Unleash Exponential Success with The 10x Approach | Dr. Benjamin Hardy

23:46Most people, they take the present and they say, oh, the future is going to be pretty much the same. Just like they take the past and say that the past is pretty much the same as the present. So Tim, he would, so the only reason I say that is a bigger future is ultimately going to force you to doing something pretty different. He was more of a engineer dude. And he was running a business for like 10 years, very 2x like they were almost making no progress he was also like a micromanager not a very good leader admittedly so like he didn't trust his people he was the bottleneck always doing everything and um they also were not very specific you know back to the idea of the 80 versus the 20 like they were not defined in what they did who they did it for like they took any job that they could get so like they were very mediocre they focused on quantity not quality um and he just wasn't a good leader he wasn't developing himself wasn't developing his thinking he was getting no better.

24:34And he just admits that. And so what happened for him was, is that he actually had a kid, right? And that led him to like thinking about protecting his son. And so that made him want to go get a gun. He'd never had a gun before. And that got hit and he had a horrible experience. This kind of reminds me, by the way, and by the way, I look at 10X kind of like a, like the hero's journey. Like every time you go 10X, it's kind of like a hero's journey. Like you get some call, right? You got to be called to something new. And then you're going to resist that call and that's your 80%. You're going to revert back to your former self and stuff like that.

25:05But for him, his kind of incident that led him to kind of thinking about having a new perspective was having the kid and then having a horrible experience trying to buy a gun. Like they didn't... Anyways, it led him to like trying to like find the laws and stuff. He ended up starting to study it on the side. He was still running his terrible engineering business and making no growth. But ultimately, like the key aspects of him going 10X and to fast forward, he ended up creating a company that provides education and even now insurance for gun owners. You know, this is a company that has like 700 ,000 clients right now, like active clients.

25:39Like he's gone 10x a million times since then. Like his company's worth billions of dollars, you know. But, you know, he had to clarify his 20%, you know. He had to clarify that this is what I'm going to focus on. Eventually, he let go of his business. He, you know, he took out money and took risk and invested in the new business. he developed himself into a leader and started to hire people that he could trust. And he started to trust himself to be in his own lane and actually like have a team and like, like trust them and like, let them have ownership. There's a lot of research on this and like transformational leadership theory where like, first off you have to trust yourself.

26:13Like leadership is really two things. It's trust and transformation. And if you don't trust yourself, then you're not going to like go deep and transform yourself, but you're also not going to trust others to like manage things and like own things rather than you like needing to like hold on to everything and govern it and essentially squander things. So he just developed himself into a massive leader and he gave massive trust to his people. And then he transformed himself. He just developed himself, got better and better at what he did, learned more and more about how to provide value. Eventually, he focused on quality over quantity too.

26:42He raised the prices dramatically. There was an episode where they had a ton of clients and they weren't really... He could tell that at least half of them were just not the full right fit. So he literally tripled the price. And in one day, half of his clients left, but he tripled the price. And so technically they were making more money with half the clients, but they were also more of the right fit clients, higher quality, less quantity. And so he just focused on like who he wanted to serve and getting better and better for them. I like how, I like his principles. Like, and you mentioned the story, like what's the origin story of the business?

27:15What's his origin story? And he kind of like started at the bottom, you know, had trouble getting a gun and suddenly made a business that revolves around this. Then Then he talks about ideology. There needs to be a mission and purpose in your organization that's based on principles. Goosebumps and stuff. And then he talks about a symbol. So maybe explain some of these things, like symbol and shared rituals and so on. So these are a lot of Tim Schmidt's perspectives and principles, which I think are epic as well. I would say that these are not the core aspect of 10X, but they're the philosophies that he did use.

27:48I'm trying to remember all of the aspects of what he did. He talked about rituals. What else did he have? I mean, you've got to listen to me. I forget his story specifically. Yeah, there's the enemy. You have to have an enemy. Yeah. But I like that. I sell courses and stuff about investing in one of my businesses, and the enemy is all the media and government that tries to basically keep everyone down or fool people or whatever. You have to have your own particular insider language. So I'm not quite sure what he means there, but I could vaguely understand it. And you have to have a good leader.

