The Science Backed Psychology of Setting Impossible Goals ft. Dr Benjamin Hardy

A few weeks ago, we had Dr. Benjamin Hardy fly out to a private event at Snowbird, Utah for our top-tier Black Card members that are all launching their private investment funds. Now, meetings like this are usually private. We don't share this with the public, but Dr. Benjamin Hardy absolutely crushed it on stage. If you don't know who he is, he's the author of 10X Is Easier Than 2X and the psychology around setting large, even crazy goals and actually how that helps high performers. So with that, let's roll the tape of Dr. Benjamin Hardy.

So what I'm gonna teach you today is what I call strategic psychology. This is not taught anywhere, and within it is a 3-step framework that if you follow, you will achieve ridiculous things. You will find the right model. Let me first start off with some very foundational psychology to give you the base. This is Viktor Frankl. This is one of the most important books of the last 100 years. He was a Jewish psychiatrist who was basically taken by the Nazis, brought into the concentration camps. His wife, unborn daughter were taken, killed, his parents put into the gas chambers. Viktor Frankl sat through all of that. He survived, and he wrote about it in 8 days in what's called Man's Search for Meaning, one of the most important books of the last 100 years. And in that book, he describes the psychology of the concentration camps. When you've had literally everything in your life stripped away from you, And when you're in an environment where there's almost nothing to hope for, literally every day you see people right around you being shot in the head next to you. You're demeaned, everything's been taken from you, your identity, you're starving. If you wanna Google what these people look like, they are nothing but skin and bones, sleeping on dirt next to each other. And so Frankl, as the psychiatrist, is wondering, how the heck do I help my co-victims in here to make it through this difficult situation? Nothing worked except for one thing, is this. He says, any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nothing else worked. You had to have a future, and a specific future. You had to have a goal. Without that, nothing had meaning. And he said he could tell when people lost hope. And by the way, in the, in the psychology literature, you can't have hope without having a goal. And a core aspect of hope, which I'm gonna be teaching you about, and strategy, is what's called pathways thinking. You can't have hope without beginning to develop pathways to achieving that goal. And so for Frankl, once a person lost connection with their future, all of a sudden, a few really negative things started happening. First off, the present lost all meaning. If you don't have a future, your present is miserable. Your future is really the way in which you live through your present. The reason you're all here is because you have a future, and you're seeing this as a potential pathway to achieving that future. That's why you're here. You're seeing building a fund as a phenomenal path, or a phenomenal model to achieving your future. That's why you're here. If that wasn't part of your future, you would not be here. You'd be somewhere else. And so what Frankl found was, is that if a person did not have a future, A few really negative psychological effects happened. Number one, they became retrospective. They started thinking about their past, and they started wishing that things were the way they were back then. They started to withdraw emotionally and socially. They stopped having any contact with other people. The, the color in their eyes literally went away. It was like the light went out, and they could see the spirit go away. They stopped sharing their food. They just would eat their morsel of bread, Whereas the people who had goals and who had a future that gave their life meaning and purpose, they not only were happy and could notice the little things like the butterflies flying, they would share their little piece of bread. They had social contact, they were aware, they were present because they had a future. And I'm gonna share with you some of the real powerful psychology behind that. But this is just another great quote of his. He says, what man actually needs is not a tensionless state, This is what I think a lot of people teach in entrepreneurship, is that you should have a tensionless state. That's definitely not how you scale, make hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. What you want is the striving and struggling for a worthy goal, which is a freely chosen task. This is what he taught back in the '50s and '60s, but the beautiful thing is that you catch up now, and this is where the whole field of positive psychology and neuroscience is going. So let me just show you 2 different models of time, and then I'm gonna go into some case studies where you can really start using time as a far more strategic tool so that you can start stripping away a lot of the dead-end paths that you're currently on that are gonna waste years or decades. Time is a very powerful tool which you can use to filter out all the nonsense and all the noise. And then back to hope. begin finding pathways, people, partners, models that can take you to places you couldn't get to in hundreds of years with the wrong path. So this is what we call linear time in psychology. Linear time means that you let your past determine your present, and you let your present determine your future. In business slang, what this would mean is, is that you let your past performance determine your goals. You did $5 million in revenue last year, so let's do $6 million or $7 million This year. In this model, you're literally letting your past and your present determine your goals. That is not an effective