How To Scale Your Business 100x in 3 Years w/ Dr. Benjamin Hardy

People who are very talented, even very talented entrepreneurs, they could be getting 100x the results they are. The belief that you can or can't isn't necessary in the beginning. A business is a human system. Every human system is driven by a goal. The clearer and better you get at the goal, the better you can systemize and scale. As you start using that goal more and more as the tool for orienting your life, for orienting your direction, for letting things go, you can start to reach a place of massive conviction. The human systems get what you tell them to give you.

Right?

Like we all have systems, we all build out teams and processes. This, that, that, that, that. And they're just doing what we tell them to do.

The book science of scaling. Grow your business bigger and faster than you think possible. Step one, set an impossible goal.

It's very difficult to shoot for a goal that's that big because that goal will force you to grapple with hidden commitments or just lesser goals. I actually think that it's very powerful to set a goal that forces you to look at all your goals and say, why do I have these goals? Really? It's simply about is this.

Yeah, that. Yeah, you just mind warped me a little bit. Ben Hardy, I have a bone pick with you. I read your book and then I couldn't sleep. So this is one of those books that I found very convicting, which is ironic because I first discovered your work when I read Willpower doesn't work, which is the only book that I've ever gifted to a therapist who then he kept in his office. So I find your work very convicting. And what I want to do with you today is I want to be the case study. Like, I want to actually put some of my thinking of what I've been wrestling with after reading the science of scaling you down.

Yeah, this is fun.

First, I like to ask people, how did you make your money?

I did through, honestly, through books and through a training company I had, which I sold.

You sold the training company?

Yeah.

What was the training company?

It was called AMP Platinum. I sold it to a guy named Chad Willardson.

I love how you just lay that out there. Sold it to Chad.

He's also just a dear friend, but I had that for like five years.

What was that business?

It was just a $20,000 a year coaching company that I had for five years. And then I've had probably 20,000 people go through my information products of some forms. And then my books do very well, oddly, in Asia.

In Asia?

Yeah. Like, I get I do very. I do very well in Asia. That's weird.

That, that's. That's interesting because for. For a while there have been times that our books have been competing with each other for, like, number one on Amazon, but I've never checked the Asian markets.

So, yeah, South Korea and Japan. My books do very well, it seems like.

And in the last couple of years, you made a conscious decision to go in a different direction, which I think became the impetus for this book. You kind of allude to it.

Yeah.

But you don't, like, come out and say it. So will you come out and say it?

About what? The conscious decision.

Yeah, the conscious decision to make a pivot and do something bigger.

Yeah. So Richard Ralt, who wrote the book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, and I referenced him in the book, he said that good strategy is surprising because of how rare it is.

Right.

And so for me, as I was learning more and more of these concepts myself, I purposely walked away from kind of the mainstream concepts of social media. A lot of the groups I was a part of, even my old business, like, I just. And just decide I'm going to go deep into. I didn't even know it was going to be scaling, to be honest with you. A lot of it was strategy and psychology. And so I was just going very, very deep into this. And basically my pathway was going to be books and audiobooks. And so I'm just kind of just sharing it with you directly rather than going the way that I just think that there's so many, like, bloody red oceans. And so I just said, I'm just going to go books and audiobooks. And so that was just the way I was going to go. And we're essentially in the process of creating a field called strategic psychology. So it was a very deliberate decision, but it was. I mean, it's hard, as always, to peel away. You know, even you were just mentioning about moving everything to capitalism dot com. So it. It was painful to walk away from the path I was on, but it was great.

But basically what I'm hearing you say is that you made a conscious decision to double down on where you had the greatest impact and where you probably found the most fulfillment, and you stripped away everything else, and that included all the things that everybody else says that you're supposed to do, like post 17 times a day on social media and go to masterminds and manage a blog and update your LinkedIn, all these things. Is that a fair summary of what you're saying?

Oh, yeah, Yeah. I walked away from pretty Much all of it. And had a full year and a half or two years after I wrote 10x is easier than 2x to just, like, sit. And I did have many potential collaborative conversations. And so. But most of it was just delving, delving, deep learning, considering things and just looking at the landscape of business strategy. All these things. One of my favorite quotes comes from. I think it's laughly, but he says that strategy, a big part of it is choosing the game you want to play and knowing how you'll win there. And so, like, I just knew that a lot of the games I was playing in, I didn't want to be playing in, and I didn't. Maybe I could have won in those games, but I didn't want to be playing in those games.

And so that is a radically different view of scaling than what most people will say, because I think what most people mean when they say scale is how do I do twice as many things.

Heard that very recently, even today. No, I heard that my sense of.

Humor will grow on you as we get to know each other better.

I know what you're talking about, but, no, I heard that about a week or two ago on a massive launch, a launch that you'd be aware of, but it was a massive launch. But he was talking about scaling, about how scaling means you add more and more and more products to what you're doing. And I was like, oof, I don't know about that.

Yeah, no, no, I disagree with that. But the. That is kind of the. The way that most people think is. Is doing more means more growth. And I have sort of had the sense. It's been kind of a feeling I've had within our company specifically, like, the more we do, the less that happens.

The.

Everybody's busier. Yep, more is happening. I'm definitely more stressed, but our work isn't better.

True.

And, And. And what your most recent book did for me was put language to it, put words to it. But it's been kind of an observation and a feeling I've had. And over the last few months, I've started chipping away or at least questioning, do we really want to do this project? Like, is this process really necessary? And I'm curious if this was something that you chose or did you discover it through pain?

Like the idea that to really scale you, you do less. Yes, I think that I. I think I learned it. I learned it through. So. One of the partners in scaling.com is a guy named Joseph Wynn. Joseph wrote the book Don't Believe Everything you think. Have you heard of that one?

Yes.

Yeah, so he.

I do not understand that man. You know him personally?

He's a partner.

Okay, great. I have so many questions I want you to.

The reason I bring him up, one is he changed. He's changed our book strategy. But number two, I was teaching him about a concept in learning where. So there's a concept in learning where you can either be a high rep learner or a low rep learner. A high rep learner means you have to like, go through something over and over. You have to do many reps to finally learn the lesson and move on, which is fine. Low rep learner, they can do a few reps. And, and what's crazy about Joseph, and he literally said this is. He said, I prefer no rep learning. And so what he meant by that is, is like he does a lot of. He does a lot of thinking in his mind and like anticipating. So like, for him, success is being ahead of situations and problems. It's almost like go where the puck's going. But even like with clients, it's like rather than waiting and being reactive, it's like, let's. Obviously you can't predict everything, but let's, let's be as far ahead of it. He's pushing me on that. But so to your point of learning, I think that because I've been so deep in psychology and I understand that most of psychology, like most growth in psychology is stripping things away, letting go, you know, unlearning, et cetera, like, because I have that foundational knowledge of psychology, thinking about in the terms of strategy and business came pretty natural. And just seeing how rare it is again that people actually focus and choose a focus path. And so I think it became just more and more clear to me and continues to become more and more clear to me how, how unfocused people are. And I had to have that shoved in my face because I think often we think we're focused when we're really not. And so that was one of the things that hit me hard even while writing this book was, you know, one of my mentors saying, ben, you are not focused. Like, literally, just be honest with yourself. Look at the many things you're doing. Like look at the web of goals you have and you're. They're not as synergistic as you think. Like, let's just, let's. Let's just be honest. And it's good to have good people too. I'll just tell you.

What were they that you thought was.

So synergistic one was like a YouTube channel for me. Like, YouTube is obviously probably one of the smarter platforms for anyone to be on right now. Like, me, even as a writer, it's smart to be on YouTube and, like. But for me, that was one. My coaching business was one. Even doing the books with Dan was another. And so, like, there was. There was many things I was doing, even consulting, actually, for a while, I was consulting big companies. And that's. And a lot of it. A lot of the learning did come from that experience, but it was still just like I was doing probably five things that all were related, but all of them were pathways. I viewed them as pathways, but none of them were an excellent path, like, to where I was trying to go. All of them were decent pathways, but none of them were powerful. Like, none of them. None of them would get me where I was. A good word.

