What Happens When You 10x Your Life (New Ideas and Personal Stories)

How's it going? I'm Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I'm an organizational psychologist and bestselling author of many books, including the new book with Dan Sullivan, 10x is easier than 2x. In this video I'm going to explain some of the concepts from this book, but also the most life changing concepts, honestly, that I'm writing about in my new book which is called Rapid Transformation, which comes out in 2024. But before that I want to actually share a few thoughts because in my last YouTube video I explained that I am quitting my YouTube channel and indeed I fundamentally am. But I want to actually share some of the things I've learned from that. And in general, I just want to say that Moving forward, this YouTube channel is not really my focus. When I say quitting YouTube, it meant I'm quitting YouTube as my strategy. I'm not really focused on growing this channel, although I will still post from time to time here. I do want to share some of the backlash though that I got and what I've learned from that. And that's really the purpose of this YouTube channel is to share what I am learning and, and just share honestly the things that are really unique that I feel are very powerful and I want to share, but I'm not trying to blow up, be some big YouTuber, be some big influencer. If I'm thinking about my own future self, that doesn't really excite me. I don't care to have some big name brand where I'm just out there sharing stuff. I'm buying, honestly. If this channel is niche and just a few people watch it and I'm sharing really high end, really powerful stuff. But to share some of the backlash that happened when I told people I was closing my YouTube channel, I'm going to highlight some of the principles from this book and my new book, Rapid Transformation. So basically, I don't know, it was like two weeks ago I made that video explaining why I was letting go of this YouTube channel. I also got rid of a lot of the old videos that were on this channel. I did however, keep all of that content on my podcast. And so if you want to listen to all of those old videos, they were like a couple hundred videos. You're welcome to listen to those on my Path podcast. Now I will tell you what happened. There was probably like 15, 20, 30 comments of people very frustrated. Most people are actually very excited because I was living the principles of this book, letting go of the 80% that got me here and going all in on my future Self. A lot of people though, were upset because they're like, how dare you take away that content from us? And here's kind of my thought is, is that usually, and I, I found this on my own self. Usually when someone loses something, we all as people, and this is a huge concept in psychology, we all have a huge loss aversion. We hate when we feel like we lose something, and we also feel like we hate when some something is taken from us. I have loss aversion too, and I'm gonna personally share some very personal things. This channel is gonna become a lot more deep dive intense on like the training in terms of just what I share. And when I share it, it'll be more sporadic. But also I'm just gonna be very honest and personal. We all hate loss, and when we feel like we've lost something, we tend to miss everything we've gained. And so there were people on this YouTube channel and very understandably, by the way, I actually love the concept from Esther Hicks where she talks about the art of allowing. I can't control other people's reactions. I can only control my own reaction. I also love the quote that you never actually see the outside world. Like, you can never actually see the outside world. You only see your own reaction to it. It's like that quote that we don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. And so one of the things obviously that Esther Hicks talks about is the art of allowing allow other people to see the world as it is or to see the world as, you know, as they are. Honestly, it's okay if you disagree. I am not mad at people being mad at me for taking away this YouTube channel. I have that concept art of allowing. Let them see the world as they see it, let them disagree, allow people to be and do and have as they will. Often when you feel like you've lost something, you actually forget all that you've gained. So as an example, the people who are mad at me for closing this YouTube channel and even taking away some of the old videos, they were focused on what they lost and therefore mad at me versus grateful for all the things that I did for years making all those YouTube videos, it's easy to focus on what you've lost versus all that you gained. Interestingly, when it comes to letting go of your own stuff, me letting go of my 80% right, we often focus on what we lost and we go through this morning process rather than focusing on all that we gained because of it. And also all that we gain by letting it go. You gain a lot by letting something go and then replacing it with something that's deeper and better. What I would call the 20% that's relevant to your future self. I think that people end up going into what Dan Sullivan and I call the gap. You go in the gap by focusing on what is lost or what what you're not doing versus focusing on all that was gained when it relates to the Dan Sullivan books. I wrote these books, who, not how, the gap in and 10x and this was a trilogy that I wrote with Dan. And it was very life changing for me. And ultimately the collaboration came to an end. I was deep into writing this book. I'd