use of goals. That's not an effective use of time. There's a lot of psychological downsides to this model. I'm not gonna go into all of them, but the primary downside is, is that the past is the driver. The present is in the passenger seat, and the future is unknown. The future is nothing but a guess, but the future is a byproduct. And there is a lot of research as it relates to the topic of future self, that this is how people form their future self. It's not the effective way to form your future self, but this is how people think about their future self, is that they just take who they are today and they just project that into the future. That again is an ineffective model of time. That's not how time works psychologically. Right here is a far more accurate, far more useful modeling of time as it relates to your psychology. There's a few super important things to note here. The first one is that it is always the present that determines the meaning of the past, not the past that determines the meaning of the present. I grew up, my father was a drug addict, my parents got divorced, I was driving a car when I was 16 years old, went in through a construction site, my mom got thrown 50 feet from the car, I went out, my mom almost died, she was in a coma for 3 weeks, almost died, I was the driver, right? All of these things happened, The question is, are they determining me, or do I in the present determine what these things mean? When you, you have to take, uh, it's called in psychology locus of control. Locus of control means location of control. Where do you place the location of control? If you're operating from a linear model of time, what that means is you're placing the location of control outside of you, and you're viewing the past as outside of you. The reality is, is that psychologically the past is inside of you, and it's shaping you Deeply, it's shaping you deeply. But the important thing that I'm trying to tell you here is that it's always you in the present that determines the meaning of your past. The way you do that is you give the past value. I can give extreme value to my father being a drug addict when I was in high school. I could give extreme value, it's my choice, the value I give it. And if I'm grateful for it and give value to it, now the past is a phenomenal tool that's benefiting my present and my future. But importantly, it is the present that determines the past. And it is the future, as the picture shows, that determines the present. And both of these things are psychological tools. The past is a tool. You take it for learning so you don't have to constantly repeat it. The more you learn from it and are honest about it, the less you'll repeat it. Lessons are repeated until they're learned. But this is back to Viktor Frankl. The past isn't a powerful enough tool to give your life meaning. You need a future. You need a goal, and I'm gonna explain to you the kind of goals that are the most effective tools and filters so that you can begin finding pathways and partners that can help you begin achieving things that seem impossible. And there's even a lot of research on this topic, on impossible goals. But as it relates to the future, the future probably weighs in terms of impact on your present 10x or more what your past does. If you do not have a powerfully framed future, Your present will be ineffective. Your present will be distracted, and you're, you're just not going to— you're gonna waste a lot of time and you're going to be repeating the past. So I'm gonna end up going into different types of goals, goals that can transform your present and goals that can help you achieve 10 to 100x in the same amount of time that you're currently planning for. But what I want you to see with this picture is, is that the future determines what you see in the present. In psychology, we call it frame. I'm gonna show you the scaling framework, which we call frame, floor, and focus, but the future determines your frame in the present. And so what this image shows is that the things you see, the things you deem as either signal or noise, positive pathways or distractions, those things are based on your goals. And John Doerr, who's a billionaire venture capitalist, said that a goal properly set is halfway reached. Because if you set a goal the right way, it allows you to strip out the noise and then to begin filtering for effective pathways that you could not have found if you were going for a different goal. Once you go for a goal, even an impossible goal that you don't know how to achieve, and again, I'll show you many stories, then you will begin filtering and finding, first off, you'll begin filtering out. Have any of you read Antifragile? Nassim Taleb. He says that subtraction is far more important than addition. The first step when you start going for a bigger goal is subtraction, because the majority of what you're doing right now, based on the better and bigger future, is a distraction. So the first step would be subtraction. We call that raising your floor. And then what happens is, is that you can then filter and find paths and partners that will get you very far. So here's what I want you to see. It is your goal that shapes your psychology, how you filter your life, what you filter out, and the pathways that you filter and find. Psychology fundamentally comes down to goals and pathways, and the better the goal, the better the path. Even in Bill Belichick's recent book, he calls it The Art of Winning. He says, the more vivid the vision, the more vivid the path appears. That's literally a quote from his brand new book. But very importantly, your goal also shapes the system And the model that you develop. And so if you have a small goal, you don't need a powerful system or model that can scale dramatically. All human systems are driven by goals. And so in order