Complexity is the enemy of executing. The entrepreneurs tendency is to complicate things. What happens when they do that? Our psychology is shaped by our future, but also the systems that we build is shaped by our goals. I don't think people appreciate how big that means. Because if you set proper goals, you can create simple systems that scale. 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." Well, when are you going to do it? He said, "Age 55." Well, you got 33 years to do it. I said, "What would happen if you went for it by age 30?" And so the short timeline literally forces out all false paths. Oh my gosh. And it forces out complexity. That's the point. Complexity comes from false goals. We're kept from our goal, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. Future is meant to disrupt the present. The future is meant to be the enemy of today. Impossible goals, they redefine who you are, but they also force you to define yourself. 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. A true leader actually holds a system accountable 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. Holistic time is the psychological appreciation that the past, present, and future are all happening right now. Your past is shaping your present, and your future is shaping your present. 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 to have those regular experiences every day. You start to normalize it. You start to scale. [Music] Advantage Gold is giving away a free copy of Ragoff'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 win85545 or go to advantagegold.com. Data and message rates apply. Performance may vary. You should always consult your financial and tax professional. Welcome back to the show everybody. So, my guest today, I got to tell you, I was just 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 masterclass 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. 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. It's really fun. Thank you, man. He's got a great energy, man. Thank you. So, do you by the way, he's an organizational psychologist. Uh, 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 neuvo terminology. 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 entrepreneurs tendency is to complicate things. What happens when they do that? You can't scale a complex system. It 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 uh human beings we're 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 is 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 the real lever is that it comes down to your goals and setting the right scale goal that forces you to simplify. You have a process in the book. What do you call it? The scalable something, right? Scaling framework. Framework. We might as well start with a gig 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. Yeah. So, the framework is it's a psychological model. Um, actually I call it uh 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 10x 100x 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. Great point. 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. Okay. Stay on here. Stay on. And by the way this is why I love uh 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. Frame, floor, focus. So, your frame is your goal. Yep. And when you have a better goal, it raises your floor. Yep. So, your floor is defined by what you don't do. So, Michael Porter, a strategy expert, he said he said basically strategy is what you don't do. Okay. Wow. 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. Yes, 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 y that almost everything becomes noise. This is exactly why I loved our last conversation. It's correlated to the last one too. Sure. 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 Waznjak very well. who uh was his f co-founder with him and then um 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. He's awesome. He's awesome. His personality was Henry 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 impossibility 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 goal with those deadlines. What is the difference and how does someone distinguish between the two things? So I'll give an example. There was a 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 100x her clients in 90 days. Mh. 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. Hello. And so, so it was like a it was a 800x jump in a week because she went for an impossible goal. Would you call that like asking a bigger question? Is that part of the training or 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 doortodoor selling. She was going to every single one of these credit repair companies. There's 50,000 of them. And she was knocking on 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. Um, 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. Yes. 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 it when you go for the impossible, it forces you to find much more efficient paths that you couldn't be finding otherwise. It's interesting. Again, I I reflected Jobs. I 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. Yeah. And it's him saying, "Here's what we got right here. We got this thing. It's going to be a book. You're going 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 time frame. 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 I'm manipulating time and and uh you know, caveman live 300 years. 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 time frame as well or impossible time frame, 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 time frame 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 fivestep algorithm. No. Basically his algorithm is you always want to question requirements cuz 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 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. Gotcha. And he said, well, and they started to get 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, the future is only a psychological tool to shape the present. Like um 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 a 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. Oh my gosh. And it forces out complexity. That's the point. So that's the Cuz by the way, it sounds complexity comes from false goals. Oh my gosh. Cuz that 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. Extreme frame. So the extreme, the extreme frame of him going for that impossible goal. he's gonna 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 is 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. Um you always and 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 would happen 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 had happened to his dad. That's complexity. So anytime you have multiple goals, the point of a goal is to simplify a system. Yeah. So you want one goal that essentially derails all your other goals so you can actually focus. That's brilliant. The fact that you take this off ramp because of the clearer path to the easier goal. That's brilliant. I was thinking of uh 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. Yeah. And he's such a great example of what you're describing. He's a younger guy. He 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. what had happened. He found a way to borrow this, put that together by pathways thinking pathways, right? And then it ends up being that I mean I'm I'm probably off, but I think he paid hundred million for the team and it's now probably valued at 8 or 10 billion dollar. But that's the framework in the book is how the Musks, 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, you're probably smart enough to know when something isn't working. And for me, when I'm off, even my cognitive function, I always kind of decide what's going on with my gut. So, when there's things going on, like you can't focus at work, your stomach's bothering you. It feels like you've got kind of symptoms like that. Your gut impacts everything from your digestion to your brain function and your energy levels. So, when your energy is draining, you got to ask yourself why. That's why I love Just Thrive probiotic. Just Thrive is one of the only probiotics clinically designed to arrive in your gut 100% alive. 