already written two books with and for Dan. I was the who that wrote those books using the language of who, not how. I wrote these books. They were in my own voice, in my own knowledge, in my own language. But I was drawing largely from the deep foundational well of Dan Sullivan. And if you don't know who Dan Sullivan is, Dan Sullivan is the co founder with his wife Babs of a beautiful coaching company called Strategic Coach. Dan is approximately 80 years old and he's been coaching high level entrepreneurs for 50 years. I first learned about Dan when I was doing my PhD program. In my PhD program for my master's thesis, and I'll link down below, my master's was on the courage to start a business. I was very interested in psychological courage. The advisor that I worked with was one of the top researchers in the world on courage. I was very interested in entrepreneurship and so I kind of applied those things together and, and I was deep diving studying courage. I also ultimately in my PhD, studied Transformational Leadership and combining those things together. Where my career is kind of gone is I very much train leaders, mostly entrepreneurs, but also CEOs who are exponentially growing. I'm very interested in exponential growth. Hence 10x is easier than 2x. During that time, call it 2014-2015, I learned about Dan Sullivan. I learned about his work. I started studying it and I was blown away by it. And so ultimately we ended up writing the books together. I was the who that wrote them. Those books were very much in my words, from my voice. I put a lot of psychological knowledge in it. It was a very pure collaboration. Well, on our third book, when I was writing the book, ultimately I reached a place where I didn't feel good about the collaboration. By that point, by the time I'm writing this book, 10x is easier than 2x who, not how in the gap in the game were insanely successful, more successful than people expected and driving huge business to Strategic Coach. By that point, I'm in a different place as an author. When I was, in 2018, when we set up the collaboration, I was a young author and not very proven, although I was a massive blogger. My blogs have been read over a hundred million times, specifically on medium.com and so ultimately I just didn't feel right about the collaboration, largely because I was writing these books in large part for free for Dan. Dan generously let me have all the money for the books, but they got all the back end. And the back end being, you know, a hundred X in terms of financial value more than what I was getting. I was also being offered lots of money to write books with other people. And one of the things I actually taught, learned from Dan, which has to do with the gap in the gain, is, is learning how to transform your own past experience to create a higher floor and filter. And so because of all my experiences, I was creating a really high filter and ultimately just it. It didn't seem like a. An amazing prospect to keep writing these books without the financial upside which I could get in other ways. And so I only share that to say it ended up leading to me approaching the conversation of renegotiating the deal with Dan and Babs in an unhealthy way. I did not approach it. I did not approach it with the right mindset. I approached it from a gap mindset. And ultimately it led to us deciding that this would be the last book. Ultimately, I'll say how I approached it wrong is, is that I was focused not on everything I had gained, I was focused on, yes, what they were gaining, which has nothing to do with me. Obviously I was excited. My intention of the collaboration was to massively grow and blow up the books and even Strategic coach. My main point here is, is that I had to get over my own trauma of not appreciating what I had gained. And even though they may be, you know, all things are relative in a, in a transformational relationship, no two people actually gain the same. I actually write about this in this book. And if you're trying to make everything equal or fair, that just doesn't respect the infinite game. It also doesn't respect that people are in different positions. The point of a transformational relationship in a 10x collaboration, or what Dan Sullivan would call a free zone, is, is that all parties get their own 10x. And without question, I went 10x writing those books with Dan. It Took me time when letting go of that collaboration to not focus on what I lost or on maybe where their collaboration was unfair, instead just purely focusing on what I had gained. And I really am learning to get to that place. And I, I, I just want to say massive gratitude to all the people in my last chapter. I do think it's important to close chapters, though, to. And that's part of letting go of the 80% is closing a chapter and then going all in on the next chapter and being open to the idea that sometimes you're going to disappoint people as you do that. Case in point, when I stop overly focusing on this YouTube channel, yes, I disappoint some people. So there's a guy named Brandon Turner. Brandon Turner is a friend of mine. And a couple weeks ago, I was at a mastermind with him. There was like 25 people. It was a beautiful mastermind run by a guy named Stu McLaren. A lot of, lot of interesting people there. But anyways, Brandon was there. And it just so happened that it was right around the time when I released the last video on YouTube where I talked about me quitting the channel. And anyways, Brandon walked up to me and he said, dude, I watched your YouTube video. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And he said, the YouTube video where you actually talk about how you're quitting YouTube. He's like, I watched that. I said, oh, that's interesting. He said, the reason I watched it is because my coach texted me and told me to watch it. So Brandon, him being this epic entrepreneur, has his own business coach. And his business coach texted, brandon, I'm about to show you the text because he shared it with me. And honestly, I just thought it was hilarious. But then from there, I'm going to go deep into the point and I'm going to share some powerful principles. So this is the text that Brandon's business coach sent him about that. He said, you know, forgive the language, but Benjamin Hardy has balls. He's cutting his growing and thriving YouTube channel so he can go all in on his 20% unique ability of writing books. I think it would be worth watching this as you are spending time clarifying the strategy to simplify things, such as the podcast. So the reason I say this is that you really have to disappoint people when you're letting go of your 80%. I've had to disappoint a lot of people the last couple months as I've been getting clear and clear on my own future self and Then as I've been letting go of things, of course you disappoint people. One of the things that I learned, I was just barely at a summit. It wasn't a summit, but it was an event and there was a lot of high level CEOs there. And one of the things that they talked about is that the team that got you here is not the team that'll get you there. One of the CEOs, she's, you know, leading a company doing 500 million company is about 5 to 10x in value in the last 12 months. She just talked about how her goal was to get the company to $1 billion in revenue and that she needed to make the team from the goal and had to look at the team right now and she knew that the team right now wasn't going to get her to a billion. The team that'll get you here is not the team, they'll get you there. The same is true in life that a lot of times the paths, the people, the things that got you here won't get you there. And by letting those things go, you're going to have to disappoint people. I had to disappoint some people because I'm letting go of this YouTube channel and that's actually a case in point of who, not how, that the team that got you here is not the team that can get you there. Well, similarly, I'm not the same guy as my mentor who I believe is a 10 times better coach than me and who can take my coaching program to 10x levels that I never could. That's actually a key point of who not how. And this is something that I've learned massively in coaching some really high level companies. Is, is that the right who doesn't need to be trained? Yeah, maybe they need to learn some concepts that are related to the industry, but the right who will actually train you. And so for me, applying who not how, when I'm passing off my coaching program to my mentor, I'm transitioning it to him. I don't need to tell my mentor how to run the coaching program. I don't need to train him. He is a 10x who. He's actually way further along as an entrepreneur than me as a leader, as a person. And so I don't need to train him. When you get the right who, they actually train you. So now let me go ahead and go to my screen and I'm just going to share with you a few of the powerful principles I've learned since Writing this book and fundamentally share with you some of the core concepts in my book Rapid Transformation, which I'm writing and in due process I believe that you will be able to get a lot of powerful insights from this. So this is the core model of 10x is easier than 2x, my book with Dan Sullivan. While we were writing this book, Dan actually came up with this model and I think it's really beautiful. And basically the main point here is that if you're going to go for 2x growth, what that means is that you can keep 80% of who you are right now, 80% of your life right now can continue into the future. If you're going for 2x, 2x is linear. 2x is also a continuation of who you are in the present. And to be honest with you, me having studied future self science for a long time, this is my book, be your future self now. People view time incorrectly from a psychological standpoint. People think that the past is behind, present is now, future is up ahead. From a psychological standpoint, past, present and future are all right now. Time is continuous, Past, present and future are all right now. For example, if I have a unhealthy view of my past and I haven't resolved it, reframed it, moved on from it, then of course that's going to impact me in the present. Also, if you've never read the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, that book really is clear. And Frankl makes the key point which is now very solidified in neuroscience research and modern positive psychology research. But the main point Frankl makes in that book is that if you lose hope and a sense of purpose for your future, then your present loses meaning and ultimately you decay mentally and spiritually. And he wrote that book in the context of the concentration camp or the focus of that book was in the context of the concentration camps of World War II, the Nazi concentration camps, that the people in the concentration camps who had had everything taken away from them and they were literally starving like skin and bones, sleeping on the dirt. That when those people lost hope in the future, they that their present loss meaning and ultimately they ended up dying very quickly. He basically says that the loss of hope in the future