to have an effective, simple, scalable system, you have to have a very high and even a very urgent goal that forces you to develop and innovate that model. So this is what I call frame. This is just an image representing data information. Basically, as it relates to our psychology, there is infinite information going on, even in this room. There's like exit signs over there, there's sounds, I can even hear little sounds buzzing behind me, right? There's infinite data and information. If you think about the internet, endless data and information. And all of these things actually represent pathways. If you wanna distract yourself, if your goal is to distract yourself, Often there will be a pathway, right? Social media, distraction, food. You start to find pathways to achieve your short-term goals, and there's just infinite information online. Think about it. But what determines the information you see? It is your frame. And that also includes the people that you work with, the people you partner with, the people you hire. All of that is based on your goals. And so when you move your goal up to a very high level, in the book 10X Is Easier Than 2X, I gave my, my son Caleb as an example. Caleb's a tennis player, and so we live in Orlando, Florida. His goal for a period of time was to play college tennis, and he was very competitive. Not as much into that anymore, he's very into cars. But the main point with the story I told in 10x is, if he wants to go to college, there's a lot of pathways he can use to get there. This is his model if he's wanting to go for college. And what the lines represent in there is pathways. And so in Orlando, there are literally hundreds of coaches that could get my son Caleb to college. But if he wanted to go for pro, the floor would go up a lot higher. And the difference between professionals and amateurs is their floor. The difference between Steph Curry and some other no-name NBA player is not as much about their ceiling as it is their floor. Your floor is the, is essentially your base performance, and it's also your base standard, and everything below it is a no-go. So Steph Curry's average game is like most people's maybe once every 20 games game, right? His floor is radically higher than the other place, his average performance. But the point of my son Caleb is if he went for pro, maybe only 2 or 3, maybe 1 or 2 or 3 coaches could actually get him there if he was that committed. And so you want to raise your goals so high that the majority of things you're thinking about right now, the majority of things you're investing in yourself right now, the majority of things you're doing right now fall below the floor. And then this is when the emotions kick in. This is when your level of self-honesty and transparency, I was hearing about accountability from John, the floor also represents your level of accountability, right? The floor is the system. Everything gets stripped out that's below the floor. And so as you raise the floor, the things that are in your system, the pathways you're pursuing, even the people, the level, the products, whatever, maybe your job or whatever, those things fall below the floor. You can maintain them, but now you're just creating complexity in your system, you're creating complexity in your life, you're saying yes to things that you know are below the floor. And that creates a lot of psychological damage, 'cause essentially you're lying to yourself, you're contradicting yourself, and you're just, you're overly complex, you're not focused, you're not committed. So this takes me to one of my favorite quotes from Elon Musk, and this quote is relative, and it's related to what he calls his 5-step algorithm. His 5-step algorithm is based on first principles, and it's the systematic thinking he's used to engineer systems for the past 20 years and create some of the biggest companies in the world. So what he says is that the most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing which shouldn't exist. And so the beautiful part about framing your future effectively and using it as a filter in the present is that then you can begin to see all the things you're doing in your life and your business that are optimizing things that are below the floor. You're optimizing things that can't scale. You're investing yourself into things that are dead ends. There's a really good book on this subject actually called Quit by Annie Duke. And Annie Duke's a professional poker player and she's a decision theorist. And basically what Annie Duke talks about is that the difference between professional poker players and average poker players, amateur, professional and amateurs, is, is that the professionals, they fold their hands way more often. They don't get themselves into bad hands. The amateurs are putting money on hands that are losing hands from the beginning, and then they deal with a concept called sunk cost bias, where because they're invested in a bad hand, they keep throwing more and more money after bad. That's what it's called. You're throwing good after bad. And so not only do the pros play less hands, but even if they get invested in a hand and then they have better information, they'll get out of a bad hand. So they lose way less money, they win way more hands, they have a higher floor. They fold faster on the stuff that is a dead-end distraction. And that's ultimately what we wanna do if we wanna scale. If we wanna start achieving 10 or 100x or faster growth, you can't be so caught in all the noise and all the dead ends and distractions. And so the beauty of raising your floor as a person is that you begin systematically saying no to things that your past self used to say yes to. You just honestly acknowledge that it's noise. You begin honestly acknowledging this stuff at some point in time, whether now or later, is a dead