The Science of Scaling with Dr. Benjamin Hardy - Part 1 | #Success - Ep. 102

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What's up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the show. All right, I got good news for you. We are getting closer and closer to launching the new Bootstrap Secrets podcast, and I'm just kind of pre— trying to get a bunch of episodes in the queue so that way I don't fall behind in the future. So I got 2 more episodes I wanna share with you guys as we're getting ready to roll out the new podcast, and both of them are from Dr. Benjamin Hardy. If you guys know Benjamin Hardy, he's one of my favorite people, and he spoke at Mastermind in Paradise right when his brand new book came out called The Science of Scaling. How do you scale a business? What's the science behind it? And the book's amazing, and he came and gave a presentation to our group at Mastermind in Paradise, and so with that, I wanted to share that presentation with you guys. We're gonna break this up into 2 sessions 'cause it's a longer, You know, it's a little longer, and it's all the cool stuff that he gave our audience there, all the 2CCX members when he was there, which by the way, if you're not in the 2 Comma Club X coaching program or inner circle, you couldn't have been in that room. So it's time to come play with us, you guys. There's so many cool things happening every single month that when you plug into our ecosystem, you can be part of it. But anyway, with that said, I'm gonna go intro you guys right now to the very first session. Again, this is part 1 of The Science of Scaling from Dr. Benjamin Hardy from the Mastermind in Paradise presentation. That said, I'm gonna pass it over. Dr. Hardy, take it away. This is the Russell Brunson Show.

There's a, there's a story that I want to share. So I, me and my wife are here. We have 7 kids. One of them, we're actually going to be leaving here a little early to go and visit our daughter who's 15, who's in a boarding school right now. And we're going to go spend some beautiful time with her. So there are crazy things that are going on in most of our lives. One of my favorite stories is a story, and it's kind of a parable but it's of a young man who drove up into the mountains. And I actually gave a TED Talk on this subject a few years ago. But a young man drove his pickup truck into the mountains, very snowy, got out of cell phone service, and he got stuck in very deep snow. And he didn't know what to do. It was starting to get dark. No one was coming. He was trying to peel out and was only getting deeper and deeper and deeper into the snow. And so he ultimately didn't know what to do. Again, he couldn't call anyone. It was getting dark. He was not really sure what to do. And so he offered a prayer, and the thought came to him, just grab your chainsaw and go cut down a tree. And so he went and cut down a tree, chopped it all up, threw it in the back of his truck, and then got back in his truck. And because of the weight of the wood on the back of the truck, he was able to get some traction and get moving. Now, we kind of need weight in our trucks in order to get that traction. But the thing that's not told in that story is, is what allows you to really get that traction. So I'm going to talk a little bit about Viktor Frankl here. Viktor Frankl wrote the book Man's Search for Meaning. He was in a tough situation. Frankl was a psychiatrist. He was Jewish and he was taken from his home. His wife, who was pregnant, was taken from his home. His parents were taken. All of them were taken into the Nazi concentration camps. And basically his book, Man's Search for Meaning, describes how you can handle that level of a tough situation. Basically everything was taken from him. His wife and his unborn child were killed. His parents were killed in the gas chambers. I actually took a psychology class called The Psychology of the Holocaust, and it was very interesting to get the different perspectives, the perspectives of the victims, the perspectives of the people who were the killers, right? And how, like, how lost their psychology became to— in order to just kill people without any emotion, right? And so Frankl was having this experience and the dreads of everything. He wrote all about it. I would recommend you reread that book. But he realized that a person couldn't metabolize that experience. They couldn't filter that experience or get traction from that experience unless they were really clear on one thing. And that one, that one thing was this. He said any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. This is essential. This is core psychology. It was core psychology in the concentration camps. It's core psychology in a pandemic. It's core psychology here. Even if you're thriving, you will get lost if you don't have a future goal that gives your life meaning. You will get lost if you don't have a future goal that forces you to rethink your existing assumptions. You will have— you will struggle if you don't have a future goal that maybe requires you to exercise more faith in God. That is the key of psychology. I'm going to explain a lot about that and how that psychology leads to better strategy and how that strategy can lead you to scale a lot more effectively. Whatever you're trying to accomplish. This is, this is the essential element of all of psychology. No matter what your situation is, if you're in a concentration camp, you can have meaning in those circumstances. You can filter those circumstances very differently if you have a goal. And one of the things I absolutely want to fully say to you, and I think that this is about as truthful as it gets, is that everything you filter in your life is based on your goals. The reason you're here at this mastermind is because it relates to your goals. You see this as a pathway for you getting some form of insight, knowledge, relationship. You see this as a pathway to your goal. Everything about psychology is generating pathways towards our goals. That's it. Like, that is the core. Now, learning how to set better goals is crucial. Learning how to let go of bad goals, learning how to let go of goals that are based on traumatic or painful experiences from your past, or even hidden goals Those things are essential. Learning how to set goals that allow you to let go of other goals. So this is what Frankl said. He said, what man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the strug— striving and struggling for a worthy goal, a freely chosen task. I believe that the topic of psychology, strategy, and even scaling, all of these topics have been very mistaught. Um, a lot of, a lot of entrepreneurship has been taught to remove the striving and struggling for worthy goals, but instead to have a tensionless state. And that is not how you grow. That's not how you scale. Now, it doesn't mean you have to always be struggling. Um, but if you're not stretching towards something that's freely chosen, a freely chosen future, then you're not becoming the best version of yourself. You're not being forced to let go of bad thinking, bad, bad dead ends. You're not required to raise your floor. As a person. And your floor as a person, your floor as a company, is the defining feature of who you are. It's the defining feature of the culture of your organization. It's the defining feature of your character as a person. Your floor is the dividing line between yes and