Join host Bronson Hill and co-host Nate Hambrick for an inspiring June 2025 episode featuring Dr. Benjamin Hardy, organizational psychologist and bestselling author of 10X Is Easier Than 2X, The Gap and the Gain, and Who Not How. Dive into Hardy’s forthcoming book, The Science of Scaling, and discover how to achieve bold goals by redefining time, raising your baseline, and embracing humility. From overcoming a traumatic childhood and a church mission to landing a $220,000 book deal, Hardy reveals how envisioning a bold future self shapes present actions, why 10-year goals can hinder progress, and how to reverse-engineer transformative results in three years or less.
Perfect for investors and entrepreneurs, Hardy’s strategies on filtering the present, building key partnerships, and letting go of outdated beliefs will empower you to redefine success.
Get my new book: https://bronsonequity.com/fireyourself
Full Transcript:
Bronson Hill: All right, welcome to the Mailbox Money Show. I’m your host, Bronson Hill. I am super excited today.
We have in the studio Dr. Benjamin Hardy, who’s an organizational psychologist, best-selling author, renowned for his work. I’ve read his books, 10X is Easier Than 2X, and The Gap and the Gain are probably my top five books of all time. He’s also wrote the book Who Not How among other books, and his writings have been read by over a hundred million people.
And so we’re super excited to have him here today. We’re just going to have a conversation about really what does it mean to live a successful life. And I have my co-host here, Nate Hambrick, who’s the author of a couple books himself.
Nate, what are you most excited about this interview for? I know we’re both, we’ve been studying Dr. Hardy for quite a while, but what are you most excited about?
Nate Hambrick: Yes, I told you this earlier, but I’ve read over a thousand self-help books. And no lie, I have purchased more copies of Who Not How and given it out than any other book. There was probably a solid two years where I bought them by the cases and would hand them out to clients and friends. So, I’m excited to learn the personal side behind all the wisdom in his books.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, you know, I was talking about this, the book 10X is Easier Than 2X. It’s just what I love about that book is that like to go to 10X from where you are now. A lot of people you say, hey, is it easier to double the size of your business or 10X the size of your business? Everybody says, well, it’s easier to 2X, right?
Because I just do, you can see the path that I just work twice as hard, work twice as many hours and do twice as much. But to be a 10X person, you’ve got to let go of 80 percent of what you were doing before. You actually have to become a totally different person.
And so in this new book, we’re going to talk about this today. The Science of Scaling just really talks about that. Really like what does it look like to be this person that is actually a different person. That’s developing and creating in that space?
So super excited. He’s in the studio today.
Ben, welcome. Really excited to have you, brother.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: You guys are awesome. I’m already I already love hanging out with you guys. So just happy to be with you.
Bronson Hill: Oh, man, I’m so so thrilled, man. So let’s just I mean, I guess kind of getting into your story, I let most people know who you are. A lot of people may not.
Can you just maybe give us the one two minute version of kind of what inspires you to become an author. And create books in organizational psychology and really becoming a better person?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I think that the answer to that question changes over time. But there were key events that took place. When I grew up, very traumatic childhood parents got divorced.
Father became a drug addict, barely graduated high school, almost died in a car accident where, you know I was the driver, 16 years old. Threw my mom from a car. My mom was sleeping in the back, not in a seatbelt, flew 50 feet from the car, almost died. Like there’s a lot of crazy events that shook me up as a person.
But then I ended up serving a two year mission for my church. Like a door to door like church mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Were in the white the name tag and stuff like that. And I really approached that in a way that was very pretty pure, to be honest with you. Like I had gone through a lot of crazy stuff and I just wanted to go and learn. Like my younger brother who went through all that, he joined the Marines. Right?
And so like that was just a really good experience for me to go give service, to learn. It was during those times that I read a lot of books. I read a lot of religious books, obviously spiritual books, but also a lot of philosophy, business, psychology.
And I journaled like a crazy person on that. Like I really started journal. And it was during that experience that I just fell in love with psychology and fell in love with learning.
I just saw a lot of different sides of life. So coming home from that experience, you know, I was 22 years old. This was in 2010.
And so I just knew I wanted to study psychology and wanted to become a writer. I didn’t really know what that looked like. So I went and got into school, got married, went to graduate school. And once I got into PhD school, which was organizational psychology. Now studying entrepreneurship and transformational leadership.
That’s when I really started to start writing online. This was in 2015. So five years later from coming home.
And I guess the simplest way to explain it is and it’s kind of an application of some of the principles of the book that we’re talking about. But I had a big goal when I wanted to become an author. It wasn’t just to like publish a book, but like I wanted to get a six figure book deal with one of the major publishers.
And one of the principles, obviously, that we teach in the book is like when you have a really high goal, most paths won’t work. Right? And so like, to write a book, there’s a million paths.
But to get a six figure book deal to one of the major publishers and to do that in three years. There’s almost no paths. And so that forced me to like filter my pathways a lot more aggressively. And I ultimately found medium.com at that time, which was a very viable blogging website, and I took online courses. Learned how to write to really call it viral way and was able to get that two hundred twenty thousand dollar book deal with one of the major publishers in about 18 months. And had a hundred hundred million plus or not hundred million, hundred thousand plus email list.
But it was really just a desire to learn. A lot of that comes from my faith, a lot of that comes from just my my background.
And a lot of that comes from my future self and just wanting to grow and wanting to learn and wanting to improve. So that’s kind of some of the origin story.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, I love it. Well, I love your person of faith. I actually also served for about five months in college with a non-denominational Christian kind of missionary group in Africa.
And it was super transformative. You know, at 20 years old, doing that and seeing the world and there’s lots of time to reflect. Started writing music, wrote a lot more music, written about a hundred songs over the years.
A lot of people don’t realize that. But yeah, so I kind of wrote. But I think the desire to make an impact is very huge.
There’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask you. I want to kind of lead off with this. I know Nate has tons of questions.
He’s been literally like steadying for hours and hours.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Whatever you guys want.
Bronson Hill: Open book, whatever you guys want to talk about. So these two books where we’ve got the gap and the gain. We’ve got 10 X is easier than 2X.