end. And so I'm better off stripping it away now. And then from, from the higher goal, finding a far more focused path. This is what you want. You want a more focused model, a more focused system, a more focused path. Part of the beauty of setting high, seemingly impossible goals is that they force you to define who you are. If you're doing 5 or 10 different things, you're not defined, you're not focused, you're not clear, you're actually noise in the marketplace. No one knows who you are. You have to be defined. Let me give a few funny stories and case studies. So this is a young man who I interviewed while I was writing The Science of Scaling. And he's someone who wants to one day in his future own a European soccer team. That is his dream. That's a massive dream. Probably have to be around a billionaire to do it, right? And so I asked him, when do you want to achieve this goal of owning a European soccer team? First off, when there's a goal that's that big, I'm not, I'm not worried about the scale of the goal. Often the first problem is, is that people's goals are too small. And because people's, that's literally the first thing Tony said in his foreword. Is that most people, they're shooting too small. In this case, I don't think the kid's shooting too small. He's 22 years old and he wants to own a European soccer team. That's a beautiful goal. Most people, their first problem is that they're shooting too small. He's not shooting too small, but he had, he faced the second problem of framing a goal. He's 22 years old, and I said, when are you gonna do it? And he said, I will do it by age 55. I said, that's great. You're giving yourself 33 years to achieve this ridiculous goal that almost no one can accomplish, 33 years. I said, what would happen if you went for it by age 30? By, by our boy Bridger's age, right? Instead of going from 22, what if you just went for it by age 30? What would happen? And this is where he began to get upset and frustrated, even a little, um, a little concerned. So what happens is, and this isn't his timeframe, but this is just showing that what happens when you go for the same goal, but you change the timeframe.

Mm-hmm.

is, is that the paths are fundamentally different. This is one of the things that people mistaked when they read 10X Is Easier Than 2X, is they thought they could go from 2X to 10X by following the same path. That's just not true. You can't 10X with the exact same path or model. And so one path is linear, one path is different. One path is very focused, and it's focused on things, those pathways that I was talking about, that are not obvious. So what happens when you have a very long timeframe? And I'm very open to long-range thinking, but not long-range goals. If you have a 10-year goal, move it forward to 2 or 3 years and watch what happens to your plan. This is what happens to your plan. On a very long-term goal, you have a lot of what Musk calls false requirements, false requirements to the goal. These are also based on false assumptions. Right? And so on a linear journey, here's the real problem. You're not actually solving the goal. So let me go back to the 22-year-old kid. I asked him, when I said, what would happen if you moved your 33-year timeframe? What if rather than age 55, we did it at age 30? He said, he started talking to me about his 33-year plan that was perfect. It was a perfectly framed plan. He said, firstly, I really wanna get a PhD. And so right now, I'm in my undergrad, and I'm really working to get into a PhD program. From there, I really wanna run a firm, I wanna do this, I wanna do that, I wanna do this. He had a very well-thought-out 33-year plan, which he was very attached to. And so, one of the problems with having your goals too far out is, is that you're not actually solving the goal, you're solving the next linear step. In his case, he's not solving How do I own a European soccer team? What he's honestly solving in this minute and for the next 5 to 10 years is how do I get into a PhD program? That's what he's optimizing for. And when I said, what would happen if you just moved the timeline radically forward? He's like, I don't know if I could still do a PhD. It's like, okay, so now we have 2 conflicting goals. And what happens when you have conflicting goals? You have a complex system that doesn't scale. You have a system that's going in multiple different directions. Remember, your goals shape your psychology. Your goals also shape the systems you build, your team. They build what you're focused on, what you're optimizing for. And so when you have too long of a timeframe, you're not building what is called the crux in strategy psychology. You're not actually solving. Think about if he actually just spent the next 8 years Solving the goal instead of solving false steps and optimizing things that shouldn't exist. Truly, he's optimizing things that shouldn't exist, and he's on a path that if you go back to the poker example, a lot of those hands should be folded. A lot of those paths are dead ends. A lot of those paths aren't going to actually get him where he wants to go. And so you can know if someone has a complex plan or an overly long plan that they're especially very attached to, that they're not committed to their goal. And in fact, the thing that I've found, and I've consulted many companies doing hundreds of millions of dollars, scaling for billions, having big exits, I've helped companies of all sizes. Whenever a founder or a CEO has a 10-year goal, I know that they're not actually solving the goal. They're solving the next linear step, and their chances that they're gonna hit their goal are almost zero. If you have a goal that's 10 years away, your chances of hitting it are almost zero. You can take the same goal and go for it in 3, and you don't have to hit it in 3. Remember what I said? I