not only has a deadly mental effect, but a deadly physical effect. And so the main reason I'm bringing this up is, is that the past, present and future are all happening right now. And that your views of your past and future ultimately are going to impact who you are now. And that from my view, the past and future are simply tools for effectively operating in the present. But there's one more massive point here that I want to make as I'm going in back into the 8020 model that is the main model of this book is, is that what a lot of people do is, is they take their present self and they use that to create their future self. And because they're using the present as the platform or the present as the baseline, that present is the large shaper of the future. And so most people, when they're viewing their future self, they view their future self as mostly the same person as their present self. And that's the basis of a 2x mindset, is that you take the present and you use that to create the future. What I'm saying, which is profound and powerful. And this is a great quote from Dan Sullivan, even he says the only way to make your present better is by making your future bigger. And also there's a great quote from Albert Einstein that imagination is more important than knowledge. Also I love the quote that the bigger the vision, the better the decisions. And so there's a lot of research obviously in psychology about conceptualizing your future self. Even Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist, talks about how most people, they are not thinking about their future self in a lot of ways from a growth minded perspective. You want to view your future self as a different person. You want to view them as a different person from a imagination standpoint because imagination is more important than knowledge. And honestly, your future self is a different person than you and they can be massively different. To the point of this book, your future self can be 10x different. You really want your future self to dictate who you are in the present rather than letting your present dictate who you will be in the future. So here's one of the key stories in the book that I share. And I share the story about my son Caleb, who's 16 years old, he's a tennis player. And Caleb's goal is to play college. And again, I'm going to share this story because it explains strategically why a 10x goal is actually simpler and easier than a 2x goal. But anyways, Caleb's goal is to play college. And his coach asked him why isn't your goal to go pro? And Caleb didn't even think about it. And this fits with the idea of questioning assumptions, which is something that Elon Musk talks a lot about. And it also fits with the idea of imagination is more important than knowledge. And usually if you believe something is impossible, you probably Won't even think about it. You won't even consider it, let alone commit to it and reverse engineer it. You know, when we were driving home that night, I asked Caleb, I said, caleb, do you think you're on a path to going to college? And he said, I think so. And this, I'm using these two goals as it relates to 2x versus 10x. College would be a 2x goal for Caleb. And so when I asked him, caleb, do you think you're going to go to college? He said, I think so. In other words, he was 80% confident that he would get there. And I would argue that that's probably pretty accurate, that he's pretty much 80% on his way to getting to his goal. But of course, with a 2x mindset, you do have to tweak 20%. He, you know, we're not 100% confident. And I would say that there is that 20% change we need to make. He'd probably need to improve his cardio, is his, his nutrition, and maybe a new coach or something. Like, when you're going for 2x, you're. You don't, you don't need to change that much. You can keep 80% of what you're now doing. But then I asked him, what about pro? I said, are you confident that you're going to go pro? And again, this is all in chapter 1 of 10x is easier than 2x, my book with Dan, my third book with Dan. But ultimately I asked, do you think that your current path is going to get you to pro? And he said, absolutely not. He said, no. No way. No way. He didn't, he. He didn't even have 20% confidence that he was gonna get there. He had 100% confidence that he is not on the path to going pro. Now, this fits with a concept in psychology called pathways thinking, or even strategy thinking, that it's always the goal that shapes the process. But if you're gonna go for a 2x goal or a linear goal, then you can keep 80% of what you're now doing. And another key point about that, and this is something I learned from Dr. Alan Bernard as I was writing this book, is that if you're gonna go for a linear goal or a kind of marginal goal, a small goal, then there's a thousand pathways to get there. So in the case of Caleb, my son, if he really wants to play college, there's. Honestly, there's a huge amount of variance. There's a huge amount of pathways for him to get there. There's dozens or even hundreds of coaches and academies. He could also play on a lot of the high school teams. There's a lot of potential pathways for him to get there, which actually makes it an ineffective tool. If you're using the future as a tool, this is not an effective tool. If he wanted to go for a pro, if that was literally his goal and if we committed to it, there's far less pathways to going pro than to college. He can't do all the many things he could do to go to college, to go for pro. If this was his goal, realistically, there may just be a few coaches that could