Yeah, powerful.

True.

That's a. That's a good word.

Yeah.

Power requires focus.

Yeah. And power in statistics means you can actually, like, get the thing done. Like, in statistics, they talk about, like, how much power does the. Does the experiment have? Or how much power does the variable have? And so they were all decent, but I even knew that they were still kind of shotgun versus laser. Yeah.

I think that's why I found the book. So convicting.

What I want to understand more of, like, for you, what was. What was convicting or. Or strong about it for you?

Well, one. I mean, the book, Science of scaling. Grow your business bigger and faster than you think possible. Step one, set an impossible goal. And then all my resistance came up. So that was, you know, chapter one. Set a goal so big that you don't think that you can hit it. And I thought about that, and I had, like, seven goals that all seemed related to one another. And it was very difficult for me to narrow it down to, like, three. And at that point, it's like, well, they're all related, which I know is a cop out, but I struggled with step one. So that was convicting.

Right.

And then the next part is, like I said, a timeline that you don't think you can hit. All right. More of my resistance comes up.

Right.

Why? This is.

This is the good psychologist in me.

And then it's raising the floor. You're gonna have to cut some things out. Okay. And so more of my resistance comes out. Now, logically, I totally get why this is correct.

Right.

And I have experienced enough, and I would even advise clients to do the exact same thing of. You're doing way too Many things, you're not doing enough of them well. And I have enough experience in my life to that when we do fewer things but do them better, we get better results across the board. But this was just like a smack in the face of, you can do way more. Focus on a few things.

Yeah, yeah. My feeling is, is that people who are very talented, even very talented entrepreneurs, they could be getting 100x the results they are, you know, but, you know, it's very difficult to shoot for a goal that's that big. It's because that goal will force you to grapple with what I call either what Musk calls false requirements or what others would call hidden commitments or just lesser goals.

Right.

These are lesser goals that I actually think that it's very powerful to set a goal that forces you to look at all your goals and say, why do I have these goals? Really? You know, that's the sign of a good goal, is that it forces you to look at everything you're doing and say, I have to really dig into the well and say, why am I really doing that?

Right.

So like one of the guys who I wrote about in the book, 22 Year Old Guy, wants to own a European soccer team, wants to do it. And like, you know, he's 22 years old, wants to do it by age 55. So he's got, he's given himself 33 years to potentially become a billionaire, which is great. You know, that's a huge goal. But when I said, how about we just try to do it rather than by your 55th birthday, let's go for it by age 30.

Right.

Let's use time as a tool. Then he had to realize, well, I really had a path that I liked, that 33 year path, I was attached to it. I really wanted to get that PhD and run that firm and do all of these things that would make me important enough to own a company or own a. And I said, well, when you go for it and you know, by your 30th birthday instead, and let's just cut the timeline to like five to seven years. Now he has to say, now we have to actually really question his PhD and his business and say, are all of these just hidden assumptions, false goals? Why does it even matter now if we're just going to go straight at the goal versus optimize for things that are not really that valuable in light of the better frame. And so that's the beauty of being smacked in the face with these things is it forces you to say, do I really need that thing or how valuable is it instead of just going that way, that straight way.

So let's talk about that some more because I found it difficult and convicting and not like I could just make a decision about what goal was big or meaningful enough to forsake all other goals. That was something that, it was like, I, I need to put my pen pen down and think about this for a little bit. So I would like for you to prod a little bit.

Okay.

And, and let's just play of how you would advise me or someone listening to wrestle with this question of setting a goal too big for someone to think that they can actually hit.

How intense and blunt do you want me to be with you?

Be blunt.

Okay. So what is the current goal of capitalism.com?

There'S like seven.

But what's the, what's the, what's the revenue goal?

Oh, $100 million holding company.

Perfect.

By when?

By 2030.

Perfect. So what would have to go if we said $100 million holding company by 2020? By the end of 2027. So if we just applied the idea. Yeah, I'm fine with the goal. I'm not going to question the goal. Let's just say we want to get there by end of 2027. If we did that, what would what in your current plan starts to fall apart? If we are literally going to go for a. Yeah, if we just literally went for your same goal, but by the end of 2027, we're going to give you two and a half years to do it. What in your current plan can't get you there?

What needs to be removed or what needs to be added?

Removed? What in your current plan that's going to get you there by 2030? Because you have a 2030 plan, I'm guessing. And so if we were just going to go for it by the end of 2027, what part of your current plan absolutely can't work?

There's a way we treat a role. We call it the brand manager. On the org chart, it's the bottom of the role. And that role either needs to be eliminated or we need much higher level people in that role. There's a lot of management of that manager. That's what needs to go.

And so when were you planning on making that decision?

I wasn't planning on making that decision.

Really? So that decision just came clear to you from the 2027?

Oh, I've, I've, I've kicked it around like, is this the right use of this role?

But if you. If you were going to do this by 2027, that would have to happen soon.

Yes.

What else would have to happen soon? If you were going to like, if you were just actually to say to your team, guys, we have this goal.

It's the right goal.

We're just going to do it by the end of 2027 and we're going to find a better way to get there, a more straight path to get there. What else would have to change?

Change or be removed.

Whatever one you prefer.

Honestly, there might be one brand in our portfolio that we just need to scrap or sell.

Like that one's a distraction from.

I would have to sit down and think, which one do I really think has the upside here? Because they're all small and managing small brands versus one, maybe two big brands.

Yeah.

Is different.

So if you, what is the current, like the main. I know you said you have seven goals, but like, what is the current model to a hundred million holding company? Like, what's, what would you call like, is it, is it, is it managing brands? That's pretty much it, yes. And so do you know how many ish. You'd have to get to a hundred million?

I want to do it with less than 10.

Okay, perfect.

So how many do you have now?

Three.

Okay, so if you were to do it by 2027, you think you'd need way less than 10.

Yeah. I mean the thing that's coming up again is that I would need to develop the skill set of acquiring bigger companies.

That would be like, that's the idea of raising the floor.

Right.

But so, so that would be like, would, would you call that the crux of solving that goal? Like, that's the main thing that if you got phenomenal at acquiring, what did you call it? Bigger companies or.

Yeah, bigger brands.

So if that, is that the core path to getting there, I think it's.

A way to get there.

What would be another way to get there?

Install ex. Really high level experienced brand managers rather than training people up.

Okay. So bringing on much better people from the beginning. Much better people from the beginning. Okay. What would stop you from just changing the timeline? Che. Keeping the same goal. Assuming the goal is right. What would, what would stop you from just saying let's just go for it by end of 2027?

The honest answer.

Yeah.

Is because I've done it in the past and I.

What done when I passed. Created urgent timelines.

Correct. Yeah. And doubted my own abilities and stopped and aborted.

Right.

That's like, that's, that's and, and, and the longer timelines, I relax into doing the work.

Yeah. And some people operate that way. Some people operate that way. I, I wonder if, rather than letting the timeline be a stressor, no one says anything about success or failure if you hit the goal in the time or not. Like literally. That has nothing to do with this. It is literally between you and no one else. Like no one else is monitoring your goal. And so it's just a tool for making better decisions.

This is what you mean by using time as a tool.

A million percent. This is actually how I view time. It's also how I view goals, is that time is simply a tool for making better strategic decisions. It's a tool. And so if you remove the emotion from it because so many people have emotional baggage around goals and deadlines and time. And if you just said it is a tool for actually looking at the present more strategically, for looking at everything I'm doing, including the companies we're investing in and filtering for, and if we're just going to actually commit to it in two and a half years using time as a tool, what would the path have to be? And then you just start to look at it as a pathway to solve versus something that means failure or success, that you're a good person or a bad person. None of that means anything like your morality as a person or your value as a person. That's how it's about. And so it's literally about just.