I think as an achiever, I wrestle with this because just for those listening, The Gap and The Gain is you’re looking at what’s ahead. A lot of times a lot of achievers can look at the distance from where they are to where they want to be and feel discouraged over that. Which leads to discouragement versus looking back and measuring the distance how far we’ve come. But I kind of go back and forth between like, oh, I need to measure. How far I’ve come, but yet I have this incredible drive and this incredible desire to make a difference in the world and incredible desire to to grow and scale and all this.
And sometimes I get it’s hard to like, if that makes sense, to stay in the game of like, I’ve done all these things. This is great, but I still have all these things I want to do. And I want to be content, but also be very motivated.
So how do you balance those things together? Or is there a balance from those?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Yeah, there actually is. I think that a lot of it has to do with how I would view the psychology of time. So time psychologically isn’t the way we have naturally been taught to understand it.
We tend to we tend to think about time as the minutes passing on a clock. And so when you’re talking about the past and looking back, you’re talking about something that’s outside of you. You’re talking about a past that’s behind you that you no longer have access to.
You’re also talking about a future that’s up ahead that you feel some distance between and psychologically, that’s just not how time works. Psychologically, the past and future are simply tools that we use to navigate the present. And so if I’m looking at the past a certain way, I might have a traumatic past and that past may be negatively impacting my present and my future because now I’m just sad and upset.
So the way to look at time from a psychological standpoint is that the past present like the past and future are co-occurring in the present. And it’s really how you frame these things that impacts your quality of present. Really how I would call it is it determines how how well you filter the present.
And the thing you’ve got to understand with this is that the linear or what some would call like Newton Newtonian model of time. Which is kind of the more external, like the past shapes the present and the present shapes the future. That’s fine for like Newton physics, but it’s just not how psychology works. It’s also not how Einstein’s physics works either, but I’m not going to go into that with psychology. I think the easiest way to explain it is first off, both of these things are just psychological tools for improving your present and the better you get it framing and reframing your past, right? The better you’ll live in the present.
But way more importantly, the future, and even Victor Frankel wrote about this in Man’s Search for Meaning, but way more importantly, the future is probably 10 times the tool. Like if you think about different types of tools, the future is probably 10 times the tool that the past is. The past is a phenomenal tool.
We can learn from it. Certainly we want to squeeze the juice out of the past, which I think The Gap and The Gain sort of teaches you quite well how to do actually. But the main thing is, I’m just going to give it to you really simply.
I know that the listeners are just hearing this with their ears. The linear way is that the past drives the present and the present drives the future. So that’s like the arrow of time is moving forward.
I would say that the more accurate way is that the arrows is running backwards. The present is actually like the future is actually what drives the present. It’s always your future that shapes who you are in the present.
It’s always you in the present that shapes and reshapes the meaning of your past. And so like that’s how I reconcile it is, yes, you’ve got a past. It’s amazing.
You get to learn from it. But the way more important thing to be fully honest with you is that you have a future that’s shaping your choices. The only reason we’re having this conversation and the only reason people are listening to this is because for some reason. This podcast has some relevance to their future.
If it had zero relevance to their future, no one would be listening to this. The only people that are listening to this podcast are people that say, this has some relevance to my future. I want to listen to it.
Maybe I’ve enjoyed podcasts in the past by these guys, but I’m only coming here again because I think it’s going to help my future.
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, and one of my to one of your earlier points there, Ben. One of my big takeaways from your book, The Gap in the Game was just that because I would be a self proclaimed dopamine addict. Where dopamine definitely feels a lot of the motivation that I have for achieving big goals until you go to a conference like Bronson and I both spoke at Limitless. And it seemed like every person I met in the room was worth, you know, 100 million, 500 million dollars. Then that dopamine cycle kind of has a negative effect on you.
So I was curious going back to The Gap in the Game and the other works that you’ve put out there. How you see dopamine, the interplay between dopamine, realizing that your future is more potent than your past. How do you approach what I would call being a dopamine addict?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: So a really interesting question. I think that, and again, I’m not the deepest on this topic. But I think that from what I understand, dopamine is a misunderstood topic as well. I think dopamine is less about like the quick hits, and it’s more about motivation.
That’s it. That’s at least as I’ve understood it. And like I know that people are driven by dopamine, and we deplete our dopamine and stuff like that.
But I think that the primary purpose of dopamine is to fuel you to a goal. The problem I think that most people have is back to the idea of their future, their future is not defined well enough to enable them to filter their present. And so they’re seeking the wrong goals.
Even like people, and I myself, I’m back when I was in high school, I played, I played eight hours, I played 15 hours a day of World of Warcraft, right when I was in high school. So I mean, I was driven by, by ambition, but I was ambitious towards the wrong thing. I was leveling up my character in a video game, right?
And so like, did I have dopamine? Was I ambitious? Yeah, I was ambitious towards the wrong thing.
And so, even people who are just scrolling, right? Or even trying to beat other people, right? I want to scale my company so I can be cooler than that guy, right?
I think that wisdom comes when you start to understand that the most things aren’t worth scaling, or even most things aren’t worth even focusing on. And so then that enables you to choose better things to drive your energy towards, but we’re always driving our energy towards something, even if it’s just literally consumption to your point. So that’s how I understand it.
Bronson Hill: I have a question, not follow up on that. So I just a little personal here, I about eight years ago went through a divorce, unfortunately. Just lots of personal challenge and just therapy and all kinds of stuff. And I realized, like, there’s a like a educational program I did, it’s called the landmark, a landmark educational, landmark forum.
And they spent a lot of time with kind of working through a lot of times. Like, the present, a lot of times who we are in the present is defined as who we have been in the past. So when we look at we go into a situation. We go into a room, and all of a sudden, there’s opportunity to give a speech. Well, we don’t give a speech because we haven’t done that in the past, right?
So it’s kind of this, like the present, a lot of times can be a collection of experiences of like, this is who I am, from these collections of experiences from the past. Would you say, I guess, what’s the role of kind of working on and resolving the past? Or kind of like realizing, like, as part of through this was realizing we’ve created all these stories around ourselves. Like, I created the story that I’m not this kind of person, or I could never do this. Or I could never do that. When those weren’t really even things were true at all, they were just interpretations that happened when I was a child, and they basically put them on myself.