actually get him there. If we were trying for it, obviously there's no guarantee that we could get him there. But if we actually were going for it and we took it seriously and we used the goal to reverse engineer the paths, almost none of the paths that he's currently taking would get him there. And that's one of the things that Dr. Alan Bernard talks about and which he taught me and which is in the book 10x is easier than 2x, is that if you're going to go for a 2x goal, almost everything you're doing right now will work. That's to the point is almost everything you're doing right now, 80% of what you're doing right now will work. To get you to 2x, you only have to change some. But if you go for 10x, almost nothing you're doing right now will work. This is the point of if you're going to go for a 10x mindset, at least 80% of what you're doing right now has to go. And to the point of this example, if Caleb were to go for pro, almost nothing he's doing right now would work and almost nothing in general would work. We'd have to find the few paths and people which would get you there, which is what would fit into this category of what we're calling the 20%. Now. This is something I've learned recently, which I want to share with you, which is if you're going to go for a 10x goal and it doesn't have to literally be 10x, it could figuratively be 10x, it could be. It could just seem like an impossible goal. It could just seem like something that's very unrealistic. It's a massive goal. If you're going to go for a massive goal, what that means is that you have to have a massive floor. And the floor is ultimately what determines what you say. Yes and no to Massive goals, just like my son Caleb, mean that almost nothing will work and also almost nothing you're doing right now at work. The 80% is 80% of your current life, your current business, your current situation, your current focus. One of the things that's talked about in constraint theory is the idea of the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the key thing that needs to be solved. And when it comes to people, the key bottleneck is your attention. And so when you're going to go for a massive goal, 80% of what you're currently paying attention to has got to go. 80%'s got to go. That doesn't mean you have to like literally eliminate it. Maybe you pass it off to a new who or like my coaching business, you know, I'm transitioning that to my mentor and I'm no longer doing it. It's part of my 80%. I'm getting rid of it. Just like my YouTube channel, not focused on it, it became part of my 80%. And so higher goals have a much higher floor or standard, which means that filter wise, and the filter is our psychology. And so there's a million things going on, you almost notice none of it because you're paying attention to what you care about. Whatever you focus on expands, whatever you see you're becoming more of. And so actually, and this is kind of like that whole concept of the mirror principle, you can know who you are by what you're seeing. And so when you raise that floor massively, you also have to filter out almost everything you used to be doing. In my case, I actually think you should filter out at least 80% of the information you're consuming. 80% of it is a representation of your past self, not your future self. Also, 80% of what you were doing in the past got you here, but won't get you there. And to the point of what I was talking about earlier, when you let things go, the 80%, when you let those things go, rather than focusing on what you've lost from a loss aversion standpoint, you actually want to focus on everything you gained as a result, but also everything you gain by letting it go. By letting it go, you can now go deep on the new 20%. And this fits with the book, by the way, Good to Great. In Good to Great, he talks about how good is the enemy of great and about how most companies, they ultimately don't become great because they're focused on too many things. You have to let go of the good and go all in on the few things that could make you great as it relates to your future self, as it relates to where you want to go. So one of the things that Nassim Taleb talks about in Antifragile, and he also talks about it in his book Skin in the Game, is this is a quote from Skin in the Game. He said, let us return to Warren Buffett. He did not make his billions by cost benefit analysis, rather simply by establishing a high filter than picking opportunities that pass the threshold. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. So that's the point. Setting a really high floor and filter and saying no to almost everything and saying yes to just the few things that meet the filter. Here's a quote from Steve Jobs. He said, people think that focus means saying yes to what you've got to focus on, but that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundreds of other good ideas that are out there. You've got to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things that we haven't done as the things we've done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things. This is the whole concept of good to great. Good is the enemy of great. I would argue it's actually harder to let go of the 80% than to focus on the right 20%, because the 80% is confusing. And there's a really great quote. It's actually one of my favorite quotes. And the quote comes from Robert Brault. He said, we're kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to our lesser goals. So again, I'm going to repeat that. We're kept from our goal not by the obstacles. The obstacles are the