The Science of Scaling: Mindset, Methods, and Mistakes That Make or Break Exponential Growth with Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Joe Polish

One of the people I wrote about in the book, her name's Alyssia. Last year, she started to cold call credit repair companies explaining her software. And every time she would talk to someone there, they fell in love with it. And so they created like a Rev Share partnership and they would start using it with their clients. So it takes her 90 days to have 10 of these calls. And so she has 10 clients. So for her, I said, you want to set a seemingly impossible goal and use that to create a more scalable path. So she said, okay, I'll 10x it in 90 days. I'll have a hundred people using the software in 90 days. And ultimately that goal wasn't big enough, using Drucker's words to disrupt her presence. So she just thought, in 90 days, I'll just make up 90 more of these calls. I get 100% conversion rate. And so I just said, that's not how it works. You want a goal that's so big that it stops you from most of what you're doing and helps you realize that most of what you're doing is optimizing what shouldn't exist and helps you find a more scalable path, build a more scalable model. And so she said, okay, I'm going to go for a thousand of these companies using my software in 90 days. No clue how to do it. Here was what's really cool, though, is when you start to actually meditate from the goal. And she just thought, what if I just partner with one of these software companies that already serves thousands, if not tens of thousands of these people? I could just partner with them. And so that's what she did. Literally less than a week later, she got on the phone with a guy who owns a company called Credit Repair Junkies. He fell in love with the technology. He had 8,000 clients that were these same companies. He white labeled her technology. She created Rev Share Deal, and she went from 10 people using the software to 8,000 in a week.

How can you be a domino for someone else? The Joe Polish Show. Any problem in the world can be solved at the right genius network. I'm really excited about what's about to happen here. Hopefully you won't be disappointed if I do a bad job. You might be, but we'll see. So how many of you ever heard of Ben Hardy? All right, awesome. How many of you have? Is there anyone here who has not yet read a Ben Hardy book? Wow. Okay. I think there's got to be someone that doesn't make sense. They're just they're trying to be nice. Yeah, yeah. Who has read a Ben Hardy book or two or three.

Awesome. Awesome. Great.

All right, so let me go into the official intro. We're going to make a video here too that I hope that you can share with your leadership team that will help instill a mindset into your company and your organization for those that really want to help you. Scale all right, ten times your business. Now don't just grow your business, scale it. Achieve the impossible faster than you ever imagined. Those phrases sound great and they are. Some of you in this room have already achieved them. Or you know, people who have. But here's the real question. How do you do it consistently and how do you do it even faster than you think is possible? That's exactly what Dr. Benjamin Hardy is here to share in this interview. Key insights from his brand new book, the Science of Scaling. Right here. Look at this fancy thing. You're the first ones to see this cover. All right. The Science of Scaling Subtitle Grow your business bigger and faster than you think possible. When Ben joined Genius Network in 2017, he was in his late 20s, married, no kids, still in school, working on his PhD and publishing articles for free on Medium.com. fast forward just eight years, he's now Dr. Benjamin Hardy, a renowned organizational psychologist, proud father of seven, author of seven books that have sold millions of copies, 100K member, founder of his newest company, Scaling.com and someone who is truly 10 times both his business and his life. Get ready to learn how you can scale faster, smarter and bigger than ever before. Please help me welcome my friend, Dr. Benjamin Harding. What is up, brother?

Awesome.

Okay, so you know, I gotta show you this and I'm probably gonna barely even use this, but I've got three different to really cover this. As of yesterday morning, I finished the entire book. Cause I've sort of OCD on if I, if anyone's not noticed that on. I wanted to get through the whole book and so he was nice enough to send me the, the PDF of this. I, I read some of it and listened to it on through an app that you can listen to stuff on. So there's a lot of stuff let's, I want to jump right in, let's talk about Elon Musk. So you talk about Elon Musk's. Then we're going to meander back and forth and why you wrote the book and all that sort of stuff. But I want to go right into this Elon Musk thing. So he has this five step algorithm and if you had to apply it to the average entrepreneurial daily life, not just business systems, what would people need to delete, question or automate immediately? And here's the section with the five step algorithm. But you probably have it memorized, so.

Luckily you have the notes there.

Yes, exactly.

