Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Dr. Benjamin Hardy - Scaling.com Founder | The Truth About 10X Goals

Transcript

Dr. Benjamin Hardy - Scaling.com Founder | The Truth About 10X Goals · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  Psychologically, the future is a tool to shape and direct the present.
• 0:03
  One of the problems that most entrepreneurs have is that they are actually pursuing their own goals.
• 0:06
  They don't understand that everything that they do is driven by their goals.
• 0:09
  Most entrepreneurs, they don't go 10x, they don't have the actual goal to go 10x.
• 0:12
  He's not just a psychologist, he's one of the most influential thinkers on the planet today.
• 0:17
  Dr. Benjamin Hardy has written best sellers that redefine how we see the future.
• 0:21
  Books like Will Power doesn't work and be your future self now.
• 0:24
  His work has been read by millions, his ideas featured in Harvard Business Review,
• 0:28
  Forbes and CNBC.
• 0:29
  Your futures, what shapes your present and that also includes your view of God,
• 0:32
  obviously the afterlife, things like that.
• 0:34
  Those things shape who you are now.
• 0:35
  Say a company is doing one million in revenue.
• 0:37
  Say they have a goal of getting to 10 million and they want to do it in 10 years.
• 0:40
  I would tell them you're never going to hit that goal because you've put it 10 years away,
• 0:43
  which means you're not dealing with it today.
• 0:44
  Behind the titles and accolades is a deeper mission to help people break free from limitation,
• 0:49
  rewrite their identities and step fully into the lives they were meant to live.
• 0:52
  This isn't just about self-improvement, it's about transformation.
• 0:55
  This is Dr. Benjamin Hardy.
• 0:57
  Understanding your goals, aligning your relationships with your goals.
• 1:01
  If you have two fundamentally different philosophies about life and two totally different goals
• 1:05
  about what it means to live, that relationship is probably not going to work.
• 1:08
  Your goal determines how you approach all these things.
• 1:11
  You can actually gain trust with people,
• 1:13
  even if you disappoint them by telling them the truth.
• 1:15
  So getting really good at understanding what that means and then living in alignment with it,
• 1:19
  usually that's going to lead to good things.
• 1:27
  Ben, so you are making a very bold claim in the science of scaling.
• 1:36
  The 90% of entrepreneurs fail to scale not because they lack talent,
• 1:40
  but because they optimize for things that shouldn't exist.
• 1:43
  So talk to me about the idea that separates companies that grow 10x versus those that kind of
• 1:50
  just get stuck, which I think is the majority.
• 1:52
  The first problem, and so John Doerr, he's a billionaire venture capitalist.
• 1:59
  He said that a goal properly set is halfway reached.
• 2:02
  And so one of the problems that most entrepreneurs have is that they are actually pursuing their
• 2:05
  wrong goals, and they don't understand that everything that they do is driven by their goals.
• 2:11
  In psychology, our perception, what we filter, what we say yes and no to is all driven by our goals,
• 2:17
  as well as the systems we build and the companies we build.
• 2:19
  So most entrepreneurs, they don't go 10x because they don't have the actual goal to go 10x.
• 2:25
  And it's not an urgent goal. If they do want to go 10x, it's 10 or 20 years away.
• 2:30
  And that's a poor rendering of the future.
• 2:32
  Psychologically, the future is a tool to shape and direct the present.
• 2:36
  And the only way for it to be effective as a tool is for it to be big enough
• 2:41
  and urgent enough that it forces you to hard look at everything you're doing.
• 2:44
  And so the majority of what most companies are doing to your point is optimizing stuff that
• 2:48
  if they had to hire in a better and a more urgent goal, those things would go away
• 2:52
  because they're not good enough for the goal.
• 2:54
  If somebody is starting to build a business or trying to scale a business,
• 2:58
  what are some of the most important thoughts that they should have versus
• 3:02
  what Instagram tells them or what watching a whole bunch of entrepreneur podcasts,
• 3:08
  you know, all-in podcasts, loves Tim Ferris wants to go apply to Y-combinator, all great stuff.
• 3:14
  But what should they actually be focused on?
• 3:16
  So the first thing, which is what I already hit, is what is their actual goal?
• 3:21
  And the goal actually needs to be bigger than they thought it was.
• 3:25
  And more urgent, right? If they're starting a business,
• 3:29
  most businesses are very linear, like, you know, say I'm doing $500,000, right?
• 3:34
  My goal might be to get to $100,000, right?
• 3:38
  So to 2x, right? But the problem with that is it's going to lead to bad decisions, right?
• 3:42
  Because what you're doing right now, the decisions the young entrepreneur who's
• 3:46
  listening to this are making are the exact opposite decisions that they would be making
• 3:50
  if they were 10x or 100x bigger, right? And so you want to start with a much bigger goal,
• 3:56
  and give yourself an urgent timeline to do it, no more than three years.
• 3:59
  So say you're, again, back to doing 50,000 a year.
• 4:02
  Year goal should be doing 5,000,000 to 10 or more million in three years or less.
• 4:06
  And the reason for that is because that goal, if you let that goal be the tool that forces you
• 4:12
  to start looking more, more deeply at everything you're doing, it's going to force you to start coming
• 4:16
  to hard conclusions faster. You know, you're going to have to figure out what, what it takes
• 4:22
  to build a real business, what it takes to start hiring not bad people, but good people,
• 4:27
  what it means to actually define yourself as a business and actually have a singular focus
• 4:31
  versus doing whatever else is doing and following everyone else's paths.
• 4:36
  So, so actually starting with the goal to scale and actually having a massive goal and giving
• 4:41
  yourself a short timeline is going to force you to start getting answers that you won't get
• 4:46
  if your only goal is to get to the next linear step, which is how do I get to 100,000 in revenue?
• 4:51
  That's a bad goal. That's going to lead you to making most of the decisions you're making today,
• 4:54
  which are all mistakes. They're going to honestly kill your business in the next few years.
• 5:00
  There's one idea that I really do love, and it's so interesting. There's always dualities in life,
• 5:05
  where two ideas can be true at the same time, because one idea that I really do love is,
• 5:10
  for entrepreneurs to be successful, they have to find a way to stay in the game.
• 5:15
  I think it's originally a hermosy idea, but I'm sure it's been a purpose of a million different times.
• 5:19
  Definitely not. Definitely not a hermosy idea.
• 5:23
  I'll tell you whose idea that is, you know that you know the idea, though, that I'm talking about.
• 5:28
  Stay in the game versus win the game. That goes back to infinite games versus finite games,
• 5:36
  even I think Alan Carr, someone Carr from the 80s, and then other people have translated it.
• 5:40
  It's semi-true, but it also makes for bad strategy. This is what happens when academics and when
• 5:48
  authors teach people how to do strategy, because an author, they're focused on process over outcome.
• 5:56
  But in business, you really do have to focus on the outcome, and you use the outcome to shape your
• 6:00
  strategy. Rather than saying, I just want to be in the game my whole life, it's what game do you
• 6:06
  want to play and how do you win? And people don't want to talk about winning when it comes to overly
• 6:11
  focused on process. But in business, you actually have to say, what's the game I want to play?
• 6:18
  And how do I win in that game? Rather than how do I stay in a game or even stay in the wrong game?
• 6:24
  What questions do you have to ask yourself when you're starting that will give you the clarity
• 6:28
  to figure out which game you should be playing? I think it's really important to get connected to
• 6:32
  your own future self as a person. There's a lot of research on getting connected to your future self,
• 6:37
  thinking about not who's the default version of your future self, which is the extension of your
• 6:41
  current self, but who is the future self that you feel you actually would love to become?
