he had actually used the shorter timeline, they would have stripped away probably half of the nonsense that they did during those seven years.
- [21:10]
Ed Mylett
Whoa.
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Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Well, think about it like they, they set a goal to just achieve it by the end of the decade, which is a very lazy.
- [21:16]
Ed Mylett
It sounds good, but it's lazy.
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Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, it's lazy. So like that's, that's what often happens when someone has a 10 year goal. It's just lazy. And so if you just take the 10 year goal and move it to 2 or 3 now you strip out most of the false steps. So like with the NASA missions and I spoke with a NASA engineer while writing the book. NASA's very specifically like a linear process. They're very focused on safety and things like that. And so they're not, they're not like Musk, they're not breaking systems, they're not fast going. So it was a very linear process. And my argument was if they had just gone for it in three, they would have found a much better path. They would have found a much better, like probably. I mean there's research that shows that 10% of what a company does is effective. If you look into what NASA did. And yes, they changed the world. Like they did phenomenal things. I'm not, I'm not throwing shade at NASA.
- [21:58]
Ed Mylett
Yeah, sure, not right.
- [21:59]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
But, but it's just a really good example of an impossible goal that changed the world. But, and he used time as a tool. Like he's like, we're going to do it in seven years. He, seven years is also just still pretty far away. And, and so if he had, if he had gone for it in half the time, he probably would have found a much more effective path.
- [22:15]
Ed Mylett
The thing he said in the book, I was like, man, I think I'm not honest with myself about this stuff. And so you actually state that in the book. Like, literally, I wanted to make Sure, I read it, right? So I have it right here in front of me. Part two is when you're talking about raising the floor, because he breaks it into these different parts in the book, Be more honest with yourself and quit the wrong stuff faster. I was just talking to John Maxwell not too long ago. We were on a flight together, his plane, fortunately for me. And I said, what's the biggest thing that you've shifted your mindset on leadership on over the last years? He goes, well, it's actually that I like changing my mind. Now, I used to think that if I changed my mind as a leader, it made me look like an inconsistent thinker. And now I realize that it makes me honest that when I've changed my mind, I've got more information, I've needed to be honest with myself, and I should be open to changing my mind. So what do you mean in the book when you say be more honest with yourself and quit the wrong stuff sooner? What do you mean by that?
- [23:13]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
So anytime you're below your floor, you're saying yes to things that are essentially limiting your ability to scale, right? You may be scaling a fairly complex system, even 10x. You may be. You know, there's a lot of successful people that listen to this. The point is, is that when you're below the floor, you're saying yes to things you should be saying no to, and you're lying to yourself about it. And so anytime you're below the floor, that just means that you're actively, you're actively lying to yourself whether you're justifying it. So, for example, there's a. There's a lot of people who, who I've interviewed who are doing 50 things, and they, they believe that they're all synergistic, right? Even I myself, like, I got called out very hard by, by a mentor of mine. He's like, Ben, you're doing 50 things. Like, be honest with yourself. Like, you. If you just focused on writing books, like. But he's like, you're doing this, you're doing this, you're doing this. I was like, and I thought I was focused, right? And so I was doing things below my own floor, and I was saying yes to things that, you know, you could justify, but they're extremely costly. And I think, like, one of the things that I've learned is that the further, you know, the further you go in your learning, the more you realize just how costly a yes is. So it's like, yeah, this thing might make you a lot of money or maybe A good opportunity, but the cost is insane when you think about what you could be doing. And if you think about sports like, it's the errors, right? It's the mistakes that lose championships. And that error came from a lack of preparation. So it's really the errors that really can sink companies that mess you up. And so that's when you're lying to yourself, is when you. When you don't admit that you're saying yes to the things that you shouldn't be saying yes to and that you're really not focused.
- [24:42]
Ed Mylett
You said something a minute ago about linear thinking, and I've read this, so I know what it means, but I think I glossed over that, where people listening, I've made an assumption that people know what that means in the context that you use it in. And you don't like linear thinking, I think is fair to say, Right. So what exactly is it? And how does one become disruptive with that? What's the antithesis of linear thinking? So linear example, too.