How many of you know Elon's five step algorithm? Oh, this is good. Okay. So as you probably know, Elon is actually an entrepreneur. He has an impossible goal. Who knows what his impossible goal is? Who hasn't read the book yet? Mars. Right? And so we're going to go into the psychology of how your goal, every one of you, is driven by goals. This is fundamental. It's fundamental to human psychology. Right. We're all driven by goals. Most people are unclear of their goals and their goals are shaping bad psychology and then bad system design. So Elon is a phenomenal system designer and scaler of those systems. That's what he's attempting to do. Right. With the United States. So he's an engineer who's applying engineering skills to a system, the United States, and obviously to his businesses to reach an impossible goal, which is Mars. Right. You can't scale a complex system. There's too many things getting in the way right now. So his algorithm is five steps. The first one is question requirements. We'll go into a lot of things here, but for all of you, you have too many false assumptions and false requirements about what it takes to achieve a goal, maybe even to scale your company 10 times or a hundred times. You have a lot of false ideas of what that takes. I'll give just one quick example. There's a guy who, and I wrote about him in the book, he's a 20, 22 year old guy and his quote unquote impossible goal is to own a European soccer team. And I said, when are you going to do that? And he said, I'll do that by age 55. So I'm like, okay, I did the math. That's 33 years. And so I said, what if you actually just move the timeline to age 30, right. Why 55? And this is one of the things that you're going to understand as we get further into this conversation is that most of your goals or your timelines are extremely arbitrary. They're based on false assumptions, based on false requirements. And so I just said, what if you just move the goal to age 30? And he was, all of a sudden, he was like, well, there's so many things that I think I need to do before I can get there. Right. And so part of using time as a psychological tool, part of what Elon Musk does, he actually said if a timeline is long, it's wrong. So part of bringing a deadline to an impossible level is that it strips out all those false requirements. Right. So his steps are false requirements. You got to question all the requirements you think are there for the goal. Most of the things that you think are required to scale or to achieve maximum results fast are false requirements. Number two, he says, is remove steps of the process. Remove steps, remove. You know, think about when he walked into Twitter, right? He's removing components. He said, if you're not regularly adding stuff back in, you're not removing enough. Right. So most systems are overly complex. They're not ready to scale. Most of your businesses have too many parts, too many products, too many concepts. So if you're not removing elements, if you're not removing. If you're not regularly adding stuff back in, he says you're not removing enough. One of his core quotes, which is like a core quote in the book, is that the most common mistake of a smart entrepreneur, of a smart engineer, but I'll also say of a smart entrepreneur, is to optimize something that should not exist. Seriously. He says the most common mistake of a smart engineer, and I would say a smart business owner, is to optimize something that should not exist at all. You're spending a lot of time optimizing something that from a better perspective, from a better frame, it just becomes irrelevant. It becomes noise, not signal. So that's number two. So question requirements. Remove parts or processes. Number three is to simplify and optimize. So you want to simplify your system on a very core component and scale that the final piece is, or the fourth piece is accelerate learning cycles. In psychology, we call this deliberate practice. You want to accelerate your learning on one piece. The core bottleneck in strategy, they call it the crux. And then from there you automate and you systemize. So those are the five steps.

Yeah, you know the Peter Drucker line, where there's nothing more useless than doing really well that which need not be done at all.

I would say this is a gut check. You know, majority of things in businesses and life is that, yeah, we're optimizing things that shouldn't exist.

Yeah. And the other Drucker quote I've always gone back to is, you know, the primary purpose of business is to create and keep customers. Marketing and innovation produce results. All other business functions or cost. And there are. He's dismantling a Lot of things that from, you know, to understand. To understand Elon and understand Trump, they're not that I fully do. They look at things from an entrepreneurial lens, like it's a big Monopoly game and how do you play the game better, more effectively, cut out, waste, that sort of stuff. So how would you. Since I bring up like Elon, you know, right now, there's a lot of people that can't stand Elon. Right.

And the system is designed to defend the system. Yeah, right. That's what's going on. That's true psychologically as well, like you're subconscious, but that's what's going on right now. The system is designed to defend the system and he is disrupting the system. That's also what Drucker says. He says if the future is not disrupting the present, then you're just perpetuating the past. So that's what he's doing. But yeah, a lot of people are not very happy with him.

I'd almost like to do a survey here, but we won't get into controversial stuff. Well, I get. We don't do controversial stuff.

No.

What's that? I'll come up there if you want. Yeah, yeah.

Let's get Jim up here. Hey, Jim, critique me, man. Throw the rocks, baby.

Let's talk about this from. Because how do you cut out all the fake work? So there's a book, I talked to the author years ago. He wrote a book called Fake Work. And I don't even know what year that book was written, but I remember him saying that if you were to. And this was like in the early days of Facebook and social media, where he said if you were to monitor what your employees are doing online, you would say, see, half of what they're doing has absolutely nothing to do in most companies with the actual. What you hired them for, they'd be looking at doing personal stuff. Right. So he called it fake work. And this whole notion of the confusing activity with accomplishments. So for scaling, how do you view cutting out waste versus the big goal in the vision, which we're going to talk about all this for sure. Since we're talking about like how Elon looks at decision making and compresses time, how do you view a bloated organization? How do you view a bunch of people? Because again, I know I mentioned Drucker. He said if you've got more people that are needed for the job that needs to be done, they spend more time interacting than working. And he also said you're either working or you're in meetings. And you know Peter Diamondis, who knows Elon quite well, you know, he was telling me that he, the way that he communicates with Elon is through X direct messaging on X. And he says Elon doesn't even have an assistant. He's like, it's crazy. He doesn't even have an assistant. And I was like, okay. But he has obviously thousands of people that support what, what for sure he does. Right. So yeah. How do you view waste and how do you view getting your, your organization to not be just spending a bunch of time in processes that aren't doing anything?