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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, Gym Shark 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 worldclass 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 one month, $1 per month trial period and start selling today at shopify.com/milelet. Go to shopify.com/mylet. Shopify.com/mylet. How did JFK's moonshot affect your thinking for this or or or sculpted at least? So I was I admittedly I started the book with Musk. um 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 um 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. Well, think about it. they they set a goal to just achieve it by the end of the decade, which is a very lazy goal. It sounds good, but it's lazy. It's lazy. So like that's that's what often happens when someone has a 10ear goal, it's just lazy. And so if you just take the 10ear goal and move it to two or three 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 um 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 uh probably I mean there's research that shows that 10% of what a company does is effective. If you look into what NASA did yes they changed the world like they did phenomenal things. I'm not I'm not throwing shade at NASA. Yeah. Sure. Right. 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 it and so if he if he had gone for it in half the time he probably would have found a much more effective path. The thing you said in the book I 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. It's why 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 change 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 need 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? 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 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 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 is that the further, you know, the further you go in 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 is insane when you think about what you could be doing. And and if you think about sports, like it's the errors, right? It's it's it's the mistakes that lose championships. and and that error came from a lack of preparation. So, it's really it's really the errors that 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. You said something a minute ago about linear thinking and I 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 an example too 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 revenue 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 Ducker 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. Shoot. 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. God, you're really making me think. Um, 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. We always 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 linear thinking and that 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 to shape your future. 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 as things going off in my mind. I've been using the past as a reference. There's all kinds of things I could be doing. How does one begin to think about scaling beyond themselves and what are some of the key components in doing that? I think it's beautiful. So, this is the thing that actually disappointed me the most. Um, as someone who got to be around a lot of people who were heroes of mine, I I began to realize they couldn't scale beyond themselves. And so they were they were basically like the king or queen of what they were doing. Yeah. So in Jim Collins language that's level four leadership. Yes. 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 uh it forces different thinking. Um this is what a lot of people won't do. So um 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 one 10,000th of a good one. So like a good code writer saw that I just saw is worth 10,000 right? And so and there's research to back that up. So you won't get those superh 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 that their vision is too small. Yeah. And and they can't actually attract those super talents that are what make scaling possible like extreme scaling possible. And so just as an example, there was a guy who I advised. 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 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 he 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. 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's so big, I can't do this. I'm not the guy. I mean, that's when you know, that's when you know, right? That's when you know your vision's right. As I understand the story, he starts pursuing this guy Skully who's running Pepsi at the time. Yep. Right. And he can't get Scully even to 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, Jobs picks the phone up. It was in the answering machine days. and leaves Skully this voicemail. This answer 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." Y 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 he Now, as it turns out, they brought jobs back because Scully ran it into the ground at one point or the group did. 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 a 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 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 on to their company and never exited or they've exited and they're just private people. You say conviction is the currency of scaling. What does that mean and how does somebody develop it? So when you go for a true scale goal, which most companies don't, I mean most most companies aren't going for true scale once you actually go for it. So as an example, there's a guy who is a friend of mine named Mark. He has an advertising agency, okay? 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 uh 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 and there's a lot of research on this that 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 at scaling companies in like mass media, they diluted themselves um 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 3500 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 the 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 those 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. 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 a noise? Yeah. So signal means participating in it. 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, Mhm. Then people can hear it and they can they can hear it in the sea of noise. It stands out. 