The Science of Scaling with Dr. Benjamin Hardy - Part 2 | #Success - Ep. 103

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What's up everybody? I hope you guys enjoyed the last episode with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, the first part of The Science of Scaling. This next episode is the, the exciting conclusion of this presentation, these presentations that he gave while he was at Mastermind Paradise. He'd just written the book Science of Scaling. He was talking about the science behind how to scale our businesses. And it's such a fascinating, timely thing. And I hope you guys really enjoy the part 2 of this presentation from Dr. Benjamin Hardy.

This is the Russell Brunson Show. One of the things that I also wanna actually say is that when you come to environments like this, you guys are in Cancun, you're out of your environment, This is what's called an enriched environment. The purpose of an enriched environment is to transform you, but it's your choice. You can keep bringing your old environment back in and being distracted. The purpose of this environment, which Russell has engineered and which you all came here for, was to come and walk away different, with a different model, a different reality, a different— I hope it wouldn't be just a different tactic. I would hope you would come with a different future, which leads to a different strategy. And then from there, the tactics can, can, you can select those tactics. So let me go into the science on impossible goals. So this is the definition in the literature. It's called stretch goal. This is both in the management and the psychological literature. This is an article by Dr. Sim Sitkin at Duke. Phenomenal. He researches such really, really good things. He says, we define a stretch goal as an organizational goal with an objective probability of attainment that may be unknown. So the objective probability of attainment is unknown, but it is seemingly impossible given your current capabilities, which are your current practices, your current skills, your current knowledge. So a stretch goal is an impossible goal which you don't know how to solve, whether it's $100 million, $100 million in 3 years, whether it's $5 million, $10 million, whatever your impossible goal is, it's one you don't know how to do. A lot of people So Dan Sullivan, who's one of my dear friends, who I wrote 3 books, he says, Ben, everyone wants confidence, almost no one wants courage. Everyone wants confidence in the beginning. They want assurance. I'm not going to set the impossible goal because I don't know how to do it. I want assurance, Ben. Okay, so you want confidence, you don't want courage, so you can't have confidence. You can have confidence in your past. You can't build confidence towards the future. Courage, commitment, courage are how you start to build that knowledge, those capabilities. It's how you start to find and filter for those pathways. It's how you start to build real confidence. Confidence is earned. People want confidence right now. I'm not going to set that goal because I don't know how to do it. I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know how— okay, cool. So this is Dr. Denise Rousseau. Because stretch— oh, this is super important. This is super important. So because stretch goals involve extreme redefinitions, and by the way, I will let Russell's team share my slides. You can have these slides, so you can keep taking pictures if you want to send them to people, but you can have these slides. Also, you know, I have a link that takes you straight to the audiobook of The Science of Scaling. You can have that too. My publisher actually told me I could give it away for free, so I want all of you to listen to it. So you can have these slides. So let me read this 'cause this is super important. It says, because stretch goals involve extreme, not minor, extreme redefinitions of what an organization is capable of being or achieving, they can capture, shift, and refocus attention. Everything I've been talking about with frame is about where's your attention? What are you focusing on? Where's the, where's the signal versus the noise, right? So these goals that I'm talking about, they require you to redefine yourself rather than being this or these 50 things. You're this, you do this for this person, right? In the book Relentless by Tim Grover, he was talking about Kobe Bryant and Kobe Bryant says, I do this. I give out numbers. I get triple doubles. You know, he didn't say I do 50 things. He said I do this. The impossible goal forces you to define yourself more clearly to the marketplace so that you stop being— so that you stop being noise. If you're doing 5 different things, you're noise. No one can see you. They can see the person speaking clearly and honestly and truthfully. If you're, if you're doing too many different things, what that says is that you're not clear on your future, you're hedging your bets, you're pursuing impossible, or you're pursuing lesser goals, and you're, you're not committed. The quotation continues, according to Denise Russo, where performance expectations are elevated well beyond the limits of past experience and where previously successful frameworks are questioned, revised, or discarded. Prior experience is often a poor guide to stretch goal achievement, and this shifts the performer's attention away from old routines and assumptions towards novel and creative approaches. Those are pathways. So until you go for the impossible goal that redefines you, you're not going to be filtering or finding the pathways and the partners that could take you to 10x or more in less than 3 years. This is the thing that I, I've seen even for companies doing hundreds of millions. You can 10x in less than 3 years. Some companies, some people who have talked to me and read 10x Is Easier Than 2x, they walked up to me and said, Ben, I read that book and I 52x'd my company in the last 2 years. So you can do this, but it's not going to be on your current path. You can take aspects of your current path, but we got to find the crux. We got to have a simple system. We got to be more defined, clear, and more better defined. So your goal shapes your psychology, your goal shapes the system you build. This is just— and I'm not going to go too deep into it, we're going to move into one or two more case studies, and then I'm going to give you guys some time. We're going to listen to some Taiko, we're gonna do some journaling, we're gonna do some Q&A. But this is just— this is a really good book on systems theory, systems dynamics, and it's all about how you can build a system that's based on the wrong thing. Actually, they call it Goodhart's law. Goodhart's law in statistics is basically the idea that you get what you're optimizing for. You— and the problem happens when you start optimizing for inputs rather than outputs. What I mean by that is when you're optimizing for, I need to do this thing, right? I need to go on this path. Right? And so what it says at the bottom is, it says, be especially careful— this is the last sentence on this page— be especially careful not to confuse effort with result, or you will end up with a system that is producing effort, not result. Right? So, Goodhart's Law is the idea that your system is going to give you exactly what you tell it to give you. The problem is, you might be optimizing for the wrong thing. You might be optimizing for something that's generating a lot of movement, but not a lot of progress. Think about it. All of you have spent a lot of the last 12, 36 months doing a lot of things. What is the system optimizing for, right? You have a bigger goal, you shape a different system, you could get 10x or 100x the results. So this is further Dr. Richard Ramelt. He says, having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does. Even Michael Porter, Dr. Michael Porter at Harvard, who invented the field of competitive strategy back in the '80s, said that strategy is essentially what you don't do. Steve Jobs said the same thing about focus. Strategy is scarcity's child, and to have a strategy rather than vague aspirations is to choose one path and eschew others. Unfortunately, good strategy is the exception, not the rule. And he further actually said that you can— no good strategy when it surprises you. When you see something that's surprising and not expected— I'm not saying that's always good strategy, but where you see something, uh, where good strategy is, the unexpected will happen because they're going a different way. I remember when I let go of my YouTube channel about a year and a half ago, and people were like, man, I watched YouTube every day, how can you do that? I said, because it's bad strategy towards my future self. It's not going to get me to my goal. It's a dead-end path for me. It might not be a dead-end path for you, but for the goal that I had, it was a dead-end path. Even if I scaled that pathway up 100x and I had 10 million YouTube followers, it would not deliver me the result I wanted. It would be the optimizing of something that shouldn't exist. And so I surprised my audience and I surprised people and I walked away from that and I walked away from other things, even my collaboration with Dan. Because they were dead-end paths to my much higher frame, it became below the floor. This might be a gut punch for some of you, maybe not. So Jim Collins said, just because something is your core business, just because you've been doing it for years or decades, doesn't mean you could be the