EP#22 -- Who Not, How - Get Anyone to Do Anything For You with Dr. Ben Hardy

Hey, this is Mike Koenigs. Welcome to the Big Leap. I'm here today with Dr. Ben Hardy and Dr. Gay Hendricks. And I'm going to tell Gay to tell you what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. What is that, Gay?

How about just about everything? We talk about commitment. We talk about mission. We talk about vision. We talk about how to show up in the world effectively as an entrepreneur and just have a great conversation that focuses on our guest today, Ben.

Dr. Ben.

Yeah. So I will tell you I had some profound insights on this conversation, and hopefully you do as well, whoever you are. Listener. We're gonna also talk about big leaps. What are the big leaps you've had in your life? I'm gonna share some of my biggest leaps and also share with you some of the things I learned writing this book and selling a hundred thousand copies in the first month. Who, not how is a book that recently came out. And I share with you how I've applied that my own life to have more freedom and flow.

Okay. And here are some of the takeaways I had. One is Gay said one word that completely changed the way I think about copywriting and creating content and books. Ben had one idea based on an old idea called A Thousand True Fans that was responsible for selling about 75,000 copies of his new book. And we also got some great insights about how can you most effectively find who's who can get your houzz done with the fewest moving parts and the least amount of stress. So all that and more in this week's episode of the Big Leap.

Hey. We are here with my good friend Ben Hardy, Dr. Ben Hardy. He's the author of who Not How. Over a hundred thousand copies sold already, already a bestseller on the Wall Street Journal list. So, Ben Hardy, Dr. Ben Hardy, meet Dr. Gay Hendricks. I am super excited about this interview today. So, Ben, how are you doing? You just had a new baby boy.

Yeah.

And a new girlfriend. Yeah.

I got a new boy named Rex, named after my grandpa Rex, who lived to be 94. He was. He was my hero. Helped help me a lot in my life. So very, very big week for me.

All right, Very good. All right. And I want to kick this off today. There's a couple of things we're going to talk about. As usual, we're going to talk about upper limits, challenges, because that's always interesting. And I really want to ask you questions that haven't been asked before. We're going to talk a little bit about the book, a Little bit really about your faith as and your value system.

And look into the future. And I want to pass this over to gay, because gay, you've always got some incredibly powerful questions to focus on and ask. So take it away, my friend.

Yeah, Ben, it's such a pleasure to talk to you because you've had a lot of rich experiences at a relatively young age, and you also have a plan for your life. And so tell us how you got here. What is kind of the slideshow of things that brings you to this moment?

Yeah, brief slideshow is, I think the first pivotal moment was my parents getting divorced at age 11. I grew up in a quite spiritual and religious family, but when my parents got divorced at age 11, and I'm the oldest of three boys, both my parents kind of went through their own identity crises. My father became an extreme drug addict and went through a deep cycle of addiction up until I was about 20 years old. So he was kind of deep in a terrible, vicious cycle. And my mom was just trying to take care of three kids as well as take care of her own family. And so basically I, being the oldest of three boys, had zero foundation and zero.

Basically support all through my junior high and high school years. And so that led me down, kind of just a lot of confusion. Barely ended up graduating high school. I somehow did graduate high school. And when I was 19 years old, I was living at my cousin's house, doing nothing with myself, playing video games all day, and very depressed. And ultimately what I ended up doing was I wanted out, I wanted a fresh start. And so I, I, I went and served a church mission. I reconnected to my faith and served a church mission for a few years. And that's, that's where I really kind of grew. I started reading books, started doing community service, started journaling a lot, started developing confidence, started to let go of my past. And that's the thing that got me interested in reading and interested in psychology. So then when I got home from that experience, I began studying psychology, ended up getting married, ended up getting a PhD in psychology, and started writing pretty aggressively online in 2015. And then my wife and I became foster parents of three kids. We spent three years fighting for those kids while I was getting my PhD, and then ended up adopting them, having twins. Now we live here in Florida. And at this point now I'm just writing books and continuing to just learn and serve and teach and grow. So that's. That mean, that was very compressed, but those are some of the key aspects of my journey.

Yeah, and it sounds like you had a number of big leaps along the way in various ways. What are some that stand out for you? Or what's one particularly big leap that you took in your life that you wouldn't be here without?

That mission was. The big one was leaving my family, leaving my situation, playing video games, my comfort zone. I basically saw it as I was one of two ways. Either I was going to go create this new start and go all in on it and really believe in my future, or I was just going to kind of just give up on my future. And so when I went on that mission, I had a profound experience because I was all in and I really absorbed it, immersed myself in it, learned from it. And so I think going on that mission was my first major leap. And then I had many leaps through that experience, and then obviously many leaps since, but that one was the one that threw me into a growth cycle.