- [25:06]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah. So linear thinking comes from linear time. And so linear time is where the. The past shapes the present and the present shapes the future. So an example of that in business would be, I did 5 million last year. So let's use that as the baseline for what we're going to do next year. We'll go for 6 million, 7 million. Right? So that's where companies are doing 20% a year, 30% a year.
- [25:23]
Ed Mylett
Gosh, this revenue.
- [25:24]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Right? And so if you use the past as the basis for your future, that means you're using the past as the basis for your goals. And why it's linear is, is that if you're using the past as the basis for your future, then you're going to continue doing what you're already doing. And so you're not disrupting. Right? And so even Peter Drucker said most firms are essentially perpetuating today, they're just doing what they're doing yesterday. Right. But he said that the future is meant to disrupt the present. The future is meant to be the enemy of today. In other words, if you have a new model, right? The whole purpose of a new future or a bigger future is that it simplifies and it disrupts what you're doing in the present.
- [25:55]
Ed Mylett
Shoot.
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Dr. Benjamin Hardy
That's what you're supposed to do. But then you have to be honest with yourself, right? So that's the whole transformation is if you have the massive goal and you say, and then you look at your current life from the goal, from the future, if you Let the future shape the present. Then you're basically, you have to say, is this is the juice still worth a squeeze on these things? And all of it starts to fall below the floor because there's only a few pathways up to that impossible goal.
- [26:16]
Ed Mylett
God, you're really making me think. I use a term called legacy thinking when I interact and consult with companies that just frustrate the heck out of. We've always done it that way. And I'm like, I'm not a legacy thinker. I'm a future thinker, sure. But maybe I'm not based on your definition. There's. I do do a lot of that. Well, last year we did 8 million, so we could do 12 million. And so that's a.
- [26:38]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Linear thinking and that.
- [26:39]
Ed Mylett
And it's also a form of legacy thinking. We did it before, so we can do a little bit more now. In other words, I'm using my past.
- [26:44]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
To shape your future.
- [26:45]
Ed Mylett
Correct. Exactly what you just said. So the whole time you've been saying that, because a lot of people listen to podcasts and they don't. They don't do the hard work of listening to. How's this apply to me? They discard the things they think that don't apply to them, and oftentimes it's the very thing that does. And it would be very easy for me to go, I'm a future thinker. I'm a visionary. No, not so much. Based on your definition. I use the past to shape my thinking way too often, and I do it regularly. And then you don't know what. You don't know when you're using the past. You don't even know what you're missing. And so I'll give you, like, I'll give you one of my rubs, and you talk about it in the book. I'd love you to help everybody with this. Not everybody gets to this stage, but they should be at this stage, I think, from day one, if they're really thinking big. And as an impossibility thinker, I think about the businesses I'm involved with. Let's just use this podcast, for example. I want to scale it beyond me and actually beyond my ability to influence it like I do my. My lifetime. And I thought for a long time, well, you can't. It's you. You're the host. That's all you can do. But the truth is, there's a lot of directions I could go. Just as I'm talking with you right now, this thing's going off in my mind. I'VE been using the past as a reference. There's all kinds of things that could be doing. How does one begin to think about scaling beyond themselves? And what are some of the key components in doing that?
- [27:58]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
I think it's beautiful. So this is the thing that actually disappointed me the most. As someone who got to be around a lot of people who were heroes of mine, I began to realize they couldn't scale beyond themselves. And so they were basically like the king or queen of what they were doing. So in Jim Collins language, that's level four leadership.
- [28:18]
Ed Mylett
Yes.