best in the world at it. If you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business absolutely cannot form the basis of a great company. Good is the enemy of great. So oftentimes you have, and I'm not saying this is true of everyone, but often you're, you're holding onto the old wave and you're unwilling to jump to the new wave, which requires a new identity, a new psychology, new strategy. This is Alicia Alt. I know that some of you have heard her story on the audiobook Time Is a Tool, but just to make her story simple, Alicia for 20 years had a coaching company in the credit space. She's, by the way, just like one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. So she had a coaching company in the credit space, and she would work one-on-one with people, helping them improve their credit scores so that they could achieve financial goals like getting a house or getting out of certain bad situations with their credit. And she invented this technology called LevelUp Score. She wanted to do it for 10 years before she did anything about it, but 10 years later, she finally made the technology. So in 2019, She partnered with a who, and by the way, if you want to get much faster progress, you want to get a who rather than requiring yourself to do all the how. If you're still requiring yourself to do everything, you're not going to scale. You need really good partners, and the bigger the goal, the better partners you'll need. I'll show you that in a second. But in her case, she partnered with a who, who created the software LevelUp Score, and this software was game-changing for the credit space. This is the only technology that if I'm someone who wants to improve my credit, I tell them first my goal. Here's what I want. I want a $200,000 loan so I can get a house. And here's— then I input my data and it gives me my credit score and my goal, and it says, here's the path. And it's actionable, it's tailored, it gives you vetted resources, here's good credit cards, etc. It gives you an algorithmic good path based on your current credit and your current goal. Nothing like this exists in the credit space. Instead, there are 50,000 credit repair companies in the United States, 50,000 credit repair companies in the United States that are very expensive and that don't give you tailored guidance. So she created a simple technology that does that, but she did this back in 2019 and she's very busy in her coaching business. She's got a bunch of kids and she can't do it because she's too busy. So it wasn't until last year that she finally decided to focus on this because she knew that this could scale. Her coaching one-on-one business never could. And this was something that could actually make a big impact in the whole world. It might even change an entire field. But she loves those clients. She loves her clients so much that if she focuses on this, what does that mean for the clients that she loves? Would she be betraying them? In order to do something that might change an industry? And so anyways, she started to focus on this and she called those 50,000 credit repair companies one by one, one-on-one cold calls, and she explained LevelUp Score and every one of them said, I love it, we're going to use it, and they create a partnership and they each got a few bucks every time that someone would use this and do an output. We then started to talk to Alicia. She learned frame, floor, focus, and we said, this goal is— you need a scale goal, Alicia. You We need you to have a goal that's going to get you to stop doing most of your current process. We need you to have a goal that's going to allow you to focus on this company and scale it because it's really important. And we want you to scale this company. And so she said, okay, I'm going to go for 100 companies using this software. 100 of those 50,000 are going to use my software in the next 90 days. And she realized that that was a cop-out. That was a, that was not an impossible goal. That was a goal that allowed her to keep cold calling people out of fear. That was a goal that allowed her to stay busy on her existing path. And so what happened was she said, okay, I'm going to set a real impossible goal. I'm going to go for 1,000 of these software companies using LevelUp Score in 90 days. And then it hit her like a ton of bricks that she didn't know how to do it. She knew how to get to 100 because all she could do was cold call, and that would take her 100 hours. It would take a long time on top of her full-time practice, on top of getting her kids to school, on top of going to church. She would make those 100 calls. Once she moved the goal to, I'm gonna have 1,000, I'm gonna go from 10 to 1,000 in 90 days, she had to sit on it and she had to think about it, pray about it, journal about it. This is a really good quote from Buckminster Fuller. He says, you don't change things by fighting the existing reality. Fighting the existing reality means you're taking the present, you're trying to like force it into the future. That's not how you change. Instead, you have to have a new model that makes the old model obsolete. That new model is your future. Peter Drucker said this, a lot of people said this. You need a future that allows you to simplify your present, allows you to raise your floor, allows you to be a little bit more honest with yourself, allows you to make powerful moves that maybe you've been thinking about for a long time, or maybe that you weren't even aware. So what happened back to Alicia? Was that when she moved the goal from, from 100 of these companies using her software to 1,000, she couldn't get there with her old path. She couldn't make 1,000 cold calls in 90 days. It was a physical impossibility. So she had to find a better path, and she had to find different people. Rather than going straight to the credit repair companies, she needed to say, what's a different path? What's a different way to get 1,000 of these credit repair companies using my software rather than 100. And when you think from the goal, remember, when the goal is bigger, it allows you to filter the present better. And so when the goal is bigger, it forces you to find different paths and different people, different partners, right, that you can't find, that you won't find from a linear small goal. And so from that better goal— and remember, the purpose of the goal is to be a tool. To allow you to find better paths. She then realized there are already other software companies, and she did not think about this before. She only thought about this when thinking from the goal. Your goal shapes how you even think about life. It shapes how you filter, how you frame, right? And so she thought, there are other software companies in the credit space that not only have thousands of clients, they have tens of thousands of clients of these, of these credit repair companies. What if I just partnered with one of them? Again, rather than needing 1,000 fish, what if I just partnered with one of these software companies that already serves thousands of these? I only need one fish and I need one partner. That's a better path. That's a more leveraged path. Finding one who that's worth 1,000. There's a book on that called The 80/20 Individual, which I wish I had read when I wrote 10X Is Easier Than 2X. So one who can get you to your goal, I call those super whos. So she then a week later was having a conversation with a guy who has a company called Credit Repair Junkies. That man with his software helps improve the client experience for 8,000 of these credit repair companies. It's a software. She explained to him LevelUp Score. He fell in love with it, said this is going to change the game. They formed a partnership. He merged it in large part with his technology and boom, in one week she went from 10 of these credit repair companies using LevelUp Score to over 8,000 using that software. That's called strategy. That's called pathways thinking. That's called— right? Cheer for Alicia. Cheer for this beautiful, amazing woman who was willing to do that. You will hear in my interview, it's on Time Is a Tool, it's on the audiobook. I interview her. You can hear her voice, her prayers, the things that she did. She said, just a kind soul, but she $800 extra business in a week by better strategy. And she did sell her coaching practice that she loved. She let go of her beautiful clients, which she loved, so that she could scale. Most people aren't willing to do that. Most people are committed to their existing model. They're not willing to actually scale. What I'm saying is, if you choose to scale, it will require you, yes, to let go of your existing model. Not all of it, maybe some of it. It will force you back to that thing that Jim Collins said, to become great. It'll force you to get really, really good at what you do and to do something very important that no one else is doing. And it's far more defined, far more specific, less general, less complex. It'll force you to do something maybe you don't think you can do. That's what happens when you let the future shape the present, is you start to transform. You start to become a different person. You start to develop capabilities and skills that people in the past would have never thought you would do. They would have never thought that you could become that person. Doesn't really matter. It's just a tool. So to the idea of super who's, and then we're going to go to fairly shortly some exercises. This is a book written by Reed Hastings. He invented, um, well, he, they bought Netflix. And