28:29Well, one of the things that he talks about in this that I think is really interesting is he says that the main things that people are buying from you is he calls it psychographic alignment, which is basically like people are buying belonging. They're buying community. They're buying culture. So like, for example, he has a company that teaches people like gun education and also gets them insurance for like gun protection. And so the main thing he, like that's stuff that people sort of want, but what they really want is to like be aligned with people who are like them. And so he actually more sells the idea of like community and being around people that you want to be with.

29:10And you get all these other things that are useful on top of that. That's really powerful. It is. If you think about the people who buy your courses or the people who read your books, if you focus on aligning them psychologically with your values and principles, that's part of having the enemy. It's showing these are the bad guys. You're starting to get alignment with people and then helping them build belonging and community with people that they perceive to be like them. That's actually what makes it sticky. And then that actually is what allows... the things you're selling to be perceived as valuable?

29:46Yeah. So I'm trying to think like, you know, sometimes I do something and I'm almost afraid to 10 exit because the thought of failure is too overwhelming. Like if you really want something and you put your all into it and then it just doesn't work, you're going to be left thinking like, what the hell did I just do with the past several years or all that time or whatever. Is that truly how you think about it though? Sometimes. I mean, I would say I'm the sort of person who has unnatural confidence in myself most of the time. I watch a lot of what you do and I'm fetching. I love it, dude. I have a severe case of Dunning-Kruger bias where I'll just naturally think I'm better than I am until I finally get to where I want to be.

30:35So I'm just like an idiot for many years. And then suddenly, you know, like I started writing and I know I was really bad. but for 10 years I thought I was great until I finally got a little bit good and and that's after writing every single day boring all my friends to tears with all of my writing they had to read everything I remember this is like in the 90s one time I wrote a novel I had my girlfriend read it and then I quizzed her about the ending and she couldn't even remember the ending and I was just so upset and she was crying like, I'm sorry, I can't remember. And I just sucked, but I had this unnatural confidence.

31:15But now I think I'm older and maybe I've lost a little bit of that swagger. And so, yeah, I think now I have a little bit more, I'm a little bit more familiar with imposter syndrome, which is sort of the opposite of confidence. And I'm a little more familiar with being afraid, you know, fear of launching because what if it doesn't work? I actually wonder, why would you say you have more imposter syndrome now than you did in the past? And why would you be more afraid of it not working than it did in the past? I don't know. I guess experience because I've seen failure up front and up very close.

31:51And I've bounced back from it. I've 10x from it most of the time. But sometimes you just can't. And you don't want to deal with going back to the bottom again or something or what? Right. Yeah, I'm afraid. Right. And look, this is not with every aspect of my life. I think I still have a lot of confidence in most things, particularly like things that I have already become an expert in. Like, let's say writing is an example or other business or podcasting. I feel like I've already had a commitment to mastery. It took many years. I've paid my dues, even though I'm not a big believer in the notion of paying dues.

32:26And Dunning-Kruger bias helped me through the down points where I thought to myself, I'm so great at this. This is just a temporary problem that I'm having right now. And so that gave me an unnatural confidence to 10x. But now I have seen cases where a lot of people who have goals fail at them. And I've seen myself kind of have ups and downs that I was sort of lucky that I got out of them or maybe in some cases I didn't get out of them. it's kind of an interesting question but like at this point in your life james like do you feel called to something you know in the past you you felt inspired and very purposeful like thinking about victor frankl right victor frankl man's search for meaning like you know obviously they're in a really hot like horrid environment but like the core thing he said was like you need to see some sense of purpose or calling that even gives you reason to have meaning and even shot to believe to move forward.

33:23And obviously that's what gave the people the grit and resilience who did survive, the ones who lost that sense of calling, mission, purpose. And so I just wonder, do you feel like you even have anything like that right now that's calling you forward that gives you a reason to even consider failing and facing that imposter syndrome? Do you even have that right now, would you say? Yeah, absolutely. And I always make sure I have that in every area of my life. Otherwise, why do something? Because for instance, why do a podcast if I don't have a real like a mission, like what I'm trying to do, which is talking to people like you, talking to people like Richard Branson, what they do, what are the techniques for succeeding, for 10Xing their life.