- [28:19]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Right. So that's the genius. With A Thousand Helpers, they have to be the centerpiece. And so you really have to have a goal that's so big, so straight up for this podcast. Right. Have a goal that's so big and so urgent that it might force you out of your role to some degree. Right. And it forces. It forces different thinking. This is what a lot of people won't do. So there's a lot of research that I lay out in the book about basically people who are super effective. So basically, I mean, even Bill Gates said that the average code writer is worth 1/10,000th of a good one. So like a good code writer is worth 10,000. Right. And so. And there's research to back that up. And so you won't get those super. Who's those super talent if you're building it around yourself. Right. And so you. To scale at unbelievable levels. It has to be beyond you. But I have found that most entrepreneurs of various, Various different types of companies, they want to be the centerpiece. They want to be the primary decision maker. And so they're. For me, what that means is that their vision is too small and they can't actually attract those super talents that are what makes scaling possible, like extreme scaling possible. And so just as an example, there was a guy who I advise, he's an incredible CEO. He took a company from like 4 million to 100 million in about three or four years. He was awesome young guy, you know, he took it. But then I asked him, what would it take to get to a billion? And he said, I might not be able to be the CEO. Dude, that was awesome. Like, it showed. He learned it. He didn't need to be the guy. Yeah, like, you know, like a lot of people would be like, I have to be the guy. But he's like, you know, if we could get to a billion in two or three years, I don't need to be the CEO. I could take a different role. But I think a lot of people aren't willing to do that.
- [29:57]
Ed Mylett
I do, too. I keep going back to Jobs, and as I understand the story, Apple's kind of ticking along, and he figures out this vision so big, I can't do this. I'm not the guy.
- [30:06]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
I mean, that's when you know.
- [30:07]
Ed Mylett
That's when you know, right?
- [30:08]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
That's when you know your vision's right.
- [30:09]
Ed Mylett
As I understand the story, he starts pursuing this guy Scully, who's running Pepsi at the time.
- [30:14]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yep.
- [30:14]
Ed Mylett
Right. And he can't get Scully even call him back. He can't get Scully to get interested. And he finally uses the vision to get Scully. As I hear the story, story, Jobs picks the phone up. It was in the answering machine days. And leaves Scully this voicemail. This answering machine says, hey, dude, I'm tired of effing calling you when you're tired of selling sugar water to kids and you finally want to go change the world, give me an effing call back.
- [30:36]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yep.
- [30:36]
Ed Mylett
And Scully kind of rolls his eyes. His wife hears the. The voicemail, the answering machine, and goes, well, you kind of do sell sugar water to kids. Why don't you go do something to change the world? And he brings Scully over because he knew what. Now, as it turns out, they brought Jobs back because Scully ran it into the ground at one point, or the group did. But the point is, is that even Jobs as a young man who I admire as a business guy, had exactly what you just described. It's got to scale beyond me. It ended up bringing him back in later. But the point is, at that time, it's exactly what you just described. The other thing I think of when I think of him, and I'll stop talking about him, is he's awesome. Well, he was convicted, I think, of the great entrepreneurs that I know that many of you don't know. They're just people you wouldn't know that have held onto their company and never ex or they've exited and they're just private people. All right, everybody, right over there off camera is my element drink. I've been super obsessed with my hydration lately. I find my energy is better. My skin's gotten a lot better. The other thing that I find is I'm not quite as hungry all the time when I'm hydrating, but also because I work out a lot. I need to replace with those electrolytes and those right things in your body. You lose both water and sodium when you sweat. I've been sweating a lot in the gym. Both need to be replaced to help prevent muscle cramps, headaches. Drinking beyond thirst could be a bad idea. It dilutes blood, electrolytes and sodium levels which could lead to headaches. So just pouring a bunch of water in your body can dilute some of the good stuff. Enter Element. Element has enough sodium, potassium and magnesium to get you feeling and performing your best. Element came with a fantastic offer for us. Just go to drink lmnt.com mylet and get a free sample pack with any purchase. That's drink lmnt.com mylet these statements and products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or condition. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money. When you bundle your home and auto policies, the process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. You say conviction is the currency of scaling. What does that mean and how does somebody develop it?