no. And so until you raise your floor, you will be stuck going in cycles. If you're not raising your floor, then that means by nature you're operating from your past. Once you start operating from a bigger future, you have to raise your floor and let go of a lot of things that you're currently doing. So this is what it looks like when a person is operating linearly. This is called linear psychology, linear time. This is how the majority of psychology has taught time. This is how society thinks of time, right? That the past determines the present and the present determines the future. And this is very toxic for a number of reasons as it relates to your psychology and as it relates to your strategy and decision-making. The first reason why this model of time is very crippling is because if you let your past drive your present, then your past is responsible for your present and your present is actually in the passenger seat. You have almost no, no control. And again, back to psychology, the majority of academics actually believe in this model. And so because they believe in this model, they believe that human beings actually have almost no agency, period. Because everything you are is simply a domino toppled by what came before. You are just going to watch what happens. Another thing that happens with this view is, is the future becomes uncertain and unknown, is all you can do is wait and see. There's no agency in the future. The future is weak. The present is a little stronger. The past is the dominant force. That is this model. When this happens, essentially your present is simply a byproduct of your past. If you're in a bad situation or if something went wrong, you get to blame the past, and the past is viewed as something outside of you. Psychologically, your past is not outside of you. Psychologically, your past is right here, as is your future. This is Martin Seligman, Roy Baumeister, some of the most important psychologists of the past 100 years. Um, these are actually some of the pioneers. Uh, Martin Seligman actually founded the field of positive psychology. This is a book called Homo Prospectus. Prospection is an idea in psychology about our future prospects. We all have infinite prospects for our futures. These are different potential futures. You could even think about different prospects prospects for today. You could think about, what do I want to even do during this meeting? You could think, I'm going to sit in this meeting and listen to Ben, or I can go and, you know, go get some food. We can think about a lot of different potentials for our futures. And this is one of the primary things that, that is different from us and other life forms, other species. Plants and animals don't think about 1,000 prospects for their future. And so what this book and what the modern research in positive psychology and neuroscience is all about is that it is actually our future, as I've already been talking about, and as Viktor Frankl talked about, our future is the primary thing shaping our lives. As he said here, much of the history of psychology has been dominated by a framework in which people and animals are driven by the past. The more accurate truth is that we are driven by the future that we're most committed to, right? So this is what I call holistic time. With this model of time, it is the future that shapes your present. And it is the present that shapes the meaning of the past. And this is not just me that says this. There's a lot of really smart psychologists who study the theory of time and how our views of time shape who we are in the present. But very importantly, it is you in the present that shapes the meaning of your past, no matter what it was—business failure, situations, bad choices, whatever it is. It's you in the present that shapes the meaning of those things. However, in order to do that, you have to have what's called an internal locus of control. Locus is another word for location. So you have to place the location of control and responsibility here in the present. And if you do that, you can reshape the meaning of your past. The way you reshape the meaning of your past is simply by giving an experience which seems like negative value, right? We always place value on experiences. When I was 16 years old, and I've written about this, I was driving the car, uh, when me and my family got in a car wreck. And my mom was thrown from the car and was practically killed. She flew 50 feet from the car. Me and my brothers had to walk up and look at her body, like, you know, 16 years old. So now I can look at that experience and I can say there's zero value in this experience. In fact, this is negative value. In fact, this is the way I'm looking at my life. This is determining who I am. And my present and my future are forever doomed because this happened to me. This is a damper on my present, my future. I got no control over this. Or I can go this way and I can say, in the present, what value can I give to this experience? This is required for what's called post-traumatic growth. No matter what happens, right? I wrote a book on this called The Gap and the Gain, right? Turning every experience into a gain. But you have to be the one in the present to give value to your past experience. That's how you start to squeeze juice out of it. That's how you start to learn lessons and stop repeating cycles. The less value you give to your past, the more you're bound to repeat it. So it's your choice how much value, how much juice you squeeze out of your past. And as you give it value, now your present and your future are better. But it's your choice. The thing you have to realize is, is that the view you hold of your past is shaping you in the present, but 10x more truthfully, the view you hold of your future is shaping your present. And so what I want to talk about today, and as it relates to psychology, strategy, and scaling, The quality of your future, the quality of your goal, back to Frankl, is going to determine everything about not only how you filter your present. This is a picture representing your future shaping what you see in the present. That box in the middle of the present represents your frame. Your frame as a person determines what you see and what you interpret. Your future determines what you see. It determines signal versus noise. Signal are the things that are relevant. Noise are the things that get literally pushed away. You don't even notice it. There's thousands of things even happening in this room that you're not even noticing. There's a million billions of things going on the internet, which you will never be aware of because they don't relate to your frame. And so as you start to set a much bigger goal, and as you start to even go for what I'll call impossible goals, 10x goals, whatever you want to call them, as you make your goal almost Actually, you do want to go for impossible goals, and I'm going to show you the research on that. But for a short-term form, we can call it a 10x goal. You want to make a goal that is so big and even so urgent that the majority of what's going on in your life right now starts to go below that frame and starts to fall below the floor. And you start to realize the majority of what I'm doing right now has no relevance to that new future. Therefore, I now, I now need to change my present and start looking for better paths. And you can get very, very good at this. You can become incredibly