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. No, there can be those. Yeah. But the main signal when people think Starbucks, they don't go yogurt. They go and they're not there for that, 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 cell when someone's marketing a product. No, you can do that. It's just what are you? I think Starbucks can clearly define who they are and what they do, which is why they scale. They're the perfect example of scaling because they're they they're in the business of coffee distribution and their environment. 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% five or less. 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, for sure. 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 a 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. 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 drinklnt.com/mylet and get a free sample pack with any purchase. That's drinklnt.com/milelet. 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. Um, the CEO who says, "I'm sorry. I apologize." Uh, to me, that's accountability, right? It's a it's a huge thing. Uh, 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. Yeah. So a systems 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 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. 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. You we just go with him. Do you guys notice this? Like you just go. If I could bring in five entrepreneurs in here that are running something. They got a threeperson dry cleaners, an eight person mortgage company, a nineperson daycare, whatever they have. They want to scale and there's they're 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? I mean, the easiest place to start is always the future and 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. M. 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 Ducker. The future is there to simplify the present. It's so good. I love that quote. That's really that's the whole the whole purpose. I mean it's it's a technology. Well, you're Ro, you're reading my mind. I'm going to ask you a curveball that's not in the book and it 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. Amazing. 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's actually here now. It is. And I just wanted 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? I I love the tools. I mean, they they definitely make what used to be impossible possible, right? And so I I think they 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 a propellant. Um but a lot of people they won't 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. Okay, you guys. Is it like just so good? Right. So, you say something in the book and I've been debating it and disputing it in my mind. Let's hear it. Okay. You say a goal properly set is halfway reached. Yeah. And for me, I'm such a worker type of a dude. Like I I want to know what you mean. How do you know you have a goal 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? Yes. Okay. So, give it to us. Yeah. So and and and John Door actually was that one who originated that one. But um so a goal a goal properly says halfway reached because a goal properly set almost removes every other option. Right. And so there's I love this thinking. Yeah. It's like if you and so again John door 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 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. That doesn't actually work because all human beings are driven by goals. Of course, 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. Mh. Um, 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, um, just the final one is actually setting a bad goal, right? So, a great example of that's just Steve Balmer, 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. Yeah. 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 path. 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." I 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 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 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, at the top, you're playing against the 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 time frame. It eliminates all the crappy options is really true. I I've just had a lot of health stuff this year. You and I were talking about it 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. Yeah, I get all that. Okay, I know. I don't care. I'm going to lose 20 pounds 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. Well, here's what it did. It eliminated every part of BS thinking I could possibly come up. Should I go keto? Should I do this? I'm It like, hey, dude, your caloric restriction needs to be crazy. you need to be in the gym doing cardio a couple time, 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 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 time frame did impossible eliminated all the options. It eliminated the weird options. And you said it simplified your thinking. It focused me in on exactly what I needed to do ex as opposed to going and I know everyone's going, eh, that's so dangerous. I 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 time frame 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. Y 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 when 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 a 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 gonna throw two things at you. Sure. 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 going to let you run with it. In other words, if an entrepreneur is in here thinking, I don't am I what frame am I in? Am I in the past frame? Yeah. Am I in the current frame or am I 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. 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 and and the main insight by the way of that is that the future shapes the present and the present shapes the past. And that's a really important point. 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. 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. And if you move the goal much higher, most of what you'd be doing right now would be irrelevant, right? It'd be those wacky pathways you got to 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 and it is your responsibility in the present to reshape and redefine what it means. And it doesn't own you, you own it. I love it. And so that's holistic time. 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 were 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 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. Um, 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. This how you scale is how you scale your life. Uh every time I talk to you, I uh I 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 um uh it's a big thinker. It's a future thinker. It's a creator type thinker, not a replicator type thinker. For sure. And um I love that you back everything up with science and neuroscience. I love all of everything you do. And I already know I'm going to get messages from my most successful business friends listen to this and 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 is 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 uh things that are acceptable in my life that don't need to be that really are unacceptable. So, thank you. You're awesome. Ed, speaking honestly, you are one of the funnest people to talk to. You serve it up so fun and so e just easily and you just you just you have powerful energy. So just 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 uh Benjamin's 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. 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