- [33:02]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
So when you go for a true scale goal, which most companies don't, I mean most, most companies are going for true scale once you actually go for it. So as an example, there's a guy is a friend of mine named Mark. He has an advertising agency and they're doing 20 million. It took him 30 years to get there. Then he like learned some of these scaling principles. He's like, okay, I got to go for 100 million in three years. Again, it took him 30 years to get to 20. But once he set the true scale goal, he realized back to the point he had been lying to himself. Their, their agency, they are the best in the world at one thing, but they had become overly complex. They had been saying yes to things that were below their floor and ultimately they weren't scaling. So he was lying to himself. And so once he actually set a true scale goal, and there's a lot of research on this, it says impossible goals, they redefine who you are, but they also force you to define yourself. And I think a lot of people are unwilling to define themselves. Like, we do this, right? This is what we do. We don't do other things. We don't do these five other things. We do this. And so once he set that scale goal, he realized he had been lying to himself and he'd been lying to his clients. And so that's where he built extreme conviction is because he could clearly define himself, right? He stopped being noise in the marketplace. He became signal. He's like, this is what I'm about. And so he went to all of his clients, right? What had happened was, is their firm was so good at scaling companies in, like, mass media, they diluted themselves into, like, Amazon and social media and stuff. And so he went to all of his clients and said, I want to apologize to you. He said, we, we have not been serving you the way you should be served. You wanted lesser services and we gave them to you, and we are setting your business up for failure. And so he said, we're giving you these small packages and your company is going to fail. He said, the only way that you can succeed is if you bring your product into mass market. And he's like, you're going to have to bring me 3, 500 grand right now. And a lot of them moved over because he had such conviction, he had such clarity and definition of who he was. But in order to do that, they actually had to raise the floor and stop doing all of their other nonsense. And so his big future, his big impossible goal forced him to define himself. It forced him to say, this is who I am, this is what I do. I don't do this for 50 other things. I'm going to stop lying to myself, I'm going to stop lying to my clients. I'm going to stop lying to the world and trying to be five things. And instead I'm going to say, this is who I am. This is what I stand for, this is what I do. And when you speak with that level of honesty, that level of conviction, that level of clarity, now all of a sudden, you're a rare signal in the environment, whereas everyone else is trying to be five things. It's like, no, this is what we are. This is what we do. We're the best in the world at it. And then you can tell people when they're making bad decisions.
- [35:29]
Ed Mylett
Really good. You've used this term a few times. I want to unpack it a little bit more. Noise and signal. Yeah, right. And it's a terminology that you're familiar with, and I now am, because of your work. But unpack that a little bit. How does one know if they're a signal or noise?
- [35:45]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, so signal means.
- [35:46]
Ed Mylett
Or participating in it.
- [35:48]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, so signal means something is relevant, it stands out, it's clear, it's understandable. Think about it as light, right? It's clear, it's comprehensible. And signal is always based on your goal. Right? And so if you have a goal, then some things are signal, meaning they're relevant to where you're going, and then everything else gets blocked out as noise. And so in psychology, we call that selective attention. Right? We're always filtering for relevant signal to get us to where we're trying to go. And so the problem when you're diluted, when you're unfocused, when you're distracted, is that if you're doing multiple things, right, and you're making multiple different offers right out into the marketplace, there's no clarity. And so there's no clear signal in what you're saying. So that makes you noise in the marketplace, where it's hard for people to understand what you're saying. And so when you can come out with just absolute clarity, this is, you know, actually speaking truth, then people can hear it. And they can. They can hear it in the sea of noise. It stands out.
- [36:40]
Ed Mylett
Someone listening to this would say, well, wait a minute, there's still verticals. I mean, when I go into a Starbucks, their signal is coffee, sure, but you can get a breakfast sandwich, too. That's not what you're saying, that there can't be a vertical or an attachment.
- [36:52]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
No, there can be those.
- [36:53]
Ed Mylett
Yeah. But the main signal, when people think Starbucks, they don't go yogurt. They.
- [36:58]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
They're not there for that.
- [36:59]
Ed Mylett
Right. It's coffee. Right. So, but is that. I just want to make sure everyone that doesn't drown that out. You're not suggesting that there can't be a. Another sell when someone's marketing a product?
- [37:07]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
No, you can do that. It's just. What are you.
- [37:10]
Ed Mylett
Right.
- [37:10]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Starbucks can clearly define who they are and what they do, which is why they scale.
- [37:13]
Ed Mylett
They're the perfect example of scaling because they're. They're in the business of coffee distribution and their environment.
- [37:18]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
It'd be interesting how much they've truly optimized for those other things. Right. Like how much is the sale of those other things versus the coffee? It's probably 95%. 5 or.
- [37:26]
Ed Mylett
Great point, by the way. I would love to know that data. I guarantee you most of it's probably coffee, right? I would think it is, yeah.