skilled at this. You can get to the point— and in psychology they call it selective attention. There's, there's two related concepts here. One's called selective attention, which is that we're always looking for things that are relevant to our goal. And the things we're looking for are called pathways. Pathways. In psychology, it's called pathway thinking. So we're always looking for relevant pathways to our goals. If you start going for impossible goals, most of the pathways that you're that you're already on start to go below the floor. They start to become noise, not signal. And then you're forced, if you're willing, if you're committed, to go and find those better pathways. I'm going to share with you a lot of stories about people who have done this and achieved things in months or years that were beyond what they were ever projecting in their entire life. But the hardest part is that you're probably going to have to let go of the majority of your current plans and path to do that. And as people, we get really attached to our plans and our path. That's what happens. We get very attached. So this is the— this is basically the crux of psychology right here. Your goals shape your psychology. I've been talking about frame, right? Your frame is what you see, and it's the pathways that you take. So your goals shape your psychology, but your goals also shape the systems you build. Most businesses are complex systems that cannot scale efficiently and effectively. Most businesses are growing linearly. 10, 20% a year, until you have a goal that requires you to simplify your model, to simplify your system, and to build a system that can actually scale, you won't scale. And I'm going to share with you a quote from Donella Meadows. She wrote a really good book called Thinking in Systems. But everything, every aspect of a human system, which is a business, a family, this event, right? All human systems are driven by goals. And a complex system by nature has competing goals, unknown goals, too many goals, small goals. Those create complexity in a system where the system can't grow. You want a goal that forces out all the complexity in your system. I'm going to show you how to do that. So this is the framework, which I call the scaling framework. It's frame, floor, and focus. So this is an image that represents data information pathways. Uh, think about that as just infinite. So your frame is going to determine the pathways you see, and it's only by raising your frame that you're required to raise your floor. The difference between professionals and amateurs is their floor. I've trained a lot of people who have gone from college to pros in sports, and the difference is that the, those who succeed at the higher level raised their floor. That means they started to let go of the things that were acceptable at the previous level, but are no longer acceptable. One of the people who I talked about in The Science of Scaling is Zion Williamson. How many people know who Zion Williamson is? So he's a basketball player. He was a prodigy. He was the number one recruit out of the NBA. I mean, out of college, he broke many records at Duke. He was a phenom. He is a phenom. He's still— the story's not untold about Zion, but when he was coming out of college and going into the pro, this was like in 2019. So like 6 years ago. Everyone thought Zion was going to become the next Michael Jordan or the next Kobe Bryant or the next Dwyane Wade and the next LeBron James. And what happened with Zion is that none of that happened. Even though he has like the physical characteristics you'll never see, he's like built like a football linebacker, but he can jump like 7 feet high. He can run, he can pivot like he is. He is very incredible. And when he's on the court, he's incredible. But his problem is, is that his floor is too low. He's maintained really bad friends, he's maintained really unhealthy relationships with food. He's never actually prepared himself to succeed. So most of the time when he comes back from the offseason, he's just completely out of shape and he's not prepared to win and he doesn't take responsibility for winning. And so his team have stopped relying on Zion. They just, they've literally, his team have said that they're willing to trade him. And they put clauses in his contract that say, Zion, if you're over this weight, you start losing a lot of your money, which is like hundreds of millions of dollars. And so Zion has never raised his floor and become a professional at the new level. And so as a result, when your floor is low, what that means is that your consistent performance is low. Sometimes we might see your ceiling, but it's like once every 20 games, right? For you, it might be once every, like, once a week or once every month we see your peak. But what's the average, right? What's the floor? What's the baseline that might be lower than you think that's holding you back from scaling? A lot of what's below the floor are what you're saying yes to in terms of clients, opportunities, situations. Once you scale, you have to say no to those things. You have to raise the floor and strip those things out. They're making your system complex. The beauty right here of raising your goal to a 10x or an impossible level is, is that it forces you, as I already said, to filter and find those few pathways. This is just another image that was like the future shaping the present, and it forces you to filter and find those rare pathways. But you won't find those pathways if you don't have a goal that requires you to find those pathways. When I was writing this book, The Science of Scaling, I had such a big goal for it that I had— that I was looking for pathways for the book to explode. Right? And so I started messaging the few pathways I could think of. One of them was Tony Robbins. And it's interesting because while I messaged him and said, Tony, I have a, a new book I wanna share with you, it just so happened that he was in the hospital. He was in the hospital for 2 weeks or something like that because of some eye injury. So he couldn't even read it. I emailed him a PDF and he had someone read it to him and he fell in love with it. And he's like, he literally called me and said, can I write the foreword of this book? And so, but that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't filtering for it. Right? If my goal didn't require something like that, and if I wasn't operating from that goal, I probably would have gone and looked for something else. And so your goals shape not only the pathways you take, but the people you take them with. And a lot of the people on your current path can't get you to 10x. And the hardest thing about scaling, as I already said, is raising your floor. One of the companies who I worked with is a, uh, is a flooring franchise company. I've worked with this company for over a year as a consultant. They're doing— when I started working with them, they were doing $170 million in revenue. And the CEO said, Ben, we want to get to a billion and we need your help. And I said, absolutely. When are you going to hit that goal? First off, that's the first part. We're good with the goal, a billion dollars in revenue. I'm fine with that goal. I'm not going to tell you to lower that goal, but when are you going to do it? And here's a big problem is that most people have arbitrary timelines for their goals. Right? In his case, he wanted to do it by 