That's at least a separate conversation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's simply about, is this a good pathway? Could you do it under the current pathway?

I'm really glad you said that because it there, I think the urgency that people feel like that stressful urgency around hitting a goal is something deeper than the goal itself.

Oh yeah.

It's not effective either. It's not helpful.

It's a measure that, that they use to judge themselves rather than it being helpful.

It's a tool.

But when you say tool, you mean it as a focus mechanism, as a way to evaluate the strategy of how you're going to accomplish something.

I really don't think that there's a better mechanism for strategy. Like what other. I think that time is the most like, crucial mechanism for strategy. And so if, if we were to just again, taking your same goal from, from seven or eight years or whatever, 20, 30, move it just three years ahead.

Right.

Like, I don't know of a better mechanism for, of genuinely evaluating, for more rigorously evaluating your strategy, your pathway, who you're working with the companies you're filtering for, it would change everything. Like it would literally by just simply changing the deadline, change your path.

You kind of gave me an out by not poking holes in the goal itself, which was very kind of you. My ego thanks you, but I got halfway through the book and was still stuck on part one.

So tell me more about that.

Well, what immediately came up for me if you're going to scale a business, I understand the methodology behind this framework of set a big goal, collapse time, eliminate what doesn't get you there, raise the floor, keep things simple. I, I believe that.

Yep.

When I do it for a client, easy, effortless. No, I have, I, I will do this thing with friends or colleagues of, as we call it, swapping, where I bring them my pile of shit and like, they have none of the emotional baggage behind it, so they have no problem solving.

They're like, oh, there's the answer.

Right. And, and then they bring me there. I'm like, oh, this is so easy. Because there's no emotional baggage to those problems. So doing it for somebody else, no problem. But when I look at the question of, of what is, what is a goal? That is the North Star, if you will, that makes you question all other goals. First thing that came up for me was like the seven things that are on my mind. Like, I want this to be this, and I want this to be this, and I want this to be this. And then it felt like I needed to pick just one. And that was more emotional than I wanted to admit. So walk me through how you advise somebody.

Uh, I do wonder why you did choose 100 million. I mean, it's, it's a nice round number. We all choose numbers, you know, so it's, it's an, it's 100 million by the end of a decade, right? Yeah, it's perfect. It's a very smooth goal. Um, I guess. Do you feel what, what's going to happen after you hit that? Going to hit some bigger goal? You then going to go for a billion? Like, do, do you know what you plan for after that? Like, do you have a future self beyond that?

I mean, I would be making it up.

Right?

Like there's, there's ideas in there.

Of course.

Right.

Okay. So I guess, I mean, just using this, I would love to hear about the seven other goals. But if you did just move that to a billion.

Uhhuh.

Would that change anything in the same timeline? I mean, seven years is a nor. I guess it's five, but, but you know if you moved it to a billion, does it feel harder?

Yes. Well, it feels less clear, Right.

What. What about it feels less clear because.

I can see the path to 100 million. Can't see the.

You're already on the path, right?

Yeah. So I. But I can't see the path to a billion.

And what does that do for you?

Freaks me out a little. Like it. It. Yeah, it makes me feel. It brings up a. Anxiety isn't the right word, but, like, uncertainty is the word.

So if you moved the goal up and just. I'm not saying you have to do anything with it, by the way, but if you did commit to it, and you committed to it, even if you commit to it by the end of the decade, I wonder, what are the seven other goals? And, you know, do you mind just sharing them?

Yeah. So one of them be the number one business podcast.

Okay.

Well, those are the two that I narrowed down to, so they're fresh in my mind.

So that's funny. The 100 million in the. In the. In the.

That's funny. Like, I. Those were narrowed down to it, and I. And just that focus. I've already forgotten what, like, four of them were.

Do you have them written down or something?

I. I don't. In this notebook. I'm actually kind of embarrassed. And that was an enlightening moment where it was like, oh, it just aligned my focus into something.

So, I mean, even if you just have just those two, that is so much more focused than seven, whatever seven was. Oh, it'll come back.

Well, so the third was the. The. The public statement that we said as a company@capitalism.com has always been, we want to create a million millionaires.

Right.

And I've always liked that goal.

Yeah. Is it more of a goal or a purpose, would you say? I know that's a hard question.

Yeah, that's. Yeah, you just mind warped me a little bit. What's the difference in your mind?

Well, I guess. I guess let's just. Let's just call it a goal for now. I'll go away from that for a minute.

That's. That's a goal that I'm not building processes for, so I call that more. I guess that's more of a purpose, like we.

More of a broad mission.

Yeah.

Could you do it through getting to the 100 million or a billion? Or podcast? Those are the pathways to achieving that bigger mission.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Okay. So that's. That's. That's. That might be the goal. It might not be. Is there any others?

My My personal, lifelong dream has always been to own the Cleveland Guardians.

Would you say that's bigger personally than the other ones?

Yes.

Is that the goal shaping all of this?

Yeah, a couple of years ago, I stopped believing it. A couple years ago when I got. When I got, like, hit in the face with some major setbacks. It took me a few years to start dreaming again.

I think that you would be better off and the world would be better off if you committed back to that goal. I think that that's a gorgeous goal. I think if you went for owning that company, but I don't know, whatever timeline you give yourself on it, if you gave yourself 10 years or less, and hopefully, I think you could figure out a way to leverage these companies into achieving that. If it was. If that was the, like, the kind of, like, the, like, stabilizing goal to every. All the pathways you're going to. So would you say it is still a goal or no?

Yes. I mean. I mean, thinking about it right now is. Feels more exciting than it did two years ago where it was like, I look, I'm. I'm depressed after getting hit.

After getting hit, you're like, two years.

Ago, I was just depressed. Right. Like, my whole life got turned upside down. So. So I, I. It took me. It took me a while to start dreaming again, but. Yeah. Is that still in there? Of course. Of course it's still in there.

I see the hundred million, or if you moved it to a billion, and the podcast as pathways to that. That's how I see them.

Okay, interesting.

I see these as pathways to getting to the goal. That's how I view them.

So you view the impossible goal.

I view your impossible goal is owning the Cleveland Guardians.

I see.

That's what I see. I don't know if you have a deadline for it, because I think if you gave yourself more of an intense deadline, you would re. You would reallocate your resources and you'd reallocate your focus. You know, you would. I would. I would think you would start reverse engineering that goal and really starting to do that, like, in a very direct way. How do I own this company? Who owns it now? You probably do know. I know you're a big baseball fan.

It's the Dolan family, obviously, Ben.

So it's like, do you know them?

I. I don't know.

See? So I think you need to get to know them, right? I think that you need to get to know them and who's around them and like the other owners. I could introduce you to one and and, like, you would start to generate relationships and pathways directly to figuring out how to get that. I think you'd have a lot of fun with that.

That actually feels really good.

I have. I didn't know, by the way, that you were a Cleveland fan until I came to your house and, like, hearing you talk about the team, I. I like it. See? So like, even, like, Gary Vee, like, as much as I've never met him, like, I know he wants to own the New York jets, and, like, it's clear to me that that goal is shaping everything he's doing.

Right.

That was actually how I discovered gary in, like, 2008, because I saw this guy talk about how he wanted to own the jets, and I was like, I want to own the Cleveland team. He was 10 years older than me. I was like, I'm going to follow this guy and watch what he's doing.

Whether you hit it or not, the goal serves an enormous purpose. I still think it's worth going for. I think it's. I mean, I'm a huge believer in go for it. But the goal itself, I think, is, like, it's probably a big part of what brought you here.