then they scaled it, right? They bought it essentially when it was like competing against Blockbuster and it was like little red things on the outside of Walgreens. He bought it and it was not doing well. And then they scaled it. What he basically says here, and again, you get these slides. If you, if you look at the top paragraph, he says, I had a choice. Well, yeah, he said I had a choice. I could hire 10 or 25 average engineers. And he was talking about they were very low on cash. It was not looking good. He said, I could hire 10 or 25 average engineers, or I could hire one rock star and pay significantly more than I would pay the others if necessary. Since then, I have come to see that the best programmer doesn't add 10 times the value. She adds more like 100 times the value, right? Like I said, they actually call this the power law. It's similar to the 80/20 principle. The power law is, is that the very few almost create all the results. In the S&P 500, there's 7 companies that account for the majority of the US economy, or a lot of, a lot of the US economy, right? And so when it comes to scaling, right, Alicia was looking for the wrong people until she went and applied the power law and got one person that got her $8,000, right? So what, and it's in this same quote, right? He actually quotes Bill Gates. I steal the quote and I make it easier to read. Bill Gates said a great software writer is worth 10,000 times more than an average software writer. That's the power law. Some companies generate 10,000x an average company. Some writers sell 10,000x an average writer, right? Some ads perform 10,000x an average ad, right? And so the question is, are you filtering and applying the power law, or are you being linear and doing a lot of things that are average, right? In order to scale, You've gotta apply that power law, which is exactly what Alicia did. Her goal required her to apply the power law and find a better path and find very super whos, not just a regular who, someone that creates 10,000x the results of just a regular who. Now you don't need 1,000 super whos. You might need 1 or 2, but those 1 or 2 are going to change your business. They're gonna change your trajectory. And one of the things that really stops people is, is that they need to be that center. They need to be the center of the business. And so because of that, they can't, they can't get those super whos. Because those super whos are partners. They change the game. They make 10x, 100x, 1000x results doable because they bring the pathways with them. This is a really good book by John Doerr. He's a, a billionaire venture capitalist, but he said a goal properly set is halfway reached. The reason for that, back to Alicia, is because the goal properly set forces out the dead ends. It forces out the complexity, it forces out the lesser goals, and it forces you to be more honest, and it forces you to find only those pathways that can scale. Forces you to create a better model, forces you to become more defined. To the point of defined, and this is my last bit before I give you guys a few journal prompts when we do some Q&A. This is Mark Young. Mark Young has an advertising agency called Jekyll and Hyde Advertising. He is incredible. I love Mark Young. He would, he, he would love this room, right? He's, he's big into advertising and marketing. So he's been in business for 30 years. Jekyll and Hyde has been in business for 30 years. They do $20 million in revenue, or they did when he read The Science of Scaling. What he realized when he read The Science of Scaling is, is that they had fallen below the floor and that they had become diluted in their focus. What Jekyll and Hyde is, is they are the best in the world and maybe even the only solution in the world that can get physical products like this into stores like Walgreens, right? They can get watches, paste, whatever. They are really good at getting physical products into retail stores. Walmart, Walgreens, et cetera, and then scaling those products through mass media, which is television advertising. They are so good at that that honestly, he said that there's really not even a plan B for people who really want to do that. The problem for Mark is this: he got caught in a lot of FOMO. He said he heard that the world's going digital, right? And so they better leverage their bet or hedge their bets and start offering different services like Amazon ads or social media ads. And so they began offering a multitude of different services, which diluted their focus, but also went away from their core philosophy of business. They stopped being signal. They started to become confusing. And so when he read this, he realized that we had, we'd created complexity in our business. We'd created diluted focus. And our clients, many of our clients who are below the floor don't even know what we really offer. So he went to his clients and he said, like, one of his clients was on an Amazon Ads, um, campaign and he was on a retainer, $4,000 a month. And Mark went to that person and he said, I want to apologize to you. We offered you a lesser service because you asked for it. But if you go down this path, your business is not going to succeed. That was our fault, not yours. We're sorry. We were unclear on who we were, and therefore we offered you a bad path. And we did it because you asked for it. But we don't offer that anymore. We're getting rid of these services. This is who we really are. We're going to help you take your, you know, your eye wax, your ear wax or whatever product, and we're going to help you get it into Walgreens and Walmart. And we're going to help you scale this thing rather than from doing $300,000 a year to $300 million a year. But in order to do that, you have to bring us a lot more money and you gotta be a lot more committed to this. And if you wanna stay on your bad path, then this is where we go different ways. And we're sorry that we got you in this situation. He took ownership. Remember accountability in the system because his goal was when, what happened was, and I apologize, before he did that, he actually set the impossible goal. That's what allowed him to get clear again. It took him 30 years to get to $20 million. He decided, I'm gonna get to $100 million, which is a 5x in less than 3. But again, like, that's a radical change. Like, it took 30 years to get here and all of a sudden— so he said, I'm gonna get to $100 million in 3 years. And so it was by doing that that he realized the only way they could get there was with their focused path of becoming truly the best in the world at what they do, getting physical products into stores and scaling them through mass media, not doing what everyone else is doing in the red ocean. They're going to go a different way. And so with that honesty and integrity, first with his team, first with himself, then with his team, then with his clients, he then began to strip out the stuff that was below the floor and tell his clients that were below the floor, either you come up here to this service, which is literally 100x more expensive, and we'll take your success rate up infinitely, or we just gotta go our separate ways and you can go work with someone else. Here's some really good referrals. You can go work with these people. They offer those services. In less than 2 months of raising his floor and fully defining themselves as a business, they had pipeline business of over $50 million and, and business that wasn't there before because he wasn't filtering for it. And he said, Ben, I am mad at myself because we, we stopped looking for that business. We stopped looking for it, right? You get what you're looking for. And so within 2 months, they had a pipeline of $50 million revenue. He's a race car driver. He said that's already in the windshield. Like, he's like, it's done. He's like, we're going to be at $50 million revenue in about 3 or 4 months. And he said, and he said, my $100 million goal in 3 years was a small goal. He said, we're going to be there in about 12 to 18 months. Because he's willing to define himself. He's willing to reduce the complexity and the dilution. He was willing to build a focused model and to own it, and it becomes signal, not noise. Is this making sense? Does this make sense? You guys can do this. This is the science of scaling. This is— you can, you can absolutely do it, but you'd have to have the goal to do it. If you don't have a goal to do it, you're not going to probably get there. All right, 30 minutes until lunch. I'm going to give you a few exercises and then just answer a few questions and we'll call it. Is that cool? Let's kick on some Tycho. Pull out your journals. We're going to rip just a few questions. I'm going to throw a timer on my phone. I'm going to just— I invite you to be fast with these. Again, you get the slides. I'm going to just give you a few minutes. Just don't overcomplicate it. Just write down what comes to your mind. Bullets, scratch. Just allow yourself to use this as a tool. So this is the first set of questions. I'm just going to throw out the full set and give you 2 minutes to answer these. Where are you still operating linearly in your life? That means letting the past shape the present and future. In what ways are you letting your past define you and your goals? What are you still optimizing which shouldn't exist? Whoops. So we'll just stick with that. Give yourself 2 minutes on those questions. And I love the quote from Alcoholics Anonymous, all progress starts by telling the truth. Just, just, just write this for yourself. No one else is involved. Just, just write this down, whatever comes to your mind. All right, I'm gonna kind of go quick, but these are just primers for you. Next questions. Let me give you guys 2 minutes on these questions as well. We're gonna go through actually multiple series of questions. So I actually want you to go back just thinking about transforming your past, reframing your past. I actually want to give you guys a second and think back on where you were in 2020. Now that's a very different question. I want you to go back and just look at these questions, going back to, you know, right at the beat, like the peak of like just the pandemic. What are the biggest changes in your life and in you since 2020? Be specific. Most important experiences you've had in the last 5 years. Most important growth and learning. This is always a fun one. How would your 2020 self think about your life right now? Just mess with that for 2 minutes. 