2030. Right? Makes sense. It's a nice round number. Um, it's very similar actually, and I broke it down in the book about NASA. NASA also had an arbitrary timeline for getting to the moon. They said, we'll get there before the end of the decade. And Parkinson's Law says that work fills the space you give it. And so with NASA, they got there 6 months before the end of the decade. But if you really study NASA's process, and I break it down in the book, they did a lot of things that were very linear. And they did a lot of things that they didn't have to do. It probably could have gotten there in half the time. So back to the flooring company. I told him 7 years away is a bad goal. Why? Because that future is too far away to dramatically impact your present. I said, if it's 7 years away, what are we doing about it today? And he said, I don't know. Seriously. And so it's like, what if we move the timeline to 3? How would that change things, Tom? Him being the CEO, he said we would have to get moving right now. Now, in a franchise business, there are territories. And so with this flooring company, there were like 300 territories, 300 individual franchisees throughout the United States. And the average revenue for each of these territories was $700,000 annual revenue. Well, Tom did the math. And in order for them to be a billion-dollar company, the average franchisee can't be doing $700,000. The average franchisee has to be doing $2 million. So how do they raise that floor where the average franchisee's not doing $700,000, but instead the average franchisee's doing $2 million? That's the new floor. Until they get the average franchisee to that level or above, they're not growing. And so Tom knew that. I met with Tom's C-suite team and we talked about this for, a day in Atlanta, and we agreed, okay, we believe we can get to a billion. When we move the timeline to 3 years, now it feels like an impossible goal. And that's what we want, by the way, because now the floor goes up and now we can't sit around and wait. And so Tom said, we can't keep working with the franchisees who, who absolutely will not get to $2 million. And so he told his C-suite team, The people who won't go to $2 million, ignore them. They're below the floor. Stop talking to them. If you talk to them, you're gonna get fired because those are the people who are gonna pull down the floor, right? One of my favorite quotes is that the system is designed to defend the system, right? And so in their case, when Tom goes to this, to all the franchisees and he says, the new floor is $2 million. I know some of you've had your companies, your businesses for 10, 15 years. This is the new standard. If you don't come up with this standard, we're going to ask you to sell back your territory and we're going to give it to someone who wants that. And the system defended the system and there was rebellion from like 30% of the people and they were like, you know, screw you. You can't tell us what to do. That's not in my contract. So it took 6 months for Tom to actually raise the floor. What happened is the next 6 months, nothing happened. Very linear growth, very slow growth. And Tom starts to get upset. Why aren't we growing? I thought that we were going to raise the floor and get to $1 billion. 6 months went by and nothing happened, and he realized it was his fault. He, as the leader, did not actually raise the floor. He was just speaking. He was just talking. He was just saying, guys, stop doing it. But there was actually no accountability. And it wasn't until he actually, like, put accountability into that floor and started letting go of even team members, actually, during the next 6 months. So the first 6 months, nothing happened. The next 6 months, He fired half of his C-suite team. He fired his assistant of 19 years. He let go of a lot of people and he brought on talent that was committed to a billion in 3 years. He brought on talent that was above the floor. And for the franchisees that were not moving, he went straight to them and he said, we're not a fit for each other anymore. The culture is $2 million and above. You guys don't want to go to $2 million and above. You've already raised your hand and said, we don't want to go to $2 million and above. We are going to go back to your contract and look at it. And you're not even making the contract. The contract's going to be growing at X amount. You haven't been doing that for a long time. We've been letting that go. We've been letting you down. We're sorry, you're not with contract. We're going to require you to sell us back your territory. And so over the next 6 months, not only did they replace half of their C-suite team, and they actually held the system accountable, And by the way, the true aspect of any system is accountability. One of the people that I interviewed for this book is someone who literally goes into countries and designs economic systems for countries, first world and third world, second world, whatever. And I said to this man who literally is hired by governments to help design their economic models and systems, I said, what's the main difference between the first world countries and the third world countries or the struggling countries? And he said one word, Ben, it's accountability. With the first world countries, there's high accountability in the system, high accountability of the leaders. The system holds the leader accountable. Um, and the leader is, and, and there's just accountability throughout it. Whereas in the third world countries, there's a lot of corruption. There's a lot of breaking of laws or of changing of laws, right? Dictatorships and things like that. And so where you see low accountability, you see a broken system, right? So back to Tom. He actually held the system accountable to the new floor. And what happened over that next 6 months was this bang, like all of a sudden they start growing because they had a team and they were all unified on the same goal, right? That's one of the core aspects of leadership is unifying the team to a better goal that raises the floor. And they replaced almost like they replaced about 40 franchisees during that 6 months with a bunch that were not just committed to the floor of $2 million,, but were committed to $5 and $10 million. And so then you fast forward just a period of time, a short period of time, they started bringing on over 100 new franchisees with the new floor and with the understanding of this framework, which I taught them. And in less than a year, all the 100 new franchisees that came in started blowing past the legacy franchisees because they were operating from a better frame. They were committed to $5 and $10 million., in their businesses, they were applying who, not how. One of the things that they learned in those small businesses, these small businesses where they're literally selling flooring, is, is that the core person on that team, aside from like a, a, like a manager that runs the show, is salespeople in that case. And what happened with the people who were unwilling to raise the floor was they had, some of them had had salespeople in their franchise. Like in their franchises, some of them that had the same salespeople for like 10 years. And those salespeople were like generating about $500 grand in revenue. Sometimes like $300 or $400 grand in revenue. Remember the floor, like the baseline was $700,000. Well, what Tom and the leadership team found was, is that