So there's actually a Boston Consulting Group study that said that only 10% of 10% of what goes on in most companies is actually efficient, like ineffective. And so most stuff is focused on the wrong thing or doing it ineffectively. I actually, I'm just going to show a few pictures just to kind of make a point if I can. This is just a McKinsey study that says grow faster, die slow. This basically just means that if you're not actually scaling quickly and I'll, we'll get in like to the mechanics of it later. But essentially if you're not growing fast, what that means is you're probably making a lot of mistakes, I. E. You're compounding errors that are eventually going to stop you from make, you know, stop you from making the decisions that would lead to scale. So just as an example, the, the 22 year old that I gave at the beginning, if he actually has the 55 age deadline, there's the, it's almost 99% that he will never get to that goal. Even if it was 10 years away. He'd probably never get to that goal if it was five years away. His chances are much, much, much higher. But I'm just going to share with you, and probably some of you guys have seen this before, but it goes straight to Joe's question about waste. And I'll get into some of the deeper psychology behind why in a minute. But that's just a picture that shows a bunch of lines. But the lines represent data and pathways. And so basically there's infinite data going on even in this room, which you're not aware of. Right. Obviously you're focusing on me right now. But there's, there's infinite data going on, internal, external. And the thing that determines which data you see is your frame. And what a lot of the research in neuroscience and psychology shows now is that your frame is fundamentally based on your goals. Right. Your goals determine what you see, right, Dan obviously has the beautiful line. Your eyes can only see, ears can only hear what your brain is looking for. In psychology, that's called selective attention and pathways thinking. So we're always looking for pathways to a goal. And so the thing that determines which data you see what signal versus what's noise is your frame. And your frame is based on your goals. And so your future is the thing that shapes primarily everything that's relevant in your present. And so how you frame your future determines that's literally the first step. So John Doerr, the billionaire, he said that a goal properly set is halfway reached. So the first step to actually clarifying waste is to determine the right goal. And one of the people who read this book, his name is Robert C. Gay, Bob Gay, he was one of the founders of Bain Capital. So he's one of the people who is one of the fathers of private equity. He's been a part of scaling. Bain Capital is one of the biggest private equity firms in the world. He did blurb the book, which I'm grateful for. But he said that one of the biggest challenges that an entrepreneur or a leader faces is actually choosing the right goal. Because if you choose the wrong goal, you're going to scale the wrong thing, right? I've already told you that the goal shapes your psychology, it shapes what you see, but it also shapes the systems you create, which is your business. And so one of the things that Bob taught me was he was talking about Steve Ballmer. So Steve Ballmer, while he was the CEO of Microsoft, he had a goal of improving basically the, like, the profits for the shareholders. And so he scaled that, he achieved that, but it also cost Microsoft probably trillions and trillions of dollars because he chose the wrong goal. So he chose, he chose the wrong thing. So basically the easiest way to identify waste is to move your goal so high and your deadline so close. This is what you could do. Obviously this kind of relates somewhat to 10x thinking, but you also want to make your deadline so, so close, seemingly impossible that it forces out, it forces out all bad thinking, right? So just as an example, say that your company is doing 5 million in here, right? If you want to actually go for 10x, you'd want to do that in less than three years, right? So you want to go for 50 million in three years or less. Why? Because it's going to get rid of all the bad thinking, what we call stuff below the floor, right? So from that, what we would call frame or goal, all of a sudden, most of the Stuff in your business becomes optimizing stuff that shouldn't exist because now you can see it from the right perspective. Right. Most things don't work for that big of a goal and that urgent of a goal, but you really want to use time as a tool. So that's really how you can start to identify the waste is what are all the things we're doing that are based on what we were doing before, based on some cost bias or based on just this is how we've been doing it. When you, and you just, you want to use it as a tool. This is one of the things that happens to people is, is that when they actually set a big goal and create an urgent timeline, they then think that they're failures if they don't hit it. You really just want to use it as a tool for filtering. That's really what it's for. And so if you have a massive goal, a true scale goal, which what I have found is most companies don't have them, right? Most companies don't actually have a true scale goal or a true timeline. And so if you give yourself a very urgent timeline, you'll then be able to see that almost everything you're doing is waste. We call it. It goes below the floor. Michael Porter, the strategy expert at Harvard, said that strategy is primarily what you don't do. And so once you actually have the massive goal, you raise the floor, you become really honest with yourself that the majority of what you're doing is below the floor, that it's not scalable, then you can actually focus. You can actually create a scalable model and a scalable path. That's what Elon Musk is talking about in terms of accelerate on the thing that can scale. And so you really need the right future to start filtering out the stuff that shouldn't be there.

I think people fetishize scaling.

Sure, they totally do. Very buzzy right now.

Yeah, exactly. So which is good. I mean, they write a book about it because it's a big pursuit. But. But who shouldn't scale? What are things where you like because you don't want to scale? Cancer. Right. Because if something is like, not good, why try to blow it up?

Right.

It could actually make things worse. And my friend Keith Cunningham, who, you know, also, you know, he has this line where just as many businesses die from indigestion as they do starvation. Right. So you can, in the process of scaling, if you do not have your shit together, you can really hurt yourself.

It'll mess you up.

Yeah. So I Wanted to ask you, like, what does scaling actually mean to you?

Yeah, I think that you really most. I would say that I don't know how many of the people in the room here actually should or shouldn't. I do think it would lead to better decisions. It's kind of like some of the stuff we've talked about with, like, if you set up your business to sell, you're probably going to set up a better business, right? If you actually set up your business to truly scale and you're scaling the thing, that's the right thing, which takes work. It takes work to actually choose a thing that's worthy to scale, that if you actually systemize and actually do it, it's going to do something beautiful in the world. But also, I think you just have to be honest with yourself, like, why are you in business? Why are you doing this? What's the why? Right? What's your goal? And so it really comes down to what do you want to accomplish in your life and what do you want to accomplish in the next three years, 10 years, 20 years, and the impact you want to have? My view is that if you think about America right now, we do need to scale. Like, there's a lot of, I believe hundreds of thousands, if not millions of companies need to start doing better work, right? And so going for the goal that high is going to force you to get better. Right? It's going to force mastery and specificity. And so for me, I think I just use it as a tool for defining who I am. You know, we know who Mark Young is. So how many of you know who Mark Young is? Mark Young is beautiful. I just love that man. He's actually. His story is in the book because he read the book, like, literally six weeks ago. And he's got a great advertising agency, right? Jekyll and Hyde Advertising, and took him 30 years. His business is doing 20 million in revenue. And when he read the book, he realized he hadn't actually had a true scale goal for a really long time. And so he said, I'm gonna go for 100 million in three years or less. Right? Using time as a tool. And he became very aware that his business had become diluted. He'd started saying yes to many, many things that were absolutely distracting him, distracting his customers, confusing people. And so the beauty of having a scale goal, having a massive and an urgent goal, is that it forces you to start being really honest with yourself about all the things you're doing, but it also forces you to define yourself. Mark had realized he had stopped defining himself. People become too afraid to actually say, this is who we are. This is what we do. This is why we do it. This is who we do it for. Instead, you're doing 50 things for 50 people. And so he had realized that's what happened to him. And so I think choosing to scale something forces you to get conviction and clarity, and it forces you to raise your floor and to start being honest that the majority of what you're doing right now is holding you back and it's costing you a lot. So I just, I think it's beautiful because it forces you to start to get convictions, it forces you start to get clarity, and then to start to have good process.