said time is a psychological tool. The future is a tool for filtering the present. First off, being a lot more honest and filtering out the stuff that shouldn't be there. The future is also a tool, including goals. Goals are a tool to filter honesty. This goal, moving his goal forward, is a massive tool for this young man to begin to genuinely ask himself some hard questions. Why do I want the PhD? Why do I wanna run the firm? Why do I even want the European soccer team, right? Now he has to start asking them those questions. He doesn't have to ask himself those questions if his goal's 33 years away, or even if it's 10 years away. So this is Richard Rumelt, one of the most important strategy thinkers of the past 50 years. He's taught strategy for the past 50 years. This is called The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists. And this is really important that most leaders aren't good at strategy. So he says, you will have a much harder time dealing with a gnarly challenge if you have not distilled it down to a crux. No one solves a problem they cannot comprehend or hold in their mind. So in the case of the young man, he, he has not distilled his goal down to a crux. He doesn't know how to solve his goal, and in fact, he's optimizing too many things that shouldn't exist. When you're operating this way, when you're operating linearly, you're letting your past determine your present, you're letting your present determine your future, you will be below the floor a lot because you're not using your future as an effective tool. You're not using goals as the tool that they're intended to be. A lot of people don't set impossible goals because they have a lot of emotional baggage around goals. They think that if they don't hit the goal, they're a loser. They don't— they also think, if I don't know how to hit the goal now, then it's not the right goal. One of the most important points in the literature about impossible goals is, is that they force you out of your current knowledge and frameworks. When you go for a goal that's 10 times bigger or 10x shorter, you don't know how to get there. Therefore, you don't know the path, but you do know that your current path won't get you there. You do know your current thinking won't get you there, and so you're then forced to go and filter and find better ones. One of my favorite models from Dan Sullivan, who I wrote 3 books with, is what he calls the 4 Cs formula. Essentially, it's first you have to commit, and from commitment leads to courage. And courage is defined by pursuing something that might not work. If you think you have to have the answer, you want certainty and confidence in the beginning, you're hosed. Commitment first, courage, and then from that you start to build capability and pathways, which largely include other people. When you go for bigger goals, it's always gonna be through strategic partnerships, Through who's, you have to find people. The people are the most effective pathways when you start going for big goals. But what most people want is they want confidence first. They won't set the goal until they know they can achieve it. And so what Dan says, which I love, is he says, people want confidence, they don't want commitment and courage. And so you have to ask, are you willing to commit? And then start to filter and find those pathways. The future is a tool for finding the most effective pathways. Once you start to actually set seemingly impossible goals and scale in timeline, if that young man actually went for the big goal, he'd have to strip out the complexity of all of his false goals. Owning the firm, all of those things I think he's just honestly doing because he thinks that those are acceptable steps. Those are false requirements. He's not solving the goal. He has a complex system that can't scale. So Steve Jobs said, people think focus means saying yes to the thing you gotta 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. But this is super important, especially as it relates to you and as it relates to this young man. So the quote from Robert Brault is, we're kept from our goal, i.e., the European soccer team, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal, i.e., getting the PhD, running the firm, whatever it is. And so if you have a lot of seeming requirements to your goal, you're optimizing things that shouldn't exist. You have a complex system, you have a complex focus, you have bad strategy. Bad strategy means that you have too many conflicting things and priorities, and you're not growing fast. In fact, Richard Rumelt, and I'll share with you another quote of his in a minute, he said, good strategy is surprising because of how rare it is. You can know good strategy when you start to see someone leaving things. Back to Antifragile, when you start to see someone letting go of things that seem really awesome, letting go of the good so that they can become great. This is what happens when you have really, your goals are improperly framed. You have a lot of lesser goals and false requirements that you're optimizing for that shouldn't exist, that are creating complexity in your life, creating complexity in your business. And this can even happen, by the way, In a single business, where a business has all these conflicting and competing things, and it's creating dilution of focus. It's creating noise in the marketplace. And so you want to have a focused path. You want a focused model that's extremely defined and clear, and is not afraid of it. In the NBA Finals, Alexander, who's like you know Shea Gildress Alexander, I. I'm saying his name wrong, but he was interviewed recently and he was saying that he wanted to be one of the best players in the world. And he said he's not worried about making his goals public because he doesn't wanna run away from his goals. He's like, why would