Okay, so. So let. Let's play with this, because there is, okay, my personal goal. And I, I. Where. Where I'm feeling a little bit convicted right here is I. I'm actually two relationships away from a couple of the owners, and I. And I just haven't made that an intent. I could do that.

Right.

And part of me, I think there's, like, we could probably analyze the psychology of why I haven't done that. That would be interesting conversation for another.

You've been avoiding it.

Right. But the other part of this is, okay, the goal that you rally the team around, that you rally your company around, or that you align things around.

Sure.

So that would be the goal of the company.

Right.

So the company itself has a goal. You have a goal. The company has a goal.

Right.

And the reason it's important that the company has a goal is, is that when you go for the bigger goal in the company, and that requires raising the floor, which means letting go of aspects of the business, including team members that are not coming on the ride. It's not personal. The company has a goal. And so when you make it. When you make it overly personal, then it's like the, The. The thing about any human system is that every human system is driven by a goal. And so, like, a business is a human system. And so the clear and better you get at the goal, the better you can systemize and scale. And so it's very important that everyone is clear on the company's goal.

How do you get the founder or the founding team to choose the damn goal?

So, you know, it's funny. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you the best answer I have. It's a, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the question. It's a hard question. One of my mentors who's a billionaire.

And ask me tomorrow and it might be different than how I felt yesterday.

Yeah, yeah. No, it is the hardest question. It's why we end up having split focus and dilute, you know, systems is because we can't just choose something and have it be strong enough that we just go for it.

Right.

I think if you move the goal, I'm not saying you have to. I think if you move the goal to 500 million or a billion, either in the same timeline or moved it.

Forward.

And then you just said, guys, we're not going to do smaller companies. We're going to just, we're going to have this new floor, whatever it is. Like, you have to be over X amount and we don't. You know, you could probably set a floor. You could probably actually, like, off the top of your head, set a minimum threshold for the types of companies you'd invest in. Could you, could you give a number?

Not off the top of my head, no.

Okay.

But the current ones, they're smaller companies, you've said, right? So, like, okay, you'd find a new threshold. But my friend who read this book, he read a very sketchy early draft. His name's Robert Gay. He founded Bain Capital with Mitt Romney. He's one of the fathers of private equity, period. When he read it, I had to clean up the book because he was like, ben, the hardest thing that. And he founded Bain Capital. They've literally bought and sold, scaled some of the biggest companies in the U.S. he was like, the thing that challenged me most in reading your book is he said, how do you choose the right goal? He literally said that. He's like, it is so hard to answer that question. Like, and this is Robert Gay, who, you know is one of the fathers of private equity. I don't know how to choose the goal. Ben, he's like, that is the hardest thing. And then he introduced me and he's, you know, multibillionaire and etc. And he introduces me to who's the guy who's over his philanthropy who they do so many big things in Africa. His guy in Africa reads this and he's like, this is coming at a really good time because we are having such a hard time choosing our goal. And so I don't know how to tell you to choose the goal. I'm just giving you dimensions about goals. I believe that the goal should be so big you don't know how to solve it and that the timeline needs to be so short that it forces out all bad thinking and all bad pathways. Like those are like elements of, of an effective goal.

My longest standing mentor likes to say that all the action happens after you choose.

It's true.

So it almost doesn't matter what you choose, just choose. But I think that philosophy might fly in the face of what you say in the science of scaling because you talk a lot about optimizing the wrong things.

True.

And I've definitely been guilty of this and I've been looking at our company recently saying like, do we really need to be doing this? So how does the idea of just choose conflict with optimizing for the wrong thing?

So I think that it all starts with choosing a better goal. Cause I think if you committed to either getting to a billion in five years or getting to a hundred million in two or three, whatever it is, don't change your goal, change your goal. But if you made the goal higher and you actually said we're going to do this, that's when you'd have to start looking at all the things. And so I, I think that the goal determines and, and I think a revenue goal or, or your holdings goal, I think that that's totally fine. Um, if you wanted to go more macro for yourself and just say we're going to get the in, you know, Indians or the Guardians in, you know, by 2030, then you'd have to look at everything.

Yes.

And say is even capitalism.com and so like you could, you could do that. But just speaking to the company as a system in and of itself, if you made the goal bigger and more urgent, that is the easiest way to start looking at everything. Because then you can look and say can this get us there? Is this effective? Like it's always easiest when beginning to analyze a system or the things that are going on from a very intense frame which is the whole purpose of the extreme high and the extreme urgent is it's just like. And so I, I just think so that's how I would look at it is just, it's obvious, I think that you having a hold you could question the holding company goal, but I don't really think you even need to do that. I think that the goal is good enough.

Right.

Let's just scale it and make it more urgent so that then we can look at all your current pathways and processes.

So I guess what. What I'm learning now, hearing you kind of process this out loud, I think I'm watching you in the fourth person right now. I think you are processing me talking about your work back to you as weird. Some weird.

I think it's. By the way, this is the funnest conversation I've had today by far.

I appreciate that.

And the most intense, which I love. I love how intense you are. I know. I really do. I love. I love your intensity. I love how. How serious you are about things, and I just think it's very refreshing.

Thank you. I don't know if serious is a compliment.

It is. Well, you're just. You're rigorous. You're in. You know.

Well, thank you. I see you threw me off my game here, Ben, with your compliments. But what I'm. What I'm realizing as you're processing this is that the. The purpose of the goal is actually addressing what it forces to bring up.

Correct.

The future is a tool for the present.

The. The. The goal and the timeline is a tool to address what you keep and what you cut 100%.

It's what allows you to more accurately create a floor.

That's very. That's a very helpful clarification for me.

Good.

Yeah. The goal is a tool. And the more. The better framed the goal, the more challengingly framed the goal.

Right.

In our case, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, you take the goal and you take it to an extremely high level. Move the timeline forward, in your case, from there. And from that perspective, you look at the business, you look at everything you're doing, and you say, what if any of this could get there? Again, it's just a tool. We don't have to fire someone on the spot right now. We don't have to throw that thing out. But it's just like it allows you to start being honest with yourself. I mean, that's. That's one of the things. Is one of my friends who, when I was. He's a very mature entrepreneur. He said that he believes that the reason people don't scale is because they lie to themselves all the time. You know, and my view is when you're. When you're overly doing too many different things, you're unsure of yourself.

Right.

You're not clearly defined. You're not saying, I'm doing this, I'm not going. I'm getting. I'm not. I'm going to get the guardians.

Right.

Or we're going to get to 100 million. Like. And so when we don't just own what we're going to do and let ourselves be defined, you know, a lot of people don't want to be defined because they want to be painted in a corner. The great part is you can redefine yourself, you can redefine the business, but you do want to get defined. You want to say, this is what we're doing. This, we are going to help a million millionaires or whatever. Like, this is what we are, this.

Is what we do, period.

And I think you already do that. But it's like, okay, then if we're going to just own that and we're going to just do it. And like, no one else is going to do that. Like, where are we. Where are we kind of still playing small. Where are we not being that today.

Yeah.

The.

The example that's coming to mind for me is my colleague Logan Karodi, who started a company called Physician's Choice, and he tells a story about how they were launching all of these SKUs and selling all these products. And when they set the proper. The goal that aligned all their focus of building a $100 million supplement company, they started cutting SKUs, which is counterintuitive to what most people will do is they'll.

That's a sign of a good goal.

That it makes you cut.

Excuse. That's the sign of a good goal.

And he says they were profitable SKUs too.

Yep.

But we saw that it was derailing focus from the things that would go really deep. And that always stuck with me because the temptation of most of my peers is more, more, more, more, more. And it makes sense when you first hear it, but the experience of it is miserable.