34:05And I feel not enough people are talking about this. So people get deluded by the main story, which is the 2X thinking you described or just the normal path, which most people think is the natural path, but it isn't. But for instance, I'm about to launch a course about writing. So write and publish your first book in 30 days is the title of the course, which is almost like a 10X kind of title. Like, first of all, writing a book is a 10X thing. Publishing a book is a 10X thing. And I'm saying do it in 30 days. And I'm going to show you exactly how step by step. But I feel like the course is ready.

34:41But I feel in myself, and I've never really felt this before, I'm almost afraid to launch because what if it just doesn't sell the way I hoped it would. And this is something I feel really strongly about. There's probably nothing I've done in life more than writing. And this is my course about it. And so I really wanted to do well. So number one, you going 10x the many times you have in the past, I think, is it possible we could agree that you had some sense of purpose that we're talking about goal that identified to some degree, let's call it a 20 % focus that you eventually focused on developed some form of mastery and you would let go of a lot of aspects of your past life to ultimately go all in on that thing and achieve the goal.

35:28You've done that. Would you say you followed that process to some degree, a few or many different times? Absolutely. Everything you do. And it's interesting. I never really thought about it, but I've written a lot about the process of mastery and success, but I never really thought about it as in terms of subtraction, but you're right. There's huge sacrifice. You, everything you're going to master involves some sacrifice. Writing meant that three to four hours a day or more, I had to sit at a desk and type instead of like hanging out with friends or family, or to be honest, to starting a business and making money.

36:04You don't make money. The first bunch of years you're, you're writing, even when you get your six figure advanced, by the way, you don't make any money. You're going to get it in four chunks over three years, possibly. And then it's going to be taxed and your agent's going to take 20 % before it's taxed. And it's very hard to make money as a writer. You have to figure out how then you're going to, yeah, it's great to get the six figure advance and that sounds good. But even making what seems like a huge advance, when you really cut and slice it up, it's not as much of a living as people think.

36:38I couldn't agree with you more. No, I mean, I'm with you on that. I guess here's my kind of point with all the imposter syndrome and the fear and stuff is this. How I look at it is the 80%, which is your past self. It's all the busyness. I actually look at it as its security. It could be your habits. It could be your... Take this as a crazy idea, but maybe at one point in the future, your podcast might go into your 80%. I'm not saying it does now. I'm saying at some point, Maybe your future becomes a filter that says, this got me here. It won't get me there. I'm not saying that that's going to happen.

37:09I'm just saying it's possible that that could happen. That's just hypothetical. But all I'm saying is the 80%, whatever you're holding on to, could be beliefs, friends, situations, behaviors, even just ways in which you make money. That's your security blankets that you turn to when you don't want to face the freedom of your future self and the freedom of what you want, that calling of, in this case, it could be launching this course and helping people write, right? Maybe that fits in your 20%. Maybe not. Maybe it's honestly an 80 % pet project. I don't think it is because I think that you really are serious about this.

37:40Yeah, I mean, I shot all the video. I put the whole course is put together. Like the course is literally done and it's actually on the learning sites. I just haven't launched it. I just haven't said to anybody that it exists. Well, so you're telling everyone right now, which is pretty awesome. I think it's great. Like it really will. I'm not trying to advertise either. It sounds like I'm making an advertisement. It literally will make you write a book, a good quality book in 30 days. But the way I would launch something is I'd write an article about it and do a podcast about it and go on other people's podcasts and so on.

38:13And somehow I'm just afraid to make that leap. Let's talk about this. Do you want this thing to be bigger than courses you've launched in the past? What's your actual goal for this course? What's your hope for? What's your plan? Okay, sweet. So you want this to be a 10X course? Yeah. Awesome. So like, as an example, let's just say you do launch it at some point and you get some great result or some low result, right? Do we agree that it's in your 20 %? Yeah. Even if it doesn't do well, would it still be in your 20 %? I don't know. That's maybe what I'm a little afraid of. Even if the initial launch doesn't go well, are you still committed to it or are you not committed to it?