No, that's very. That's very good. And use Mark as an example. Those of you who don't know Mark. Is. Is he 67 hours? He's still 60.

I think he's in his late 50s, but he looks, he's.

No, he's okay.

There you go.

He holds the world record for the oldest rookie. Weird name. Rookie, professional race car.

Okay. So that surprises me even more. I thought he was like in his late 50s, looking like he's in his 30s.

He might be 67 now, but. So Mark, his dear friend, he's actually a genius network member. Those of you remember, not laug year, but the year before, he was the first interview that I did for the annual event. And we've been doing a lot of podcasts together, so I'm really amazing.

He's awesome. I've learned a lot from him.

Yeah. And this is a guy who sold billions of dollars worth of stuff for other people. Now, he does very well. I mean, he owns lots of real estate. I mean, you know, he's a smart dude, but he's also a psychologist and he understands. His book is called hypnotizing. But the point is, like, at his age, it's the scaling in the 10 times vision that actually gives him the enthusiasm. Because until you get there, you kind of just can coast along and you can do your business and you put up, you tolerate a bunch of shit. But now when you have a big goal and a big vision and a big dream, and it doesn't necessarily need to be big. That's why I asked you the question, because I think a lot of times there's so many people trying to convince.

Everyone to scale all the way down too, and just focus on a few.

Yeah, yeah. Now, from the context of this book, I think the people that will probably buy the book and read the book are people that really want to get to some big, ambitious goal. So what do you do when your team or your friends or your circle does not share your ambition? And let me say it from the framework of Elon Musk. So I've had two private meetings with Elon Musk in small groups that SpaceX, that Peter organized, and they were several years ago, and one person asked him a question, you know, why do you think you've been so successful? And he said, and Elon's a very interesting dude. He's like, I can tolerate more pain than anyone that I know. That's what he said. He's like. So he, he's like. His whole view of is like, I can tolerate a lot of pain. And so. And he can. I mean, that guy, like, he, you know, if you've ever read the book on him, I mean, he's the Walter Isaacson one. I mean, the guy had a horrible childhood and, you know, violent, a lot of crazy shit. So the atmospheric conditions. So a lot of people, though, are not. He has to continuously deal with the pain of people that believe he's full of. And there's no way this is going to be possible. So when he says, I want to do something, there's an army of people saying, we can't do it, we can't do it. And he trudges through anyway. A lot of people aren't built for that. So how do you. But you can build yourself up, right? Because what is, you know, Dan's line, Make it up and make it real, right? So if you're going to make up this, you know, I want. I'm at 5 million right now. I want to be at 50 million, I'm at 10 million. I want to be at 100 million. And everyone around you is like, there's no way in hell this is going to happen. What do you do with that?

I liked the quote, the image yesterday of the jar getting bigger, by the way. And I think that that is very true. So I've taken many people through, through this at this point, like. And so this is, this is, this is to be expected is the idea. One of the, One of the companies I consulted for a while was a franchise company. They're. They're like a flooring franchise company. The CEO actually heard me speak at the big EOS conference a couple of years ago. And so they hired me as a consultant. He said they were doing 200 million a year. And he's like, we want to get to a billion in seven years. I said, let's go for it in three, because 7 million is allowing you to stay below your floor. It took him six months to actually realize that half of his leadership team didn't want to do that. Like, the majority of them were sabotaging that. And so he was like saying, we're going to a billion. We got to raise the floor. And for them, that meant, like, with their franchisees, the ones who aren't willing to grow, we've got to, like, get them to sell back their franchise. We got to bring in new ones that have bigger goals and stuff. But for six months, the team wouldn't do it. And so they stalled and he started to get upset. And so then he was like, okay, I need to actually hold this system more accountable. And accountability is like a crucial element of any system. And a lot of people don't want to be accountable, right? A lot of you, I would surmise, don't want to be accountable to a level that it would be required to scale because you guys are all the leader, right? You like holding other people accountable. But. But when was the last time you had to be held accountable? Right. One of the people that I interviewed for this book is someone who goes into countries and designs economic systems for countries. And so I basically asked him, because he's a systematic thinker, he creates systems for economies. And I said, what's the difference between a third world country and a first world country in terms of what's just the main difference that leads to these two things? And he said, there's only one word. It's accountability, right? There's accountability in the system, right? So with Argentina, they're trying to peg the peso to the dollar because there's more accountability to the dollar than the peso, right? And so you need a system that has accountability to a goal and then to certain culture. Culture and accountability are kind of the same thing. And so to raise that, you're going to have to make certain people uncomfortable. Some people don't want that, and they're not wrong for not wanting that. They're just not aligned now on the goal. And so at some point, it's just better to have honest conversations and to hold that higher standard to what you want to choose and to just say, this is what we're about and what we're going for. And a lot of people are going to eventually say, I'm good, they're not going to want that. And then you can find people very, very aligned people who are super excited about it, who want to do that. I Think if you looked at any of your guys businesses, you could see that there were certain people that helped you get to a certain level and then at a certain point they were no longer aligned on where you were trying to go. And that's just part of the process. But I don't think it has to be a sad part of the process.