2 minutes. What's different between now and 2020? Most important growth and experiences. What would shock your past self if they saw it? All right. Same thing, but only 90 days ago. I'm gonna go back 90 days, say March of 2025. Actually go back. What the heck was going on in March of 2025? I know that takes a second to think about. Whoa, what happened? Where were you in March of 2025? What are the biggest changes that have happened in the last 90 days in yourself, your life? Biggest forms of progress, biggest forms of learning, maybe where you've raised your floor and let go of certain things, maybe where you've generated pathways. I don't know. What's happened in the last 90 days, but also what would your past self 90 days ago think if they could see a few of the things that have happened? Is there anything that's happened in the last 90 days that your past self would have thought were impossible? Just give yourself about 2 minutes to really think on what happened in the last 90 days. Take one more minute. Remember, it takes agency in the present to elevate the value of the past. You actually have to think about it. You can't just— I can't think of anything now. It's like, what actually happened in the last 90 days? There's some important things that have happened that are crucial, but we gotta mine that gold. What actually has changed in the last 90 days that's, that's very important in your life and in your business? There's a lot there. There's very important things that have happened in the last 90 days. Monumental things have happened for you in the last 90 days. What were those things? Okay, so using the future as a tool— just do this as a tool. Don't get stressed about it. Don't get freaked out about it. I want you to think about an impossible goal for yourself. Remember, it's just a tool. It's even just a draft. You don't have to get stuck to it. You don't have to commit to it. But what would a scale goal be for your company? Either taking your existing goal and making it 10 or 100x bigger, or taking a massive timeline of 8, 10, 12, 15 years and moving it to 2 or 3. That's your choice, right? Either make your goal bigger or make the timeline shorter, or do both. Sometimes you can keep the goal, right? Xavier's was $100 million. He just moved it forward, right? So I want you to make an impossible goal for yourself just for the sake of filtering and using it as a tool. Mess with that for a minute. Oh wait, and then basically after you've decided that, think about what goes below the floor, and based on that future, what would an efficient model and path be, including super who's? I'm gonna give you 2 minutes. Just think about that. This is called strategy. All right, last set of questions. Hope you guys like journaling. I think it's very powerful, personally. All right, I told you guys the crux of scaling is raising your floor. This is the hardest part because people are empathetic. We get attached to things we love. We even get attached to things we know are mediocre. We do, but we don't let them go. The crux of scaling is raising your floor. The crux of going from amateur to professional is raising your floor. The difference between Steph Curry and some basketball player you don't know is that Steph Curry's floor is much higher. He consistently performs at the level that the other player gets there like once every 30 games. The next 90 days operating from a different future, a better future. What would you eliminate in the next 90 days operating from your future, not your past? What would you elevate or renegotiate? Sometimes it's not all about eliminating, it's sometimes just about renegotiating, raising the floor and the responsibility and how things operate in certain relationships. What's the scariest thing you're considering raising the floor on? Just take 2 minutes to think about what's below the floor, creating complexity in your life and business, stopping, honestly, keeping you a little bit more stagnant, keeping you a little bit more stagnant than you'd like to admit, stopping you from creating a better path and a model. This is the, this is the crux of the matter is raising the floor. Most people I've found either unwilling to do this or delay doing this for too long, and they miss the waves that life gives them, and they stay on a wave for too long because they're not willing to let go of what they— the, the majority of what they're doing. So you miss the waves of transformation, which each wave would require a different you, a more elevated, more evolved version of you. Take 90 seconds on this. Take like 40 more seconds. Radical honesty and transparency with yourself, at least about what's below the floor. Or if you're operating more from a better future, what would become a dead end? There's a really good book on this called Quit by Annie Duke. Annie Duke talks about how the amateur poker players play a lot more bad hands Whereas the pros fold the bad hands very quickly. The sooner you can fold the dead ends and find the better paths, the faster you grow. What's below the floor that is ultimately a dead-end path? Sunk cost bias says that just because you've invested in this path doesn't mean you need to keep investing in it, but often people keep investing in a dead-end path. Just as a final little story, and then we'll go to Q&A for like 20 minutes, and then we'll call it maybe 15 or 20 minutes. We'll just see what happens. Um, if you have a question, I don't know how they're going to find you. Um, but I was talking to Phyllis, who's here. Phyllis, where's Phyllis? Amazing. You can sit, but love you. You're amazing. Phyllis came up to me when I was eating, and she said, Ben— and again, to the idea of good strategy is surprising. She said it was amazing that you let go of writing books with Dan Sullivan and doing your YouTube channel, and then all of a sudden you had scaling.com, right? Like it was a total transformation. She's like, that was crazy. I was not expecting that, right? Um, I didn't know I was going to create that, but when you start operating from a future, right? A.G. Lafley said that strategy is knowing where to play and how to win, right? And so often when your goal is really big, there's very few pathways to get there. Sometimes you have to buy very expensive domains, right? Like, seriously, like, because you're playing the game at that level, you're redefining a game, right? The new model makes the old models obsolete. And so the reason I share that is if you raise your frame and your floor, it will make your focus path better and more excellent and more clear and more defined and more powerful than even you currently think you can do it. And you'll start to build a team of super-whos that shock you. It's very doable. I'm telling you guys, you can do this. I love what Tony said. He said this at the bottom of his foreword. He said, this is not a book about scaling. It's a book about becoming the kind of person and building the kind of organization that can't help scale. I can say that if you apply this concept of frame, floor, and focus, you will scale. You have to let the future shape the present. You have to be honest about what's below the floor and what's creating complexity. You've got to create a focused path, and that takes work. As Steve Jobs said, you have to work really hard to get your thinking clean, to make it simple, but once you do, you can move mountains. You can do this. Guys, thank you so much. Thank you. I'm getting some waves. Thank you. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. Let's take like 17 or 18 minutes and let's do some Q&A. Who's got questions? Okay, we got a few. I'm just going to let Russell's team take care of this. Here are the whos. Hey Ben, I'm Joel. So grateful to have you back again. So were you here last time? I was here 2 years ago with you. Yeah, that's right. So I really resonate with Xavier because we're about the same, $2.5 mil, want to get to $100 mil. I'm 29, but I first initially set my goal for $100 mil by 40. And then 6 months ago I cut it down to 35. After hearing this, I'm like, okay, that's still too far. That's 6 years away. But I think the biggest challenge I have is how do I align? Because I feel like if I did 1 year or 2 years, I don't think my brain can like— So do it 3. Give yourself 3. Do 3, okay. Give yourself 3. Okay. Use it to really look at everything you're doing and solve how do we build a $100 million company and who do we need? Just use it as a tool. Give yourself 3. Thank you. We're here, man. Sure. Let's give everyone a round of applause. These questions are awesome.