Yeah, that sounds really profound. And for those of us who haven't been on a mission like that, tell us a little bit about what do you do? What's it like?

Yeah, so I was here in America. I was in Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh. And you do a lot of different things. You go do community service, you do a lot of teaching, teaching people about God and the gospel and helping people overcome addictions. You're in. We spend a lot of time in rough areas of town, you know, knocking on doors, trying to teach people, trying to help people, doing service for the community. And a lot of time just studying, studying books, studying good books, religion, philosophy, spirituality, and getting training, training from great leaders, helping us to increase our faith, increasing our effectiveness as like, goal setting and doing service. And so it was. And during those years, I had no, no access to media. Like, part of. It's kind of like I got to communicate with my parents twice a year. They've actually kind of loosened up the constraints on that. But this. I left in the beginning of 2008, you know, when the economic crisis happened. And to give some example of how disconnected I was from society, I didn't even know that the economic crisis happened. Like, I didn't. I didn't watch the news, didn't do anything. I was so consumed in just doing community service and work. And I wasn't. We weren't looking at the Internet or anything like that. I didn't know that the 2008 crisis happened until I got back, like 2010, 11. I then heard about the crisis and I was like, wow, I didn't even know about that.

What was what got you into the business realm. It sounds like you kind of work the edge between business and personal transformation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but how did you happen to get into that particular combination of things?

Yeah, so my PhD is in organizational psychology, which is more the psychology of business. When I was doing my undergrad, I was very much studying philosophical and theoretical psychology, kind of just understanding the deep, deep perspectives of philosophy and psychology. But ultimately I kind of had a decision, do I want to go therapy or do I want to go like professor? And ultimately I decided I wanted to go in the business way, which was organizational psychology. And through my undergrad I had already been studying an extreme amount of self improvement and business. I wasn't actually committed to becoming an entrepreneur until I went into my PhD program and then got committed to becoming a professional author and realized that in kind of today's Internet world, you have to be an author and an entrepreneur at the same time. So it was during my PhD while I was studying organizational psychology that I ultimately really slanted more towards business and towards entrepreneurship and towards. And I'm still deep in like the self improvement world, but that's kind of where they merged and combined.

I remember one of the best pieces of advice I got early in my writing career was early in my life I wrote creative writing, you know, novels and stories and things like that. And then I got bitten by the psychology bug and started writing books in that area. And one of my teachers, I told him I was very interested in I love entrepreneuring things and always have since I was a kid. And I was explaining to one of my professors that I love to entrepreneur things. I produced rock concerts, I'd done all sorts of different things, but they all involved creating events of some kind. Even when I was in college, I was on that committee that created the concerts and things like that. And so my professor said something really profound to me. He said, then you ought to write books that sell tickets.

And that became one of the best pieces of advice when I sit down to write a book is what kind of ticket am I selling? Who is my customer? Why would they want to buy my particular ticket? And it sounds like you may have crossed into those same kind of territories yourself.

Yeah, yeah. In the case of this book, the ticket is for Dan Sullivan's company. And we're actually very explicit about that. Even in the introduction we say that the goal of this book is to get 500 people into strategic Coach. So this book is very specific and direct as it relates to. But yeah, I do, I've Been taught to think that way, that, like, this is a means to an end. This is a vehicle for doing something else and making sure you know intentionally what the purpose of this communication is rather. And I even learned that as a blogger, you know, one of the things that helped me to reach millions and millions of people through my blogs was when I was writing the introduction, it was kind of the same thing, like the intro or the headline is what gets people into the article. And I always thought, what is the promise or what is the purpose of this introduction? To get people to actually read the article. So I think that that's kind of a key aspect of just communication in general is where is this leading someone to what is the goal of this? What's the purpose? What's the intention of this? And so I'm definitely learning that and have applied that to some degrees.

Can't hear you, Mike.

Yep, thank you for that. One of the things that brought us together initially Gay is Ben and I met, I believe it was in Arizona maybe at a Genius Network event. And Ben was a. He was a guest, and he had been writing for medium.com and he was at the time either the. Or one of the most popular writers on that platform. And he had really figured out how to hack and get a lot of attention.

But he hadn't met a bunch of people in what I'd call the info marketing, personal development entrepreneur world, at least as far as I knew. And we had a long conversation that night. And I think Tucker. Max is there too.