Very hard. Speaking practically, to do several things. Well, I've tried. And to your question a while ago about pain, I have tried to do several things well. And if I was honest with myself, I was doing most of them. I can get away with things. I mean, even you, you. You know how to perform and you know how to act. And so you have a. I would consider you have a high floor in how you perform in most things. And so you can get away with a lot of things. But if you really look at the work, you're not really innovating it. You're not really. To that idea of Depth, you're not really seeing how far you can really take that thing. You're kind of just, you're, you haven't continued getting better. You just, you're just kind of coasting with it, even though you can coast pretty well with it. And I totally, and I was coasting with, with most of the things I was doing where I was like, I wasn't really drilling down and like solving something new or doing something that might change at least my game, but maybe change the game. And so I wasn't doing that. I was just doing things even though doing them okay, certainly not to the level that could scale, like really scale.

I think that is the paradox or the, the, the philosophical bind that so many entrepreneurs find themselves in because there's this wide open menu of options of things that they could do. And every time they open up social media or talk to a friend or go to an event where they're supposed to sharpen their skills, they get four new ideas of what could be. And that feels productive for a short time. And, and it, it is productive in some cases in the short run, the.

Productive thing would be to have such a high goal that you don't go to that event, you know, like, unless, like it's the path to the goal. Like, unless it's like these guys are going to help me do it or this is the community to help me do it. Like the best thing to do is, and the only thing that that event should do is to give you pathways to the goal, not to give you new goals. It shouldn't give you new goals, you know, maybe expand the goal.

Right.

But yeah, I find that when people go to these kind of things, everything you just said, like, they just get more and more confused and more and more adhd. Honestly, like they, they don't, they're not using it with a filter. They're actually going in just completely open for pure influence versus saying I'm going to come in here with a very razor filter and most of it is complete noise, but maybe if I'm filtering properly, I can find the one person there who could connect me with that person.

Right.

And if you can do that with a sharp blade, you can, you can, you can find that, you can absolutely find that.

How specific do you think a goal needs to be in order for it to be properly filtered? So, so if I admitted to you earlier that if we made my goal $1 billion, I am unclear about how that would be possible.

Yep, that's a good thing.

So I'm interested to hear why you say that? But, but I perceive that I would start going and looking for options, I would start looking for routes.

You would, that's the first thing you would do is you'd start pathways thinking.

It's great.

So the example I gave in the book was the woman who has the software company, you know, Alicia Alta Software company Level Up Score and she, she was in a one on one coaching business and she wanted to get her software into the hands of the 50,000 credit repair companies throughout the United States. And she was doing it very linearly one on one. And so anyways when she set her own massive goal of I want to have a thousand of these companies using my software again it took her a long time to get to just 10. Now she wants to get to a thousand 90 days. That forced her to find a different path but she didn't know how to get there. She hesitated to set that goal. And I'm not saying you should have an absurd 90 day goal but in her case when she set that goal that I'm going to have a thousand companies using my software in 90 days, she was willing to sit with not knowing the how absolutely. She needed to start working on it. It's not just going to appear out of nowhere. She needed to start thinking from the goal, asking herself questions, journaling, pondering going in. But by thinking from the goal and pathways, thinking and considering it, pathways began to emerge. A new model began to emerge. She began to really think if you actually think on it, journal as you're doing, you can really start to solve business models, new business models to goals or just finding really powerful pathways which often come through highly leveraged who's highly leveraged people. In her case it was oh, rather than going straight to the companies, I'm gonna actually just partner with other software companies that already served tens of thousands of them. And she did that in a week and literally went from 10 to 8,000 software 10 of 10 to 8,000 of these people using her software like she 800x in a week. And so like one of the, so one of the things that I wish I had read when I was writing 10x is easier than 2x but I didn't was Richard Koch's book. Richard Koch wrote the 8020 individual and what he said in that book. I knew the 8020 principle. I even wrote all about it in 10x but I didn't appreciate like Peter Thiel talks about the power law. The power law is like the very few get almost all the results in the S and P. There's seven companies that like run our economy, right? Literally. So it's like, you know, and in, in Richard Koch, he quoted Bill Gates where Bill Gates said that a good software writer is worth 10,000x an average software writer. Like if you think about certain books, they have the impact of tens of thousands of books, right? Or certain companies. And so when you start to think in terms of that power law, the beautiful part about going for the impossible goal is, is that it forces you to apply that to some degree. It forces you to say, what are the people that could get me there? And it would probably be different than the people you're looking for in your case, maybe the companies that would get me there. It forces you to find the people and the paths with just the most extreme leverage. Back to Joseph Wynn. So our goal with scaling.com is to have 5,000 members of the program all scaling in two years, two, three years. That's 120 million. Basically from zero to 120 million in revenue in about two and a half years. And Joseph, the thing that Joseph did, like when you're filtering from the goal, you can like you, you might not always know what you're looking for, but once you see it, you're like, oh my goodness. So Joseph has probably the biggest self published book in the world right now. It's sold almost 2 million copies.

That's what I meant when I said I don't understand him. Like the book was short, it was simple. He's 26 years old and it just blew up.

It's very strategically, very strategically.

Really.

Oh, very strategically. He is a brilliant strategist. And so when we met Joseph and we were like, we listened to how he did what he did, we're like, if Joseph is on our team, I'm not saying it guarantees our goal, but it probably cuts the timeline in half. And our, our deadline was already impossible. Now it cuts it in half and it creates what, what I call margin for error.

Right?

So like you want to create margin for error. Um, for me, I'm a basketball fan, right. I also like the NFL, but, but in basketball they talk all the time about margin for error because the teams are so small, like the five man on the, on the roster that when you do have a superstar on the team, like they create enormous margin for everyone else, right? So Steph Curry, right, or LeBron James, like if they're on the court, not that everyone else has to play less well, but like they open up everything for everyone else. And so with a super who, with someone with like with extreme love interest Joseph, the who often comes with those pathways. And so for us, because the book is kind of the crux for us to scaling the company, the who often.

Comes with those pathways.

They do because they know how to get to the goal, which I don't.

Right.

You were saying I don't know how to hit the goal.

You mean that when you meet the person, they often bring the pathway to you.

They bring the pathway to your goal.

So when you have the impossible goal, it is not necessary for you to know the how. It is now ne more necessary for you to discover the who's and they bring the hows with them.

Yeah, well you do still need to determine a path. And, and, and you do need.

I'm just summarizing what.

Yeah, yeah, but usually you're not going to figure out that path until you start finding those. Right. Leveraged who's that can often bring the distribution or the capability that you don't have. Often it's in those two forms. Distribution or capability.

Right.

Targeted or, or filter distribution. And so like there's someone that can have distribution to those five companies that could get you to a hundred million plus.

Right.

There's one person. And that was the thing that I got out of the 80, 20 individual was there's one, maybe two. You don't need 50 super who's, you need like one or two. And like those one or two make your goal not only possible, but like they create enormous margin for error that like you can mess up a lot and still hit the goal.

I know we're, we're using a lot of words to come to this conclusion that I'm getting at, but I'm, I'm realizing more and more that this process is a way to clarify your thinking more than anything else. It's a, it's a way to eliminate the noise and protect your thinking so that you can stay crystal clear on the outcome that you are searching for. Because I have definitely set goals, said I'm super committed to this goal and then I will get a piece of information that just takes me two degrees into a different direction and then I'll get another that takes me to it and I start questioning it because I'm off track. But if you're quiet enough to stay focused on that goal and stay quiet enough, then as you are just going through the world, you'll be filtering for it.

Yes, you'll be filtering pretty aggressively. If you're thinking about the goal, say.

More about what you mean.

You won't just be Going through the world. I mean, you will be actively filtering, like even you said, finding pathways. If you set it to a billion, you wouldn't be just going through the world. You'd be pretty actively filtering.