• 6:46
  And the answer to that question changes over time. But as you actually get more honest about your
• 6:51
  future self and more connected to your future self, it becomes obvious which games you shouldn't play.
• 6:56
  As an example, for me, I was actually growing a big YouTube channel two, three years ago, and could
• 7:01
  have easily had a massive YouTube channel right now. But to me, that game wasn't a game worth playing
• 7:07
  for me, to be honest with you. It's a bloody game in terms of a red ocean. There's a lot of
• 7:11
  competition over there. Could I have succeeded in that game? I think so. I think it would have massively
• 7:15
  slowed my progress. And I think it would have been a dead end game compared to a more efficient game
• 7:20
  as I got more connected to my future self. So one is really thinking through your future self
• 7:25
  and getting honest about that. One of my friends who's a mentor and a billionaire said that the majority
• 7:30
  of reasons why entrepreneurs don't grow in scales because they lie to themselves. First,
• 7:34
  they lie to themselves about who they really want to be. And second, they lie to themselves about
• 7:39
  all the things that they're doing that are counter to that counter to that. And so most games aren't
• 7:46
  worth playing. And I think most games are distractions. Most games are not going to take you to where you
• 7:52
  want to go. And if you're willing to let most of those games go, you can start actually winning the
• 7:58
  game you really want to play. How do you wake yourself up? Because again, we're talking about
• 8:02
  on people that don't really have this rule book when they're going into it. Entrepreneurs don't
• 8:06
  really have a clear rule book. I mean, you studied organizational psychology. You're probably as
• 8:11
  close as you can get to going to traditional education and learning anything that's useful for
• 8:15
  business. But I mean, there's no real rule book. And maybe you can maybe you can argue there is
• 8:19
  somewhere. But hopefully the science and hopefully the science of scaling becomes that because I think
• 8:24
  you're honestly right. And I think that it's a topic that has been muddled,
• 8:28
  indistracted, and confusing for a really long time. I want to learn a little bit more about youth
• 8:32
  people who don't know sort of where you came from and how you got into this world. So again,
• 8:37
  I mentioned you actually took a degree. Was it a doctorate or a master's in organizational
• 8:42
  psychology? But that was your focus PhD PhD. Yeah, that would be where the doctor came from. That
• 8:47
  makes sense. And what were some of the things that you actually learned in that degree that were
• 8:53
  useful, applicable to somebody who's trying to build a business right now on. I'm sure there's
• 8:57
  a lot that wasn't. But what were some of the main core ideas that you actually found quite useful
• 9:01
  that you still carry through to your work today? I think that I learned a lot about systems theory
• 9:07
  systems dynamics levels of systems. They call it levels of analysis. So like as an example,
• 9:13
  an employee is a different level than a team like a team an employee fits within a team,
• 9:19
  right? And a team fits within a maybe like a sector of the business which fits within a company
• 9:26
  which fits within an industry. So there's levels of analysis and also just realizing that
• 9:34
  human psychology and human systems are driven by goals and just really being rigorous and honest
• 9:39
  about that. I think that the main things I really learned was being rigorous. So I wouldn't actually
• 9:47
  say that any of the actual subject matter that I studied was groundbreaking, although it doesn't
• 9:54
  form my thinking. It was more just being rigorous, right? Like actually questioning assumptions,
• 10:00
  asking better questions, having someone give really hard feedback, even learning things like
• 10:07
  statistics, which I'm honestly not that good at, but having to understand how these things work.
• 10:12
  So it was more about how to think versus what to think. And then obviously being in business and
• 10:18
  writing major books, actually like advising companies, those things are very different, but I have
• 10:25
  learned to have rigor and willingness to get hard feedback and willingness to get correction
• 10:30
  that I think is helpful. And whereas I think that a lot of entrepreneurs they maintain a kind of
• 10:34
  sloppy identity and a sloppy mindset throughout. When you talk about the science of scaling,
• 10:40
  you talk about doing things differently than most entrepreneur education teaches.
• 10:47
  But I would be curious if when you look at the framework and the science of scaling, I mean,
• 10:52
  you have a couple different ones. You have frame, floor, focus. That's one I want to understand
• 10:56
  what that means. You set impossible goals. You talk about 2x versus 10x, all these different concepts.
• 11:01
  Do you feel like the entrepreneurs that we look up to in terms of entrepreneurial success? Say
• 11:11
  like the Richard Branson's or the Elon Musk's or the Mark Cuban's or the billionaires at the world.
• 11:18
  Do they adopt some of the frameworks that they adopt in line with the science of scaling versus
• 11:24
  what the average person thinks entrepreneurship is, which I think is completely different than
• 11:29
  what you teach and should be what people adhere to and adopt. I think so. I would say that a lot
• 11:36
  of these people, the big names, the musk, the the bizost and stuff like that, they apply the type
• 11:44
  of thinking that I teach in the book, maybe without explicitly knowing it. A lot of them just
• 11:51
  are naturally like Steve Jobs was wanting to put a dent in the universe. Obviously he didn't have
• 11:56
  small goals. He was wanting to take over and reinvent computing. Most of the people listening to
• 12:01
  this podcast aren't trying to do something that big. Naturally they have smaller ambitions,
• 12:06
  which would lead them down pathways that they would not be going down if they had 10x or 100x
• 12:11
  bigger ambitions. The people we're talking about have massive things that they're trying to do
• 12:18
  and they're willing to figure out how to do it even if it means going down a pathway that no
• 12:23
  one else has gone down before. Even if it means risking how many times his musk risked, not only his
• 12:32
  reputation, but how many times his risked his fortune. He's willing to let go of the present for
• 12:37
  the future, even if it's being a billionaire, even if it's his reputation, even if it's Tesla,
• 12:41
  right? Him partnering with Musk or Trump, whether people agree with it or not, he had to risk an
• 12:47
  enormous amount to make that bet because why? Because he's got an impossible goal of getting the
• 12:51
  Mars, right? So how many people have a goal of going to Mars, colonizing it, etc. But if you begin
• 12:57
  to understand the psychology of it, everything he's doing, including the unique pathways he's trying
• 13:00
  to take, all stem from that goal. And so the first fundamental difference between the bigs versus
• 13:07
  everyone else is their goals are just radically different that they're willing to try to solve
• 13:13
  versus how do I have the biggest podcast in the world, right? They're like, how can I change
• 13:17
  education, right? It's just a different it's a different pursuit. But is there is there benefit,
• 13:21
  is there benefit or distraction to to adopting that level of goal to to thinking in terms of
• 13:28
  impossible goals? Is that a benefit to somebody who's trying to, for example, build a service-based
• 13:34
  you know, lawn care company or build a podcast or build, I don't know, a marketing agency like,
• 13:40
  how do you translate these frameworks into what the majority of the people who are listening are
• 13:45
  trying to accomplish? Yeah, so let's just say go back to that lawn care guy, right? Let's say,
• 13:52
  you tell me, how much money is he making? When he starts nothing, but maybe he's trying to make,
• 13:56
  you know, three, two, three hundred thousand dollars annually, in revenue or in profits or
• 14:03
  no, in take home for himself. That's huge, that's awesome. Yeah, I would say revenue, you're probably
• 14:08
  trying to pull, like a list, I don't run a lawn care company, but I've looked at a few on biz
• 14:12
  sell and I've watched Cody Sanchez enough to know that I'm sure they're making about, you know,
• 14:15
  a million in their front take home, you know, two, three hundred thousand as a as a good small business.