And a variety of other people. And Tucker, of course, is. I think he still has one of. If it isn't the top record, it's one of the top records for three simultaneous New York Times bestsellers on the list at once.

And he.

Now has a publishing company, and this book was published with Tucker and his team. Tucker got the book deal. I'm trying to think of who the publisher is.

The publisher is Hay House with this book. But. But ultimately, Tucker's the one who negotiated the 10 book contract. And. And Tucker actually edited the book. I wrote it. Tucker edited it.

Yeah. So the fact that he got his hands dirty, I think the. The common thread here came down to.

You know, the. The vision has been to really take this approach of how do you build and grow a business with a book to the nth degree with. With a really amazing team? And it's not that it hasn't been done before, but, you know, as, you know, selling books these days spell, especially selling 100,000 copies in a short period. Of time isn't easy. And, and I think that's pretty impressive. So I'll let you continue on here, Gay, because I love your questions. And then I've got a few for Ben as soon as we finish this stream.

Yeah, Ben, none of us get here by our own bootstraps. And I was wondering who have some of your important mentors been along the way and what did you learn from them?

Yeah, so my number one one at least when I was going through my dark phases was my grandpa Rex, which is who we now just named my little boy after. But he was, he lived to be 94. He died.

Must have been like five years ago. But he was the moral structure of my life. Like when everything fell apart. He was the one who was always pointing me in a positive direction when I had basically no one else to do that. And he was the one encouraging me to go on a mission, encouraging me to maintain my faith in God, encouraging me towards thinking better when I was kind of when there was no one else there to do that. And so whenever I was in his presence, I just felt like I couldn't tell him that I wasn't going to live a good life. Even though like for everyone else I was not being, I wasn't really living that well of a life. Whenever I was with my grandpa, I felt compelled to say, like, okay, I'm moving in the right direction, Grandpa. So he was, he was big. And then obviously when I was on my church mission, I had multiple, what are they called, mission presidents who were just incredible mentors who helped me to be effective and to think big about my future. One of my mission presidents told me to get as much education as I could. He gave me a blessing at one point and you know, during that blessing I felt inspired to go get a Ph.D. so like, you know, I had those kind of mentors. And then when I came home from my mission, I had incredible professors who just helped me think differently. And then obviously just reading hundreds and hundreds of books since then, more kind of, you know, more specifically like for a long time with, when I was first starting out as a writer, Ryan Holiday, who has written multiple best selling books, he mentored me for quite a while. He helped me get my book agent, helped me get my first book deal for the books, became Willpower Doesn't Work. And then ultimately more recently, Tucker Max has been an insane mentor for me as a writer and also as a thinker and just thinking a lot bigger picture as a writer and as a business person. So, I mean, I've had so many different mentors. I mean, even Dan Sullivan's a mentor, Joe Polish, and mostly just a lot of people through books.

Yeah. And it sounds like you're incredibly open to learning, too, which I think is the most important variable. As you move through life, are you able to learn from the experiences you have rather than closing down or getting defensive? And I want to compliment you on being wide open to learning enough that you attract those kind of mentors into your life and you attract those kind of books into your life.

Thank you. Yeah, I'm still learning more and more to be open. One of the big things I'm trying to do and learning how to do is just actually receive hard feedback, receive genuine perspectives, and actually one of the things I'm also really trying to do lately, which one of them really did serve me recently? So when we launched who not how, as an example, I had a separate friend who was giving me some strong advice to make a certain investment to get some sales for the book launch. And Tucker was very strongly advising against it. Even though I really wanted to do it, I was like, I really want to take the strategy. Yes, it's going to cost some money, but it's going to, like, guarantee this certain result. And he was like, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. And I was really hooked on it. I was like. I felt compelled, like, I need to do this. I was kind of getting a little desperate. And then I just took a minute to genuinely think about, you know, I thought for hours about it actually. Like, why would Tucker be advising me not to do this? Like, what are the costs? And ultimately, in finally thinking about why he would tell me not to do it, it opened me up to a much better strategy, which is one of the reasons why we're able to sell, like, 80,000 copies during the second week of the book launch, is because I. I was finally able to unhook myself from this one way of doing things, which would have been a lot easier, but it wouldn't. It had zero potential. And then finally listening to Tucker, I was like, okay. And it opened me up to better strategy. And so I'm learning more and more to realize that my current views are pretty off versus, like, mentors who have much better perspectives. And I'm trying to be flexible, but it can be hard because you can get hooked to your own ideas pretty easy.