And I believe that. So I guess the question is, would you say just creating a bigger, brighter future of yourself, does that stuff from the past just kind of get worked out? Or is it a combination of looking forward and creating the future self, and also kind of acknowledging some of these things that happened in the past of who you’ve been to this point?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: In my opinion, I think it’s very powerful. Like I said, I think that the future drives the present. And I actually think the future drives the present and the present drives the past.
And so I always take responsibility of my past from the present, meaning it’s my job to properly interpret my past. Not for my past to dictate who I am now. It’s my job to properly interpret my past and to reinterpret it, such that it’s benefiting me in the present. And so one of the things that I think is helpful in this regard is actually to understand how I’m different from who I was.
How am I different from Benjamin Hardy last year? And it’s my job to actually define that. And I can do that right in my journal, right?
I can say, how am I different from who I was a year ago? What am I saying no to that a year ago, I would have said yes to, right? How is my value system different as demonstrated by what I say yes and no to, right?
And you can do that 10 years ago. You can do that one year ago. I can do that seven days ago and say, how am I different from who I was in the past?
Now, when it comes to how you judge other people, I think that it’s almost impossible not to judge other people based on anything but their past, right? Like what other data do you have to draw from? I do think that you can mess up.
I think often if you overly define someone by their past, you might screw up. Certainly you want to protect yourself. If someone’s been a predator, if someone’s been a bad person, like that’s, remember the purpose of the past is to improve how you feel to the present.
And so you want to learn from that so you don’t have to repeat it. You also want to protect yourself. But at the same time, sometimes you can misjudge a person’s potential, just like other people might misjudge your potential.
I remember, for example, when I was a top writer at medium.com and like there was some young writers, right? And most of them, and I’ve been misjudged before, massively I’ve been misjudged many times, right? There’s even that scripture in the Bible, right?
That you can’t be a prophet in your homeland, right? Because people are going to misjudge you. They’re going to overly define you by your background, right?
But I mean, I’ve misjudged some people where I just thought this person is not that, not that interesting, right? And then like two years later, they’re 10X where I’m at, right? And so that stuff can happen.
But I think when it comes to living your own life, the main thing you want to do is I think you want to continuously set yourself up based on the future that you’re trying to create. And a lot of the premises that I’m making here is that the bigger future you have. The more urgent one, just the better moves you’re going to make in the present. And that’s really the only thing that you can control.
So that’s what you really want to be making decisions on.
Sorry, go ahead, Nathaniel.
Bronson Hill: I think that I want to just make a comment real quick. So yeah, I think that that’s what you said is so true, that like, it’s really taking responsibility. And that’s one thing I learned from this program is…
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Don’t be hung up on the past, man. Trust me. It’s a tool.
Bronson Hill: I mean, if people like, let’s say somebody’s hurt you, whatever, for them to make things right with you, it’s so important. Like, whose responsibility is it now? If something happened in the past?
Well, it’s yours. Like, I mean, they may never change. They may never come around.
But by you owning it, or you just saying, hey, I can actually move forward. I can take care of this is is valuable. Nate, I know you had some other..
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I think that just as a final piece on this, and wherever you want to go. But I think that the past is, you can know you’ve actually utilized a lot of it when you’re not thinking about it that much. To be honest with you, like, if you’re still thinking about it a lot, that means that you’re still being used by it. You didn’t properly use it, you didn’t learn the lesson, you know, like, you’re still hung up on it. And so as much as I love the past, and I use it as a tool, that’s all I use it as is a tool, I definitely not defined by it.
I don’t define others by it. And I’m not and it’s really not that it’s powerful. I love history as well.
And I love studying things. But it’s just one piece of data. Anyways, go ahead, Nate.
Nate Hambrick: Which makes a lot of sense. And I was gonna ask you, Ben, as an author, how you approach that knowing that you’re ever evolving? Knowing that your beliefs today differ from a week ago, differ from years ago. Because Bronson and I both have books that 10s of 1000s of people read for you. Last I googled hundreds of millions of people have read your works.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Not my books, you know, my books have sold a couple of copies, but yeah, sure.
Nate Hambrick: But you’re at a whole nother level of scale. And I’m curious how you approach that as an author. Because I’m sure you’ve probably written about many things that now you’ve developed further. You no longer agree with how do you approach that from a psychological standpoint, knowing that the books you’re publishing today. The articles you’re publishing today, differ from how you might see yourself and how you might approach those same concepts five, 10 years from now.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Just know that that’s going to happen, but also do your best to filter your present from your future. You know, it’s the same thing that I did when I was wanting to become a professional author. Like I thought about the future I wanted to have, I thought I want to have a six figure book deal. And so I use that to shape the type of author I became, right.
And so I always use the future to my best ability, right? To guide and shape who I’m being today, right. And there’s a lot of research on this, right. That the more connected and thoughtful you are about your future self, the better the decisions you make, right. So like, no one’s perfect, right.
And of course, our view of our future massively adjusts over time as well. And the things we think are important adjust as well. But I think that the more you can, the more you can study and learn the better the future you’re going to imagine.
And so, I’d gone through a lot of experiences and I had learned a lot of things. So like that shaped just as an example, like the type of person I chose to marry. I was very thoughtful about my future self in that respect, of course, I was 24 years old.
And so like there, of course, my 24 year old self had a lot of blind spots. But, I think it’s really important to over index on like, what is future me going to think about this, even though you don’t fully know what future you is going to think. But to your, to your artistic point, be honest with you, I really don’t worry about it.
I really don’t worry about it. My past books I wouldn’t have written today. But I’m not mad at my past self for having written them.
And I think that this is a really important point is you get no value out of being upset at your former self or the former selves of other people. You know, my father, as I said, was a drug addict. I don’t get any value out of being mad at my, my dad 25 years ago, you know, like that, that version of him isn’t the same as who he is today.
And so I think we want to have empathy and compassion toward our former selves and also just be really honest, honesty and transparency about where your viewpoints have changed. And that’s about the best you can do and just continuously be open and humble and honest. But I, I’m not that worried.