• 14:20
  Okay, awesome. So the question is, does that business want to stay small or do they want to
• 14:25
  10X or 50X or 100X? And if they do, then they're going to have to start thinking about their
• 14:33
  business differently, they can't keep doing what they're doing, right? Maybe they end up having,
• 14:39
  maybe they end up becoming the lawn care provider for their entire state or, or, or offering
• 14:44
  something different. And so any company can apply it, but the challenge that almost every company
• 14:51
  will face, which is exactly what you just said is so cost bias. The bigger goal, even in the same
• 14:57
  industry, is going to force them to remodel their company in large part or remodel their strategy.
• 15:02
  And most people aren't willing to do that. And so they end up staying in what they're currently
• 15:07
  doing versus innovating and doing something better. But, but, you know, at some point,
• 15:13
  that lawn care provider had to walk away from something. Maybe it was their job, right? Or,
• 15:17
  or something. And so they did it before. They they had a bigger goal. They realized that their
• 15:21
  current vehicle or their current model wasn't going to get them there. So they went and started
• 15:25
  something and they grew. And now they've gotten to a point where they're more successful than they
• 15:29
  were prior. And the question is, are they willing to do that again and again? Or are they going to
• 15:34
  let the past dictate where they're at? Do you think that many people think in terms of impossible
• 15:39
  goals? Or do you feel like most people let the past dictate where they're at? Almost everyone
• 15:43
  lets their past determine their goals. So as an example, yeah. So as an example, I did 300,000
• 15:51
  revenue last year. So I'm going to go for 400,000 this year, right? Or next year, right? So they're
• 15:56
  letting their past performance shape their goal versus letting the goal shape their system,
• 16:02
  shape their process. You always and people do that by the way, naturally, psychologically as well.
• 16:08
  I think it's how we're trained to think I call it linear psychology or linear time where you let
• 16:12
  the past and present determine the future. But that's that's also natural and how that's how people
• 16:17
  have been taught to think even in terms of their future selves. They think about they let their past
• 16:22
  and their present self dictate the model or the view of their future self. But back to the
• 16:28
  Buckminster Fuller quote that you just said, you don't change things by fighting the existing
• 16:31
  reality. Instead, you need a new model that makes your old model become obsolete. Well, that also
• 16:37
  fits with your psychology, but also your business. And so with your psychology, the new model
• 16:41
  would be a different future self. And you let that future dictate who you are in the present.
• 16:45
  And if it's a very different future self, say it's someone who's, you know,
• 16:50
  built, you know, growing a successful company or someone who's successful or has a family
• 16:53
  and a marriage, right? Or whatever, if you let that model of your future dictate your present,
• 16:58
  which is really what the future is for. Psychologically, the future and the past are just tools
• 17:02
  for bet for better operating in the present. They're not outside of you. Your past as an idea is
• 17:08
  in your head and it's in it's driving and it's dictating you, but your future is also an idea in
• 17:12
  your head that's shaping your decisions. And so if you let a brand new model of the future impact
• 17:18
  who you are today, it's going to lead you in a very different direction. HubSpot is a success
• 17:22
  story partner. Now think about listening to this podcast right now. You're probably multitasking.
• 17:26
  You're probably catching 70 to 80% of what we're talking about, but let's flip that and imagine
• 17:30
  you're only catching 20%. That'd be crazy, right? It's really not a good use of your time.
• 17:34
  If you only remember 20% of what we're talking about, but most businesses, most entrepreneurs
• 17:39
  are only using 20% of their data. All the most important details and call logs, emails,
• 17:44
  chats with their customers, it's just left floating in digital space, not being used. HubSpot,
• 17:48
  it gives you the access to those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more,
• 17:53
  you grow more. Visit HabSpot.com to get the full picture of your business today.
• 17:57
  NetSuite is a success story partner. Now what does the future hold for business? If you ask
• 18:02
  nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers, bull market, bear market, interest rates are rising,
• 18:06
  they're falling. Honestly, at the end of the day, we just need a crystal ball. But until then,
• 18:10
  over 42,000 businesses have trusted and future-proofed themselves with NetSuite by Oracle.
• 18:16
  The number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one
• 18:21
  cohesive platform. With one unified business management suite, there's one source of truth
• 18:27
  giving you the visibility and control that you need to make quick decisions. With real-time insights
• 18:31
  and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the
• 18:35
  books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next.
• 18:40
  If I needed this kind of business management system, NetSuite is exactly what I do. So whether or not
• 18:45
  your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate
• 18:50
  challenges in your business and sees your biggest opportunities. And speaking of opportunity,
• 18:54
  you have to download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. The guide is free for all
• 18:59
  listeners, that's NetSuite.com slash Scott Clary. Indeed is a success story partner. Now, say you just
• 19:05
  realized your business needed to hire someone fast. How can you find amazing candidates fast? It's
• 19:10
  easy. Just use indeed. When it comes to hiring, indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your
• 19:15
  job post seen on other job sites. Indeed, sponsored jobs helps you stand out and hire fast. And with
• 19:21
  sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can
• 19:26
  reach the people you want faster. And it makes a huge difference. According to indeed data,
• 19:30
  sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs.
• 19:37
  Plus, with indeed sponsored jobs, there's no monthly subscription, no long-term contracts,
• 19:42
  you only pay for results. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now
• 19:47
  with indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs
• 19:53
  more visibility. Just go to indeed.com slash Clary right now and support our show by saying you
• 19:58
  heard about indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash Clary terms and conditions apply if you're hiring
• 20:05
  indeed is all you need. But when you don't have the role models, you don't have the influence
• 20:09
  around you. Even if you are a really ambitious person that watches a whole bunch of YouTube
• 20:16
  videos and listen to a whole bunch of podcasts and reads a whole bunch of books, I think the average
• 20:20
  person has a really hard time listening to a future self that they have no tangible evidence
• 20:28
  this future self can actually exist. And then the default to sort of depending on what their past
• 20:35
  success was and they say, listen, it'd be great to have a $100 million business. But like in my
• 20:41
  heart and my soul and in my head, I just can't understand how I can be that person. I think it's
• 20:47
  very difficult. Like I don't listen. I don't study this for a living. So you probably have advice
• 20:51
  on this. But I feel like the average person is going to listen to this is going to say, yeah,
• 20:55
  that makes sense. And it's just going to go back to their old ways of thinking. Like how do they
• 20:59
  actually actually become this person? How do they actually believe that they can be this future
• 21:07
  self, this future version of themselves that builds a massive business or achieve massive goals
• 21:10
  or has a beautiful family or, you know, loses the weight that they want to lose when they've
• 21:15
  been overweight their whole life. It's beautiful questions, incredible questions. There's a few
• 21:20
  different ways of answering that question. I'll go the faith side first and then I'll go
• 21:28
  the practical psychology side second. So the faith side is, you know, and not everyone listening
• 21:33
  to this has a relationship with a with a higher power. But the more relationship you build with a
• 21:37
  higher power, the less constrained you are by what you think is possible versus impossible.
• 21:43
  You know, the scriptures or the Bible or whatever says nothing's impossible of God. So one of my
• 21:47
  viewpoints is the most the more close you get with a with your relationship with God, the more,
• 21:53
  the less boundaries you put on your own potential. When it comes to psychology,
• 22:00
  my view is is that you don't necessarily need to believe you can achieve it before you start
• 22:03
  doing it. So Dan Sullivan who I wrote three books with the gap in the gain 10x is easier than 2x
• 22:10
  as well as who not how. He has a little four step model that I think is very accurate. He calls
• 22:16
  it the four C's formula. And so the four C's formula is first you have to make a commitment
• 22:21
  second from commitment that takes you to courage, because you're making a commitment, you're making
• 22:25
  a commitment beyond what you actually know you can do. And in fact, when you set impossible goals,
• 22:31
  part of their value is that you don't know how to do them, right? That's actually the point.