That was awesome. I got a lot out of that.

So I've got a couple questions for you, Ben, the first of which is if you think about.

The mentoring you've been getting as this book was being created. And I'd like you to spend a couple of moments just talking about the premise behind what who not how really means for someone who hasn't read it or isn't familiar with Dan Sullivan's teachings. And then the next part is, you know, a huge part of this launch has been about what the premise is, which is about collaboration, really, and getting people to do almost anything that's outside of your wheelhouse. But I want to spend a little bit of time just talking about some of the biggest breakthroughs you've had through the mentorship. So you just talked about the one with Tucker specifically. But as you've gone through this process of writing this book, because it has been a different experience and it has a different outcome, I want to spend a little bit of time going there. But why don't you start with a little mini commercial about what the book is actually about?

Yeah, who not how is really the idea that as Western thinkers, we're very individualistic. We go through the public education system, and all of us are trained to think the same way. We're all trained to focus on what we can do. I have to develop every single skill myself. We're all tested against each other, so we're trained in a competitive environment. You know, I'm graded against my peers. I don't work with my peers on the test. And then together, we create a better result. Instead, we're all tested on the same thing, and we. We compete against each other to see who gets the best grades, and the people with the best grades move on, and the people with the worst grades get held back or whatnot. So we're trained to think in terms of how. We're trained in terms of how do I accomplish this goal? What do I do? And so whenever we ask, whenever we're trying to set a goal, we ask, how do I accomplish that? And, you know, Dan Sullivan and Dean Jackson spent a lot of time thinking about procrastination, and ultimately that led them to thinking about when you start at. When you start imagining a bigger future. If you stopped asking how, but started asking, who can help me do this or who can do this for me? Then all of a sudden, it frees you from the burden of having to do it yourself, and it leads you to developing a much bigger vision, because most people, their vision or their imagination is capped by how much they can do themselves. If you're not teaming up with anyone, if I. Then you can't really do that much. But in the case of Dan Sullivan, for example, he didn't have to spend any of his time writing this book because he just had me do it. He had a who do it, who was already expert at that subject. And so he didn't have to. He didn't have to spend an ounce of his time writing this book. Instead, he had someone else do it for him. So his vision for his future got a lot bigger, because rather than asking, how can I get this book out there, he just found a who to do it for him. And I think a key aspect of that is obviously aligning the vision with your whole. And we talk a lot about how to do that. But one thing that I learned as a massive breakthrough, I got, obviously, a lot of breakthroughs through writing this book. One is that as the who, you know, in the case of Dan Sullivan, he fully allowed me to just be the who, meaning he let me own my own how. I'm the writer. So he let me do it myself. He didn't tell me, as an outside force, here's how to do it, Ben. And I think a lot of leadership have problems because they micromanage their who's. They're obsessed on making the who do the how their own way rather than letting the who do it their own way. And so I got a lot of freedom, and it took me a long time to actually realize I had that freedom. Like, for a long time, I was trying to write the book that Dan wanted me to write. And then at some point, Tucker was like, dude, Ben, you're the who. You need to write this book. No one else knows how to do it but you. You're the one who has to create the result. And I finally got that ownership and that permission in my head, which allowed me to write the book I wanted to write. And so, honestly, that was what was really profound to me, is that Dan did not really care what this book was. Dan had no vision for this book. He had vision of the who, and then he let the who create the vision for the book. And so this really is my product. And I thought that that was really inspiring. And it's actually allowed me, when I hire people, to let them take full ownership of what their job is, rather than me telling them how to do it.

Yeah, that was really my next question for you is now that you've written the book, sometimes I know for me, what has inspired me to write some of my books is to actually be disciplined about a behavior. In other words, I write it to become a Process a disciplined process and organize it. Because sometimes I start out by just doing stuff. I kind of operate with bullets. And then I'm looking for a way to create a process and obviously share that, too. But it holds me to a higher standard. So I'm curious for you.

Are you.

Have you shifted the way you just mentioned you are managing your. Your who's a little bit differently with the vision, but are there any other insights that you've gotten either from Dan or from Tucker or from creating the book that's helped with some of the how activities like the book promotion now, how you're interacting with other outsourced talent and that sort of thing?