path and the people that you've got to ultimately, like, learn and transform. But you're. You're kept from your goal by clear paths to lesser goals. And those lesser goals are things in the 80%. YouTube was a means to my higher goals. It wasn't my actual goal. And so if I'm trying to 10x YouTube, that may be relevant to other people's future selves, but it was not relevant to my future self. And so by trying to 10x YouTube, I was actually trying to 10x my 80%, rather than letting go of my 80% and 10xing my 20%, which is the paths and people that are truly in synchronicity, pure alignment with my desired future self. So you got the vision, which is the 10x vision, whatever that is. And then ultimately you've got the strategy and what I'm saying the strategy is, is the strategy is the floor. The floor. And the filter is the strategy. And the strategy is what determines where you focus. It's what, it's what. It's the dividing line between the 20% and the 80% and only a few things that you focus on. This is again, difference between good to great is, is that the strategy is the few things you focus on and everything else that you don't. That's the idea of having a really high filter back to the idea of Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett. And good to great is that the vision is the. Is the ceiling and the strategy is the floor. The vision is your identity. Your identity is the view you have of yourself. And I would argue your identity really wants to be based on your future self. You want the identity, the picture in your mind, the narrative of your future self, and that's really what drives your actions and behavior. Your identity is so powerful. Your identity is the driver. Also, you don't want your identity to be broad. I love the quote from Zig Ziglar where he said, it's more powerful to be a meaningful specific than a broad generality. I believe that is true as well, of identity. You want your identity to be specific, which means you want it to be based upon a specific, vivid, meaningful goal. Viktor Frankl would agree. You want your vision of your future self and your identity to be very specific. So, for example, in the case of one of the businesses I work with, they're doing 200 million a year in revenue. They really want to get to a billion in three years. And so they have a very specific identity of being a business that's doing a million a year in revenue and working with and serving people at a really high level. In the case of this company, they're a franchise business. And so I want to show you that not only do you want a very specific identity, you also want a very specific floor, which is a very specific strategy, but also, as I'll show you, a very specific character and culture. Your identity is what you say yes to. Your identity is specific, not broad. It's not just, I want to be a runner or I want to be a writer or I want to be a good person. It's very specific about who you intend to be. And I would argue it's about focusing on the 20%, but also, just as identity is specific, so is character. You know, developing the character. And it's honestly the vision and the identity of your future self that ultimately dictates the character you develop and the character represents the floor. The character is only truly solidified as your character when you actually say no. There's a great quote right here that I love from Tony Hsieh. He said, for individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny. So as I see it, you've got a vision which is a very high goal. High, high goal. Like my son Caleb going pro like that company, shifting their goal from a hundred million in three years to 250. The goal is huge because with a higher goal, almost nothing you're doing right now will work. And you have to set a much clearer floor and filter which represents your character and culture. We're kept from our goal not by the obstacles, but by clear paths to lesser goals. And so when you set that floor, you have to keep it or else you confuse your character and the culture of your team. The identity, really the floor is what determines the strategy, the character, the culture of the company. I'm just telling you, I've seen this. When you set a really high floor which determines what you say yes and no to, most of the things get filtered out and they allow you to then master at the new level, that's when things really start to happen. And I'm just telling you, when I've seen this with a CEO, when you set that high floor and you don't go below it and you say this is the new floor, what we used to do doesn't work. This is what we do and you stick to that, then the right team will, will, will, will grow into that, will adapt into that so that your identity ultimately becomes your character and you really set that. But if you keep going below that floor, either on an individual level or on a business level, you confuse, you confuse your identity and ultimately you don't filter effectively for the 20%. But also the right people won't filter for you because you're not gonna be resonating at the same level. I love the quote from the book. As a man thinketh you do not attract what you want, you attract who you are. Hope that's useful. Just sharing a lot of personal potent concepts and ideas and hope you find them valuable. I will get to the point where I'm dialing this YouTube channel more and being a lot more like probably specific. I'll probably still make the video shorter and more bite sized, but for now I just wanted to share some of the big things that I'm learning and I hope they're useful to you. Talk to you soon.