• 22:37
  If you if you only set goals, you think you can accomplish, then you are operating linearly and
• 22:43
  you're unwilling to find new ideas. You're operating based on false assumptions. And so one of the
• 22:47
  actual strengths, again, goals are tools, right? People have a lot of negative emotional baggage
• 22:54
  towards goals because they think if they don't hit it, they're losers. Like there's all these false
• 22:59
  premises, even if you do hit it, right? So people approach goals ineffectively. Goals are psychological
• 23:07
  tools for evaluating your present, for evaluating what you're spending your time on, for being more
• 23:12
  honest with yourself about what you're doing. And then for if you choose to begin filtering and
• 23:17
  finding other pathways to getting there, your brain is a natural tool at filtering. It won't filter
• 23:22
  effectively though, if you don't actually commit to a goal. So back to to Sullivan, first commitment,
• 23:27
  then then what happens is courage. First off, the courage to start letting go of the things that you
• 23:32
  know are counter to the goal, right? That's the stuff that we were talking about was on cost bias.
• 23:36
  Begin to actually be honest and with yourself, honest even starts to take a little bit of courage
• 23:40
  and start eliminating the stuff that you know has no bearing on on on that bigger future.
• 23:46
  The third is capability. You start to build knowledge and capabilities and pathways and relationships
• 23:51
  about that goal, right? To the idea of the person with a hundred million. Okay, cool. You don't have
• 23:55
  the knowledge about it right now. You have no capability. You've got no understanding of it.
• 23:59
  But that goal is going to force you to start learning about that world, right? If there is a world
• 24:03
  over there, there's a we know that there's a world, all these worlds, you just don't know about them.
• 24:07
  So your ignorance is slowing you down and stopping you. So you're going to have to start to develop
• 24:11
  some capability, some knowledge, some context. Then the fourth is what he calls confidence, right?
• 24:17
  What you're asking for and what a lot of people are asking for is give me the confidence before I
• 24:21
  do any of this work. Give me the confidence before I make a commitment. Give me the confidence
• 24:25
  before I deal with any courage. Give me the confidence before I start being honest with myself
• 24:28
  about all the stuff I'm doing that's a waste of time. Give me the confidence before I start gaining
• 24:32
  knowledge, education, relationships, and experience in that world. And so yeah, if someone wants
• 24:37
  confidence before they're willing to make commitments, exercise courage and develop capability
• 24:41
  and knowledge, they're screwed because you confidence is earned. You can't have it. But if you're
• 24:47
  willing to exercise some faith, set use a goal as a tool, not a tool as a way to make you feel like
• 24:54
  a loser, but use a tool, right? A bigger goal. Use it as a tool to begin exposing and examining
• 25:02
  yourself and examining your current thinking. This is what I do when I work with companies.
• 25:06
  And I'll just use it as an example. Say a company's doing one million in revenue and they have a
• 25:11
  goal of getting to 100 million or even 10 million. Say they have a goal of getting to 10 million
• 25:16
  and they want to do it in 10 years. I would tell them you're never going to hit that goal. Why?
• 25:21
  Because you've put it 10 years away, which means you're not dealing with it today.
• 25:24
  Remember, the future is a tool. And if you've put it 10 years away, what that means is you're not
• 25:28
  doing anything about it right now. And what you're actually doing is you're trying to get from
• 25:32
  one million to maybe 1.2 million, which means you're not solving 10. So what we want to do is we
• 25:36
  want to use the future as a tool and even your goal as a tool to start using it to more effectively
• 25:41
  examine your present. So let's take that 10 million. Let's move it to two or three years and
• 25:46
  start using it to genuinely looking at your current path because your current path is nowhere near
• 25:50
  10 million. You don't even know what 10 million means. And that's okay. But what we do know is that
• 25:55
  most of what you're now doing is nowhere near that. And so can we at least start being honest about
• 25:59
  that and start developing a plan to 10 million and start developing a knowledge of what that means
• 26:04
  and who you'd need on your team and what you'd need to do as a business to get there.
• 26:07
  So again, the goal just simply becomes a tool for higher levels of honesty and then for beginning
• 26:12
  to solve it. It turns into a forcing function. And also I guess this then force you to examine all
• 26:18
  the tasks that you're doing every single day. I'm assuming that really makes you aware that a lot
• 26:24
  of the stuff that you do is not optimizing stuff that shouldn't exist.
• 26:28
  The goal determines this. The goal determines what you're optimizing that shouldn't exist.
• 26:32
  Anything you're optimizing that shouldn't exist fits what we call below the floor. So the frame
• 26:35
  determines the floor. The floor defines what you don't do. As Steve Jobs said, focus is defined by
• 26:41
  what you don't do. Strategy, expert, Michael Porter says strategy is defined by what you don't do.
• 26:46
  So and most people don't have good strategy because they're operating linearly letting the past dictate
• 26:52
  the future. And so they're doing 100 things that are optimizing what shouldn't be done. And that's
• 26:56
  why I shared the quote from John Doer at the beginning that a goal properly said is halfway reached
• 27:00
  because it allows you to begin honestly examining that the majority of what you're spending your
• 27:05
  time on right now is great from the past, but it's not great from the better future. And so the sooner
• 27:11
  you can just be honest about that and let that stuff go, the sooner you can go and find better paths
• 27:15
  that will get you 10 100x the distance in the same amount of time. Talk to me about your your
• 27:20
  relationship with the traditional 80 20 rule from the context of how do we get to 10x?
• 27:26
  Yeah, it's awesome. So me and Dan Sullivan wrote a book called 10x is easier than 2x. And
• 27:32
  you know, Dan's 80 years old, been coaching entrepreneurs for 50 years,
• 27:36
  personally coached you know 20,000 plus. And you know, while we were writing 10x is easier than
• 27:42
  2x. Part of me, my process of writing books is that I have to really get into the weeds, right?
• 27:46
  And I have to really understand something. And he had a lot of good insight on 10x, but
• 27:51
  I still felt like we needed to drill a little deeper. And ultimately, he's really good at making
• 27:56
  frameworks. And so, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about the 80 20 principle, but he
• 28:00
  he basically I'll give you the simple framework, but then I'll tell you how I really think about it.
• 28:04
  So the simple framework from that book, using the 80 20 principle and the idea of the 80 20 principle,
• 28:08
  which they sometimes call the power law, is that 80% of results comes from 20% of of inputs.
• 28:16
  In other words, 80% of outputs comes from 20% of inputs. And so if you look at 80% 100% of what
• 28:22
  you're doing, or 100% of your relationships, almost all the progress, the results, the successors
• 28:27
  coming from a very small amount of it, say 20% or less. And so the model that we came up with in
• 28:32
  that book was if you want to go for 2x growth, again, you're that that lawn care company doing 200,000
• 28:39
  a year. If you wanted to x, you can actually keep 80% of what you're doing. You don't have to
• 28:45
  transform that much to go to x. All you have to change is 20%. Maybe you need more marketing,
• 28:49
  right? Maybe you need, you know, so you only have to tweak your company to go to x. You only
• 28:54
  have to change 20% of it. You can keep 80% of what you're now doing, which means you're fundamentally
• 28:57
  operating from your past. You're letting the past dictate your growth. You're letting the past
• 29:02
  dictate your strategy. You're keeping 80% of who you are now. Whereas having a 10 times bigger future
• 29:08
  is so big and transformative that 80% of what you're now doing is noise. 80% of what you're now
• 29:14
  doing is fundamentally a distraction. And so it forces 80% of what you're doing away. And it forces
• 29:20
  you to find what's the 25, what's the 20% or less of what you're doing right now that you've got
• 29:26
  a 10x that you've got to actually focus on and scale. And so what that means in some companies
• 29:31
  is that, you know, I was just talking to a guy right now who has a small business, you know,
• 29:36
  they're doing $2 million revenue with their awesome. And, and he does windows. And we started to
• 29:42
  talk about the different projects they're doing. And he said, you know, they do maybe 70 projects
• 29:48
  a year, right? Some of them are $10,000 projects, some of them are 30, some of them are $50,000 projects.