I know, for example, that my future self just speaking will have hopefully much better views than the ones I’m presenting to you right now. And that’s okay. My future self will handle that.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, it’s amazing. I love how you talk about future self, like being a different person, which it is, you know, is a different version of, you know, who we are, and obviously certain things are going to be similar. But I have realized this when I first started putting myself out there, I had a lot of imposter syndrome.
I was like, Oh my gosh, what if it’s terrible? What if nobody looks at my videos or my stuff or they don’t like it? And then very quickly, once I started putting things out there, I realized like if it’s not good, especially with the way social media and all these things, like if it’s not good, it’s just people won’t see it anyway.
It’s funny. But like, I think there’s a vulnerability in being able to share your ideas and share your yourself. Have you always been just able to kind of put yourself out there and just kind of leave it and do it and just kind of be bold in that way?
Or is it something that’s always, has there been a feeling of imposter or sometimes it comes up for you?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I don’t use the word imposter syndrome just cause I think that that’s too worried about what other people think. Or judging yourself based on what you think you should be or what, I’ve never really felt imposter syndrome. But I always feel, maybe not always, but many, many times I’ve felt fear, right? Of, you know, doing it right or just how good it’s going to be or how it’s going to be received right? Like, I think that that’s pretty normal.
Even like, if you give a keynote, right? I would say like on a scale from one to 10, my fear level of how this podcast goes is probably a one or less like just cause at this point. Like, I try my best to have my, my like floor, my baseline be pretty dang high, like my floor. I want like, you know, if you’re like a basketball player, right?
You want to be pretty inconsistent, like if I’m a basketball player, I want to probably pretty consistently get 20 points a game, right? No, not like five points a game. So like, I think I have a pretty high baseline.
Of course, I want to get better. And of course, some nights I’m in a freaking rocket and some days I’m going to not be that great. I think just from a performer’s mindset, I’m not that worried about it.
Like I’m an, I’ll study this. I think it’s really important to study your tape, to the idea of a basketball player or a, like a quarterback, right? Go back and study, be honest, be rigorous with yourself.
And then just do better in the future and just keep improving. But also I think what a lot of people don’t do is they don’t actually study both sides of the tape. Like, what did you actually do right?
What are you doing better? What are you doing rapidly or radically better than you were doing a year ago? Like where have you truly developed?
Yeah, it’s important to see where you’re still weak and where you could improve, but like also analyze like, where are you massively better than you were a year ago? You know, like again, to the idea of using your past as a tool, right? You get to choose the lens through which you look at your past.
And I think many people, they miss the development that’s already occurred to the point of the gap in the game.
Bronson Hill: So true. So true. I wanted, let’s talk and kind of talk about the floor there.
Let’s talk about the Science of Scaling, which is your new book coming out here. Super excited. I’m about halfway through the book.
I know Nate, I think has read most of the book as well. So those listening, you have to keep your eye out, pre-order the book. It’s all, is available for pre-order now, if people go pre-order.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Yeah, go to Amazon, you know what I mean?
Bronson Hill: Whatever. Love it. Love it.
And when does it come out or when’s the release date for that?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: July 29th, I believe.
Bronson Hill: July 29th. Awesome. Your frame is what you see based on your goals. Your floor is what you filter out, defining what you don’t do.
And your focus is what you filter for defining the paths and partners you develop to reach your goal. So I want you to talk for a minute. You talked about the floor.
The floor is filtering out what you don’t do. Can you talk a little more about how your floor has changed? I got your goal sheet here.
If you’re on Dr. Hardy’s email list, you’ll get his, his own personal goals and what’s happening. So I’ve got your, your March 2025, one page and kind of what you’ve accomplished and things you’re doing and how it was different than what you expected. And so how do you, how have you changed or how do most people change their floor?
And like, what are you suggesting is kind of different than kind of the standard approach of just kind of getting a little better each time is, I mean, do you say, take a big jump in your floor of like, I only do these things and I, everything else, nothing, I don’t do anything else related to this or talk a little bit more about the floor.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Love it. And by the way, in my opinion, what you read there is like a massive compression of like all of course, psychology and even core strategy. Like literally, it’s okay.
It’s an extreme compression of that. I think that, you know, so Michael Porter was a Harvard researcher, like a Harvard business school guy for like 20 years. He invented the field of competitive strategy and he defined strategy.
He actually said, essentially strategy is choosing what you won’t do. Right. And so that’s kind of just how we’ve defined the floor is that the floor sets the line of what you don’t do.
This is super important, but then obviously the question is where does the floor come from? I think that most people, they’re focused on addition, not subtraction. And we’ve already talked a little bit about like some of the 10 X philosophy, but if you’re wanting to scale rapidly, it’s usually going to be a matter of subtraction and simplification, not addition.
Of course, there will be some addition. But I love the quote from Elon Musk, where he said that the most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist at all. And I honestly believe that that’s the majority of most people’s lives is is their optimum.
They’re focused on the wrong thing, essentially, not only the wrong thing, they’re actually focused on the wrong goal. And so that’s why you have to start with frame, right? The frame is just a lens through which you see the world, right?
And I just made the point and I’ve already made the point even prior in this conversation that the primary aspect of a person’s frame is their goals. The problem for most people is, is that they’re unaware of their goals. They have the wrong goals or they have too many goals or they’re scared.
And so they have small goals, right? Like people, people are emotional beings. And so they have 50 goals or they’re unaware of the goals that they have, or they’re lying themselves about their goals, or they choose small goals because they’re afraid of other people’s opinions.
The main point I’m trying to make here is that the thing that primarily shapes what you see and what you do is your goals. And that’s whether people like it or not, that’s just human psychology. We’re intelligent beings and we have goals.
You know, even just us recording this podcast, it was all on all of our calendar. And therefore it was a goal. We have all of our own reasons for doing it.
So the main thing here is just that whatever goal you have, for better, for worse, is going to set your floor. And your floor is the thing that divides a yes and a no. And if you want to get really, really good at fast growth, obviously you want to set a better goal.
Nate Hambrick: And that was going to be one of the questions I was going to ask you Ben, because I spent probably four hours yesterday and two hours today, just reading and rereading chapter two of your new book. So clearly, I love it. So, but one of the things that that I loved about your chapter was set a timeline so short, you think it’s impossible.