Well, in the beginning, I think what is most difficult is when people are sabotaging you or you're sabotaging yourself. I think you made a really important statement about how us as entrepreneurs are often not ready to be accountable. Right. But we see other people.

It's a higher bar. It's a high bar of accountability. It.

Well, so almost everyone in a company thinks they want to help the company grow. Even when people are sabotaging it, they're not consciously aware of seeing that they're, they're frame their comfort zone. It's not there. And there are times where every one of us have. Have to walk ourselves or other people through. You know, it's like that song, if you're going through hell, keep on going. Yeah, you know, where you just have to go through that purgatory. Right. Where you're just like, man, you know, I'm enthusiastic but. And I, I look at it as who's putting wind behind my sails? Not who's putting wind in front of my sails. Right. Who's what's creating the resistance? And the hardest is when you're doing it to yourself and you don't, you know, you're just picking things because your fear or whatever. Because I think so much of this is like, you know, your last book on, you know, future self. Define future self. Because I think this ties in so much to the image and the identity and the vision of scaling.

Yeah, it's huge. I'm just going to show just a picture if I can go back to the slides for a second. This is. So there's basically two models of time psychologically. Oh, there's a quote. I'm just going to skip ahead. So this is the.

By the way, I've not seen any of these slides. This is not a. Like he saw none of the questions I'm asking him.

I just knew that I would want to show some of these pictures. So this is what we would call linear time. This is the idea that the past shapes the present and the present shapes the future. A part of linear time is that the past and present or, sorry, the past and future are external. Right. When we're talking about psychology, time is internal. And so this is the view that the past is outside of you. You can't change it. It's just, boom, the future's up and ahead, can't know it. And so this is how most people view their future self, is they let their past self, present self, be the creation of the future self. And so the future self then looks like the past and present self. And that's a lot of research on that, right? That most people's future self is simply a reflection of their current self. This is more what I would call holistic time. And this is more accurate to psychology that your future shapes what you see and do in the present. Obviously, if you have trauma and things like that, that's going to deeply impact your present. But it's you in the present that are continuously creating that frame, right? So psychologically, the present is what shapes the meaning of the past. We're just continuing to create the same past over and over in terms of how we frame it. But the responsibility of the past is in the present, and the responsibility of the present is in the future. The future. And there's a lot of research on this now in neuroscience and psychology. I would say that the future probably holds 10x the weight of the past. Obviously, one of the problems, and I'm not gonna go too deep into the traumas, is that the trauma, the trauma just na. Unless you deal with it in the present, it's going to just destroy your future. And that's really, in my opinion, the worst part about it is it crushes hope in the things that we've talked about. And when you have a hopeless future, what do you think that's going to do to your present? Right? But the main point about future self is that your future self is the view you have of your future self should be created, should be chosen. And that that view of your future self can. And when you get more connected to that future self, as we already talked about in conversations today or yesterday, the more connected you get to that view of your future self, the better you act, the better you operate in the present, the better you filter in the present too. And so it's just important for you to know that whatever view you have of your future, that's the primary force shaping how you filter and see things. And so that's why we really want to operate from the bigger goal, right? The seemingly impossible, because then that completely alters what you see in the present. It completely alters the pathways you see, the options. You have one just simple example, and I'll share with you Guys. But there's a lot of research on these impossible goals, like literally. And I reference it all in the book. But the thing that I would have, you know, just as a quick example, one of the people who I walked this through and I wrote about her in the book, she is someone who has an awesome technology, right? She created software, she's in the credit industry. She's been in the credit industry for 20 years. Her name's Alicia. Just a lovely woman, beautiful woman.

It's Alicia.

Yeah, Alicia. Alicia.

I thought it was Alicia.