• 29:53
  But once or twice a year, they do a project that's a couple hundred thousand, you know. And so
• 29:59
  using the 8020 model on that, my question for him was, well, how would you, what would happen if
• 30:04
  you just optimize your business around those those opportunities, right? Which are like the 1% of
• 30:07
  opportunities for you where you're only doing in there a little bit more specific gigs, right? But like,
• 30:12
  there are these jobs that are a couple hundred thousand. What would happen if you just 10x to those
• 30:16
  and forgot about the rest, right? That would be raising the floor and stripping away the 80% of stuff,
• 30:20
  right? And he realized that he could 10x his company. He could get to actually 50 million if they
• 30:25
  only did those jobs. But right now they're not, they're not, their system isn't optimized for those.
• 30:29
  They're not even looking for those jobs. And they're still saying yes to all the little jobs. And he
• 30:34
  out of fear of disappointing people says yes to things all the time that he knows are projects they
• 30:40
  shouldn't be doing. But he doesn't want to disappoint people. You know, he wants to have a good name
• 30:46
  in the reputation, in a good reputation in his environment and stuff like that. But what he doesn't
• 30:49
  realize is the whole environment sees him as the guy who takes these little jobs because of the
• 30:54
  things he does. So he's created this, this image and this persona for himself. And it's probably just
• 30:59
  as, it's just as damaging the way the customer sees him as the way he sees himself. 100%. I asked him.
• 31:06
  I said, how do you, how do you think you're defined in the marketplace? And he, and he didn't
• 31:10
  really know. And I said, well, we know that they see you as the guy who takes these little jobs
• 31:14
  because those are the ones you get. Those are the ones you take. How do you manage all the other
• 31:20
  things outside the business that are not in congruence. They're not helping. They're not sort of
• 31:24
  moving the needle forward. What's your, what's your framework for that? Because that's the human
• 31:28
  element of business that is not so easy to figure out. Like I said, everything is driven by goals
• 31:34
  and back to the idea of levels of analysis. Some goals are higher order than others, right?
• 31:38
  Speaking for myself, my own faith, my family are higher order goals than my business. Therefore,
• 31:45
  if I needed to, I would let, I would sacrifice my business for my higher order goals.
• 31:52
  And so understanding your goals and, and, and, and aligning those, and even Victor Frankel talked
• 31:59
  about this long ago in man's search for meaning, right? Aligning your relationships with your goals,
• 32:04
  right? So the person you're married with, if you have two fundamentally different philosophies
• 32:09
  about life and two totally different goals about what it means to live, that relationship is probably
• 32:13
  not going to work, right? Like those could be, you know, spiritual alignment or things like that.
• 32:19
  But, but, but honestly, you know, to the very practical level of when you want to start making
• 32:24
  improvements in your life and when you want to start actually living, like as I call your goal,
• 32:28
  your frame, and your frame determines what you see as a person we all see the world through a frame.
• 32:32
  And our frame determines what, what we notice, what we care about, what we see as relevant.
• 32:36
  And so determines what we view as signal and what we view as noise. And so if you, if you,
• 32:41
  if you're trying to, like, become the world's best, like, player on World of Warcraft, right?
• 32:47
  Then, like, you're going to, you're not going to listen to this podcast, probably, unless this
• 32:50
  podcast can help you do that. But you're going to be like studying, how do I become the best player
• 32:53
  on World of Warcraft? And so your signal and the pathways you're going to be looking for and everything
• 32:57
  in your frame is going to be based on that, right? And so your goal determines what you,
• 33:02
  what you see, what you look for. And so the reason I'm saying set higher goals is because that
• 33:07
  forces your floor to go up, meaning that a lot of the things you could say yes to for a low goal,
• 33:12
  you can't say for a higher goal, right? And so your goal determines how you approach all these
• 33:17
  things. But the easiest, in my mind, the easiest way to do it back to all progress starts by telling
• 33:22
  the truth. And that most people are lying to themselves is you can actually gain trust with
• 33:27
  people, even if you disappoint them by telling them the truth, right? And so if you're wanting to
• 33:33
  grow and succeed and put yourself in new environments and learn new things. And that means decreasing
• 33:39
  what you're currently doing, such as spending time with X friends, doing X activities,
• 33:45
  the most healthy approach, even though it still disappoints people, is being honest, like being
• 33:50
  transparent, not making it about them, not saying you're a bad person and that the activities and
• 33:55
  behaviors that we're doing are are below my floor and their loser activities and I want to go be
• 33:59
  successful. That's not how you do it. It's just saying it's not making about the other person at all.
• 34:04
  It's literally about this is the direction I want to go. I feel like I need to focus in these
• 34:10
  directions. And that that therefore means like we're not going to be able to spend as much time
• 34:15
  doing what we're doing that. And so this is just the direction I should go. You don't have to
• 34:19
  actually apologize about it. Like even with this guy with the the the window company in order for
• 34:26
  his company to scale and grow and get to 50 million in three years, which he wants it to from two.
• 34:31
  And he can. He actually knows the pathway. He's going to have to disappoint his current a lot of
• 34:35
  his current client base and start saying we don't do these projects anymore. And he can do it in a
• 34:41
  way that builds trust by saying, look, this is the direction our company is going to go. You can go
• 34:45
  work with other people if you know, and if you start to want to come in this direction, you know,
• 34:50
  you know, who to come for us for. So you can gain and build trust even if it means disappointing
• 34:55
  people by being really honest. The HubSpot podcast network is a success story partner. Now a quick
• 35:01
  podcast recommendation. I've been listening to truth lies and work. They're in the HubSpot podcast
• 35:06
  network. Just like success story. It's this husband and wife team Al and Leanne Elliott. They break
• 35:11
  down why people actually do what they do at work. So if you have a business, if you manage people,
• 35:16
  if you have to hire people at any point, you have to listen to their show. I just listened to
• 35:19
  an episode on my good employee suddenly quit. That's an issue that we all have and it totally
• 35:24
  clicked for me. One of the reasons I explained is why it's not usually about the money. It's about
• 35:28
  all these little promises that we as founders, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, we break without
• 35:33
  realizing it. Like when you tell someone you just hired that they're going to learn all these
• 35:37
  new skills, but you just keep giving them the same tasks over and over and over again. It made me
• 35:41
  realize that I probably lost a lot of good people for dumb reasons that I never noticed and hiring
• 35:45
  is one of the most important things you can figure out. So if you manage people or if you just want
• 35:50
  to understand what makes your co-workers tick, it's worth checking out. Listen to truth lies and work
• 35:54
  wherever you get your podcast. Chipstation is a success story partner. You know what separates
• 35:58
  successful online businesses from literally everyone else? It's not just having great products.