I run away from my goals? This is who I wanna be. And so you have to be willing to become definitive. Let me give another example. This is Xavier Martin. So Xavier has a law firm. He learned this framework, frame, floor, focus, and the importance of having seemingly impossible goals in Q4 of last year. It's been about 7 or 8 months from today. He learned this framework. He was doing $2.5 million in revenue. He had about 3 or 4 law offices in Minnesota. So Xavier had something that is, again, rare, like the young man. When I asked Xavier, what's the goal for your firm? I was surprised. He said, I want to get to $100 million in revenue and be a national firm. Most attorneys don't want to do that. That's exciting. I said, but again, I said, What's your timeframe? And he said, I'm gonna get there in 10 years. And often you can know if someone has a bad goal frame, if they just have an arbitrary timeline, especially if it's far away, that's a bad goal. That's a goal that's probably not gonna happen. And so what happened for Xavier, which was really important, was we said, Xavier, you're not solving the goal. You're not solving for $100 million. I know you say that's your goal. It's 10 years away. You're not doing it. I said, what would happen if you move the time frame from 10 to 3? And what what here's what's really cool is he actually did it, but then a lot of things happened. The first thing he realized was is that he had no concept, no no model, no strategy for 100 million. He had no clue, and he was not solving for 100 million. He was not on this path solving for the goal. He was on this path. And because he was at $2.5 million, what he was actually solving for was, how do I get to $5 million? Does that make sense? He was trying to, he was on the linear path of letting his past and present shape his goal. And so he was solving for the next logical step, which makes sense if you're on a linear track, not if you're using time and goals as a strategic tool for filtering noise out and for finding effective crux, right? And so what we found out was he's down here on the bottom rung and he's going for this rung. He came to all these conclusions himself within 90 days of moving his goal. He realized, first off, I'm not solving for $100 million. I don't have a plan or a path to $100 million. I don't have a model for $100 million. I don't even know what I'm doing. But then he realized a lot of other things, because remember, the future is the filter for the present, and it forces you to raise your floor and be a lot more honest. And so because he was a lot more honest, he started to look at his business with new eyes. Again, the future is the tool for looking at the present. And so as he began looking at the present and looking at his business, he began to realize this business, if I pushed it hard, could probably get to $5 million. But the very decisions I'm making right now are not going to get me to $100 million. They're probably going to sink me around $5 million because I'm making really bad decisions right now. He began to look at his systems and processes in his business, and they were awful. He began to look at his sales team, and he began to realize that they were— he had a Spanish and an English sales team, and he'd never been aware of this before. He was beginning to become aware of so many inefficiencies in his business. His English sales team was converting at like 1/3 his Spanish, and they were a really bad team. And so when he moved the floor up and he said, guys, you gotta move from 30% to like 60% or 80% like the Spanish team, they actually all quit. None of them wanted to be there. And so he had to hire a new English-speaking sales team, and immediately within a month, they were performing at way, you know, at the level of the Spanish team. At around 90% conversion to get leads to do a qualifying call. He also brought on what we call a super who. He brought on a general manager that within the first 30 days brought on 3 really good attorneys. He also began to look at all the forms of law that they practice, and he realized that they were practicing over 10 forms of law in their offices, and that the majority of them were not only unprofitable dead ends, they were also things that they didn't want to be doing. But they were just, they'd become split-focused. They were undefined as a law firm, fundamentally. If we asked, what does Xavier, or what does Martine Law, what kind of law do they do? They literally did 10 or 15 different forms of law. So during those first 90 days, he stripped out all of them but 3, the 3 that they wanted to become the world class at. They refined their systems. He put in a really phenomenal general manager, and they built a system that they could replicate throughout the United States. Because he began to develop a plan for $100 million in 3 years or less. You fast forward to today, and they're trending towards about $15 million for this year. So last year they did about $2.5, they're gonna do $15 this year. But more importantly than the $15 this year is that they actually have the plan and the system and the team to do it. And it's a simple model. It's a simple, clarified, defined model, and they're no longer— optimizing things that shouldn't exist. When I asked Xavier— oh, and there's one other thing. He's now actually getting mentoring and guidance from people who have scaled over $100 million and have legal practices at that level. He's now getting mentoring from them and getting connections to them and getting people on his team from those connections that are going to help this happen. None of that stuff would've happened if he hadn't set the goal. He told me, that had he kept the 10-year timeframe, he would have remained unaware of the inefficiencies in his business. They would have kept a very complex model for who knows how long. He