Would you explain the story of Tom Brady, that the example that you use in the book? Because there was. There were some pieces of that that I didn't know that made this even more convicting. So would you share it with your own words? And then I'll add the commentary.

Yeah, please. And share what used to, what's what, you know, what. What resonated. But essentially, one of my favorite quotes is that we're kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.

Right.

So we're kept from the goal or whatever our goal is, not by the many obstacles along the way. We end up not hitting our goal because we've taken some clear path to a lesser goal.

Right.

And so professional sports is that I often think that people who use sports analogies for life and business, I think that. I think that there's. There's huge limitations in doing that because sports, everyone does have the same goal. Right. Like win the super bowl, and it's just so. It's so confined.

Right.

At least that's the goal that's given to you. Yeah, but as you point out, it's not everyone's goal.

Exactly. Yeah. So there's shortcomings in using sports as an analogy for business, but you can still use them, and we're doing that right now. But in the case of Tom, I think that he was singular focused on winning Super Bowls to the extent that he was willing to take enormous pay cuts and. And actually figure out what it took to win Super Bowls. Whereas, you know, you look at professional athletes, you see them on. On commercials.

Right.

You see them doing this and that. Right. I think about, like, Odell Beckham Jr. Who you would know just given that, you know, you're a Browns fan. He had a lot of goals, obviously. His fame, his house, like his Persona. Right. He is. Which is not. Not surprising that his career fell off. He stopped scaling like he was. He could have been one of the best receivers ever. Just being blunt, and I hope he hears me. He. He had a disappointing career. He had a bad career, um, and he had a bad career for who he could have been. But he had too many goals. He stopped actually wanting to be the best receiver in the world. And so the thing that separates Tom Brady from other Super Bowls or from other quarterbacks is that they had too Many goals, whether it was their fame, whether it was their sponsorships, whether it was this and this. And Tom's was very clear. He was optimizing, for one thing. He even left, you know, his team to go win another one. He wanted to just prove that, like, I can do this. Like, it was very obvious to everyone that that's all that mattered to Tom was winning Super Bowls, and he got what he optimized for. And that's one of the things that I've. I grapple with is, is that, you know, in learning about human systems, the human systems get what you tell them to give you.

Right.

Like, we all have systems. We all build out teams and processes this, that, that, that, that. And they're just doing what we tell them to do. Whether it's our teams, whether it's our businesses, whether it's our. Whatever we're doing, we're telling these things to do them. And so for Tom, it was just that.

Do you think most systems are unconscious?

I think that it's a really, really good question. I think that. I think that probably, yes. I mean, there's. There's still a goal behind them, but there's a lot of unconscious aspects of those systems.

Because if you. If you take the contrast of Tom Brady and Odell Beckham Jr. They both are given the same goal of the game.

Sure.

But they're clearly optimizing for different things.

Very different things. And that's a beautiful way of saying it. Yes.

So, yes, the. The goal of the sport is to win Super Bowls.

The goal of the individual is gonna be different. Yeah, but there was. And. And this is why. This is why the beauty of. Of this conversation is it forces transparency and honesty on yourself. Because the. The. The most central piece of any system of it is its. Is its accountability. But the kind of. The question is accountability to what? In the case of Tom, for one reason or another, he just said, my goal is one thing.

Right.

Of course, he had others, but he lost many things, including his marriage, for that goal.

Right.

But for others, I don't think that they're willing to be honest enough with themselves about their conflicting goals. Because I think if you asked Odell five years ago, when his career was unraveling, Odell, like, I'm sure he had people tell him, odell, like, you're doing a lot of different things. Maybe you're partying too much.

Right?

Like. Like, what about football? Do you remember that you're a football player? No, like, really. You know what I mean? It's like, remember when you wanted to be the best. Like, do you still. I think in his mind, to the idea of unconscious, I think he didn't think he was as off track as he really was. I think this is where we start to really lie to ourselves. I think he was lying to himself and thinking that he had it handled and he didn't. And I think that he was caught in a bunch of bad goals, a bunch of whatever it was. Low floor. He had. He had a low floor, you know, and the low floor created complexity in his life, and it allowed him to optimize a ton of things that were fine, but they. They were below his, probably his true goal. And so he didn't. He didn't. You didn't get. You know, so the. The. The great part about Brady is, is that when you actually do have a singular focus and a singular goal, you can actually start solving it. Right Back to the idea of, like, you know, you can get away with a lot, right? And you can get away with not being so great at it. But, like, Tom was actually, like. Because he was so focused on winning Super Bowls when other people were, like, just going to practice, like, he was actually, like, solving it. He's like, you know what? Like, I have to lower my salary. I know that I need a much better line and a backup line. Like, that's called innovation. Like, he was solving things that other quarterbacks weren't solving because he was really working on the goal, whereas they were just coming to practice. Right. Like, they might have even still been motivated, but they weren't solving it with the level of strategy and insight that he was, because he was really solving it. And he did have a high floor. Like, if people weren't committed to the goal, if they weren't coming, like, he's like, get this guy out.

Yeah. So the example that's coming to mind for me now, we're sticking with sports. Cleveland Guardians fan, the star of the team is Jose Ramirez, and his goal is to go down as the greatest Cleveland baseball player of all time.

Great.

And so he took a contract that was $100 million below market. He plays his heart out every day.

Good for him.

And they're the team that brought him up when he was 16. And he wants to be the greatest player ever. And it's so obvious that he's going to do it.

It's because that's his one goal.

Yes. Yes.

I think that that's. That's like, a shocking fact is, is that once you actually commit to it, it doesn't take long for it to become obvious that you're going to do it. I really don't think it has. I'm serious. Like, I think that once you actually establish it, own it, and just start, start marching toward it over not too long of a time, it becomes pretty obvious that you're going to do it.

So, Ben, how many goals do you have?

It's a really good one, I would say I certainly have.

Busted.

It is.

I would say I have a few core goals. One would be helping my son here get on a church mission.

Right.

Like, I think that would be phenomenal for him, certainly as a family. We have seven kids, right? So, like, you know, helping my family is, you know, and just being aligned with God are like my core goals in terms of my business life. I have one goal. Get 5000 members into scaling.com and help them all 10x their companies or more. If I am honest. Like, I do have a broader goal, which is like, I would love to change how this conversation of entrepreneurship and scaling happen.

Right?

I want to. I want to change that conversation. I'd love to see tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of companies in the US Scale. I'd love to help the US Like, I, you know, I would love for various people to read this book and be like, we want help, you know, implementing this. But in terms of the business and the business having a goal, you know, we're all aligned that we, you know, in the next two or three years, we want to help 5,000 members of our company to scale their companies. And that's our standard. So that's. That's like, that's the only goal there. Of course I have family goals.

One of the themes of this conversation is that you can have too many goals. You can, but how many goals are too many?

It's a really good question. Good. And a hard question.

The example I'm thinking of is Logan Paul. Logan Paul just wins at everything he does.

He's intense, man. He is intense.

He wants to have the. The top podcast. Has the top podcast. He wants to be a WWE champion. What?

He is a very crazy gifted human. He's amazing. I have to give it to him and I.

He's a billion dollar sports drink company.

Yeah.

Like, he does all these things. Clearly, Logan Paul does not have too many goals.

It's a good point.

So what do I do with this? Riddle wrapped in a sesame seed but a mystery.

He is. I wouldn't model him. Okay.

Elon Musk.

Yeah. So I would guess, I would guess.

How many other super extreme examples Can I throw at you just to put a wrench in the thinking?

No, trust me. When I think about Musk the most, I think he does have one goal. I really do. I think he has one major goal.

Going to Mars.

Yeah, I think that's his one major goal. I think that all of these other things are him generating pathways to that. I really do. In terms of Logan, I can't say I think I, I feel like his psychology is a bit harder to read than even Musk's. I think Musk's. Musk is a clear guy than Logan. I don't know what Logan is really optimizing for.