• 36:03
  It's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back. All of my friends
• 36:08
  that run the biggest e-commerce companies, they use Chipstation and it has completely transformed
• 36:13
  how they handle orders. They save thousands on shipping costs thanks to the rate chopper tool
• 36:17
  that finds the best discounts. And when it makes Chipstation brilliant, you never need to upgrade
• 36:22
  because it grows with your business no matter how big you get. And they offer discounts up to
• 36:26
  88% off UPS, DHL Express and USPS rates and up to 90% off FedEx. It integrates seamlessly
• 36:33
  with every selling channel you're already using and your customers get branded tracking updates
• 36:37
  that keep them happy and informed. When shoppers use your products, you turn them into loyal customers
• 36:43
  with cheaper, faster and better shipping. No credit card required, cancel anytime. That's
• 36:47
  shipstation.com code success story. HubSpot is a success story partner. Now the future of business is
• 36:53
  happening right now and you don't want to miss it. That's why you have to be at inbound 2025.
• 36:58
  They are bringing together the brightest minds in marketing, sales, business, entrepreneurship AI
• 37:03
  for three incredible days in San Francisco, the global epicenter of innovation and technological
• 37:07
  disruption. Picture this. You are learning directly from Amy Poler about creative leadership. You're
• 37:12
  getting AI insights from Dario Amote who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
• 37:17
  Here's what makes inbound special. It's not just the great keynotes. You're going to dive into breakout
• 37:22
  sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn. And plus San Francisco's legendary
• 37:26
  startup ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with all these great entrepreneurs,
• 37:32
  decision makers, industry leaders, peers who are actively shaping the future of business.
• 37:36
  From September 3rd to 5th at the Moscone Center, you're going to be surrounded by
• 37:39
  forward-thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs. Don't just watch
• 37:44
  the future unfold. Be part of creating it. Visit inbound.com slash register to get your ticket today.
• 37:50
  I think that's very important because we always speak about scaling and business strategy,
• 37:57
  but there's so much more to it that even a lot of the things that you're discussing today,
• 38:03
  it's yeah, there's some tactical items that you can pursue. But a lot of it is you're talking about
• 38:08
  different mental models, different frames. We're talking about a future in past self. A lot of
• 38:13
  the things that actually are leading indicators of success are less of the strategy that you use
• 38:20
  in more of the mental model or the mindset that you adopt. My view is psychology, psychology always
• 38:26
  shape strategy. And strategy always determines time management. The sad part is people talk about
• 38:32
  time management and productivity without first starting with psychology or strategy. And the fundamental
• 38:37
  root of both psychology and strategy are goals, honestly, like humans are driven by their goals,
• 38:43
  they may not be aware of those goals. They may have past based goals that were provoked by traumas
• 38:48
  or that they're unaware of. But humans are driven by goals and and and so a strategy. And so
• 38:56
  the reason people are listening to this is because they see this as somewhat relevant to the
• 38:59
  goals that they're trying to set or pursue. Otherwise, they wouldn't be here. And so,
• 39:04
  yeah, people people think very tactically first. And I think that the world's taught us to think
• 39:09
  tactically in terms of productivity and time management and even things like habits. But all
• 39:14
  of those things are fundamentally secondary to psychology and strategy. But are there any other
• 39:19
  ideas that somebody should implement as they raise their floor and remove some of these relationships
• 39:24
  in their business or remove some of the activities they're doing? Is there any other
• 39:29
  framework on how they think through new ideas that they should adopt or new ideas they should
• 39:34
  bring into their business? Like when they look at their future version of themselves,
• 39:38
  fine, you want to make 10 million dollars in three years. Great. But there's a million in one
• 39:45
  ways to achieve that. So how do you without going through every single tactics, strategy,
• 39:52
  customer type, new product that you can bring to market? How do you figure out what would be the
• 39:58
  quickest path to actually get there? Because we said we want to get there in three years.
• 40:02
  But now we have unlimited things that we can take on. And that can also sort of be a distraction,
• 40:07
  shiny objects and we don't know where to spend our time on going forward. So how do we rank some
• 40:11
  of these opportunities or ideas? The beautiful part about framing the goal properly, back to John
• 40:17
  Dora, a goal properly said it's halfway reached, is that if you set the goal properly, most of the
• 40:21
  options disappear. You don't have infinite options to go from one million to 10 million in three years.
• 40:27
  You actually have very few. And so you have infinite options to get from one million to two
• 40:32
  million. You don't have infinite options to get to 10 X in two or three years or more. Most paths
• 40:38
  won't work. That's why the framing is so powerful is because it forces out dead ends. It forces you
• 40:42
  to be honest that most of what you're doing won't work. It forces you to find better paths and
• 40:46
  better solutions that you wouldn't be looking for. There's very few paths to massive growth.
• 40:50
  There's infinite paths to small and linear growth. And so it forces you to find the best path,
• 40:56
  the best model, the best team, the best people. If you're really rigorous and honest about it,
• 41:00
  I'll give an example and I share it in the book. But you know, one of the ladies that we worked with,
• 41:04
  her name is Alicia Alt and she had a software company called Level Up Score. And she was in the
• 41:11
  credit industry. She'd been a coach for 20 years in the credit industry and she had built a software,
• 41:15
  not her, but she had hired someone and had a partner with someone who built a software that she
• 41:19
  thought was incredible. And she wanted to get that software into the credit industry. And in the
• 41:26
  US, the credit industry, there's 50,000 credit repair companies in the US alone. People you can
• 41:31
  hire to help you dispute claims or raise your credit. And so she wanted to have those 50,000
• 41:36
  companies using her software with their clients because it was very valuable at helping them
• 41:39
  along that pathway. And anyways, she began cold calling those credit repair companies and every
• 41:46
  time she talked to them, they fell in love with the product and they said, yes. And so over a 90-day
• 41:50
  period of time, this was in Q1 of last year, 224. Over 90 days, she had 10 of these calls,
• 41:56
  created a deal where these 10 different companies were using her software and they had a little
• 42:01
  bit of a rev share. Well, she met us and we said, Alicia, we want you to set an impossible goal so
• 42:05
  that you can actually start to scale this company because right now you're on a path that's going to
• 42:08
  take you 20 years to make a lot of progress. And she said, okay, I'm going to go for 100 of these
• 42:13
  companies. She was at 10. I'm going to go for 100 of these companies using the software in 90 days.
• 42:17
  And obviously that was a stretcher. That's a 10X in 90 days. But it was still not a new model
• 42:23
  that made her old model or her old thinking obsolete. Right. And so she figured even though she was
• 42:28
  really busy, she had a full-time job as a coach, she also had kids, she figured she could squeeze
• 42:34
  in over the weekends and stuff even though it was still lying to herself. There's no way she could
• 42:38
  fit in 90 of those hour long calls. She was already booked to the guilds. Her play was already full,
• 42:42
  but she was lying to herself and she thought, I can maybe have 90 of these calls. And so we said,
• 42:47
  Alicia, you're thinking is bad and it's going to hurt you and it's going to it's not going to work.
• 42:51
  And so he said, we need you need a bigger goal so that you can find a better path. And so she said,
• 42:55
  it's that's what's interesting about what I'm talking about is is by actually setting a more
• 42:59
  impossible goal, she found a more streamlined path. What happened was she said, okay, I'm going to go
• 43:04
  for a thousand of these credit pair companies using my software in 90 days. And she said, as soon as I
• 43:09
  said that goal, like my mind went completely blank, I had no clue how to do it. And that's exactly
• 43:14
  where we wanted her. And so essentially a big part of what we call pathways thinking in
• 43:19
  psychology is thinking from the goal. You always want to think from the goal, not toward the goal,
• 43:24
  rather than thinking, oh, here's business model, you know, business model X, Y and Z, maybe I
• 43:28
  should pursue all those. No, let's set the right goal. And from the goal, let's start to develop
• 43:32
  a model on a path. And so for her to get a thousand software or a thousand of these credit
• 43:37
  repair companies using her software in 90 days, she realized she had no clue how to do it. And so
• 43:42
  she began just thinking from the goal, what are some possible pathways to do it? And ultimately,
• 43:48
  what came to her, and this is one thing that people don't do, I spent a lot of time advising
• 43:54
  business owners. And even when I'm sitting on a call, like I'm on with you, and I asked them to do
• 44:00
  something that takes them 30 seconds of thinking and literally 30 seconds of quiet, they don't do it.