So good thing it's Alicia. So she's just a beautiful woman. I just love this lady. But she's been in the credit industry for like 20 years. Been a one on one coach, really knows it. And she's just a super learner. And so what happened was five years ago she had a technology created. She felt it would disrupt the industry, honestly. Because in the credit industry there's not like a useful tool for me. If I want to accomplish some goal, say I want to get my first house, right? There's not really a clear technology or tool in place except for she's now invented it where I say my goal, I provide my situation, I get a credit score and then it gives me a specific tailored path based on where I'm at and what I'm trying to accomplish. So she created the software to do that. And involved in that software, it provides links to like good sources, good safe credit cards and stuff to build credit. And it gives you a path to do that. She invented that, it's called level up score. And so she made that five years ago, but she was busy in her current business and she didn't scale this thing that was very scalable. Her current business, one on one coaching, no scale there. And, and so she never did this thing. And so last year she's like, she started to get convicted toward that future, right towards that goal. And so what she did was she started to just essentially cold call credit repair companies. There's 50,000 credit repair companies in the United States. They sort of help, they're very expensive. But these are the kind of people who, people go to to start building their credit. And so she started cold calling them and explaining her software. And every time she would talk to someone there, they fell in love with it. And so they start, they created like a rev share partnership and they would start using it with their clients. Maybe like $3. The person goes through it, puts gets their credit score, starts to get a path. So these companies then begin using it. So it takes her 90 days to have 10 of these calls. And so she has 10 clients, right? Then just going back to that picture, like the bigger future shapes the pathways, right? This is a really important point, is pathways. Everything you're doing is a pathway toward a goal, right? You want to get much better at finding better pathways. So for her, I said, you want to set a seemingly impossible goal and use that to create a more scalable path. So she said, okay, I'll 10x it in 90 days. I'll have a hundred paths, people using the software in 90 days. And ultimately that goal wasn't big enough, using Drucker's words, to disrupt her presence. So she just thought, in 90 days, I'll just make up 90 more of these calls. I get a hundred percent conversion rate. And so I just said, that's not how it works. You know, you want a goal that's so big that it stops you from most of what you're doing and helps you realize that most of what you're doing is optimizing what shouldn't exist and helps you find a more scalable path, build a more scalable model. And so she said, okay, I'm going to go for a thousand of these companies using my software in 90 days. No clue how to do it. Here was. What's really cool, though, is when you start to actually meditate from the goal. It actually only took her a few hours. She's very prayerful person. So she sat for like three hours and just thought from the future. She had a lot of bad ideas in terms of pathways to that goal. But one of them was just simply. And she'd never been filtering for this or never been thinking about, dawned on her very, you know, after she said that same day that there are dozens of very awesome software companies already in that space that serve thousands, some of them tens of thousands of these credit repair companies. And she just thought, what if I just partner with one of these software companies that already serves thousands, if not tens of thousands of these people? I could just partner with them. And so that's what she did. Literally less than a week later, she. She got on the phone with a guy who owns a company called Credit Repair Junkies. He fell in love with the technology. He had 8,000 clients that were these same companies. He white labeled her technology. She created a Rev Share deal, and she went from 10 people using the software to 8,000 in a week. But that's a different pathway, right? And her, who, if you want to use that language, became different rather than going straight to the soft, to the companies. Right. She went to like a distribution partner. Right. She went to a software company that already had it create a win win and now they, she got their distribution. So one of the most, I would say there's two forms of pathways. One is very filtered distribution. These software companies had the perfect client base that she wanted. So filtered and leveraged distribution. Right. The other one is that you just bring on some super capability that then changes your company and makes distribution a lot easier. Right. So I would say that. Just saying that's probably what happened with me and Dan. He brought on my skill set and boom. You know, a lot of people was able to join through strategic coaches because first off I brought skill set but I also brought distribution to those books. Right. And so you're either bringing on a super skill set. Um, even, even Bill Gates said that the average software writer is worth not like he said an excellent software writer isn't worth a hundred times an average one. An excellent software writer and you could use that for, for anything is worth 10,000x. Right. If you get a really good, really, really, really good super skill talent, but which you can get if you're filtering for, they're worth 10,000x a normal client or a normal employee.

Okay, so let's talk about that from the lens of belief. So if I go back with you. So you joined genius network in 2017. You immediately gave a 10 minute talk.

And I did that because my aunt was in here and she told me to do that. Really? Yeah, my aunt Jane was in here and she said, Ben, you should give a 10 minute talk in your first meeting. I said, I mean thank you. That was good information.

Yeah. And it was terrible. I told you it was terrible.

How am I doing now, Jim? How am I doing now? Throw some rocks.

As I see these hecklers.

And I love Jim and I want to say just like the conversation yesterday and today, like I know Jim and Mimi very well. Like genuinely some of the, some of the best people that I've known in this group have let me sleep in their house. Like they're just beautiful people. And I don't know, remind me from yesterday, her name?

Karina.

Karina. She's amazing too. And I think we all learned from today. So I think Joe is really what I love about Joe in this room is that he allows that to happen and he can handle a little bit of discomfort. And then all of a sudden we come out, I think a little bit better. Right. So I thought it was all beautiful.

Thank you. Thank you. I Appreciate that.

Anyways, you were saying something about 2,017, me coming in.

You always have had this growth thing. So then you joined 100k. You're always stretching yourself. You had no kids, now you have seven. And so you scale things, right? And, and by the way, so, so you should tell a story about your wife because it's not like you married into this, you adopted some of the kids, then in the process of going through crazy stuff you had to go through to adopt your children, then she ends up getting pregnant with twins, right? And then all of a sudden, yeah, I mean, and so you, and then in the midst of this, you, you know, you put it off for a bit, but then you get your PhD. And that's an extraordinary amount of work. You know, I've seen you go through these mental gyrations and you become the number one writer, I think in the world on medium.com. millions of people reading your stuff. Then you decide, now I'm going to change my focus over here because I think this is higher leverage. You build a YouTube channel, start building up the thing. You're like, you know, I mean, and so you, you build up what, I don't know how many thousand people you have on this multimillion dollar coaching group and you decide to sell it because you're, you're always, so you're behaving to what you're talking about here. And, and part of it is like you make these decisions and you learn what's going to be a big lever. And I've always seen you keep jumping and you, I mean you, you, you grapple with a lot of stuff too.

You got to grapple with a lot of stuff.

Yeah, it's good, but it's because of the growth mindset. It's because of the future self focus. Right? So my question to you is like a lot of people would dream to build some of the things in such a young age at such a pace that you end up deciding this is not going to get me to where I want to go and you literally drop it.

Most people aren't willing to do that.

Right. So I wanted to talk about, like, that's really hard to do. So how do you bring yourself to rev yourself up and actually do it? Because I think you're not doing this thoughtlessly. I mean, you certainly have made some great successes and you've probably made some big mistakes, but the fact is you're willing to do it. And most people limit themselves because they just don't. I don't know if it's courage. I don't know. What is the secret sauce to that? I don't even know if it is a secret sauce. You're. You're building yourself to do this. I'm just trying to break into. What is it?