38:53I could say I'm committed to it, but I'm afraid to feel disappointed. You're afraid to be disappointed in a single launch, in an instant. But the question is, and this goes back to the 10 years of writing and stuff like that, and even all your life of investing, did any one of those specific failures matter if you were committed to something bigger? No, you're right. And it's like the guy who plays golf or your son who plays tennis. If he loses one tournament in tennis, he might be disappointed the next day. He might crime himself to sleep that night or whatever. but three days later, he's back on the court exercising harder than ever.

39:33That's turning the experience into an asset rather than a liability. If you're all disappointed and attached to it and stuff like that, then you've already framed it as a failure and now you're worse off because it happened and now you're stuck. Whereas it's really interesting. You can want something without needing it. If you think you need it to be successful, then you've made yourself a slave to it and therefore you're not free. That's a good point. So it's the making sure you don't need it. Well, needing is an attachment, by the way. Needing is an unhealthy attachment. You can be committed to something without being unhealthily attached.

40:03You can be fully committed to having this thing become successful and have zero attachment to how this launch goes.

40:24So you wanted to have a six-figure advance on the book. and a little bit that like money is related to necessity, right? And it's related to freedom. So to some extent, well, I guess what you have to do is make sure you don't need it for the money in order to get it. So you had to have like other jobs. Well, here's what it was in my case is in my case, I was a graduate student making$12 ,000 per year. So I was making a thousand bucks a month. I was making no money. And we had recently become foster parents of three kids. And so money was becoming more of a relevant concept to my future than it was, you know, what got me here in the past.

40:59It was like, well, I just want to get into the grad program. I was not caring about money. Like that was not a relevant factor, but with my, that situation then, and also with my values and kind of what mattered to me at that point, it was a factor. It did matter to me. And so, but I also wanted to do what I loved. And so I factored all those things in and that's what shaped my process or my, you call it your deliberate practice. But I mean, yeah. So, I mean, it was a part of the factor, but that doesn't mean that money has to be a part of my 10X now. It can be, and it can be the only thing. If that's what I want, that can be the core factor, but it doesn't have to be.

41:31Even if it is connected to something you need, you kind of have to give up the need and focus on the want. Well, the truth is, is I didn't need it. I could have still stayed in my grad program, and I could have racked up some debt, and then I could have become a consultant like other people who got PhDs in organizational psychology. I didn't need to become a professional writer. I certainly didn't need a six-figure book deal. I wanted those things. Like, I could have found ways to get money in different ways. I could have taken on more student debt, you know? So, like, it's not like I needed a six-figure book deal.

41:59I wanted it. But it did, you're right. By getting it, it would create more of the freedoms I wanted, which is now I can let go of the university position, which I pretty much did. Now that I was a professor, but, like, I didn't have any jobs. Like, the money, yeah, although not as much as people think, as you said. It still afforded me the freedom to just write the book and not need to think about money. And so that freedom created space, time, and I was doing what I wanted. And I did feel like I could provide for my family in the way I wanted to. So the want, which was the money, created the freedoms that are the freedoms I personally wanted.

42:32Sometimes in order to do the 10x, you need the freedoms as well. Explain. Like, for instance, needing is an attachment, like you said. So you need freedom from these attachments. so it's much easier to focus on let's say building a business writing a book being a stand-up comic being a golf bro or if you don't need the money or if you don't need uh to spend 20 hours a day with your social relationships i don't know if you need a lot of those things though like as an example like if i have you know this guy who we were talking about the golf guy right he's got a job. He's got a family. So he's not going to just bail on his family to go to the golf because the family actually is a higher priority, but the golf really matters.