in order to have like a really good salesperson, those really good ones usually generate $2 million on their own. Right? One really good salesperson can get you above the floor, but that really good salesperson doesn't want to be in a low floor culture. Period. And so all of this, the only one move that the franchise needed to make was to let go of their existing salespeople who wouldn't accelerate and just bring in one phenomenal salesperson. And they're already at like $2 or $3 million. Pure, like it's that simple, but they wouldn't raise the floor. They were unwilling to disappoint people. They were more accountable to the past and to the existing system than they were accountable to their future and making a better system that could scale. So this is, this is funny because, you know, I was writing this book 2 years ago before all of the Elon Musk stuff happened. And one of my favorite concepts of Elon Musk is what he calls his 5-step algorithm. By the way, I gave a talk in Colorado 2 weeks ago and someone walked up to me and he said, Ben, if you, he's like, if you use the words Viktor Frankl and Elon Musk in the same sentence, You can't do that. He said Elon is a Nazi, Frankl is a saint. He said you can't speak these two people in one sentence. Um, but how many of you have actually ever heard of Elon's 5-step algorithm? Perfect. Is it good? It's phenomenal. It's what he calls first principles thinking, and it's the same level of thinking. It's his algorithm that he uses to scale systems. And this is the core element of that algorithm is, and this is one of his direct statements. He says that the most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing which should not exist. So take his politics for what they are. One of the things that I have to emphasize, I was, I let, I let a dear friend and a mentor read an early copy of The Science of Scaling. He's one of the people who founded the field of private equity. The name is actually Bob Gay. So he and Mitt Romney created Bain Capital. Bob Gay is the brains behind that. Bob Gay is one of the most smart business people in the world. Again, one of the fathers of private equity, scaled some of the biggest businesses in the US. He read an early copy of this book and he said, Ben, this book changes the game. He said, but I have one question about this book and it concerns me. He says, how do you choose the right goal? How do you choose what to scale? He's like, 'Cause if it's absolutely true that the goal shapes the system and the quality of the goal shapes how you can scale and how you can strip out all the negative paths, how you can stop optimizing things that should, should not exist. But how do you choose the right goal? And, and then he gave me examples of people, which I wrote about in the book, who scaled the wrong thing. So I'm not here to talk about what you scale. I'm not here to tell you how to choose the right goal. You have to, you have to, what I'll tell you is the mechanics of a goal that scales. You can disagree with him going to Mars. You can disagree with his pathways of getting into politics to do that. But when you go for an impossible goal, the pathways become very nonlinear. He's going for an impossible goal. And he saw that a pathway to get there was to partner and leverage the US government. It's actually pretty dang smart if you think about it from a strategic standpoint. Now, he paid the piper. I'm not talking about all that. I'm talking about his thinking on scaling, how to scale, not what to scale. This is very true, that the most common mistake of people in this room is to optimize things that shouldn't exist, stuff below the floor, dead-end pathways. And so it's only by raising your floor, which occurs after you raise your frame, Right. One of the things that I have found is that most entrepreneurs, back to the idea of Frankl, want a tensionless state. They don't want to scale. They've been taught a weak form of entrepreneurship. We're very rich in the US, right? And I'll share one of my favorite quotes from Richard Ramell, who wrote the book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. But because of how luxurious and how comfortable our lives have been for so long, we don't want to strive and struggle for worthy goals. We want things to be tensionless states. But what I would challenge you to do, and what I would invite you to do, is think about the idea of 10x or 100x your goal. Because when you do that, and I'm going to show you how to do it in a way that doesn't make you get all of the psychological baggage of what if I fail, or what are people going to think, there's a different way of looking at goals. But only until you raise your goal to a very high level will you become aware of 90 or more percent of the things you're doing that are optimizing that shouldn't exist. When you raise your goal and the floor goes up with it, most of what you're now doing can't hit the goal. And so then you just have to say, how much of this do I keep doing? Or, or can I go and find the better path? Can I create a focused path? A simple system that can scale. A focused path. Steve Jobs said that focus is largely about saying no to 100 great things. He said innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. And so do you have a focused path? How focused is your path? How simple is your model? Or are you trying to scale complexity? 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. One of the things I want to emphasize to you again and again is that your future is the thing shaping your present. You could have a 10 or 100x bigger and better future that shapes your present. Of course, doing that requires you to raise your floor and start to let go of some of the dead ends that are optimizing things that shouldn't exist. And it would force you to create a simpler, more focused, more innovative, more powerful path. And you absolutely can do that. You absolutely can do that. It's your choice. I'm going to share a funny story. There's a story of a young man named, um, he's, he's a young man from Brazil. I'm not gonna share his name, but, um, he's someone who wants to one day own a European soccer team. That's his impossible goal. Um, it's a massive goal if you think about it. In order to own a European soccer team, like Europe is like, you know, the hub of football. Um, he'd have to like have a billion dollars or something. He'd have to, it's, this is like the biggest sport in the world and the hub of it, right? And so that's his impossible goal. And I said, when do you want to do it by? And he said, I want to do it in 33 years by age 55. And I really want you to think about this because every time you have a goal, you place an arbitrary timeline on it. And that timeline is based on false assumptions. It's also based on what are called false requirements. But in his case, he said, I want to own the European soccer team by the age of 55. That's actually pretty decent thinking. Probably most owners of sports teams are probably in their 50s or 60s or 70s. And so that's probably pretty realistic. But I told him, I want you to move the timeline from age 55— again, he's 22— to age 30. What happens when you change the time frame to age 30? And that's when he started to get confused. That's when he started to get concerned. That's when he started to get worried. This is just a representation of time. Same goal, different time frames. In his case, it was 33 years or 7, but they're two very different paths, fundamentally different paths. You can't achieve a 33-year goal in 3 with the same thinking, with the same path, with the same plan. So this is a representation of the linear path. Mainstream education is linear. 