And so I was going to ask you, since you have worked with a lot of people who do their big, hairy, audacious goals and you take them through a 10 year framework, a three year framework, and then, hey, how would you achieve the exact same thing in one year? What are some of the patterns you’ve noticed and things that people most often have to cut to reach their goals and attend to the time?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: It’s a really awesome question. What I would say is what I laid out in that book is the most extreme frame that you can use to set a goal for the purpose of raising the floor and weeding almost everything out. So like what, so we want you to have a goal that is huge, right?
So let’s just say you guys have a goal of, you know, I’m just going to be an idiot for you. And so you want, you know, 10 million downloads, right? What we would say is actually go for, you know, 100 million in less time.
So if you were going to get, and I know your podcast is bigger than that, but it’s like, if you want, if you want to have 10 million podcasts, if you don’t have 10 million downloads in five years, actually, what you should do is go for 100 million in two years. And why would you do that? Because now almost to your point earlier, Bronson, like you have to really, you have to really raise your floor and you have to start saying no to almost everything you’re currently doing.
You have to find much better paths. You’ve got to be much more filtered, right? And so now to your point, it’s hilarious actually that people have such long-term goals, right?
Like, it’s good to have a long-term compass, right? We’re talking about a long-term future self. Of course, I think about my future self as an old man, right?
I’ve got seven kids, right? So I think I’m not going to try to like do something that’s going to blow myself up and I’m not going to like be existing in three years. But when it comes to actual goals, meaning literal targets that you’re trying to hit, you know, your best serve to take some target that’s 10 years away and just move that target to two years away or two or three years away, because that’s going to force you to actually figure it out, right?
Usually if you have a really long-term goal, say I want to get my, you know, and I’ve done this, I’ve consulted lots of big companies, they all have 10 year goals. And I always tell them the same thing. A 10 year goal is never intended to be hit.
If it’s that far away, you actually don’t plan on hitting it. And if it’s that far away, it’s certainly not shaping your strategy today. That’s just the whole point of the future is a tool for shaping the present.
And it only becomes a good tool when you make it really high and really urgent, because now you have to actually make really important, really intense decisions in the present. That’s the whole point of the future. And I think one of the people that I referenced in that, in that chapter, which is a guy I love, his name’s Xavier.
His main point was his Xavier is a lawyer. He’s doing like 2 to 3 million, 2 to 3 million revenue in his law firm. He actually had a big ambition, which is actually pretty rare.
He actually wanted to get his law firm to 100 million. But to your point, he wanted to get there in 10 years. And I told him 10 years is a really bad goal.
Like it’s not a good use of the future. And I said, I can tell you it’s not a good use of your future, because do you even know how to get to 10 million or 100 million? Are you even planning for it?
And he said, no, I don’t know how to do it. He said, I’m actually honestly just trying to get to 5 million. I’m like, then why are you saying your goal is 100 million?
I said, how about you take your 100 million goal, which is 10 years away, and let’s go for it in three. What’s going to happen then? And literally he did that, which is awesome.
He said, I realized I wasn’t going for 100 million. And now I’ve got to actually solve 100 million. And now I’ve actually got to look at my business from the perspective of 100 million in three years.
I got to realize first off, I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know what I was doing. Like third, everything in my business is, is awful.
And it’s a sinking ship that’s going to like, it’s filled with holes and it’s going to sink. So that’s the beauty, right? And so like, to your question, what are the main things that people have to do if they actually like use time as a tool and obviously make the future bigger, but also make it more urgent.
Their floor goes up. They got to start saying no to almost everything they’re currently doing, including maybe their clients, their team, how they do it. And then they got to raise that floor and their baseline on the things that actually matter.
They’ve got to get really, really good at like one or two things max and be phenomenal. And they actually have to think about like an actual plan and strategy for how to get there. Right?
Like, that’s what happened. Xavier, he was like, I actually have to figure out how to get to 100 million. He was never thinking about that when it was 10 years away.
And honestly, the decisions he was making when it was 10 years away were the very decisions that would have made it almost impossible for him to ever get there. Because he was making decisions maybe to get the 5 million or 7 million. And those very decisions were, would have destroyed his business.
He would have, he was adding bad team members, right? Which were justifiable to get to 7 million revenue. He was, he was doing all sorts of things that were literally going to make it impossible for him to ever reach his 100 million goal.
And when I actually interviewed him, I said, Xavier, let’s be honest. If you, if it was a 10 year goal, do you think you would have ever hit in it? And he said, no, like if it’s a 10 year goal, you’re actually not planning on hitting it, to be honest with you.
Like it, that’s why it’s a 10 year goal. Cause you’re actually proving, you’re proving to yourself that like you really don’t care. I know that’s hard for people to hear because we hear about like BHAGs and stuff.
I’m not saying every goal can be achieved in three years. Certainly like Musk is trying to get to Mars. But like most people’s goals, if it’s more than a few years away, they’re actually just lying to themselves.
And they’re just like, they’re just continuing to do what they were doing yesterday.
Bronson Hill: So this is really interesting. I want to share, so my story, I just put out a video recently, I basically 20 X mine at worth to about $4 million over a four year period. And it basically happened cause I made a decision, you know, Tony Robbins says 80% of, you know, success in life is just getting your psychology, right?
I made a goal, started moving towards it, started doing it. And one of my 10 year goals are longer goals. You know, it’s less than 10 years now because I made it a couple of years ago was to get to a hundred million net worth.
And I was thinking, well, that’s exactly what I was saying is we’ll get that in three. What would it take for me to get in three? And we’ve been working on business acquisitions.
We’ve raised about $50 million for different things. And those against other people, this is investors, listeners, money, things like that. So it’s, you know, I get a small piece of that, but I was thinking the only way I could get to a hundred million that I could see really in the next few years is basically by doing a business acquisition of a certain size and then just doing bigger acquisitions.
That’s really the, that’s the way I could see it. And it could happen.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: That might be a really, yeah, that might be a really phenomenal path. The cool part, if you actually made that three year goal is, is that you’d have to find the path to do it, which is not the path you were going to do. If it was 10 years away, you’d have to find a much more efficient path.