Ben, Dominic sat next to you on the bus. Very awesome.

That was fun. Thank you for the, what's it called again? Hydrogen. Hydrogen. Yeah. He gave me some. I'm on the bus with him and he's like giving me powders and potions and things like that. It was awesome. Thank you for the hydrogen. You're all great. Yeah, for sure.

A little bit of vulnerability because I think that's important. 2023, rocket ride of a year. You know, we had our best year ever. I got to speak on stage at Funnel Hacking Live, one of the absolute like joys and, you know, most pleasurable things in my life, right? To be able to do that and inspire people. And then 2024 happened. It was like the year of how not to scale, how not to do what Ben Hardy talks about, how to stay stagnant and just, you know, slowly die inside. And for me, it was interesting. Removing the people that were not there to 10x and 100x was really the key, but I didn't even have the energy to do it because I had health problems that I wasn't even aware of. And so I went and did blood testing and found out I was messed up. And so I guess my question is, obviously a 100x goal and a 10x goal is really important. But do you have different 10x and 100x goals for, you know, you, Ben, right? You, the author, you, the spirit, right? You're a human. Do you have a 10x goal for your family? Do you have one for your business? And then the— sorry, I'm talking so much. The second question is, how do you align the other people with that? Because sometimes it seems absolutely, you know, batshit. To be honest.