I am processing this internally and analyzing some of my behaviors and wondering where it has fallen off in the, the science of scaling model, if you will. Because Logan, Paul can optimize. He can have multiple goals and hit him. You say Elon has one, but he's, he's done a few really cool things.

He's doing huge things.

Yeah, you know, they're all, you know.

He'S only doing the biggest five out.

Of ten big, you know.

Exactly. For me, if you looked at Musk and even if you've read his biography, Isaacson said that, and he uses the word focus over and over, he says that he has like a destroying focus. Like he focuses so hard that like it blows everything up around it. Like he has a laser beam focus. And so I think that where he's at in his scale and where he's at in like he, he has more room to explore pathways which we don't fully understand. You know, he's so up there. I mean, when he created PayPal, that was the only thing he did right. It's not like he was doing 50 things.

I see.

Like, did he got to such a high level and you know, we're watching now. You know, SpaceX has been around for 20 years, right. So like we're watching at like the highest level that like the system that we're observing with Twitter and all these things, it's probably not big in his eyes with where he's at. Like he's in outer space compared to us. And so when we're seeing things, we're not seeing it from the mothership where he's looking, you know. But I still get what you're saying, which is it all looks very complex. It looks like he's doing 15 and he probably is. And so that is a contradiction in my thinking.

Well, well, I. The way that you described it actually clicked in my brain because what you're Suggesting is one goal at a time can compound on each other. So in, in my experience after reading the book where I have seven goals and I'm like, I have to pick one and I have to sacrifice six. The actual nugget of truth in there is that I may have to sacrifice six. For now.

For now, Absolutely.

And it does not mean that I don't pursue them. It means that we are choosing one to focus on. So what I will tell clients in, in E Commerce, a simple business like E Commerce, you sell products, you make something, you sell something. I tell them the first step is that you choose your customer. And they have as much resistance to that as I am having to picking the damn goal.

That's good.

So all of this resistance comes up. What could be this person? It could be this. And it's just a choice.

Choose who your customer is.

We just, we just, we just choose. Because once we choose, we speak to them, and once we speak to them, they convert into customers, then we treat them really well and they start to tell other people about us. And, and now they are bringing other people to us. And so in the same way, the impossible goal is not picking the one that I'm going to live with forever and forget about these other goals. It is what is going to get all of my relentless focus right now.

But also. Yes, but also, if you did achieve that impossible goal, maybe a handful of those other six end up just being solved by doing it. And maybe the other two or three become less valuable.

Right.

So in going for that goal, either you end up solving or making the, the three ones that can stick easier, or they just get solved.

Yeah.

And then along that way, the other one or two just fall. By the way you let them go.

That was really helpful.

I want to see you go for the goal. I. I would love to see you go for the billion, but if not 100 million, in, in two or three years.

Well, in what was helpful until you said that? What I'm processing is I. Again, I said I could not sleep after I read the book because I had so much. I had excitement, but it was like I had a cup of coffee. It was conflicted in a bunch of different directions.

Right.

Which meant that I had some thinking to do. And what I've processed out of this conversation is it's not that it doesn't matter what you pick, it's just that whatever you put all of your focus on is going to grow. And everything that is a distraction from that is a dangerous threat to progress.

That's great.

I agree with that. I agree with that.

I do want to talk about the concept of raising the floor big because regardless of what goal we pick.

Yeah.

The idea of it, raising the floor is a, is another conscious choice to let things go.

It is the conscious choice to let things go. That's what raising the floor is.

How do entrepreneurs know what to cut?

That's why I think that the goal is the first piece is because the goal determines what the floor is and then therefore from there, what the focus is. And so it's very hard to know what. I mean, there are, there are things in the business that you don't need to set a different goal for to know that they probably should be cut. There's, there's things that are obviously below the floor. I mean, those things, whether it's just bad product or bad team members or just, you know, bad habits, whatever it is, there are things that we already know are probably below the baseline of our best self or our best company.

Right.

And so those things are below the floor. But if there's things that you just don't know, the goal is what determines that. That's why you use such an extreme frame of an impossible goal and impossible deadline, because that then shows you with more honesty that pathway can't get you there. Like that pathway is eventually a dead end or that product or that team member or you need, you know what you were saying, you need the better general managers or whatever they are. Like, it start, the goal starts to highlight the new floor and, and then, and then you start to set that. And so that's why I was thinking about the companies that you would invest in is, is if you went for either the higher goal or the more urgent goal, it would force you to say, like, we don't take these kind of companies anymore. You know, it would, it would establish a new floor and then you'd have to start to optimize a new skill set or a new, a new type of company that you invest in. But also it would force you to look at what are those other things that are competing our focus from doing that.

Because would you say that again?

What are the, like, what are the things that we're currently doing that are competing. I said competing our focus, but you know, they're like just taking away our focus from figuring out how to solve the goal.

Right.

That's what focus is.

Right.

And so if you went for the a hundred million in two or three years and you actually were like, we're going to solve this, you could solve it but right now, there's too many conflicting things that are, you know, like sparring for your focus. And so that's what creates dilution of focus. With a goal that intense, right, you going for a billion in four or five years to actually solve that would mean that you can't. I, I believe, you know, I mean, you could try, you could try to solve everything else. But what I like is, is that the goal forces you to say, which of these things absolutely can't get me to that goal? Which of these team members can't get me to that goal? Often what happens when a company moves the goal so high is that they realize that they're probably not the who, you know, that can solve it in the way that they got here. So, like, often I'll, I'll work with, like, I've worked with CEOs who took a company 10x or even more. Like, worked with one CEO and he took a company from 4 million to 100 million in four or five years in revenue. And now he's like, I want to get to a billion, but to do it in like two or three years, I absolutely cannot be the CEO. Even though he's the most capable CEO, he's like, if I was to get there in 10 years, maybe I could say the CEO. But to get there in two, we need to bring someone on who's taken a public company public and who understands what it means to go to that next level. And so therefore, not that my role is less important, but I shouldn't be there anymore. And so, like, that's the kind of thinking that happens when you're like, we're going to move the goal up, is you start to really think about what it really takes to hit the goal. And your current model, your current process, your current thinking will get you there. Your current team won't get you there.

I would imagine that one of the most common things that comes up when someone sets an impossible goal is I'm not capable of doing that. So is there a way around that?

Use it as a tool. It's just a tool. I'm serious. Like, maybe, maybe I have more optimism or faith or whatnot. But it's the belief that you can or can't isn't necessary in the beginning, I don't think. I think that that belief and that confidence can grow. As you start raising the floor, as you start stripping things out and start actually moving things, you're actually demonstrating commitment. And so as you start using that goal more and more as the tool for orienting your life for orienting your direction, for letting things go, for maybe filtering and finding better ways of solving it, you can start to reach a place of massive conviction. But I don't think you have to, like, think about the goal and be like, I absolutely can do this. Like. And, like, you know, be. I don't think you have to have that for it to be an effective goal. I think it's. It's. It's a tool for just, like, looking at things. I think you can. I think you. I don't think you. You have to be, like, autistic and, like, be absolutely, like, zero emotion, right? But, like, you. You can. I think you can look at it, kind of analyze it, just. And just think about it. Like, if you were to go for the. The, you know, the. The Guardians, right, in seven years, just as a tool, I don't know how to solve it, but, like, what if we just tried to start solving it and having conversations around it? Like, how. How would you go about it? If at a certain point you start to get more emotional about it, you start to strip things out and you start to be like, screw it, I'm doing this. Like, whether I hit it or not, I'm going for it.

Right?