There’s a guy who, I never put his story in the book, but he read the, he actually he read 10 X, but then he read the book when I was like in early development of it, like two years ago. And by reading it, he literally 10 X, his net worth, and he’s like a guy in his sixties, right? And it took him 60 years to get to a certain point, but then literally in about 18 months, he 10 X, his net worth, he went from low seven figure net worth to multiple eight figure net worth in about 18 months.
But he concluded the same thing as you. And I’m not going to say it’s always acquisition by the way, but it’s always going to be a more streamlined path. If you give yourself way less time, it’s just it, that’s the beauty of using time more as a, like a razor blade tool is it just forces out dead end paths or just inefficient paths, right?
Non leveraged paths. Certainly you got to be aligned with the path, but like one of the things he told me and his name’s Greg Sini, he’s just an amazing guy. He, him and his wife do like healthcare for older people and stuff like that.
For the first 18 years of his career, he spent his whole career just working with his wife on her, like in her company, right? And then when he hit like age fifties, like, okay, I’m going to go grow my own company. But I asked him, you know, I like asking hard questions.
I said, Greg, cause now he knows how to use time as a tool. And know that you spent your first 18 years in your career in your wife’s company. But now knowing what you know, now, could there have been a way to accomplish what you did during those 18 years in 18 months?
And he said, Ben, there actually is, he said it on, he, he actually said this, he said, he said, honestly, Ben, it would have just been one good acquisition and we would have achieved as much in 18 months as we did in 18 years. That’s just a good use of time as a tool, right? There’s just much better.
There are better pathways if you’re willing to find them.
Bronson Hill: So a quick question on the pathways idea. Cause a lot of people like we don’t know what we don’t know. Right.
So if we’re thinking through this three year, even one year timeline, do you think, is it, is it just like getting in your imagination? Is it, is it mentors? Is it looking other stories?
Like how do you imagine yourself three years from now at a hundred million or whatever, you know, way your 10 year goal now is way closer. Is it just imagining it? And like, that’s what it is. Or is it getting a mentor that kind of, what.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: What I would say is it’s, I think that a lot of people, they, I’m a spiritual person, so I don’t want to sound wrong here, but like a lot of people overly like they make it into such a, a voodoo process where it’s like, ha, like getting into like some deep imagination, literally it’s reverse engineering a number or an experience. Right. So like your number is pretty damn clear.
A hundred million revenue. Right. And so if we’re just going to reverse engineer a number, but it’s in a certain form, right?
It might be a net worth. Might be, in my case, it might be revenue, right? It could be books sold, right?
You have to choose what you’re scaling, right? You have to choose what you’re optimizing for and that, that takes work and a lot of things aren’t worth growing. But just assuming that that is your goal, a hundred million in three years, I don’t have to get into some crazy mystical state to think about that.
All I have to actually think about is I have to just start reverse engineering honest pathways to that. Most of them won’t get you there, especially from where you’re from. The question is, which ones will, and that’s where, you know, maybe education, learning, thinking, being honest, being ruthless, being rigorous, most of what you’re doing right now won’t get you to a hundred million in three years.
And so you got to ask yourself, are you willing to chop almost anything, even this podcast, right? Like you have to be willing to ask that. And, you know, you got to say like, what would get me there?
And then the question is, and this relates to the floor and to the idea of strategy is essentially what you don’t do. You have to really ask yourself if you’re not willing to get there in three years and you instead want to push it off further so that you can keep these 40 other things or even these four other things, you have to say, was it worth the price? Right?
Because now, and I’m not trying to do this to your podcast, but now this podcast is costing you a hundred million dollars or the other three things you’re doing, right? And so you just have to ask yourself, and it’s okay to make a choice, right? But you just have to say, this is what I’m choosing and I’m not choosing that.
And I think a lot of people are unwilling to make that choice, you know, instead to the idea of goals, they actually have four goals and those four goals make it really hard to rapidly scale one. And so by keeping your floor low, meaning you’re saying yes to a you, you really lower your ceiling, which is another word of saying you really lower your potential, which I think for a lot of people, this whole topic is, by the way, I’m not trying to put your podcast on the chopping block. No, I’m giving up a hundred million dollars to be here with you today, Ben.
Bronson Hill: This is a hundred million dollars.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: No, I’m just trying to be ruthless and rigorous. A lot of people are not willing to do that. And I think good psychology and good strategy require that.
Where you say there’s no sacred cows here, like the future determines the present. And I got to be willing to strip things away, even things I love. And most people are unwilling to do that.
Bronson Hill: Which I think most people, most people don’t stop lying to themselves. That’s one quote from your book, a billionaire was saying that most people are lying to themselves about what they want. So go ahead, Nate.
Nate Hambrick: With that in mind, I was going to say, Ben, most of the most helpful frameworks I’ve learned from you are absolutely nuts to most people. And so I wanted to ask you just kind of off the cuff, what is one other belief that you believe wholeheartedly that almost everyone would believe to be completely insanely nuts?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I have to ask first, like, give me an example of why these ideas are nuts. I love it, by the way. I love what you’re saying, but tell me why it’s nuts.
Nate Hambrick: Yeah.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I’m not saying I don’t agree with you, by the way.
Nate Hambrick: Yeah. Well, we’re talking about taking a 10 year goal. So in Bronson’s case, $100 million.
So that goal is completely bonkers nuts just by itself. And then you’re here to say, well, how about we do 10 times that in a 10th of the time? That’s crazy.
And I love it, right? So that would be a great example of something that’s completely nuts. You use your book deal, right?
You working with Dan Sullivan, you working with all these super famous people, your ability to take those massive goals and do it in a timeframe that sounds absolutely ridiculously crazy is a framework that I would consider to be nuts, which is why you’ve been so successful. And so, yeah, hopefully that answers your question.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Yeah, I’ll just tell you, like the whole purpose of the future, as I see it, is it’s a tool for being a lot more rigorous and honest in the present, which was the first point, which is really be honest about everything I’m saying yes to, and at least be honest with myself about why, right? So that’s what the high and intense, you know, frame or future does to you. So I usually more as a tool than a requirement, right?