- [37:31]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
For sure.
- [37:33]
Ed Mylett
The CEO who says, I'm sorry, I apologize to me. That's accountability, right? It's a. It's a huge thing in my estimation, as I travel and speak and work with different people or if I'm coaching somebody, there is a dramatic lack of accountability in the companies that I see that are average and there is hyper accountability, hyper accountability in the companies that I consider to be elite. And you talk about that in the book. So go ahead, talk about that.
- [38:00]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah. So a system's ability to scale comes down to the accountability of the leader owning the frame and owning the floor. The floor again is what you say no to. And so one of the people I interviewed for this book is a guy who creates economic systems for countries. So he goes into first world countries, helps them design the economic systems, goes into third world countries, helps them, you know, and again, these are, these are systems, right? And so I asked him what's the, what's the difference between a first world country and a third world country? And he said one word, accountability. And so it's accountability in the system, right? And if you look at any true leader, a true leader actually holds a system accountable so that it can, so that it can scale. And if you don't have accountability, then there's a lack of focus, there's a lack of clarity, there's a lack of truth. And so accountability is just your, it's essentially your accountability to your goal. Right? And if you're not being accountable to the goal, that means you're being accountable to your past, you're being accountable to other people. That's what creates complexity, is you're saying yes to other things versus just saying this is what we're accountable to. And so therefore we're saying no to everything else.
- [38:58]
Ed Mylett
You're, we just go with him. You guys notice this like you just go, if I could bring in five entrepreneurs in here that are running something, they got a three person dry cleaners, an eight person mortgage company, a nine person daycare, whatever they have, they want to scale. And there's there in the noise sense, even getting clear on what you want. Do you have any tactics or strategies or thoughts about how do I get my mind out of the noise? Like it's just very easy to be. Someone walks in your office with a problem, then you got to pay a bill over here and then someone's behind on their payment there and you got a client issue there and all of a sudden you've gone through your day or your week or your month or your year and you just dealt with noise and fires all day long. Right? Is there a structure, a framework, a thought, a strategy on that?
- [39:45]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
I mean, the easiest place to start is always the future. And that is, it's A recognition that your future is shaping everything here. And the problem with that person is that their past is shaping their future. So, like, they're just doing. They're in a sea of noise. They have a complex system. They can't get above it. And so the easiest thing to do is actually to set a goal that disrupts all that, that makes all that irrelevant and helps you actually start to find a simple path forward. And so if you have a really high goal. So like, as an example, if that person was. It's really easy to just start using numbers. So I would ask that person, like, literally how much revenue are you doing? We're doing 2 million. Right. This is crazy. All right, so let's just go up to 20 million. If you were going to do 20 million in three years, how much of this stuff can even stay? Almost none of it. How much of the team can stay? I don't know. Depends on if they're committed. Like maybe half of them. Right. But it's going to be a different business model to 20. It's going to be a different path. You're going to have a different team. And so you start thinking from there. And again, back to Drucker. The future is there to simplify the present.
- [40:44]
Ed Mylett
It's so good. I love that.
- [40:45]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
That's really. That's the whole. The whole purpose. I mean, it's a technology.
- [40:49]
Ed Mylett
Well, you're. Bro, you're reading my mind. I'm going to ask you a curveball that's not in the book. And it.
- [40:53]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Do it.
- [40:54]
Ed Mylett
It plays right off of where you just went. The future and technology. To me, when I think of even my own usage of AI recently.
- [41:02]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Amazing.
- [41:02]
Ed Mylett
Okay. It ought to be changing what I believe is impossible in the future. Right. And so I'm wondering your thoughts about technology and how we all should be looking at this as I just call it stretching our vision of what's possible. Because the future is actually here now.
- [41:18]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
It is.
- [41:19]
Ed Mylett
And I just want to know your thoughts about that, because it's not in the book, but it's like, I got you here. I got this guy that understands business and psychology better than anyone and thinking the impossible. And now we're in the midst of this AI revolution. What are your thoughts about that?
- [41:31]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
I love the tools. I mean, they. They definitely make what used to be impossible possible.
- [41:36]
Ed Mylett
Right.