Yeah, I mean, one of the key kind of psychology ideas, there's two that really I think about all the time. One is flow, which is obviously being fully absorbed in what you're doing. And flow is obviously something that we all want more of, because if you're in a flow state, you're. You're. You're operating at peak performance. You know, you're not inhibited by a thousand different things. You're totally doing what you're doing. And so I think one of the key aspects of who, not how, is it creating an environment where you can have more flow because you're not trying to do 5,000 things at once. And that connects with, obviously, all the research on willpower, more specifically decision fatigue. Decision fatigue is basically the idea that the more decisions you have to make as a person in a given amount of time, the more stressed your willpower will be and the more you'll make poor decisions. And so I think another thing about who, not how, is offloading your decision fatigue so that you let other people make those decisions for you so you don't even have to think about it. And that's one of the big things that helps me, is realizing there's only certain decisions that really matter that I should be making and I should allow other people to make the other decisions so I don't have to. For example, one of the things that I did when I launched this book earlier this year, which is personality isn't permanent, I approached this book launch in more of a how way. I did get some consulting, but I ultimately ended up doing 250 podcasts to launch this book, thinking that that was going to be the best way to sell millions of copies. Turned out it wasn't. But I was doing a lot of the hows. But one thing I didn't do was I didn't schedule all the appointments. I actually hired a Who, And I talked about this in the book who, not how, but I hired someone to make all those decisions for me, hired someone to communicate with all the podcasts, hired someone to schedule. So that is all I had to do was show up. I didn't have to make any decisions related to scheduling podcasts. Is all I had to do was show up and do the one thing I wanted to do, which was do the podcast. So I had a lot more flow and I had to make a lot less decisions. And so I think that that's a really key aspect of who not how is realizing you shouldn't be making too too many decisions. You should be making big picture decisions, and you should be in as much flow as you can doing the few activities you really want to do. And you should offload all of those decisions onto other people so that your mind's not going in 20 different directions on a given day, but it's going on one direction over and over and over. And so I think from a psychology standpoint, who not how, makes a lot of sense for high performance and also for not having a lot of stress. So that's kind of the big aha for me is just that I want more flow in my life and I want to just do the things that really matter. And I also want to grow other people. And when you give other people full autonomy, but also goal clarity, they know what the goal is, but you give them autonomy on how to do it, then your who's really expand as well, so everyone around you gets better.

You're a really good example, Ben, of what I call living in the genius zone. You stay right in your sweet spot there and give other people permission to do a good job with whatever their genius is, but you don't try to micromanage their stuff. I just, actually, I was just counting up in my head. I'm just finishing this week, my 47th book.

That's insane.

Yeah, it happens to be a memoir, so it has a lot of memory and everything in it. So it's really fun to write. But I was thinking Mike was mentioning bullet points and everything. I've never made an outline.

And I don't know of your books and never had never written an outline of any of my books. And the way I approach this is a little bit different. I say, what is the first thing that people really need to know about this? If they. If they just stop there, they'd already have a key, useful nugget of information. Then chapter two is okay, what else do they need to know? About that, then chapter three, I go like that, kind of like by proceeding from one essential to the other, which is a kind of an outline, but I just never make an outline of it. I just kind of tune in inside and really keep living in. The question, what is the most essential next thing that this person needs to know?

I think that's amazing. I mean, as someone who's read some of your books, you know, when I first read, for example, the Big Leap, like, I was hooked immediately by your story. And so I think that that's, that's genius. Why wait to get to the essential, you know? And so that's what we actually tried to do with this. And I honestly think if people just read the introduction of this book, they're going to get it. But yeah, that's beautiful.

I love that. So I'm going to ask one more. I actually am going to ask a how question, but hopefully, yeah, it'll illustrate the, the concept a little bit more here. And then. Gay, I'd love you to do what you always do, which is dissect the psychology here. And that is.

You just mentioned, for example, in your last book, personality isn't permanent versus this one, you did all those podcasts. So what was the distinction, the difference in sales in the first two weeks or month between that book and this book and what was done that was different, that really took advantage of the who, not how psychology. So I'd like to answer the question, how do you get the right who's to do almost anything for you? So it does feel almost effortless and much more in the flow. And that kind of ties this whole conversation together as well. It makes it.

I think, more integrated. So I'm just curious what your response is.