• 44:05
  And almost every time when I say, I'm going to sit here quietly, and I want you to just think
• 44:10
  about it for 30 or 60 seconds, it's hilarious. They start getting answers. Like literally,
• 44:16
  people start coming to their mind and stuff, but they won't do that. And so I forced them to do it.
• 44:20
  But in the case of Alicia, she's sat for literally three hours. She journaled about it and thought,
• 44:24
  how could I get to a thousand in 90 days? And the idea that came to her mind again,
• 44:29
  thinking from the goal and giving herself space for meditation prayer journaling is she realized
• 44:35
  there's already software companies in my industry that serve thousands or even tens of
• 44:39
  thousands of these credit repair companies. If I just partnered with even one of these,
• 44:44
  I could probably have over a thousand of these companies using my software. She'd never had that
• 44:47
  thought. It was completely different from what she'd been thinking before. And so ultimately,
• 44:52
  within a week, she was having a conversation with a guy who owned a company called credit repair
• 44:57
  junkies. He had a software that helped these 50,000 clients with their client experience.
• 45:04
  And he actually had 8,000 clients using his software, these credit repair companies, 8,000 of them.
• 45:09
  She explained to him level up score her product. He fell in love with it. They formed a partnership.
• 45:14
  He white labeled it. And she went from 10 of these software or 10 of these companies to 8,000
• 45:19
  from one partnership literally from one partnership. But she would have never gotten there on her
• 45:24
  old thinking on her old pathways. And so she had to go from a different, the goal took her down
• 45:29
  a different path and the different partners and the different people. And it took her, you know,
• 45:34
  that that that that strategy is thinking differently. That's so powerful because yes, I think
• 45:40
  it's so funny. So the average person listening to this, they're so crazy that they would for a
• 45:48
  moment pause and think, how do I make 100 calls in 24 hours? Yeah. I mean, well, I'm going to make
• 45:57
  a thousand calls over the next 90 days. Okay. So that's 10 a day. You know, what else? You know,
• 46:02
  you got a full-time job. You got kids. How are you going to do that? They try to 10 x the current
• 46:05
  path rather than taking a 10 x goal and finding a better path. They're attached to the path.
• 46:12
  So wild. So incredibly insane that it's now impossible. So now you've got to figure it out.
• 46:18
  And I think that listen, remember, the goal is just a tool. It's just a model for disrupting
• 46:23
  your existing thinking Peter Drucker said this 50 years ago. It's just a tool. It's not something
• 46:29
  to get emotional about. It's a tool for analyzing your present, your paths and looking. I did this
• 46:33
  just barely. You're at what's what. So I was scheduled to be honest with you to do 50. I was actually
• 46:39
  scheduled to do about 70 podcasts this year. Oh my god. And guess what? I literally just unscheduled
• 46:45
  all of them, but five. One of them was yours because you're a great podcast. But like,
• 46:50
  the reason I let those go is because I wasn't dumb. If you talked to me 30 days ago, I was going to
• 46:57
  do podcasts and I was going to do a lot of keynotes. And those were related to my old type of thinking
• 47:01
  to spread a book, right? I have this new book called The Science of Scaling Out. But when you begin
• 47:06
  operating from a much bigger goal, and when you start bringing on what we call superhooves,
• 47:10
  superhooves are people that can make the 10x goal possible, they bring capability and knowledge,
• 47:15
  and they bring pathways with them that you didn't have before. So in our case, because our goal
• 47:21
  and scaling.com is to have 5,000 members and to be helping 5,000 companies scale, the easiest pathway
• 47:29
  for us to get there is to have a million people read our book or less. It doesn't have to be a
• 47:33
  million. It could be a couple hundred thousand. But because of a guy who we brought onto our team,
• 47:37
  Joseph, when he wrote a book called Don't Believe Everything You Think, he's self-published,
• 47:43
  he sold millions of copies, he's a genius. We brought him on. He's got phenomenal marketing
• 47:46
  capability. He taught us things that are going to make it 10 times easier for us to get our book out
• 47:51
  there such that I don't need to go on podcasts or do keynotes like I thought I did.
• 47:58
  We have a far more leveraged path because of the people we've brought on our team. And so our
• 48:03
  goal is going to be a lot easier to get to, plus it forces me to start letting go of the pathways
• 48:07
  I thought were relevant. And so literally last week I was seeing an event and I realized
• 48:14
  half of my schedule for the rest of this year is a waste of time. It's below the floor. Not
• 48:19
  that doing podcasts is awesome, but for me and for my goal, I can't actually spend the majority
• 48:24
  of my time doing podcasts. We actually have already developed a better pathway because of Joseph
• 48:28
  on our team where we can actually reach 10x the audience, 100x the audience without me doing podcasts.
• 48:33
  So now I have to let that go, which is hard. And I've got to go think about where is a better use
• 48:38
  of my focus, right? Because the model is frame floor focus. And so the question is where is the
• 48:43
  most important thing to focus on to hit my goal or to to move the needle? And I got to be honest
• 48:48
  that at least half of my year was going to be focused on the wrong things. And so the willingness
• 48:53
  to let go of old pathways or to even let go of old goals, you know, I used to have the goal
• 48:59
  of selling millions of copies of the books. That's no longer a relevant goal. That's optimizing the
• 49:03
  wrong thing for me and for my higher and better goals that allows me then to focus the system
• 49:09
  in a different direction and make better decisions. And people often don't want to let go of goals.
• 49:14
  I think also because people will lie to themselves and say that the goals are serving their
• 49:19
  business objectives. But I think more often than not, it's just serving their ego.
• 49:23
  You're so right. You're so right. They want that New York Times best seller or they want to
• 49:27
  have been on that show where they want to have x, y and z. And those are optimizing things that
• 49:32
  shouldn't exist. And those are actually optimizing things that are counter to their goal. And they
• 49:37
  hold them back. They literally hold them back. Is there anything that you've seen as a major
• 49:42
  indicator of lack of alignment in someone's life? Like when you think about burnout or you think
• 49:48
  about, I don't know, like some people talk about how they always get sick and they're always tired
• 49:54
  or they're just, they have so much anxiety or depression or they just hate the work they're doing.
• 49:58
  I like, what's the signal that you need to really shake up your life and and start to apply
• 50:04
  some of these ideas? I think you should anyways, but people always, it's so funny.