I really blend psychology and strategy. Like I don’t separate them, you know, I know Tony might say it’s 80% psychology, 20% strategy, I literally, I’m more of a holistic thinker, not an incremental thinker. And so like, I can’t separate the two.
So for me, psychology and your view of your future and the fact that that impacts how you filter and what you see and what you do in the present, I don’t separate that from strategy. The only reason I use the extreme future is so that it allows me to make better decisions in the present. It allows me to be more honest about what’s, what’s worth the time and being really honest about the cost of continuing to say yes to this thing.
And so that’s, that’s really why I do it. It’s more of a practical tool. Although I get that it’s, it is an extreme frame.
It is a very extreme frame, but it’s for the purpose of highly honest and practical decisions. In terms of other things that I believe that other people might think are crazy. Well, it’s sometimes hard to get out of your own head, but I’ll say that some of the things that I believe that I know are uncommon.
Like one of the things that I learned just from really up close experience and continuing to be more and more up close with big names, whether they’re billionaires or whether they’re big name influencers. Right. Is that most of these people, it’s still really, really all about them.
Most entrepreneurs, most companies, even just most, I don’t know if I’ll say most people, but like leaders and companies, you know, in good to great gyms, Jim Collins calls that a level four leader. And that level four leader is someone who it’s all about them and their genius. They’ve got the thousand helpers around them.
And one of the things that I’ve found is, is that most of those people are, they will never actually scale to the highest level, right? To Jim Collins point, they’ll never actually become truly great. They may be famous.
They may be even billionaires, right? And you might define that as great. But when you get up close to these people, um, you start to really realize that most of them, um, they have a bunch of yes people around them and they’re kind of like a king versus a president.
And they’re not, they’re really limited in what they can actually do and who they can actually work with because they have to be the person. They have to be the one, they have to be the guy, they have to be the guy or girl. And I found that that really limits.
And so, but I’ve also found that that’s honestly like the model. That’s like the common way for an entrepreneur to be or a leader to be, um, or a thought leader to be. And so when you can have a really big goal.
So for example, there was a guy who like he was, he became the CEO of a company. His guy in his late thirties, really smart guy, really amazing guy. He became the CEO of a supplement company.
Maybe back in 2019 and it was doing about three or four million revenue, three or four million. And he’s just an incredible CEO. He took the company to over a hundred million in about three or four years.
But then, you know, he hired me to consult them and to kind of work with them. And I love the guy. And this is where I knew he was actually like the real deal.
As I said, you know, I said, first off, do you want to get this company to a billion plus and revenue? And he’s like, oh yeah, for sure. And I’m like, do you think you can do it in three years?
He’s like, I think so. I said, well, do you think that you have to be the CEO this time? And he said, if he’s like, if it became clear that we’d need a better CEO for us to hit the goal. I would step down and I’d choose a different role.
And I was like, boom, like this guy, this guy gets it, right? Most people, they, they like, they need to be that. And I’m not saying he can’t be the CEO, but what I love is that he doesn’t have to be right.
He doesn’t have to be. He’s more, you know, it’s like the idea of that the goal is more important than his role. Right.
And I think that, you know, it kind of hits that quote that like, you can really accomplish a lot if you don’t need the credit. But I’ve, but I’ve just found over and over that most people are unwilling to do that. Most people are, most people are unwilling to set up other people for more success than themselves, which actually limits your, your ceiling.
It limits your potential. And actually, I just come to that again and again, that most people are unwilling to like, actually set up a game where other people will be more successful than them, but you’re setting up a game that’s so big that like you’ll be 10 times more successful than you otherwise would have been. If you were building your own little game, even though that little game might be big, but like, if you set up a astronomically bigger game than that, yeah, you might not be the one, you might not be the guy or girl, but by setting it up that way, you’re going to be infinitely, you’re going to do infinitely more than you would have otherwise.
Maybe you don’t become famous as a result. Maybe you’re not. Yeah, go ahead.
Bronson Hill: A question related to this. I’m sorry. I know we’re, we’re getting closer to the end of our time.
I wanted to name another question too, but you’ve been super successful and this is kind of ties in with what you’re talking about the idea of having a great partners. Obviously you partnered with Dan Sullivan. You saw it something there at help to kind of bridge synergies.
When is it, the right time to partner or I guess, what is the role of partnerships? How do you evaluate partnerships? How do you invite when you should use a partner, when you shouldn’t use a partner for certain things.
Because obviously when you do that, it can, it can tap into someone else’s network. You can kind of work with them in a way, but it can kind of limit some of these years. People can say like you look at, you know, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, which one was better, right?
Because you had a great quarterback. You’ve got a great coach or who’s the, I mean, is there some of that I’d love to just know kind of your view on partnerships and how partnerships are helpful and how they’ve been helpful for you.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I think partnerships are essential. That both Tom and Bill would definitely say that they couldn’t have done it without each other. I think that obviously Tom did go win a Super Bowl without Bill, but like, yeah, that’s true.
I think that’s a dumb. So that’s a dumb conversation. Like, I think that if you want to go massive, you’re going to have to have partners.
Now that doesn’t mean like they have to be on the inside. Like they had to be equity partners, but you know, look, show me anything huge where they’re probably where there wasn’t a partner. And most of the people who you assume there’s not a partner, there are.
And so partnerships can take different forms, but if you want to grow big, if you want to grow fast, I actually view partnerships as just another form of pathways thinking, right? Partners are a pathway, right? And I view partners as usually offering one of two things.
They’re either offering very filtered distribution to the right channels, right? So like, you know, um, if you think about like Nike, you know, and like partnering with Michael Jordan, yes, he offered phenomenal flair, right? But he also offered distribution, right?
He was putting those Nikes on in front of everyone back in 1984, right? They were on TV and he was so flashy that like they got a lot of attention, right? And they, so like partnerships or distribution, but they’re also capability, right?
And so if you add that capability, and this is what often a lot of acquisitions are, it’s just adding a capability that makes it easier for you to scale. You’re either adding distribution or adding capability that makes it easier to distribute. And so, partnerships, whether it’s like an actual, like, you know, you’re like equity partners, or whether it’s just like, you’re utilizing each other’s resources for various, um, various wins, completely essential, right?