And then you start, you know. But I think that too much. We. We think that we. Like, I do think you have to get to a place of belief. You have to get to a place of. Of. Of. Of assuming that you're gonna get there, right? You have to get. You have to get to these levels of conviction and confidence. Um, but I think that, you know, one thing that Dan Sullivan said that I liked is he said that, you know, confidence feels great, but the courage feels awful.

Right?

And so, like, you don't. What people want is the assurance.

I actually think he says it feels real shitty, but you don't curse.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he says so many funny things, but. Yeah, but. But that's pretty much what he says, you know, And. And so I think that people don't want the courage. They don't want the commitment, but they want the confidence and they want the assurance. And if they don't have that at the very beginning, then they'll look for something that they can have those things for. And so they're therefore optimizing for assurance and, and, and confidence versus transformation. You know, when you go for the higher goal and when you start acting courageously, the outcome is transformation. And so people don't transform at the level they could because they're optimizing for comfort.

Do you have an emotional reaction when you set a goal?

I've gotten to the point just understanding these things. Yeah, I would say I do. Yeah, I would say I do. But it's not a huge emotional reaction. Like, if I. If I said, let's go for a billion dollars right, in my company in three years, I don't think I'd have an emotional reaction in the beginning, but it would become emotional if I started to really, like, think about it and if I had to really start to face the consequences of it. Um, when you start facing the consequences, it, you know, it's.

It's.

It's. It's really hard. It's really painful. And like, you know, you have to face hard realities when you start to, like, get committed. And so, yeah, I would say. I would say I don't have an emotional reaction in the beginning, but when I actually start to get serious about does get very emotional, because then I have to actually face it, and then I have to actually, like, look at my life and I have to look at. And I have to start making big decisions or big risks or big, big moves that are scary.

I think most people have an emotional reaction in just the choosing of the goal because I've.

I've numbed that to myself.

That's interesting, because you're. You saying a billion dollars?

Yeah.

For. For. For you. Based on this conversation, I know that you are picking a number out of the air in order to focus your thinking and to challenge you to a greater level of performance and to clarify the path moving forward. I. I understand that's what you mean. For most people, there's an emotional reason for why they picked a billion in the first place.

Yeah. And I. I have a. I wouldn't say it's emotional reason. I. I would say it's not an emotional reason why we chose 5,000 people in the program in three years. For me, it's like, I am very confident that that book, if it sold even half a million copies, there'd be 5,000 people in the program. So, like, to me, I see a direct pathway there. Is that a hard goal in three years? Is it hard to fulfill? No, but, like, I actually see a very clear pathway to that goal. I've never done that. You know, my books with Dan sold, you know, generated thousands of clients to his company. So, like, I know it can be done. I even wrote in 10x is easier than 2x. Dan, why don't we just. Actually, I wrote in the book that the goal of the book was to get 5,000 people into his program. So like 5,000 members in our program isn't actually doing it in three years is what makes that goal impossible.

Right.

It's taken Dan 40 years to grow his company.

Right.

And he has nothing to do with this conversation. Like he's just a great mentor and friend.

But Ben, what I'm getting at is I think that most people are bringing emotion to the goal setting process. Like they choose a billion because emotional reasons.

Yes.

And it may be importance validation.

You're right.

It is to be seen, which are all different goals. Ah, so speak on that. Because from a psychological perspective.

Yes.

I think that's where it gets very interesting.

So there's a great book by a guy named Robert Keegan. He, he is a really phenomenal Harvard psychologist. He's wrote, written some important books. But one of his important books is called Immunity to Change. It's all about how we have a built in immunity to change, literally. And he's speaking about organizations and immunity.

Like resistance to immunity to change.

Like it's a real, really good book. But he talks about how the, the core immunity to change that we have are what he calls hidden commitments. And these hidden commitments are things that we committed to some point that have become our hidden goals.

Right.

So in this case, you know, I might have a hidden commitment that I need to whatever. Like if I want to, if I feel like I, I, in order for you to like me, I need to seem smart, right. You know, and so I might have this commitment in my mind, right. And so I have to do whatever, whatever it is. Like we may have these hidden commitments that then become our goals.

Right.

And sometimes we have hidden goals based on painful experiences in our past or traumas or just perspectives. And so like one of the people who I recently had a conversation with, he, in the conversation realized he had a hidden goal. And goals are often in the form of either approach or avoid. Right. They're trying to approach something you want or to avoid something you don't want to happen. And, and, and generally speaking, having an avoidance based goal is a bad goal. Like where like you're overly projecting a future you don't want to happen and therefore you're spending a lot of time trying to steer away from it. And so in his case, he realized he had a fairly good sized company. They're doing $31 million in revenue. 31 million. But in having the conversation, he realized, oh my goodness, I've been unintentionally to your idea of unconscious goals. I've, I've Been actually trying to avoid what happened to my father because he said his father once had a company that had 500 employees, and it tanked and cratered and they all lost their jobs. And it was like a painful thing for his dad to see. And it was a painful thing for him as a little boy to see. And so he has been growing his company, but he's also been intentionally not growing it. And so even though they have a business goal, what he realized is he actually has an unconscious goal of not. Not going through what his father went through. And so he actually doesn't want to ever get the company to 500 employees.

Right.

And so that's a. That's just an example of a hidden goal, a hidden commitment, which he then became aware of and was like, okay, like, I have been screwing myself in my company because I've been trying to avoid this thing for all these years. And so he became aware of a hidden goal.

Right.

So that's. That we all have. That's. I think part of the beauty of this unpeeling process is, is like becoming more aware, becoming more honest with yourself, becoming more ruthless with yourself, becoming more rigorous with yourself about, you know, why do you. Why do you want that thing?

And.

And what are some other things that you don't even know you're unintentionally optimizing for that are hurting you?

Do you think that you can work that all out by yourself?

No. No. But you can set a goal that forces you to start grappling with it. You can start. Set a goal that forces you start analyzing and looking at the system and start forcing you to start raising your floor. Because raising the floor is where you analyze it. Raising the floor is where you start stripping things out that shouldn't be there. And so it's the raising of the floor, like, that was a raising floor moment for that man. And so, like, now he doesn't have to have that thing stop him. And so the raising of the floor is where you start to go, like, head to head with yourself. You're going head to head with yourself. And you're saying, why is that? Why am I accepting this thing? Like, this thing is costing me a lot. This thing, this pathway, this product, this company, this person is costing me a lot. It's costing me my life because I'm choosing to invest in it. I'm choosing to optimize for it. So you have to start saying, why am I doing this? I could be doing that. And so when you start to let those things go, even goals which you've had for a long time. Those things are very powerful moments. They are very freeing moments where, like, that's, like, one of the most essential elements of spiritual and psychological development is letting go.

Did you know that this was going to be a psychological process?

I knew. I didn't know that it was going to be a scaling process. Okay. That's the better answer. I was so deep in psychology and setting strategy that I didn't realize that it was going to become the scaling process. I really didn't. And then once I started working with big companies and going for 10x goals and things like that, and applying this framework and just stripping out their business, stripping up their leadership, you know, I mean, I have people come up to me very regularly. You know, Ben, I read 10x is easier than 2x. My company's 52x. I mean, I met someone like that last week at a Cincinnati Reds game. And so it's just, like. It's interesting that, you know, but you've heard it before. Psychology and strategy are. Are almost all of it. And so better psychology leads to better strategy.

Ben, it's been a pleasure. This isn't the conversation I thought we were going to have today, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

I'm not surprised at how the conversation went, because the thing that I know about you, just watching you from afar, is that you are incredibly sincere and, like, very just, like, you're just, like, looking for the answer. And you're also very honest about sharing yourself, like. And so, um, I guess I'm. From my perspective, I. I'm very. This has been very enjoyable, but as I think about it, I'm. This is. This is what I expect from you. It's awesome.

Appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, it's great to see you.

You too. My man.