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade. You have to pass all of the tests in 1st grade to get to 2nd grade. And once you pass all those tests, you can get to 3rd grade. And so there's a bunch of expected requirements to get from one level to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next. And what happened with this young man who wanted the European soccer team was I asked him, when I told him to move his timeline from age 55 all the way to 30, all of a sudden the linear progression that he had set for himself to get there started to become apparent. If he's going to get there in 7 years, he can't go get the PhD he wants anymore. He thinks he wants a PhD in business. He also wants to run a big firm and he wants to do like 5 other things. But when we move his timeline from age 55 to age 30, he now gets stressed because he's like, well, what about the things I wanted to do along the way? The things that I thought were required. See, what happens when you're operating from a very long timeframe is that you're not actually optimizing the goal. In his case, he's not actually solving how do I get a European soccer team? He's not even thinking about that right now. He's literally not solving his goal. He's solving if he's down at the very bottom. And he's going up the linear path. He's solving the next step, which in his case is getting into a PhD program. That's what he's optimizing. That's what he's solving. And that's what he's working everything towards. That's actually the future pulling his present. The, the, the, the goal that he really wants is so far away that he's not thinking about it. He's certainly not solving it. The question is, is he optimizing something that shouldn't exist? That's now what he's called to question when we move his timeline forward. Can you still go get the PhD? Can you run the firm? Or are you required to find what is called the crux? Are you required to actually find the thing that's required to solve your goal? If we move the timeline forward and we actually started solving the goal, in his case, how do I get a European soccer team? If he actually started solving that rather than waiting for two decades to start solving that, because right now he's solving how do I get into a PhD program? As someone who's gone through a PhD, the next five years is like, how do I I'm going to, you know, appease my, my advisors. He is going to spend the next several decades optimizing things that shouldn't exist based on false assumptions and false requirements towards his goals. That's actually the first step of Elon's algorithm. The first step of Elon Musk's algorithm is to question requirements. All of these things, or the, or the majority of the things that you think would be required to scale are actually false requirements. Based on bad framing. So the thing you really want to learn how to solve is what is the crux? What is the core thing to solve in order to hit the goal? The problem again with most companies is they're never actually identifying the crux and they're never actually beginning to solve it, right? So this is back to Richard Remelt. Richard Remelt is one of the most important strategy thinkers of the past 50 years. He wrote a book called The Crux. In rock climbing, the crux, as the picture demonstrates, is the core difficult problem to solve on a climb. It's like the thing that needs to be solved in order to reach the climb. And so what Ramelt says is you will have a much harder time dealing with a gnarly challenge, or I would say an impossible goal, if you have not distilled it down to a crux. No one solves a problem they cannot comprehend and hold in their mind, right? And so the problem with this young man is he hasn't distilled his goal down to a crux. Instead, he literally has like 30 years of false requirements and a linear progression that is creating all sorts of complexity. He really doesn't even know how to get a European soccer team. He's certainly not thinking about it. He's not solving it. He's not trying to find pathways to it. He's not having conversations that would lead to it. He is spending his time trying to get to a step. That's taking him the opposite direction. And, and as I'll show you in another example, the decisions he's making right now are making it statistically impossible that he'll ever hit his goal. I believe if he stays on his current path, he will not own a European soccer team. That is not going to happen because the literal things he's doing right now are the opposite of owning a European soccer team. The things he's doing right now are, how do I get into a PhD program? Right? So this is the common model. This is letting the past shape the present, shape the future. You can know that you're operating linearly if you use your goals— sorry, if you use your past performance as the base for your goals, right? So let's just say you did a million revenue last year. If you use that metric, your last year's performance, to establish your future goals, you're letting the past shape your future. And if you let your past shape your future, then you're going to continue on the same path you're currently on. And 10x is easier than 2x. We call that staying in the 80%. So you don't want your past to shape your goals. You always want your future to shape your goals. And in this case, you want to define a future that seems impossible. In that case, moving his timeline to age 30 seems impossible, but only once you start to get there. And again, I'm going to show you the research on this. Then you can shatter your assumptions. You can shatter your existing beliefs about what's required. You can start more clearly defining yourself. He can actually start saying, I'm gonna own your pin soccer team instead of I'm gonna do these 50 things and then I'm gonna do that. And a lot of people's businesses, they're doing this, this, this, this, this, this, this. They're undefined. They're unclear. They haven't defined themselves. They haven't said, this is what we do and this is who we do it for, and we do this differently and better than everyone else in the world. So this is an image that shows the difference between a complex system and a simple system. A complex system by nature has multiple competing goals, priorities, bottlenecks to solve. You're trying to solve too many things. In the case of our young man, he's trying to solve like 5 different things: get into a PhD program, run a firm, X, Y, and Z. He's trying to do so many things that He's not going to get toward his goal. He's not on that trajectory at all. He needs a goal that strips out all of those false requirements and enables him to find the crux. Again, people think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on, but that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas there are. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. That's raising the floor. That's raising the floor. Right now, you're saying yes to things that are below the floor. You're optimizing things that shouldn't exist. The only way you can figure those things out is by having a better goal, a bigger goal, a goal that allows you to start stripping out the complexity and the— and honestly, the bad thinking. Good psychology leads to good strategy. I love this quote. This is probably my favorite quote. Robert Broad said, we are kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. Right? False requirements. This young man is kept from owning the European soccer team, not by the obstacles or the crux in between him and owning the soccer team. He's kept from his goal because he's optimizing a lesser goal. A false requirement. This, this, this, this, and this. All the things he thinks he needs to do are lesser goals. They're optimizing things that shouldn't exist. One of the most powerful things you can do as a person is let go of goals. A lot of the goals you have aren't useful in light of a better goal. And if you're willing to let those things go and let go of your existing path— he would have to let go of that beautiful 33-year path that he constructed for himself. Is he willing to let go of that path for a better path? Is he willing to let go of a lot of the lesser goals that are creating complexity in his life and his business and stopping him from 10x or 100x or 1,000x growth? You can scale. I'm telling you, scaling a company isn't that complex, but you have to remove the complexity. You have to remove your lesser goals. You have to remove the false requirements and you have to create a simple system. And the first way to get there is actually to set a scale goal. If you're, if you're at $1 million in your business and you're going for $3 or $4 million, that's not a scale goal. That's a linear goal based on your past. Until you set a truly 10x or 100x goal, and not let that stress you out, but instead use that goal as a tool to start simplifying your thinking, then you're going to just— you're going to be complex. You're not going to scale. You're going to be moving very slowly, and you don't need to do that. I'm just telling you, a whole lot of you can achieve 10x or 100x greater growth than you're doing right now, and it requires you to just simplify and let go of bad, bad thinking, bad pathways, dead-end roads. If you have a complex system, you're optimizing for lesser goals. You're still weighing competing goals and priorities that you're not willing to let go of. There's a lot of vanity metrics that people want. Um, one of my, one of my mentors, and I wrote about in The Science of Scaling, he said, Ben, this was while I was writing the book. This was after I wrote 10x Is Easier Than 2x. He said, Ben, you're doing way too many things. He's like, I see all the things you're doing. It's like you have a coaching business that you're leading and running. You write books, you do this, you had a YouTube channel, you're doing all these things. He's like, you're doing way too many things. Some of— all of it you're doing fairly good at, like fairly successful. He invited me to let go of lesser goals, right? There's certain things you want. One, A.G. Lafley wrote a book called Strategy, and how I think it's called This Is Strategy. Um, and he says one of the hearts of strategy is choosing the game you want to play and learning how to win there. One of the things that I have found in talking to entrepreneurs is, is that they want to play the wrong game. Like, as an example, they want to be famous on social media, right? Or they want to have X, right? They want to have Y. In this case, that young man was optimizing for the wrong game. He wanted to get into academics. He wanted to have a PhD. A lot of those lesser goals end up being vanity metrics. That are the wrong game. So you have to ask yourself, what are some of the games that I'm trying to optimize for that are literally the wrong game? They're a red ocean, they're bloody, and if I just chose a better game, I could go this way and choose a better game, and I could figure out how to win in that better game. In his case, there's not very many people who are trying to have European soccer teams. If he actually just made that the game he was playing and stopped letting— he let go of some of his vanity metrics, his false requirements, he would have a much simpler life. He would have a far simpler life. One of the things I just want to say really quickly, um, is— and by the way, just so you know, I'm going to give you guys time to journal, discuss. There's gonna be time for Q&A. There's a few more really powerful stories I want to share with you. But one of the things I want you to know, if you went back to, um, back to this image right here something that people don't— they don't understand, and it really stops them, it really holds them back, is, is that they use both the past and the future as— they consider them as realities. They consider them as physical realities. And I get that, yes, like, there are things that happened yesterday in the physical world, but I'm talking about the psychology of time. Your view of time, your past and your present shape everything about who you are in the present. And as I've said, your future holds like 10x the weight. But the thing you gotta realize is these things are past and future. I was sharing you about prospection, right? About our human mind and how we can think about the past and future are really psychological tools. They're just tools. The same is true of goals. The past and future are not things to get stressed about. They're tools. If you wanna use your past better, give it more value, give it more gratitude. Now it becomes a tool that you can use rather than something that's draining you, right? The past is there for lessons. The future is there for filtering the present. And so just realize that goals are tools. They're not things you are a loser if you don't hit. They're not things that should create imposter syndrome or comparison. The goal is literally a tool for looking at your life and for being honest with yourself. It's between you and you. It's your own future. Your future shapes your present. Your future is a tool. All goals are tools. Some goals are not effective tools. That kid's goal is a great tool if he uses it as a tool, and if he uses time as a tool, and if he moves his timeline forward. Now he's using time as a more effective tool for weeding out the bad thinking in his present, but it's just a tool. I think so many people, they think, I can't set the bigger goal because what if I don't hit it? Then am I a failure? It's like, what does that have to do with anything? That's not the purpose of the goal. The purpose of the goal is to filter everything you're doing and be a lot more honest with yourself and be a lot more honest about the things you're doing that are optimizing things that in light of the better goal, maybe you could just, they're below the floor. You can stop being so loyal and accountable to the past and you can start making jumps in your life because you're letting the future shape the present instead of the past. You want your future to shape your present. That's really where you can start making jumps. That's when you can start to filter and start to see incredible waves that you can jump to. But if you're too stuck on this wave, on this path, and that this thing got me here and this team got me here, right? It's again, I'm not saying you have to let go of everything. A lot of people are going to move with you and advance with you. Amazing. Like it's, again, you don't have to let go of everything, but it's just, are you letting the future shape your present or are you still clinging to the past. This is