Well, so for me, for personalities and permanent, I put all the pressure on myself to produce the buzz. I actually did 250 interviews and hoped that all those interviews would do a lot of hard work, you know, and obviously they've created a lot of potential opportunities. People still watch podcasts from six months ago, seven months ago. So those podcasts are living vessels to some degree. But what I did differently with there was a lot of different strategic aspects that allowed who not how to be more, more successful. One is Hay House allowed this book to be a 99 cent Kindle. So one thing to be sure of is that although 100,000 copies of this book were sold in the first month, 85% of those were Kindle, you know, and so they allowed a 99 cent opportunity. And so rather than me, I didn't do a single podcast. Not that I don't love podcasts, I love podcasts. But I didn't do a single podcast for this launch. Instead what I did was I applied the principle of 1000 true fans. 1000 true fans is a Kevin Kelly idea. But it's the idea that if you have a, you know, five hundred to a thousand people who are die hard fans of your work, you know, you let them do the outreach. And so what I ultimately ended up doing because we had a 99 cent Kindle launch is I did an incentive competition where I set up basically an opportunity. So for the, for the most people who would sell these 99 cent copies to their friends or whatnot, I then gave bonuses, whether it be like private coaching with me, etc. And I got my thousand biggest fans to go and sell those books for us. You know, so I, on the week that we sold about 80,000 copies, probably 75,000 came from my email list. But it really came from about 500 to 1,000 people who are, who are gifting the book to hundreds and hundreds of people, some of them gifting thousands of copies. And so I really let my key audience sell the book rather than me trying to work relentlessly to sell the book. I got my biggest fans or my biggest followers to go out and spread the book for us. And so that was, and I did it by incentivizing them correctly. And also the setup was right because it was only a 99 cent book, easy to gift, easy to sell, so it made it a lot easier to do.

So just in practical terms, someone could effectively gain access to you for, you know, I don't know what was the top person in terms of the gifts that they.

I think it ended up being like there was a handful of people who, who gifted a thousand copies, but 1,000 copies is $1,000 at 99 cents. And so yeah, they were able to get some coaching from me for 1000 bucks and access to. I actually also had cash prize too. So like the top few people got three grand plus access to my 12 month amp program, plus a couple of private coaching calls with me. I mean it was a really nice incentive which really got people excited. But yeah, the people who won probably spent, you know, some of them probably spent two or three thousand bucks, but they got it right back because they got the cash prize back, but they also got coaching from me.

So that's brilliant. Brilliant. Is there anything else? What's, what's another strategy that wound up working really well? Either that was unexpected new or traditional, where you just repackage the same concept like you did with thousand true fans.

That was honestly the main thing that sold the books, to be honest with you. Outside of that.

Outside of that, I think it was just hopefully really believing in the book. One of the. Actually, I will say one thing I did differently with this is in my emails to my email list, I actually took pictures of myself holding the book like this and I would actually send pictures of me with the book. And I think it's taught me like one thing. I really learned from the personalities in permanent launch, which I didn't know in prior launches, but you kind of have to learn through, you know, deep, hard emotional experiences. I learned to just directly ask my email list, will you please go get this book? Rather than trying to give all sorts of here's the 10 things you're going to learn and here's, you know, I just said, would you please just go get this book this week. I know it'll change your life, but please go get the book. And once I did that on the personalities and permit launch, it really changed the trajectory of it. And I think the other thing that I learned with this book launch is, you know, obviously I did the incentive competition, but also I just directly asked, will you please go get this book right now, this week? Like, it's only 99 cents. Please go get it right now. Here's the link. And I was just a lot more authentic. I sent pictures of myself holding the book and I, you know, and I'm doing that a lot more now. I mean, this week, for example, I had Rex, our baby. And in the email I sent to my email list on, I think Tuesday or Wednesday, I had a picture of my wife holding the baby, you know, brand new baby, and just said, we just had this baby. I got like 3000 emails responses back today. I sent a second email just saying, hey, it's been a crazy week. Rex had to go to the hospital. He had acid reflux, but he's doing all right. And I had a picture of, you know, my wife and little kids. And I think I'm just learning to be a lot more genuine with my audience so that they know me as not only like this thought leader, but they know me as like, this is a human being who, here's what he, here's what he did this week. So I think just a combination of asking directly, but also just being really authentic and genuine and being vulnerable and just sharing what's really going on is a big combination that's helped A lot.

That's great. Gay. I'd love you to tear in now and do what you always do.

Well, I'm really, first of all, just really appreciating you, Ben, for what you've accomplished to date. And I'm really excited to see what comes next. You probably get quite a bit of fan mail, as most authors do of these kind of books. And I was wondering what's the best kind of feedback that you get from your fans or your readership on this.

Book specifically or just in general?

Just in general, yeah.