Yeah.

So someone here that's watching or listening to this could, you know, learn from that.

So there's. There's a lot of beauty in your question. I'll try to break down as much as I can from that. So 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 a goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. And so sometimes the goal does change, and it. And I would. I actually feel like a very healthy thing is when you have a new goal. Right. A new future. And as I'm talking about, I'm just sharing with you my view of the psychology. A bigger future and a more urgent future, and obviously it should be an online future, is going to lead to better decisions in the present. And so you have. I think one of the hardest things to do is let go of goals. Right? Goals of your former self. Right. Vanity goal. They end up just admitting that maybe that goal wasn't worth the squeeze. But so one of the people, as an example that read this book early, he then, you know, he's in real estate. And so he. He was like, okay. He realized he was on more of a linear path. And so I. He read the book. He's like, okay, I'm going to set a scale goal or an impossible goal. And so he got on the phone with me. He's like, I'm going to go for 10,000 specific types of units in this way in three years. And I asked him, what, like, what level of growth would that represent based on your current trajectory? He said, that's about 20 years of growth. 10 to 20 years of growth to do it in three years, different path, it'd be a different. A different. And then I was like, okay, so do you see some pathways on how to get there? And he's like, I would have to get really good at getting funding. Right? And then this is where, like, I'm now just pulling to the idea. He then said, well, Ben, I really still want to have a podcast. And I said, well, tell me why. And then he started to begin to justify the podcast. And I said, if you want, you can have the podcast, but if you're going for the podcast, it's probably going to cost you the 10,000 in three years. And he was like, no, no, no. They, they synergize. This is a pathway to that. And I was like, well, then be rigorous with yourself, right? When you have the bigger future, and I think it's very strategic. You gotta be really rigorous with yourself and really honest with yourself. And I was just inviting him to be honest with himself. Is that a vanity goal? And it might not be. Yeah, it's. And so the letting go of certain goals is very difficult for people. Like, I view the impossible goal as the goal that makes all the other goals obsolete, right? And so it's like, choose one, right? A new model or a new future that makes your existing, you know, your existing situation obsolete. It's very difficult to let go of things that meant something or, you know. And so that's the hard part.

The very first question I was going to ask you, but I. This. Let me just read it the way I have it written here. Right now, people are more burned out and distracted than ever. But you're saying the problem isn't their calendar, it's their goal. Why is having a big impossible goal actually less stressful than just grinding? And now, of course, you already answered a lot of this, right, with where you're talking about previously, but the, the thing is to make everything we think is so damn important obsolete because we come up with something that's better, that is a magical place to get to.

Beautiful.

We are so drawn to what we think is significant and important until we have something that is that much more exciting, that much more important, that much more impactful. Not to just ourselves, but our. Maybe our everyone, our families, our clients, our community, etc. And to be able to let that other stuff go, not feel like you're giving up.

No, it's, it's. It's. You know, I define the floor as what you say no to, right? And so part of growth is saying no to things your former self said yes to, right? That's learning. And so what I have learned is that when you start going for a bigger future, which I believe all of you can do, you have to let go of a lot of things that you currently place value on that from the better future becomes noise versus signal. And then certain. I believe in this. The idea of there are tests that will question your floor. I was actually talking to Tucker Max this morning because there's interesting things that are coming towards me now. And as you're starting to go for certain growth, right, Obviously you can get in Your own way. You can start. You know how many people in here know Garnett Morris? He's awesome. Oh yeah. I quoted him in the book because he talked to me much over the last few years and he said that his view of the reason why people don't scale is because they're lying to themselves. You know, And I believe that they're lying to themselves when they're below the floor, when they're saying yes to things that they know are contradictions to what they want. Right. Or what could, what could be better? And we all do it. All of us go below the floor. We're all. And that's why raising the floor is a spiritual process, but it's a strategic process. But you will be tested. And if you're willing to say no to certain things that you would have said absolutely yes to even like a few months ago, right. Then you're demonstrating that again, that goes straight back to just accountability and honesty, transparency. And so there will be things that will come to you that are those lesser goals, those vanity metrics, those things that absolutely will take you off course. Tucker actually brings up a really good case study because he himself was scaling Scribe and they brought on a yellow flag, right. They're, they're Javon like their CEO. Right. And if you're saying yes to even like yellow flags, right. There's that quote that when you see smoke, you're in the future going to see fire. Right. And if you're trying to justify certain yellow flag decisions or people and you start to scale, those are the things that are going to blow you up. Right. So you have to be willing to make some of those hard choices.

It's really funny too because the domino effect of all of this. So Ben was very instrumental in helping with even my book, which is the latest book. Yeah. What's in it for them? And. Well, I guess I didn't write the second. The latest book is Winners Find Ways, but that's really crowdsourced. All of the genius networks.

Yeah. Kids with pathways, thinking. Yeah.

And so with Tucker, so the way this happened with the Dan Sullivan thing is I brought Tucker Scott Hoffman, my agent, and Reed Tracy, who's the owner of Hay house, to a 100k meeting and there was a four hour session all on books. Everything from writing a book to marketing a book. And Tucker, you would think like you and Tucker in terms of Satan disposition. Complete polar opposite. Right. And when Tucker started doing a bunch of plant medicines and psychedelics, I mean it completely shifted him. Right. And it's Funny, because he told me after I did ibogaine, he, like, he had told me in 2017, he goes, a big reason I'm starting down this path is because of what you shared with me about your experiences with doing, you know, plant medicines and stuff. And so you approach Dan Sullivan in the 100k group. You propose like a book reads there. Everyone's there. Right. So you end up doing this three book.