43:17And so he's not going to bail on the job, but he is going to let go of some aspects of his 80%, right? Maybe it's distractions, maybe it's certain friends and he's going to actually, he's still going to go to work because he values that. He wants the family, right? Doesn't need it. He wants the family more than he wants golf. Yeah. And so he's going to keep the job because he wants the family and he wants to provide for them, not need want, but he wants golf and golf is becoming increasingly important. And so it's becoming part of his 20 % that he really values. And so he's going to let go of some of the other things that he doesn't need, that he doesn't want.

43:46And that's going to become more of an investment until maybe eventually he gets to a point or he gets to a point of either, you know, either a place of confidence or truly a place of just situation where maybe that job now is not even something that he thinks he needs or even wants. Because now he has, you know, he's going to go for this. So, I mean, I just think it's like the language we use is pretty important. And it's like, he may not actually need that. Like a lot of the things you might think you need, you actually just want. Or if you think you need them, they may actually be stopping you from what you want.

44:18I like this concept also of kind of distancing yourself from the task in a little bit, like in the sense of, you know, building what you call the self-managed company. Can you talk about that a little bit? Dude, I think that's essential. That's essential. Yeah, this is like a classic Dan Sullivan concept, but there's so much psychological research to back it up. So as an example, and this is mostly for entrepreneurs, but I think it's kind of true for everyone. We all need space, right? You need space to process your thinking, space to go in the 20%, space to digest things. The problem with most entrepreneurs is that they're the bottlenecks in their business.

44:51They're in their business, not working on it. And so they're involved in every touch point. First off, they're managing their team, and that stunts their team taking ownership and having freedom. and trusting themselves and stuff. So leadership is really two things. It's about trust and transformation. You got to trust yourself first. So the leader at some point has got to trust themselves to free themselves from a task or from thinking about things. A lot of it's about freeing your attention so that you no longer are overly obsessive and knowing everything that's going on. You actually allowed your mind to be free from that so that you could go deep.

45:25I don't know. Have you ever read the book, by the way, called Catching the Big Fish? No. So it's a phenomenal book, catching the big fish and it's all about consciousness and about how consciousness and creativity are like the ocean. And if you're at the surface, what that means is that all you can see is the small fish up at the top. In order to go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep and catch the big fish, you got to like remove, you know, this kind of just goes to the idea of attention that if your attention is so spread thin and you're so caught up in everything going on, not only are you coddling the team in the business, but you're also coddling your attention from going deep down and catching the big fish, which are big ideas, big insights, big transformations.

45:59so for the leader they've got to actually like free themselves up and in order to do that they've got to trust themselves and then once they've trusted themselves they can actually go deep so that they can transform themselves dr alan bernard calls it return on attention because if you're up at the surface if you're caught in 80 if you're just overly busy then you're not getting a big return on your attention because you're just scraping the surfaces it's only by going deep that you get a big return on your attention meaning like you get big insights big transformations. It's interesting. So it's almost like, like you refer to this, like 10X, the quality of everything you do, like does kind of put it through this filter.

46:35Is this activity I'm about to do going to help me achieve this 10X goal? Like I remember when, um, again, when I was just starting to write published books, I went to dinner with some friends and they kept saying, oh, they're, they have this idea. They're going to write these books. But here we were out at dinner was like 9 p.m. then 10 p.m. then 11 p.m. and i'm thinking to myself how are they ever going to write their books if they're going out to dinner every night like this till you know midnight every night because it was rare for me to go out to dinner because i knew that was their 80 percent and so sometimes i think people get stuck in the 80 percent or think that they need this social activity or they feel lonely or whatever but you have to really put this 10x filter like i love TV.

47:17So I have to ask if I'm watching TV from 7 PM to 10 PM every night, will this help me achieve, you know, my 10 X goal? Probably not, but I love TV. So maybe I say, okay, seven to 8 PM, I'll, I'll do the TV. And then, you know, I free up two hours there and, and so on, on and on with all your activities, you kind of have to improve the quality of everything you do. and then it becomes much easier to, it's easier to get rid of stuff in this sense than to add stuff. Well, it's back to Michelangelo. You got to strip away everything that's not the David and also higher goals have less potentials. You know, like there's less coaches that are gonna get my son to pro.