That's beautiful. Good question. Uh, I definitely have higher order goals than even my business. Obviously my wife's here. Sure. We are very oriented toward a similar future, um, which we're using to shape our present. And then from there, you know, I have goals that fit within that bigger game. And so, um, but I don't have like 50 sets of 10x goals. I have a big future, very spiritual, shaping my present, shaping my family. And then from there, I continuously elevate my business goals, right? Business is just one thing, one aspect of my life. But one thing that people mess up with business is that they make, yes, business is personal. Like even the things that Russell was saying was very true that a lot of why you're here is 'cause you resonate with Russell. And so do I, I love Russell and it's very, he's very unique compared to other places. So business can be personal and it is personal, But at the same time, a business also is a system that has a goal. And sometimes you have to make hard moves for the business to achieve a new goal. And it doesn't have to be personal. You know, for, for Tom, the example I gave, it wasn't personal that he let go of half of his C-suite or 40 of those franchises. It wasn't personal. It was just that they were no longer going the same direction. And he is the leader was taking that company into a different direction. And the natural byproduct of that was that a lot of people didn't want to go in that direction. So it wasn't personal, but he was making the right move for that system and for business. Right. And business has a different goal than friendship, even though you can have friends in your business, very good friends, it has a different goal. So I think that sometimes we let, uh, we let certain things get in the way of actually taking a business where it could go. And if you, you know, if you really think about economics in the country, um, growth is important. Like, the reason we're here and blessed the way we are is because, you know, the US and other countries, like, it scaled, it grew, and they made hard decisions. They left Europe, right? I know that there's lots of, like, complexity there, but they had to let go of a lot of things, right? Yeah. So Yeah. Thank you so much. I assume, I don't know where it's going. I'm not, I'm not really, you guys don't look at me.

Sorry.

I was just going to let them go where they go. I, um, the story about the guy that wanted to have the European soccer club, hold it up a little bit. The European soccer club. It sounded to me that when you move the goal up or challenge that it was more like a pipe dream for him. He didn't really know if that's what he really wanted. And I'm like, so my question is, how do you really know? Because it's scary to think, oh my gosh, I'm gonna go from here to there. And like his story, I really didn't think that was really a goal for his— him after you challenged like that. So how do you know? Beautiful insight. Very, very true. It questioned, is it really a goal? Right? And that's between him and himself. Right? I can't say if he should commit to it. Commitment isn't a one-time event. It's a continuous process, right? Your commitment increases as you start to really think about something, as you start letting go of the things that are counter to it. Every time you raise your floor and strip something out, your commitment raises to the new frame or to the new future. So it's not like he has to like get all in committed right now, but as he really begins to process it, you know, if you think about your own selves, there have been goals or things in your mind that really shaped a lot of the direction of your life. Right? There was, you know, an idea in your head or a goal that really moved you forward in various ways, right? Many of the things I now do are because of a goal, right? And so these things can move you forward and they can get you through very dark times. But just to the point, I think you're right. I don't know if it was a real goal. Even with Xavier, $100 million, I don't think it was a real goal until I moved it to 3 years and they started solving it and figuring out how to do it. And so now that forces him to say, do I really want the PhD and run the firm, or do I really want to do this? It really forces you to start to get honest with yourself. So it's great. Let's, let's cheer for this here. Yeah, I don't know where the mic is.