says, I might've never become aware because when a goal's that far away, you're not solving it. You're solving for the next linear step and you're optimizing things that shouldn't exist. And you're making decisions in your life and your business that are counter to the real goal. That's why you need to have a high-framed goal and an extremely urgent timeline, not to stress yourself out, but by using that frame, you can be a lot more honest with yourself in the present about everything you're doing right now that's a dead end distraction, everything that's below the floor, everything that at some point or another is going to really mess you up. There's a lot of yellow flags in your life, right? A lot of yellow flags in your team and on your business. These things are gonna create complexity. These things are gonna create problems. Recently, I was giving a talk and I was in Cincinnati, and a guy walked up to me and he said, Ben, I read your book, 10X Is Easier Than 2X. It was 2 years ago and he 52X'd his business. And so I hear these stories all the time. I want you guys to know, if you apply this framework, frame, floor, focus, and if you actually apply it, it will simplify your focus. It will force you to raise your floor. That's gonna be very difficult for you because you're gonna have to start letting go of things you don't wanna let go of. You have to start first off being a lot more honest with yourself. More transparent with yourself. Before I even go into this research, I just wanna share one thing. So when I was writing this book, I interviewed a guy who creates economic systems and economic models for countries, third world countries, first world countries, all along the spectrum. And I asked him the question, so he's hired by governments to form their economic models for their entire country. And I said, in a single word, I didn't actually say this, I didn't say in a single word, I said, what's the primary difference between the first world countries and the third world countries? And he did say it's one word. He said, the word is accountability. In the first world countries, and that was something that John was saying, that if you have a floor, if you have a consequence and you don't keep it, then you're actually going below the floor and you're lying to yourself and others and you confuse people, right? And so in the first world countries, there is accountability in the system. It may not be perfect accountability, but the leaders are held accountable, the system's accountable, maybe the currency's more accountable, Right? Whereas in the third world country, there's a lot less accountability, there's a lot more corruption, there's a lot more stealing, and that trickles down into the culture. And so the floor is the thing that's accountable. And in companies that I've consulted where we've set— we've taken their 10-year goal and moved it to 3, and their floor went really high. And the CEO said, I know I need to raise the floor and I need to let go of stuff. They didn't start scaling until he actually made the floor the floor. And in a lot of cases, that meant getting rid of half the C-suite team. You know, it meant getting rid of XYZ product. So until you make the floor the floor, you're lying to yourself and you're not gonna scale, and you've got a complex system where you're optimizing a lot of things that shouldn't exist. So this is just some of the research on impossible goals. I'm not gonna go too much into it. Again, I'm gonna share with you these slides, but basically the definition of these, and this is straight from the psychological literature and the management literature, in the literature they call them stretch goals, but basically what it's defined as is it's an organizational goal with an objective probability of attainment that is unknown, but is seemingly impossible given your current capability and knowledge. So essentially, you're setting a goal that seems impossible 'cause you don't know the way, you don't know the pathway. And then this is what it says further. It says, because stretch goals involve extreme redefinitions, this is very important. As I said, you need to become defined, very clearly defined. And when you go for a bigger goal, you have to define yourself differently, right? Maybe you go from a, a product company to a service company or to a technology company, or you say, we only do these kinds of law, we don't do 50, right? And so because these types of goals involve extreme redefinitions of what an organization is capable of being and achieving, they can capture, shift, and refocus attention, right? Remember, I've been talking about how goals shape attention, goals shape psychology, they shape what you're looking for. This is what it further says, this is Dr. Denise Russo, sorry, says, according to 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 a poor guide for stretch goal achievement. You can't use your past as the tool to finding the pathway. It says this, and this shifts the performer's attention away from old routines and assumptions towards novel and creative approaches, right? Those are the pathways. This is how these goals work. The future is a tool. Goals are a tool for filtering the present, for filtering out the noise and the waste, the dead ends, the false attachments, the false goals, and for finding the crux, for finding the most direct, straightforward path, the focused path to your goal. Your goal shapes your psychology, your goal shapes the model, the system. Most systems can't scale, most goals, most models can't scale. This is why you always wanna use the, The goal to shape what is the model that can get me to $100 million or $1 billion in the next 2 or 3 years. Not every model can get you there. This is again why I love what Bridger teaches. I've heard him teach this, that not every boat can get