I think that the things that people really appreciate about what I share are, you know, just having a vision for yourself, living, trying to live in alignment with that vision, trying to just make improvements every day. I mean, my. Although this is an entrepreneurial book, most of my content is generally more. More mainstream self improvement psychology stuff. And so I think just kind of, I mean, the major concept that I'm obsessed with right now is future self, which I deep dive a lot in personalities and permanent. I'm currently writing a book right now called you can choose your future self. But that's, that's been a big one for people, is learning how to do that. But outside of that, I think a lot of it's just, you know, trying to live in alignment with what you believe in, trying to. Just appreciating that. I'm trying my best, you know, and although I'm far from perfect, you know, I'm striving to be a good example through my life and through the results I get. And so I think people just appreciate me as a person and they're learning from me.

Interestingly enough, I went to graduate school and took a class from Walter Mischel at Stanford, who was a professor that kind of launched the whole idea of personality isn't permanent and I need to.

Probably study his work.

Yeah, he was quite a character. So another question I had for you as you go forward, you mentioned future self. Could you say a little bit about what that is and how that, how you're thinking of that?

Just like what the broad concept is or who my own personal future self is.

Broad concept, yeah, broad concept first. But that's where I'm going is for you yourself. Yeah.

So broad concept is, is that.

We all have a view of our future self. So in psychology, kind of where a lot of the research is going right now is a concept called prospection. And what prospection means is that as conscious human beings, we have the ability to imagine multiple futures and then we can use those futures to guide Our present. And that's, that's, that's what makes us conscious versus plants and animals and other beings that are more reactive to stimuli. We actually can imagine multiple futures and then use those futures to guide our present. That's called prospection. And so what, what the field of psychology is really slanting towards is the belief used to be that the past is what drives you. Now the assumption, or a lot of people are realizing it's actually your future that drives you, and then more specifically your view of your future self. And so I kind of broadly concept wise, most people believe that their future self is essentially the same person they are today. Most people don't have a radical imagination towards their future self. But what the research actually shows is that you should conceptualize your future self as a different person, just like you should conceptualize your former self as a different person. You probably see the world slightly different or very different from your former self. You would do things different from your former self. And so you're not the same person. You don't, you're not operating from the same assumptions. Your future self is the same way. They've had experiences you haven't had. They have knowledge, they're in a situation you don't have. They may have connections, experience. And so you shouldn't assume that they're the same person as you. In fact, you should assume that they're not and that they value and are seeking different things than you're seeking. They know things you don't know. And so the goal then is to view them as a different person rather than viewing them as the same person you are today. And then to begin imagining that future self and ultimately using your future self to dictate what you do in the present.

And then what does your future self look like?

Yeah, my own future self is me obviously continuing to write books, me focusing on my family, which is my core priority, and then me spending a lot of time doing missionary work, which is what I learned how to do a long time ago, and which is the thing I value most is helping people come close to God. And so I see myself, you know, far more set up in all ways, you know, financially with my time and just being able to obviously continue to write great books. But I want to spend more time with my family and more time doing directly missionary work. And it's not the current version of me doing that. It's a much more capable, powerful version of me doing that, which inspires me to learn in the present, inspires me to develop skills in the present. Inspires me to become more than I currently am. So, I mean, I see myself as a. As a powerful leader and as someone who can really guide and help people to transform their lives. And so that's. That's the future self that I have and the thing that's pushing and inspiring me to do what I do today.

Well, I'm really excited that we got a chance to talk to you. It's been a real pleasure and I'm looking forward to.

Seeing all of your work in depth and seeing how it evolves over the years.

Thanks, Gay. Appreciate it.

I'll ditto.

There you go.

Yeah, I'll ditto that. This has been great. And I got two big insights here because I've seen, for example, the Alter Ego book, which I think deals with some of the same concepts that you're talking about with future selves and seeing yourself differently. But I hadn't thought about it the way you described it. I just had. I can't even articulate the nuance that I picked up from it, but it's inspired me. I'm going to do a Future self exercise today because I haven't done one in a darn long time. And the second thing was what you talked about. Gay is as simple as it is. You know, it's not just opening up with the headline, but, you know, like, what is it? Can you describe that one more time? When you talked about your big takeaway, which was, what's the number one thing someone needs? It's a question you ask when you open up any kind of a book or an article, and it's more than a headline, it's more than a concept. But what was it specifically?

Yeah, I ask, what is the one absolute essential thing that if I could only teach one thing, what is this? And then the next chapter is, okay, what's the second biggest thing? And so if you look at the way the big leap is laid out, it comes out of that intuitive sense of. It begins with stories about my own experience. And then that led me to see the upper limit problem, then that led me to start exploring the genius zone. And so it organically moved from one thing to the other. And it's probably the same. If I could make an outline, which I've never succeeded in doing, it would probably get me to the same place. It's just that my brain doesn't work that way. And so I've never been able to do anything but the kind of. The coming from inside, intuitive version of creating structure.