- [41:36]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
And so I think that. Use the tools, you know, I mean, that's. That's what they're there for. So I think that increasingly we're going to be able to do things we we couldn't do before. But I mean, even, even without the technology, the technology is just a propellant. But a lot of people, they won't get. They can't use it effectively because they don't have a future. That gives them a reason to. Right? And so if you have a massive future, you don't need the best tools. The best tools only accelerate your progress. But the reason that people can't use the tools is because they don't have a reason to.
- [42:05]
Ed Mylett
Okay, you guys, is it like this? Right? So you say something in the book and I've been debating it and disputing it in my mind.
- [42:14]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Let's hear it.
- [42:15]
Ed Mylett
Okay. Anything you've seen me do online, Shopify has probably been involved in it. I was at a speaking engagement this weekend. There were three other very prominent influencers there and each of them were talking about how they use Shopify in their businesses right now, this day, just like I do. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. And 10% of all E commerce in the US is Shopify. Household names like Mattel, Gymshark to brands that are just getting started with no clients yet. And so I can tell you Shopify is something you need to investigate to help you with your business online. Best yet, Shopify is your e commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your 1 month, $1 per month trial period and start selling today at shopify.com mylet go to shopify.com mylet shopify.com/mylet. You say a goal properly set is halfway reached.
- [43:20]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah.
- [43:21]
Ed Mylett
And for me, I'm such a worker type of a dude. I want to know what you mean. How do you know you have a girl properly set? And why do you think that means you're halfway there? Does that mean 99.9% of the people are not setting goals properly?
- [43:34]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yes.
- [43:35]
Ed Mylett
Okay, so give it to us.
- [43:36]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, so, and, and, and John Doerr actually was that one who originated that one. Okay, but so a goal, a goal properly says halfway reach because a goal properly set almost removes every other option. Right. And so there's love this thinking. Yeah, it's like if you. And so again John Doerr said that. But the goal properly set is halfway reached because if you set the right goal, almost all the dead end paths that you would have taken and wasted decades on now become irrelevant. They become noise because those have zero efficacy for the Goal. Right. The goal shapes the relevant pathways. And so if you set the right goal and the right doesn't mean it's like a perfect goal, it just means if you set an effective goal, okay. Then what that goal does is it gets rid of a lot of what you're doing. It gets rid of also a lot of the options that you would have taken and wasted a lot of time on. And so that's the point. I would say that there's, there's like, there's like three or four false models of goals. So you hear a lot of people that say, don't set any goals, just focus on the process. Yeah, that doesn't actually work because all human beings are driven by goals.
- [44:32]
Ed Mylett
Of course.
- [44:33]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
The second one is a small goal, right. That's a linear goal. That's just going to create complexity. Right. So if you're going for small goals, that means you're just trying to avoid failure. But that doesn't enable you to filter the best paths forward. Also just the competing goals. A lot of people have like, you know, 50 goals. Right. So that's going to create a complex system that can't scale. You're going in 20 different directions, you haven't defined yourself. And then just the final one is actually setting a bad goal. Right. So a great example of that's just Steve Ballmer, right. He set a goal to increase shareholder value. Right. But he was with the company for 14 years and their value went down a lot. And because he wasn't focused on growth. And so you can scale the wrong thing, you can, you can actually set a goal and hit it and, and honestly cost yourself huge in the future. So it's about, obviously you want to think about growth and it's about setting a goal that simplifies what you're doing and forces out all the bad paths, all the dead ends.
- [45:25]
Ed Mylett
Yeah.
- [45:25]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
And you just be honest. Again, be honest with yourself. There's a lot of people who won't let go of the dead end paths. Like as an example, I taught this to a guy, he's in real estate. And he said, okay, I'm going to try it. I'm going to set an impossible goal. He said, I'm going to go for 10,000 units in three years. I said, awesome. I said, how much growth does that look like on your current path? He said, that's 20 years of growth. Ben said, perfect, perfect, impossible goal. And then he said, but I really want to have a podcast. And I said, okay, tell me why. And then he started to lie to himself. He started to say, that podcast is going to help me hit my goal. And I said, tell me why. I said, tell me how that podcast is going to help you hit the goal. And he started, that's where he started to try to justify two competing goals, which would make a complex system. I'm not saying you can't have two goals, by the way. I'm just saying pick one. Like, because you're not going to have.