48:01And so 80 % of what you're doing is a distraction if you've got the higher goal. But also this is just kind of a time thing, like the psychology of time. So a lot of people say live in the present and ignore the past, ignore the future. Truth is that your full experience in the present is based on how you frame the past and how you frame the future. If you've got a past that you view as a liability and essentially like an unresolved past, of course, that's going to impact your present and future, right? If you have no goals, of course, that's going to impact your present. You're probably going to be distracted just chilling.

48:31The only reason I bring this up is that most people, and there's a lot of research on this, most people project the past onto the present. What that means is that they say that the reason the present is the way it is is because of the past. They say that the past causes the present. Psychologically, it's actually the opposite. One of my favorite psychologists, he said, it's more accurate to say that the present causes the meaning of the past than to say that the past causes the meaning of the present. So what that means is that in the present, you're always reshaping and remodeling the past, or at least reconstructing it.

49:00But the same is true of the future. So most people, they project the present onto the future, meaning they're going to use the present to determine what they do in the future or like what their goals are. And what's a lot more useful is actually to take the desired future, some imagined future, Aberdeen sense that imagination is more important than knowledge and think about what you actually want and project the future onto the present. That's that whole idea of what you were just saying with filter. Like actually let the future you want dictate who you are and what you do and what you say yes to and what you say no to in the present.

49:31It's the future that's dictating the present, not the present that's dictating the future. That is such an important concept, actually. It reminds me of day trading. So for a long time, I was a day trader. And there's a big tendency when you're a day trader that on the day you lose money, you think to yourself, oh my God, if I have the next 30 days in a row like this, I'm going to be broke. And then when you win money, oh, this is great. If I do this 250 days a year, I'm going to be making tens of millions of dollars. And the reality is some days are good and some days are bad. It's not like, but you tend to think whatever your day was this day, you project it out like every day is going to be like that.

50:13And it's just not true. You realize very quickly, it's just neither that's true, but you have to convince yourself of that every single day. I think that's hilarious. And I think we all do that. And like the fight part is like, like the research actually shows that we do that. Like we actually overly assume that the future is going to be like the present. When in the reality, the future is going to be very different. Even your future self in five, 10 years from now is going to be way more different than you are than you think they will be. Yeah, he's going to be an alcoholic in a homeless shelter.

50:43But what is he going to value? What is he going to care about? Maybe he's going to be deep into knitting hats or deep into religion. I don't know, deep into religion. The point here is that your future self is going to be very different than you think. And then you want to start thinking about, well, how different and what type of different. And then you start thinking about taking that future and actually reverse engineering it and using it as the filter for not only your decisions in the present, but also your identity in the present. And, you know, Daniel Gilbert, he gave this epic TED Talk called The Psychology of Your Future Self.

51:17You know, he's a Harvard psychologist, but he basically just said most people are not even thinking about their future self and they're overly projecting their present self onto their future self, meaning that they just assume that their future self is the same dude that they are today. Truth is, your future self is radically different. but most people are just not even imagining it. Key though is to start imagining it and you can stretch it because higher goals are, as we've already talked about, simpler and easier than small goals because the higher goals actually weed out the 80 % and allow you to make harder decisions which actually make it easier.

51:45That's so fascinating that the harder goals actually are actually more, but yeah, they're actually more possible because it gives you a roadmap. They're practical. Like, okay, so if your goals are too simple, that's a roadmap also. Like, okay, I'm just going to stay at my job. I'm going to do well every day. I'm going to show up to work and I'm going to get a five to 10 % raise every year. So that's a simple roadmap. But the other roadmap, which you just described, the 10X roadmap is kind of just as simple or more simple because like if I wanted to be 15 % better every year, I might not even know what that means.

52:19But to be 10X better at something, to master something, it means like you say in the book and like you said on this podcast, you have to do things very different than the way you're doing things now. And so it actually then restrict, okay, if I watch three hours of Netflix, clearly that is not on the path to tennis mastery. If I, if I, if I'm also taking, I also love playing the piano too. Well, that might not help you become a master at tennis. So that's eliminated. So it actually really does give a good, the higher, the more difficult the goal, if I want to make 10 million a year instead of 1 million a year in revenues in my business, it's very clear that you need to either raise prices or have more customers and will watch the Netflix or going on a road trip every weekend to an amusement park.