you to Mars, right? You need the right model. This is a really great book. I'm not gonna go too into it on systems theory, but this is just the whole idea. Just look at the very last sentence here. Be especially careful not to confuse effort with result, or you'll end up with a system that's producing effort, not result. This whole book is about how your goal shapes your system, and you really wanna make sure that your system is optimized for the goal. And when you have an impossible goal, you're gonna be forced to build the most simplified, focused system, focused on the crux, and eliminate all the noise. So this is good strategy, bad strategy. It says, having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and the powerful, but they make for bad strategy. I'll tell you, most people don't understand strategy. Strategy starts with psychology. If you're letting your past shape your goals, you don't understand strategy. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does. Michael Porter, who invented the field of competitive strategy, said that strategy is essentially what you don't do. That's why the floor is so important. Until your floor goes so high, You're an amateur. Once you raise the floor and you strip out all the noise, then you can become a pro. Strategy is strategy's child, and to have strategy rather than vague aspirations is to choose one path and eschew others. Unfortunately, good strategy is the exception, not the rule. Last quick story. This lady, Alicia Alt, came to me. She had a software company called LevelUpScore. that she really wanted to scale, and she didn't know how. When she came to me, she had 10 clients. In the United States, there are 50,000 credit repair companies, 50,000. And all she wanted to do was have those 50,000 credit repair companies using LevelUp Score, 'cause it helped their clients better than anything on the market. And so how she got the first 10 of these 50,000 companies using her software was cold calling them. She called them one by one by one by one, and they're so— and her software is so innovative, So powerful, she's put the work in, she's created something that is revolutionary for the credit repair, or for the credit industry. Every time people heard about this, they're like, we need to use this for their clients. The problem was, is her one-on-one method didn't scale. And so I said, Alicia, we need you to set an impossible goal so that you can find a better path, right? The goal shapes the path. And so initially she set the goal of, I'm gonna get 100 of these companies using my software in 90 days. And here's the problem. That goal was a cop-out. That goal was not an effective tool. That goal allowed her to maintain her current model, her current assumptions, her current path. She said, I'm gonna get 100 of these companies using my software in 90 days. I said, that's a lie. That's a bad goal 'cause you know you can call 90 of them in 90 days. Set a bigger goal. So she said, okay, I'll go for 1,000 people using this software in 90 days. And then she what? Changed her goal. She had no clue how to do it. She went from confidence to no confidence, which is where you wanna be. And so then she began pathways thinking, i.e., strategizing from the goal. How do I have 1,000 of these companies using my software in 90 days? It's not gonna be the same path, and it's not gonna be the same people. By thinking from the goal, by letting the future shape the present, by using a much higher, better-framed future, To filter out dead ends, she did end up selling her coaching company. She began to think about pathways to the goal. It dawned on her, when you begin thinking from the goal, you begin to find pathways. Back to Bill Belichick, the more vivid the goal, the more vivid the path will appear. It dawned on her, there are other great software companies in this space that serve thousands of these credit repair companies already. There's dozens of great software companies in this space of different types that serve these credit repair companies. Some of them serve thousands, some of them serve tens of thousands. If I just partnered with one of them, I'd be past 1,000. So rather than needing 1,000 whos, rather than needing 1,000 sales, she just needed one. I just need to talk to one of these software companies and form a partnership. And that's what she did. In less than a week, she was on the phone with a guy who owned a company called Credit Repair junkies who had 8,000 of these clients, 8,000 of these credit repair companies using his software. She was on the phone with him for less than an hour. She explained LevelUp Score. He fell in love with it. They formed a partnership. Immediately, her software was being used by his 8,000 clients, right? From 10 to 8,000, right? Come on, that deserves a round of applause. This is what Bill Gates says, this is when you understand the power law. Peter Thiel talks about the power law. The power law is knowing that in the S&P, there's 7 companies that make up the majority of the US economy. The power law is the understanding that one great software writer is worth 10,000 times an average software writer. The power law is the understanding that one book sells more than a million other books. The power law is, is that one person generally owns the monopoly, right? And so when, what Alicia began to apply the power law, rather than being linear, she went for the power law and partnered with one person that got her 8,000 clients. That's called good psychology, good strategy. That's called what we call frame, floor, focus. As I started with, a goal properly set is halfway reached. This is my invitation to you guys. Set an impossible goal, raise your floor, strip out the noise, strip out the complexity, define yourself, find the crux, find the model, you can achieve 10x, 100x goals in less than 3 years.