• 50:10
  People always sort of ignore what they have to do until
• 50:14
  usually, usually something happens. And I'm curious what that thing is. When you talk to
• 50:19
  these business owners, why do they reach out to you finally after x amount of years of
• 50:24
  not listening to your advice? You're absolutely right that people don't raise the floor. They
• 50:29
  raise their floor as they wait as long as they possibly can to raise their floor. Whether that
• 50:34
  means on bad habits, whether that means on staying in a bad job, whether that means on keeping a
• 50:39
  bad employee, whether that means, you know, again, back to the guy I talked to this morning,
• 50:44
  he said that the biggest thing he did in the last 30 days was literally let go of someone who's
• 50:47
  been on his team for 10 years, even though like it's been five years too long. And now his
• 50:54
  system has been built around this bad actor and now it's going to be a long cleanup because he
• 50:59
  waited too long. So it's pretty obvious when someone is out of alignment, when they're
• 51:07
  when they're not growing very fast, to be honest with you. When someone's not growing fast,
• 51:14
  there's something wrong. Whether they're in a business and it's growing it less than 50% a year,
• 51:21
  there's something wrong. I'll be honest with you. There's something wrong. They're either caught
• 51:25
  in the weeds. They're doing too many different things. They're distracted. They're optimizing the
• 51:29
  wrong things in a person's personal life. Again, if they're not growing quite fast and quite well,
• 51:36
  then they're stuck either in past patterns, sunk cost bias, as you've already said, fear of failure,
• 51:46
  not getting connected to a better future self. And so the most obvious thing is just if a person's
• 51:51
  stagnant, frankly, if a business, if a person or a business is stagnant, there's fundamental reasons
• 51:57
  why. And you know, back to the quote, you can't change it by fighting the existing system,
• 52:02
  right? You can't just, you know, willpower or force your way out. You need a new and better
• 52:08
  model that forces you to really start letting go of your old model, including mental models, your
• 52:13
  old identity, your old way of thinking, but also face the grips that you're on a dead end path.
• 52:19
  You're just not willing to admit it yet. And the sooner you admit it and get off that path
• 52:23
  and get onto a better path, right? You know, Guy Kawasaki was on a bad path. Like he was on a path
• 52:32
  that was that was not optimal. And he found a better vehicle, a better pathway to equal the result,
• 52:37
  if not better, the result, plus tons of other benefits. And so, but he had to let go of that path,
• 52:42
  including the identity and the dopamine of him being the one of the top speakers, etc. And he
• 52:47
  had to let, let go of all that. And you know, it's the same with the $200,000 a year lawn care
• 52:54
  person. If they want to let you know, they're on their own version of guys, guys, you know, hard path
• 53:02
  versus a much easier and a better and a more scalable path. But they're going to have to let go
• 53:06
  of the current path and model to go find the better and more more aggressive one. And then they're
• 53:11
  there. They're all over the place. Again, it's called pathway syncing. The problem for most
• 53:15
  people is they don't have a goal that forces them to go find that path. And so they just stay
• 53:19
  stagnant. Fear holds people back. Do you believe that there is a fear element in pursuing impossible
• 53:27
  goals? Do you feel like there's fear of, you mentioned maybe fear of failure? Is there a fear of
• 53:33
  becoming somebody who you don't want to become? Like, is there a fear element that you encounter
• 53:36
  when you when you speak to some of the people that come and approach you and want to work with you?
• 53:41
  Absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely. Fear is a fear is a big thing that holds people back
• 53:45
  even from small things like saying hi to a stranger, right? So yeah, but the fears are just
• 53:52
  misplaced. They're miss they're misframed. A lot of it comes down to two types of fear. One is
• 54:00
  what if I don't hit the goal, right? And so then they feel like a failure or they they define
• 54:04
  themselves as a failure, even though the goal is simply a tool to make better decisions.
• 54:09
  I myself don't think it's useful to overly attach to your identity to the achievement of a goal.
• 54:16
  I don't think that that's useful. But but the goal is a powerful tool for shaping your focus,
• 54:23
  direction, and the pathway you take, such as guy with the better path. But the the second
• 54:32
  fear that kicks in is that they don't know how to do it. And they and they do know how to do what
• 54:36
  they're currently doing, right? They know how that that that that lawn care company knows how to
• 54:41
  get 200 a year revenue. They don't know what it's going to take or who it's going to take the higher.
• 54:45
  They don't know the path to get to to the next 10x jump or whatever. And and they also know that
• 54:55
  in order to go figure that path out, they're going to have to raise their floor and start letting
• 54:59
  go of a lot of what they're now doing. And they're afraid of the consequences of that both socially
• 55:04
  and economically, they're afraid because that they don't know how they're going to make it.
• 55:08
  And and and and so they don't give themselves the the time or the energy to actually start solving
• 55:13
  the new goal, which when I gave you the elicia example of getting to thousands of software,
• 55:19
  you know, saw thousands of people using your software. Or I gave you the example of people just
• 55:23
  don't even give themselves 30 or 60 seconds to think about it, right? People don't realize that
• 55:30
  solving the goal isn't as complex as they think they just don't actually solve it. And they just
• 55:35
  anxiously fear and stay on their path and months go by and years go by and they never really
• 55:42
  actually spent the time to actually solve the goal go ask people questions about it, actually learn
• 55:46
  and figure it out. You know, what I have found in my own self is every time I've made a big big jump
• 55:58
  in my life and gone a different direction than what I was previously doing for a much bigger future,
• 56:03
  there is a challenging couple months or a year even that goes by of uncertainty. And not
• 56:10
  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
• 56:15
  don't want to deal with that that few months of that year. And so they just don't do it. And so they
• 56:19
  stay on their their path and they've just chosen their fate that they've reached their peak. They've
• 56:24
  reached a lower peak. And even though they didn't have to do that. But what I have found in myself
• 56:30
  as well as advising others is that if you actually do make the commitment and if you actually start
• 56:34
  to really work on it, you will like you will figure it out. Like it's figure outable, you know,
• 56:43
  to the idea of that quote. It will not it might look a little different. It might look scrappy for a while.
• 56:50
  But you can figure it out and find it. And going through those processes is somewhat what they
• 56:55
  call the hero's journey. You know, it's it's it's it's how you evolve to a higher plane. And it's
• 57:02
  only for people who are willing to go through that process and and and very high levels of
• 57:08
  of achievement and becoming and meaning and purpose. Victor Franco back to him said that,
• 57:12
  you know, what man needs is not attentionless state, but the striving and struggling for a worthy
• 57:16
  goal of freely chosen task, right? So that's how you get meaning. That's how you get purpose.
• 57:21
  That's how you stretch and grow. That's how you experience significance. And yeah, does it
• 57:26
  sometimes mean does it mean sometimes going through some dark tunnels? Yeah. Where do you want
• 57:30
  people to connect with you? Where do you want to send them for the books, socials, all that?
• 57:35
  Yeah, no need for socials. I would just say scaling.com forward slash audio book. We've gotten
• 57:42
  permission from the publisher to give the audio book away. Obviously, if you want to just read
• 57:46
  the physical copy, go go grab it on Amazon. But for a scaling.com forward slash audio book,
• 57:51
  you can give you can listen to the entire book for free. We actually want to give away a million
• 57:55
  copies. And so feel free to share that is a widely and abundantly as you want. We don't care.
• 58:00
  We just want people to listen to it or read it. You've given over a lot. But if you could pass on
• 58:04
  one lesson to your kids, all seven of them, one of the more important lessons that you've learned
• 58:09
  over your life that you think would maybe it's been a hard lesson that you wouldn't want someone
• 58:14
  else to learn. Or maybe just something that you think is one of the more impactful ideas that's
• 58:18
  changed change your life for your outlook. But would that lesson be the one to pass on to them
• 58:22
  and why? Yeah. So I think it really comes down to as people are future and the view we have of our
• 58:27
  future is what shapes who we are in the present, right? That includes your future self. That includes
• 58:32
  your view of God. And so, you know, Victor Frankel literally taught the same thing. It was his
• 58:37
  court thesis in Mansurge for meaning that, you know, what what human beings need is is a future
• 58:42
  and a goal. And where I see people struggle is when they stop having a big meaningful goal
• 58:48
  that stretches them and forces them to grow. And so, your futures, what shapes your present,
• 58:54
  and that also includes your view of God, obviously the afterlife, things like that,
• 58:57
  like those things shape who you are now. And so, getting really good at understanding what that
• 59:01
  means and then living in alignment with it, usually that's going to lead to good things.