53:10That's probably not going to help you 10x your revenue. So it gives you a pretty clear roadmap. But the thing about it is that people, when they think 10x, they still think linearly. They're still actually thinking 2x. The average person, if they say, if their business is making in a million and they want to go to 10 million, they'll actually still think linearly, which is 2X, where they'll think in terms of more, not better. Right. So they'll think I need, oh, I need 10 times as many customers, which is the wrong way to think. Exactly. Yeah, that's thinking 2X. They'll think linear, which is thinking from the past.

53:39Oh, I just need to do 10 times more of what I'm doing when it's actually like, no, actually, if you start to think about it from 10 million, what actually needs to be true from 10 million? And it's not going to be more, it's actually usually gonna be less yeah it's interesting well let me ask you about your son's example so like to be a tennis pro in his training what should he no longer do well so he actually got asked this lately and truth be told he's not even i don't even think his goal is to go pro so like you know we only use this as a hypothetical to say like is your current path going to get there but if he wanted to go pro there are so many things like there there's a lot in his 80 % that he'd have to let go of.

54:20Like he actually would have to play more tennis. He would have to play more tennis. He'd have to play less video games, kind of back to your original point with the Netflix. But there's things that would be in his 20 % that he's not focused on now. One of them, he said, is cardio. Like the better and better you get, you need to be in amazing shape because you need to like be able to chase down balls and stuff like the pros have insane cardio versus the college people. Like they're so much better. So right. So actually, sometimes he can't just play a casual game of tennis because he should be working on cardio those times instead of playing like, oh, just a game of the fence.

54:53I mean, there's nothing – by the way, there's nothing wrong with having recovery. Like this is actually a big aspect of going 10X is that like – and like – so like flow is two things. Flow is focus, but flow is also recovery. Like often a lot of – like for example, if he's never actually resting and recovering, he's probably not getting a lot better, right? If you study people like LeBron James and stuff, they highly prioritize recovery. I'm not saying he can't have chill games every once in a while or even that he can't just go play video games every once in a while. Actually, a lot of that recovery may be essential.

55:24Main thing is that if he's going for pro, he's going to have a much different path. He's going to have to get better at things that he would not have to get good at if he was going for college. The going pro, he'd have to isolate. There's a few things he's going to have to get masterful at that he won't even have to think about if he's going for college. One of them is going to be his, his cardio is going to have to be 10 times better if he's going to go pro. That's one of them. Yeah. Again, like you say, having some chill games with tennis, that could be part of recovery, but that's probably not a part of mastery.

55:53Like part of mastery means he's playing with his coach and they're going over specific new ideas that that's part of the focus. Yeah. That's part of the focus, not the recovery. Yeah. And the other thing I would think is you kind of have to do things differently than your opponents. like if you're all practicing if you're all in good shape and you're all practicing and you're all talented and you're all practicing four hours a day it's random who's gonna beat each other so you have to kind of figure out by the way that's focused on quantity of quantity of practice rather than you're right it's gotta be different it's gotta be quality of practice right quality of skill she's got to focus the quality in two ways one is what am i good at that i could get better at better faster than other people and also what are my opponents not studying that i could study so that if I direct the tennis game in that direction, I'm going to be better than none at that.

56:42I mean, that's part of mastery, is having the fine-grain nuances and stuff that other people don't have. It's different than expertise, by the way. A lot of people, his friends might be experts at tennis, but mastery is doing things uniquely well. He's actually chiseling the fine grains. Right. This is actually very relevant for investing and even day trading, it reminds me of. So everybody could be an expert on any company. So reporters at the Wall Street Journal are experts on Google, Apple, Facebook. They know more about - Being an expert's not how you go 10x. Right, exactly. Just because you know everything about Facebook doesn't mean you'll succeed as an investor.