an example of lesser goals. A linear path, a 10-year time frame, is an example of lesser goals, optimizing things that shouldn't exist. This is complexity. This is stagnation. This is slow growth. This is non-scaling. Let me just give an example of someone who I love. And by the way, If you've listened to Time is a Tool, you'll hear Xavier's story. I interviewed Xavier in Time is a Tool, which, which Russell and them gave you. So Xavier, when he learned this framework, frame, floor, focus, he's an attorney. He's from Minnesota. His company was doing $2.5 million in revenue. It took him 5 years to get to $2.5 million revenue. He passed the bar in 2019. And so from 2019 to the end of 2024, 5 years when I met him, he was doing $2.5 million in revenue and they were starting to build out additional law, like law offices throughout Minnesota. Now, Xavier had gone through a lot of education, right? He had, he had been a part of groups like this. And so he got to the point where he actually had a scale goal, which in my opinion is rare. He actually wanted to get his law firm to a million, $100 million in revenue. To me, when I hear someone say that, I'm like, okay. That's rare. That's rare for someone to have a goal that big. Why do you have a goal that big, Xavier? Why do you want to get your law firm to $100 million revenue? He said, I just realized I could. Like, you know, he just realized like, why not? And he gave himself 10 years to do it. And I said, Xavier, you can't give yourself 10 years to do this. Like, if you give yourself 10 years to get to $100 million, you're not going to get there. He said, why? I said, 'Cause where are you trying to get to? Where, where, where, where are you really trying to get to right now?' And he admitted he's trying to get to $5 million right now. So for him, he's at the bottom and his next step is $5 million. So he's optimizing for $5 million, which is different from optimizing for $100 million. Two completely different paths. The decisions you make trying to get to, to 2x, right? Like literally the decisions he's making are, are really bad decisions. Very bad decisions. Um, him going from 2.5 to 5 and trying to get there as fast as he can, very bad decisions. It's leading him to do the wrong forms of law. It's leading him to have the wrong team. It's leading him to, um, maintaining a lot of bad practice in his business, which is making it statistically impossible. What happened when he moved his timeline forward? And I said, Xavier, let's go for it in 3 years. I know you're at $2.5 million. Let's go for the $100 million goal. No difference in the goal, only in the timeline. Let's go for it in 3. What happens? He said, I'm gonna do it, Ben. He's like, I'm going to trust you. I'm gonna use time as a tool, and I'm gonna start using the future to make me, to make myself look at my existing system. And what he found over the next 90 days was all sorts of noise. His business was a mess, so inefficient. There was all sorts of inefficiencies with his sales process. He had a sales team that actually literally hated him, and they were literally sabotaging him. They were performing so poorly, like they were converting really low, and he gave them a higher requirement, and they all literally cooed him and quit. And so he hired a better sales team, and literally they went from a 30% conversion rate to getting phone calls to 90. In one month. He got a better team, but importantly, he also started to look at his business. He started to realize we're practicing like 10 different forms of law. Most of these, not only are we bad at, but most of these are actually like really unprofitable and like we don't like doing them. What if we just let go of 80% of the different forms of law we practice? And what if we just focused? What if we actually focused and got best in class at what we do? And what if we create a simple model we could replicate so that we could build practices throughout the US? So for the next 6 months, he simplified his model. He stripped out the complexity. He elevated his floor and the systems in his business so that he could create something that he could replicate throughout the whole United States. He actually started solving for how do I build a $100 million company? He was not doing that before. He was solving for how do I get to $5 million? Two completely different paths, and one path would've led him to making the very decisions that would make it almost impossible. Because the decisions he was making towards linear growth, even if he was going for like $5 or $10 million in the next few years, those very decisions, the types of law he practiced, the types of people he hired, those are the very decisions that are exactly counter to having a $100 million company. So once he let go of those things, he could actually start solving the bigger goal. And he realized most of what they were doing was optimizing things that shouldn't exist. Almost most of the things they were doing were below the floor. So they could raise the floor and get really good at a few really good things and have a really clean, simple system, right? In less than 90 days, they hired a general manager who hired 3 really excellent attorneys and bang, less than a year later, they're like on track for $15 million this year, right? So from 1 year, $2.5, this year they're gonna be at 15. But way more importantly, they're on a path to his real goal. And he would've never gotten there had he not used time as a tool. He would have never gotten there if he hadn't shrunk the timeline, because that shorter timeline, that more intense timeline, is not there to stress you out. It's there to force you to look a lot more honestly at your present, right? The future is a tool for being honest with yourself. One of my dear friends who is a billionaire, he said that the reason entrepreneurs don't scale is because they lie to themselves. You lie to yourself when you go below the floor. You lie to yourself when you say yes to things that you know are counter to your growth. The beautiful part about going for scale is that it forces you to go from amateur to pro. It forces you to stop doing like 5 or 10 things at an amateur level. It forces you to get really, really good and unique at what you do. That's— it forces you to stop being about you and your comfort, instead doing something that's very valuable and a very important, maybe even very life-changing, innovative, game-changing service for other people. That's the new path that the scale goal would give you. Xavier's going to have to get really, really good at a few forms of law, maybe even the best in the country, if he's going to hit his goal. If he was going to go for a smaller goal, he could be pretty average at 5 different forms of law. So I'm going to give you guys a quick stand break in a minute. I know we've been going— I got, by the way, I got one more hour and then we have lunch, so I hope you're ready for this. Russell doesn't take things lightly. This is what I love about Russell. He He— last time I came here, he was like, he had me speak once, twice, and then like, he's like, you're going to speak at midnight on The Gap and the Gain. I'm like, I can't speak at midnight, Russell. I love him. I love Russell. He's so awesome. So just give me— let me just get you into— actually, you know, everyone stand for 30 seconds. Let's just take a quick break.

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.