Okay, well, I think the takeaway for me, the distinction, now I know what it is is just the word essential, because the way I've been approaching things for a long time, and I'm curious for you, Ben, is I think I always deal with things in a step by step way because I've been teaching for almost 30 years and I'm used to doing it, figuring it out myself, prototyping it, iterating, and then figuring out how can it be done with the fewest steps by the lowest common denominator to get the highest result. And it really comes down to what's the step by step. In other words, what do you have to do in order to accomplish whatever the big promise is. But instead I'm going to rethink something I'm working on right now through the lens of the word what is most essential. Because sometimes all the steps are not really important and it comes down to the essential psychology as well as the essential process. But that'll ultimately, I think help as I integrate my who, not how strategy. Because transparently, one of the things that I despise doing is I just, I, I both don't like to do it and B, don't want to get good at it. It's like way outside of my purview is I don't like managing people at all. But I totally.

Me neither. Me neither.

Yeah. And. But I want the results and the outcomes. So it's what are the essentials, the bare minimum essentials One needs to provide a who to get a maximum output without projecting your how on them, which is part of what you talked about, Ben. And you know, what I've been spending a bunch of time doing lately is collecting massive resources of whose and the best places to find them and also refining really effective ways to communicate a vision so they can get the how done with the minimum amount of management required and, and without requiring that. I figure out all of the house too. Right. You know, but you've still got to filter and determine who is it.

How can you effectively find a way to gather the proof, both the social proof, the physical proof, that they actually are capable of accomplishing what they say they can and have done so recently. So this is getting really tactical. I know.

That's the mental struggle that I see is that is the gap to be filled. Here is the practical who, how management articulate the vision component. And again, I've been approaching that through a step by step approach. And I'm going to rethink it completely through what is most essential approach. And I think that tiny nuance is going to make all the difference in the world. So that was one of my big takeaways today.

If I had written the book, by the way, personality is impermanent with that mindset, it would have been a better book. I think I put way too much in the book on the front end. That was non essential, which is why I'm now writing the book. You can choose your future self and it's going to be. It's more approached from that direction, which is. Yeah. So I think that that's a killer mindset and it allows you to cut the fat of what's not essential from the product, which makes it probably a smaller book and a more effective book than just loading it in with stuff that is interesting to you but may not be effective to the core idea.

I love that. So I've got an idea, a way to wrap up today's podcast, and I want to ask each of you to go round robin and would you describe your biggest takeaway that you got today? Either some nuance, a breakthrough, a little nugget that if you were going to summarize the essential of today's podcast and craft either the headline, the outcome, the benefit, the result that you've experienced. What is it?

Yeah, for me, it's just what was your big leap? You know, I haven't actually, even though I read the book and loved it, I've even read it a few times and we've had our whole community read it. I haven't thought of it in just terms of what were my big leaps as far as what were my big leaps right now and what are the big leaps I'm going through right now or what are the big leaps I'm seeking? So I think that just that question is brilliant and thinking about the platform that you go from one leap to a next. So thank you for that, Gay.

My pleasure. Also, something you said moved me a lot and into my body in the sense that when you talk about mission, I spend a lot of my time working with people on commitment. And mission is a profound form of commitment. And it started me thinking about how do you get that commitment to mission? I mean, it must be an incredibly long process of refinement, dealing with adversity and that kind of thing. But once you got that in your body, you can apply it to anything. You know how to commit. And so I really want to honor you for that.

It's great.

I love it. All right, so to wrap this up, I'd like you to share. Ben, if you had a dream come true that our audience can support you with. Aside from going and grabbing a copy of who, not how, what would that be and where should people go to learn more and visit you?

Yeah, go to BenjaminHardy.com because if you go to BenjaminHardy.com and put your email in, you can get access to a free 30 day future self course that I've made. It's a full on course. There's 30 days of trainings and emails and it's totally free and it breaks down a lot of science and psychology on becoming your future self. And so I just say go there and learn about future self. And also, yeah, if you're wanting to be a successful entrepreneur or someone who just utilizes teamwork more in your life to upgrade your vision and your time, read who not how.

So blessings to both of you.

All right, thank you very much. And that's all you need to do. Head over to benjaminhardy.com and of course, course, if you've enjoyed this podcast, share it with someone that you think could benefit from this message and the.

The.

Fun that we had together. So thank you gentlemen.