What actually happened was I was at my first 100k meeting in Dean's old office. Dan presents his first view of who, not how very sketchy, 15 minute, awesome version. And I was like, that's phenomenal. And I already loved Dan thinking. And so I was like, dan, if you ever want to make that a mainstream concept, I'll write the book. It actually took. It was. That was a year before this. This next hunter came in because my publisher, I was at Portfolio, they're like one of the top business publishers in the world. They didn't want to do who, not how. They didn't know who Dan was. Dan very famous in this room in New York. No one knows who he is. They do now. Right. And so you know the publisher at Portfolio who was the editor of Good to Great, said, ben, you're making a massive mistake wanting to write this book. Who, not how, because I already had Willpower doesn't work. I had Personalities Impermanent. I was writing. They were like, you should grow your own brand. We don't know who this guy is. This is a bad decision for your career. And so I was like, well, I really want to write this book. And so then I had no publisher. I mean, I was writing Personalities Impermanent. It came out. But then a year later, I'm at your meeting, Tucker's there in this. And Reid became that pathway. And so then I just walked away from my publisher, which is one of the top business publishers, I mean, business publishers in the world at Penguin Random House. And we went to Hay House. So Dan waited patiently for a year for that to happen.

Yeah. Which is cool. And of course, the instructive thing here, really the underlying message is that all things start with me.

He is the first domino.

No, what I'm saying is it. It shows that if you spend time developing these relationships, they will turn into something like. So Dean Jackson is the one that came up with the term who, not how Dan Sullivan developed it into. You know, he's talking about it because it's a good concept. Ben ends up writing the book about it. Right. And so they do that. And then it leads to this whole other domino effect. But if you're, if, if you only go shallow with relationships or with groups or with. Or with communities, that's what you get. But when you go deep, that's where you actually find the gold.

Right.

And how you develop it. And you've all. And so here's one of the questions I have is you. So you and Dan Sullivan, you guys met, you wrote three best selling books together that have sold, you know, over a million copies. What's something you and Dan disagreed on that.

There's actually a lot of things. I don't know if, I don't know if in the process we agreed disagreed. There's definitely perspectives that I fundamentally disagree with on Dan in terms of. But in terms of the process of writing those books, he was very, he applied the concept of hunai how he, he very much let me go through it and go I mean I wrote those books on 10x is easier than 2x. He Aside from like my frustration of there not really being a process for that, you know that's where we came up with the 8020 model was like through. I couldn't write the book until I, until I actually had some framework for how to make it work because that didn't exist. And he was very collaborative and so there was nothing process wise we disagreed with. He let me write the books as I saw fit and which was awesome. So I'm like there, you know, I would. How I wrote those books was I pretty much just used his, his interviews with Shannon Waller, you know that he used for the little books. And then I, I'd say 80% of my study was outside of Dan. Right. Studying psychology, studying strategy and then just integrating that in with, with his simple like he's just so good at coming up with like a really snappy concept. Right. Gap gain. Right. And so I just would take that snappy concept and really build it out.

Oh yeah. And part of it is he has these great concepts and now you've got an army of humans that it's completely altered their life.

And they're beautiful. They've got a lot of depth to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I mean they're great books. They're great books. And so in part of the reason I bring this up is because look, I mean you and Dan are both great. I mean dear friends of mine and when I said disagree is because the fact is if you're going to collaborate even with the guy who you put his name on is an which I'll wait for you to read the book and you can hear that story with Ben, is that no matter who you're going to be with, there's going to be differences of opinion.

There were some tough moments. Oh, yeah.

And scaling, though, that's the whole thing with scaling. If someone thinks scaling a business is going to be all ELF versus half, don't try to scale.

There's a good quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. He said that for the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, I would give my whole life. And so even Steve Jobs said, right, just explain that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to get to your goal, right, or to get to some new level, you're going to have to go through complexity because you don't currently understand it, right? And so like even Steve Jobs said, you have to work very hard to go from complex to simple, but once you do, you can move mountains. And that dealing with the complexity, whether it's just you don't know how to do it, or dealing with relationships, right? Going through the half component and reaching that new level of understanding, right? Or going through those decisions where you realize this can't scale, right? Or I'm below the floor or like, I gotta let go of this relationship or these businesses, right? Even Mark, in thinking about his 100 million in three years or less, he had to grapple with the reality that actually, like most of his businesses, he has a lot of businesses were all a distraction. And so he actually is now in process of selling all those. But to, you know, the main pain or half is just psychology, right? It's like you have to get to a new perspective and, and then from that new perspective, you can make a better decision. So the main, the main pain is just dealing with it and figuring it out and reaching kind of a new level of understanding, which is then getting to that new side of simplicity that now is from a completely different place of understanding. And now you can do something that you couldn't do before. Maybe even you're now innovating a new field or system, but takes a lot of work to get there. As Steve Jobs said, a lot of people aren't willing to. Yeah, I think that that's really the pain that Musk is going through is he's got this huge goal, but to actually get there, there's a lot he has to deal with psychologically, systematically. He's got to do inventions, he's got to build rockets, but look at what he can do. Look at what he has done.

Yeah.

But there was the quote, you know, yesterday from Frankl, when the why is strong enough, you can bear any how. Right. So, like, that's what allows him to do it, is he's utterly committed and convicted to get to Mars. And so that's allowing that's his strength, is his future. Right. And that's what allows him to clear through all the noise. Right. And he, he's amazing at that, honestly.

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