And if you want to grow fast, you need them, right? You need really good partners. Um, and you need to set them up right.
You know, and if you’re not the kind of person who, if it’s all about you, you’re not going to be able to get good partners over time. People are going to get away from you.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, it’s good. Maybe you have anything else?
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, I wanted to circle back if it’s okay, Ben, I wanted to circle back to what you were talking about earlier about humility. Cause one of the things I’ve noticed is most of the people I know that preach the whole, you know, success or humility thing, haven’t done, haven’t truly been successful. And so it is really, really cool to see somebody who is extremely successful like yourself, um, approach the game of winning through a lens of humility, through a lens of, Hey, if there’s somebody who can do it better, I’m going to have that person step in instead of me.
And so, I don’t know if there’s anything that you can add from your own vantage point from other humble people you’ve worked with like Dan or someone else. What do you feel like drives those people to allow themselves to step aside and let others take the spotlight when some leaders, like you said, are unable to step down because their ego is involved in the equation.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Humility is, to be a huge topic. I mean, I don’t even know how to answer that, except just that, um, it’s good to build good filters, you know, and if, if someone has a massive ego, like one of the, one of the concepts I didn’t write, write about in the book, but is something I think about is, is like, you can’t scale a yellow flag. And so like anything below the floor is either a yellow or red flag.
When you’re looking at it from the vantage point of your goal. Um, and so that maybe not everything, some stuff’s just not relevant, right? But there’s some yellow flags that can, that we can sometimes try to justify because there’s some benefit to it, right?
That we’re trying to use to help us, whatever we’re trying to accomplish. And, if a person is all about themselves and they’re unteachable and they’re unwilling to listen and learn then like, you’re not going to get very far with that person, even if they have massive capability, at some point you’re going to, you’re, your ceiling is going to, you’re going to hit some lower ceiling than you could have. And so, I find that it’s just really important.
Number one to like knock, you don’t need, you know, you don’t need all the credit. Number one, like other people are there to help as well. Um, certainly God should probably get some of the credit.
But also when you’re just really open and honest and transparent, yes, you can get taken advantage of by some of the snakes. Like there’s a lot of people out there who, you know, but I think that if you get better filters, um, you can avoid all that. And I think you get, you, you do get a lot further just being honest, just being open and honest to the best of your ability and just laying it out.
Transparency, like this is where I’m at. This is the situation. Take it or leave it.
And most people are kind of playing deceptive. I just say most people, many people are playing like deceptive games, right? And they’re unwilling to just like show their cards.
Sometimes you don’t want to show them all, but I have found that in higher and higher stakes games, it’s, it’s often better to just show your cards and just say, this is where I’m at. This is the situation. Like take it or leave it.
Yeah. And that, that allowed, that’s at least allowed me to get out of most bad games and also to like, and also to see situations. And so I don’t know if I answered the question well, but I think humility is a powerful, a powerful thing.
I found that I go a lot further when I, when I, when I trust God and when I know that my future self will be better. And when I’m humble and open to my mistakes and I make a lot of mistakes. And I think if you just own it and just try to fix it fast, you’ve really built a lot of trust with the right people.
Bronson Hill: A hundred percent. Hey, Ben, we really appreciate you so much, man. Really appreciate all the value you’ve added to our lives as well as just the community and for the books you’re writing and I know you’re creating creating this 10 X self and this, the science of scaling and the end of who you’re becoming, but just really appreciate you.
Thank you for being here. Encourage everybody to go pre-order your book. The science of scaling, which will be out in July.
How else can people reach out to you, connect with you, follow what you’re doing?
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Just scaling.com, you know, scaling.com is the easiest. That’s just our training company where we help companies 10 X. So I mean, read the book science of scaling, 10 scaling.com is just, it’s not for everyone like this. It’s only for companies that are like, yeah, I want to go that. I want to go that fast and I want to filter that hard. But, um, the thing I actually wanted to ask you guys was, and I know you guys are going to do your post like, you know, here’s what we got out of it.
But what’s, I actually do want to know from you guys, like, what was one thing that was interesting to you about this conversation?
Bronson Hill: Yeah, we can do a wrap up right here. Let’s just do it.
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I also think you probably should do some while I’m gone. Cause you guys might say better things than I’m gone. But what’s at least, but what’s at least one part?
What’s at least one thing that you thought was either interesting or interesting or different?
Bronson Hill: Yeah, we’ll do it right now. I mean, I think for me, it was, I think it’s just continuing. What I really was drawn with is the future is so much keeping your focus on the future is so much more important than being on the past and just continuing to create in a way that you’re creating that 10X, 100X, whatever, and shortening that goal and just spending more time thinking and be focusing on that, because that’s actually what’s going to create you, make you into that person by putting yourself there. I think that’s what I got.
What about you, Nate? What’d you get out of this?
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, it kind of came up indirectly, but I love something that you just threw in there really briefly when you’re speaking on humility, that the reason we’re not humble sometimes is because there is some benefit to our ego. And I think that applies in a lot of different areas. When we’re talking about sacred cows, there’s always some benefit.
Otherwise we wouldn’t keep it. And so going back to the science of scaling, we have to be willing to sacrifice those sacred cows, sacrifice the benefit that does come with those sacred cows to be able to get to that next level. So that was massive for me.
And then I loved just the different applications that you had for using time as a tool. It’s amazing how asking the right kinds of questions yields completely different answers and better answers, right? Because if you’re asking yourself the wrong question in relation to time, you’re going to get mediocre answers all day long.
And then you’re going to do what Elon Musk talks about where you are optimizing something that shouldn’t exist in the first period in the first place. So those two takeaways were massive for me.
Bronson Hill: Awesome. Awesome. Well, hey, Ben, really appreciate you being here.
Thanks so much, brother. And we’ll share this one when this goes live and so appreciate you and your work. We’d love to have you.
If we do a monthly panels, we’re having one on mindset and wealth, be fun to have you come be a part of something like that or find some other way to collaborate. But just thank you again for all you’re doing man. Just really inspired by you.
So thank you
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: For sure.
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