- [46:10]
Ed Mylett
Both, by the way. You're competing against killers who are laser obsessed, focused on the one thing they're doing, and you divert your energy, your focus and your attention to two or three places. It's just going to be really hard at the top, at the top of the top, you're playing against the bet. There are levels to this thing. There are levels to life. And I promise you, when you walk into a room of the best of the best, they are killers and they are not diverting their focus. They are thinking very, very big and they are lasered in on that thing. I'll give you an example. This is a silly one, but it's out of my own life. The theory of when you set an impossible goal with an impossible timeframe, it eliminates all the crappy options is really true. I. I've just had a lot of health stuff this year. You know, tomorrow, off camera, before I say this, I don't want any messages from people telling me this was unhealthy and all that other stuff, okay? I set a goal last month to lose 20 pounds in a month, which I know, I get all that, okay? I know. I don't care. I'm gonna lose £20 in a month, right? So I set that goal to lose the 20 pounds in a month. And I'm actually going to lose 30 pounds in 60 days is the entire goal. But for what I want to do is shrink the time frame. It's an impossible goal. But here's what it did. It eliminated every part of BS thinking I could possibly come up with, should I go keto? Should I do this? It like, hey, dude, your caloric restriction needs to be crazy. You need to be in the gym doing cardio a couple times. You know, all the things, it's calories in, calories out, what's my protein? And it eliminated all these silly paths and it was like, hey, right to the point, you got this crazy goal. This is what you got to do. It eliminated all these other options. Should I eat kiwi or fruit or. It doesn't matter, like, I got to do it. Right. And so although it wasn't business or life, it was an impossible goal. Impossible time frame. I lost 22. Right. And by the way, feel great doing it. And I'm going to crush the 30 thing. The point is, is that maybe it is unhealthy, maybe it's not even healthy to be a crazy entrepreneur all of your life, but if you're going to be one, you might as well be crazy while you're doing it. Right. And so this stuff is true. The number one thing that crazy goal with the crazy timeframe did. Impossible.
- [48:03]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Eliminated all the options, Eliminated the weird options. And you said it simplified your thinking.
- [48:08]
Ed Mylett
It focused me in on exactly what I needed to do as opposed to going. And I know everyone's going, Ed, that's so dangerous. Look, okay, all right, but listen, I didn't want to lose it over nine months when I could lose it in a month. Well, all you did was lose water. No, I didn't. I drank a ton of water. Trust me. I was so overweight, my body's like, please drop this weight. But the point being is that that impossible goal of impossible timeframe was actually easier, I think, than losing six pounds last month to your former theory or the current theory. I really believe me, losing six pounds in a month would have been harder for me than just, I'm obsessed. And to the point is, I didn't do this casually. Every second of the day, I'm thinking about, babe, what's the. What's the caloric intake? If I eat six green beans right? I'm literally right. I'm, you know, 30 minutes of cardio. What's my heart rate need to be like? It's precise. Right. But simple, so that I could scale that thing in my life. All right, last thing. I want to go back to some original work we do. This has been flipping awesome, as usual. By the way, he's the founder of scaling.com, too. And we're going to promote the book in a second. In a minute. At the end of the book, you do this thing on holistic time and linear time. I'm going to give you. I'm going to throw two things at you.
- [49:19]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Sure.
- [49:20]
Ed Mylett
What the heck is holistic time? Number one. And also, how does one know what frame they're operating at? So it's two totally disconnected questions. But I'm gonna let you run with. In other words, if an entrepreneur is in here thinking, I don't. Am I what frame Am I in the past frame?
- [49:34]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah.
- [49:34]
Ed Mylett
Am I in the current frame or I'm in the future frame. How do I know? And then just what the holistic time thing is? Because I think it's a cool concept.