Hey Ben, so my name is Tyler Watson. I am intrinsically more of an artist. I don't like to grow the business, any of that stuff. I just love my craft.

It's beautiful.

So I guess my question is, is as a really hardcore just artist forced into marketing business, you're here though.

I've been in the force of myself for years.

How or what would you say in 10x-ing a goal? Because to me, it's like my wife loves the numbers and loves me making money. But for me, I don't really care about that at all. Like, zero care about it, how do you get the motivation or 10 or 100x something that like for me, I'm just, I just want to go help people and change the world and do that. So is that, do you just switch what your focus is on more on impact base? How can you merge the two to where you can still find the motivation?

I think that often we go too much either/or, right? You're here because you need to learn business or else your art's going to fail. And so the either/or is going to— is, is, is tough, right? In order for your art to thrive and for you to continue to get better at your art, you also need to get good at business. Otherwise you're going to be a starving artist and it's going to be a tough situation. I give a really good example of this in the book, in Chapter 1, a woman who's a phenomenal photographer. And what she did was she, she wanted to create a simple business. She was a photographer doing like 30 different forms of photography, optimizing for a bunch of stuff that was good, not great. But she was actually like a really world-class photographer, but she was doing way too many things. And then she decided, I'm going to, you know, her in her case, she got an average commission of $8,000 per piece. She'd have someone come in, take a photo, photograph, beautifully frame it, put on the wall, $8,000, very high end. What she did was she raised her floor in an impossible way. And she, she wanted to have her average piece be like, you know, $15,000 or $20,000, right? And she'd never charged that much for a piece, but it forced her to become more specific in her art. Rather than doing 15 different types of photography, she actually had to become an artist. She actually had to figure out, how do I offer something that's so unique, so different, so incredible that someone would pay $20,000 for this? And so it forced her to actually become more specific. It forced her to become a better artist. It forced her to have a much better path and process, which she loved. And it forced her to start finding different people that she could serve with her art. You know, you don't have to do that. I'm just saying art and business don't have to go against each other. For me, I'm sharing with you innovative psychological models that I invented, right? To me, this is art, but it's also economics and business, and those things are really awesome. And growth in business can improve your art. So that's really how I look at it. I just think, you know, back to the quote from Wendy Russo or Dr. Denise Russo, the stretch goal forces you to redefine yourself, but it also forces you to let go of old assumptions, models, beliefs. And even identities that got you here but can't get you to the next level of growth. And so you might have a really big attachment and a goal to being seen as an artist or being seen, you know, and maybe going for scale would force you to go from amateur to pro. Not saying that you're not already a pro, but I'm just saying it might force you to a level of art that you didn't know you could do, a level of innovation and direction that right now you're not thinking about. That could be, it could, it could take you from good to great. That's what it would invite you to do. So thank you. I hope that helps. I've grappled with it. Trust me. Yeah. I grappled with that 10 years ago.

Hey man, over here.

Hey. And I have like 6 minutes left, guys. Hey, my name is Manny.

Um, so you said something very interesting. You said the difference between first world and third world is accountability.

As the system, the economic system and structure. Right. That's what he said, not me. The one who creates those. Right.

And then you also went on to say that when you see low accountability, you see a broken system. Now, if you extrapolate this over to entrepreneurship, most entrepreneurs, at least when you are the founder to CEO, there is no accountability. You are the one at the top of the tree and that's about it.

Correct.

That's a bad system.

That's a bad system. So what—

that's a king and a dictatorship. So they need some sort of external accountability to solve this problem. It's tough because you become an entrepreneur because you want freedom. But what comes with that is a lack of accountability. And you require others to be accountable, but you're not accountable yourself. And that creates confusion and a bad system. Right. And so, yes, in order to scale, you've got to be accountable to something bigger. Than you and other people, even me, you know, in my new process and my new venture, I have to be really accountable to my team in a way that I wasn't a year ago. And I had a few years where I was just like, I was, I did whatever I wanted. It was awesome, but I wasn't scaling, right? That's okay. Like, not everyone has to scale, by the way. Like, you don't have to do this. I'm just saying there's a science to it if you want to, and it's not as complex as you think it is. But yes, if you want to scale, you will have to be way more accountable. Even if you're the founder or co-founder, you have to be a lot more accountable or else you're not going to get there. And that accountability is tough.

And that accountability cannot be internal. It has to be external, right?

Both. Yes. It has to be both. The floor is the level of accountability in the system, both internal and external.

So to go from amateur to pro, you need accountability. Yeah.

If you look at even the top performers, they're extremely accountable, right? They're very accountable. They're not, they're the ones leading the accountability, but they're also often the most accountable and they take the most blame when it doesn't go well. Right. That's leadership. Awesome. Thank you. Let's go here. And then I want to hear Myron. Let's cast it back to Myron. Yeah. Go over here. No, you go, you go.