- [49:40]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah. So holistic time, just to answer that. And then I'll tell you how you can know if you're operating from your past, from your future frame. Holistic time is the psychological appreciation that the past, present and future are all happening right now. So, like, psychologically, your past is shaping your present and your future is shaping your present. But what the research basically shows is that the future weighs 10 to 100x the past. Of course, the past impacts us, but we have the power to shape and reshape it continuously. And so rather than separating these things, like the past is way over here, it's outside of me, and it's driving me. Right. And the future's out there. I don't know it. It's just a recognition. All these things are happening now. And as I shape one, I reshape the other. Right. And so that's holistic timing.
- [50:17]
Ed Mylett
Got it.
- [50:17]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
And the main insight, by the way, of that is, is that the future shapes the present and the present shapes the past. And that's a really important point.
- [50:24]
Ed Mylett
I remember this last time. It took me a little bit to process that. But he can prove it to you. It actually is true.
- [50:28]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Yeah. I mean, the future, and we've talked about this a lot, the future is the primary thing shaping everything about who you are and what you're doing, what you know, what pathways you're taking in the present. If you move the goal much higher, most of what you'd be doing right now would be irrelevant. Right. There'd be those wacky pathways you gotta get rid of. But also, just the beauty of that, it's always you in the present that shapes the meaning of your past, no matter what it was. It's all. And it is your responsibility in the present to reshape and redefine what it means. And it doesn't own you. You own it.
- [50:52]
Ed Mylett
I love it.
- [50:53]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
And so that's holistic time.
- [50:54]
Ed Mylett
Okay.
- [50:54]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
And so you can know if you're operating linearly again or you're operating from your past. If you're pretty much just doing the same thing you're doing yesterday. And if you're not scaling, truly, if you're growing slow, and if you have. If you have a lot of complexity, that story you gave of the person with the washing machines, that's a person stuck in their past. They're not moving quickly, they're not making big decisions. If you're Operating from your future, there's a lot of courage. There's a lot of letting things go. There's a lot of disappointing people. There's a lot of simplifying systems and getting rid of stuff that is the legacy, which was awesome, but it's no longer relevant to the new future. So if you're in. If you're operating from the future, you're having to be a lot more truthful. You're having to make a lot of decisions in the present that are going to. They're going to disappoint the people that were from your past, but you're then going to make better decisions. And if you do it in an honest and a respectful way, they'll get it, because people appreciate honesty and they appreciate you just telling them the truth. And so, yeah, if you're operating from the future, every day looks and feels really different. Every day looks and feels really powerful. And you start to see pathways to things that you thought were impossible. And you start to get there. You start. You start to have those regular experiences every day. You start to normalize it and you start to. You start to scale. Really, that's what you start to do is you start to just. Your growth starts to get crazy.
- [52:09]
Ed Mylett
Is how you scale. Is how you scale your life. Every time I talk to you, I want to run with you. Like, I want to mentally run with you. I want to get inside your brain. I want to. You're. I wouldn't call you a contrarian thinker because that would make. It almost seems odd. It's not that it's a. It's a big thinker. It's a future thinker. It's a creator type thinker, not a replicator type thinker. And I love that you back everything up with science and neuroscience. I love all of everything you do. And I already know I'm gonna get messages from my most successful business friends. Listen to this. Gonna go. Okay, this dude blew my mind again. That's what you do. You make. Here's what you do. You make me think about how I think. And that isn't. That's very, very unusual that someone can compel you to really think through when you think. You're not a limited thinker. Maybe you are when you think you're a great leader, maybe not so much when you think you have a big vision, maybe you don't. And you make me challenge all of the things that are acceptable in my life that don't need to be, that really are unacceptable. So thank you. You're awesome.
- [53:17]
Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Ed, speaking honestly, you are one of the funnest people to talk to. You serve it up so fun. And so we just easily. And you just, you just. You have powerful energy. So just.
- [53:28]
Ed Mylett
Thank you. Thank you. Well, bro, I love your work. Like, I. I love your work. It's why you're back here again. By the way, guys, you got to get the book. It's called the science of scaling. Dr. Benjamin Hardy. His books are great, you guys. Like, it's not an just an everyday read. I'm so sick of reading the same book over and over again with a different author and a different title. And one of the reasons I like Benjamin stuff so much is, like, it's not the same book. It's a different book than you've ever read before. So go grab it, you guys. All right. God bless you. Max out your life. Share this episode this is the Ed Milan Show.