Uh, Dr. Bing Hardy, thank you for, uh, all that you're doing, and the scaling is very profound. Um, I think it was the 2 years ago, Funny Hacking Live, I took some of your books and gave it to members of my church. I run like a business group. That's awesome. And people really are scaling.

The good news wasn't it. Hopefully you're scaling the good news.

So my question is from the B2B2HAB framework, because I know you've kind of talked about that. Can you talk a little bit about not only just the goal, but like when I saw myself as a 2-comma awardee, that's when I actually achieved it. So can you Can you talk about like, so if I'm gonna go that 100x, you know, to get that, then the next goal, can you talk about the, what identity, how the identity work works with what you, what you have to do?

Yeah.

So I look at time as a tool. I look at identity as a tool. In this case, he's talking about the concept of be, do, have, right? Be, you wanna, you have to first start with being your future self in this case, or being the bigger company and doing what they would do, right? You have to start with be, then do, and then you can have 10x, 100x, or whatever it is you want, right? And so you— in order— being is simply letting the future shape the present. It's being the future. It's letting the future shape the present and just making the moves. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's often very sloppy, but you're actually doing it. You're having the hard conversations, the sloppy conversations. And over time, you go from thinking to feeling to knowing. You start to just know that it's going to happen. You know, I recently listened to Jimmy Kimmel on the podcast, the big podcast, The Diary of a CEO, and he got to the point because of how focused he was on it that he knew he was going to be on Saturday Night Live, right? He said it was knowing, right? And you can get to that level of knowing, but you can't start there. First, you start with thinking, right? Which Russell talks so much about thinking, right? And thinking about the future and then feeling and getting to that point of commitment. And then over time, as you just start orienting your life toward it, you've reached that place of knowing, right? You go from being to doing to having. So yeah, that's, that's, that's how it works. I will go with, uh, we'll go with Myron. I think this will be the last. And then we'll let you guys all go to lunch.

So if I may, first of all, Ben, great— Dr. Ben, sorry— great stuff. Absolutely mind-breaking, mind-bending, beautiful stuff. Um, I just want to share something about this gentleman's question about accountability, if I may, just from somebody who's been an entrepreneur for more than 40, almost 40 years. Um, an entrepreneur is first and foremost accountable to the results. That's number one. Like, everything that you are doing, the results that you are getting are telling you whether or not you are following the rules that can help you achieve that objective. That's number one. Number two, most founders are not good CEOs, right? Most of them, present company not excluded, right? I'm a terrible CEO. Great founder, terrible CEO. And our business, now that I've hired a CEO and I am accountable to the CEO, I work for them. Now our business can scale exponentially. Yeah, we already do $15 million a year. Kind of working part-time because we're very selective in what we do and don't do. But even I have to make myself accountable to somebody who's good at what I'm bad at, who plays at what I work at, who can do things I don't even want to have a desire to learn to do. And until I'm willing to do that, I cannot scale to the point where our potential actually is. And the interesting thing about potential, it's the difference between where you are and where you'd like to be. Right? But the more you reach towards your potential, the bigger your capacity gets. So your potential is a moving target. It's not a stagnant target. And I just want to say, if you don't make yourself accountable to your results and to your team and to the people that you put in place who are good at what you're bad at, the only thing you're going to scale is chaos. You cannot scale order if you're not accountable. Anyway, I hope that's helpful. I just wanted to share.

Thank you for what I was thinking as he asked that question.

Myron.

Myron is so amazing. If you, you probably already know, please learn from Myron. I will continue to learn from Myron. Um, one of the people, and this is my last thought and then I'll conclude. One of the people who I talked to recently, she's a woman who runs a supplement company. It's doing $14 million revenue. She's amazing. But to this point, I'm not saying you can't be the CEO, but for her, they've stalled and are stuck and it's rough. And I said, what would happen if you went for $100 million in the next 3 years in your supplement company? And she was like, she couldn't rack her brain around. I said, you couldn't be the CEO. I'm sorry, you would need a real CEO that could, that can organize this business and lead the team and and you would be the artist, right? In her case, she's learning about herbs and supplements and she's so good at it, right? Another guy, and this is just the last one, was a phenomenal CEO. He went into a different supplement company and took it from $4 million to $100 million in 5 years. And then I talked to him and I said, Ryan, if you want to go for a billion in 3 years, do you think you could be the CEO? He's like, no. He said, I would hold the company back. If I want to go for that level of growth, we need to put in someone who can do that. My role is going to change. And then he would be in a different role and he'd be accountable to that, to that better, bigger system. So that's often what happens when you go for a bigger game, is that your role shifts. You're less at the center. You're accountable to something bigger, bigger and more systematic. And you can become the level of professional that you can be. Everyone, Myron, thank you. Everyone, thank you.

You guys know I've written a few books and people always ask me, how do you stay focused long enough to actually finish? Because let's be honest, writing isn't hard. Staying in the zone is hard. Email pops up, texts come in, you open one tab, and 45 minutes later you're watching something random on YouTube. That's why I use Freewrite. It's a distraction-free writing device built for one purpose: to help you get words out of your head and onto the page. No notifications, no internet, no browser tabs, just you and the draft. When I sit down with my Freewrite, my brain knows it's time to create. If you've got a book in you or a sales letter or the next big idea you've been putting off, go to www.getfreewrite.com/russell and grab yours. Turn off the noise, turn on the words. Your future bestseller is waiting.