57:18The people who through history have succeeded as investors are the ones who find out what areas no one else is looking at, and they plow their money into those areas. They also hyper-focus on those areas and niche down. Yeah, exactly. They're not overly diversified. They actually have a 20 % and they're getting really good in mastering us like a very niche. So like, you know, like Warren Buffett, people always think, oh, value investor, he buys Coca-Cola when it was low. And then now it's super high, blah, blah, blah. But when Warren Buffett first started, what he would do is he would go through thousands of earnings reports, something nobody did then.

57:53And they, because they were all printed on paper, you'd have to subscribe to, you have to call each company and get them. And just nobody would, would do this. And then he would find companies that were trading below their liquidation value. If you liquidated the whole investment, you would make more money than you put into it. And then he would go to the towns where these companies were and put up signs. The companies were very small, so nobody knew about them. He put up signs and he assumed the workers had shares. So he put up signs all over town saying, if you own shares of this company, I'll buy them from you.

58:26And he would stay in a hotel. He would tell me what hotel he was at. And then he'd buy all the shares he could. and no one else was there. So that's why he would make the money. That's a good example. I mean, he himself would admit there's a few things he has gone very deep on to the idea of catching the big fish and they go really deep on a few things and they ignore everything else. Like they're ignoring almost everything else. And if you look at even like some of the best tennis players, right? They all have their deep, deep, deep mastery, right? And they're not, you know, and then they've got areas where they're just not as great.

58:56And so you do, I mean, obviously you still got to have the fundamentals, but like there's areas where they've just hyper niched and gotten like radically, incomparably better than anyone else. And that goes back straight to your initial concept of the therapist. It's like, if you're going to truly solve a problem, like you want to go to someone who's like gone so niche at something, so good at something that like they can actually help you. Like they're, you know what I mean? Yeah, it's very interesting. But back to the point, 2X is being broad. 2X keeps the 80%, 2X keeps that security. to, and honestly, dude, back to your question about fear of failure and stuff.

59:32You've done it many times in the past, but when people get successful, there's a lot more security that you don't want to let go of. And so then you start living based on security, not based on freedom. Life is a lot more purposeful, back to Frankel, when you do have a purpose that invites you to go deep into a 20 % of sorts, and 20%, 80 % is just an analogy, but it invites you to go deep into a deeper level of mastery and to let go of a lot of the things that got you here and to take that risk. To not do that means that you're actually living in the past and that your past has become bigger than your future.

1:00:06And now you're just a shell of yourself, which is tough. Like if you want freedom, if you want security, you can keep the 80%. You can keep your security blankets. But if you want to go back to the freedom, you got to have that higher level of purpose, that call. And then you got to choose to go for it and commit to it to the expense of what you got now. You know, it's very interesting, like this sort of projection of your future self and kind of doing the reverse of what everybody else does, which is, oh, if today I'm a failure, tomorrow I'm going to be a failure. You have to do the reverse. But in a weird way, like I'm not a believer in the law of attraction where the idea is you write down, oh, I want three tickets to Mexico.

1:00:46And the next day in the mail, you get three tickets to Mexico. Like that's all BS. But there's one practice which I think is very interesting, which is, let's say I want to be, and I used to do this. Let's say I want to be a successful writer. 30 years ago, I would do this. I would imagine myself as already a successful writer and I would really feel it. It'd be like a meditation. Like I'd really feel it. I've already published a bestselling book. I would think to myself, I hadn't published anything at that point. It's like 1993. I'd already published a bestselling book. Everyone around me knows it.

1:01:17That's why they're all interested in reading my stuff because they all know about my best-selling book. And here's what I have to do today to write the next best-selling book and continue being a successful writer. Wouldn't you say all that stuff helped you? Oh, that's incredible. So that helped me quite a bit. And that's what I always do when I'm trying to be successful is like you say, and you refer in the book, you have to work backwards, but you have to really, in your soul, believe it, even if you know you're tricking yourself. And that's the hard thing for me is I think it's easier for me now to call bullshit on myself than it was back then.

1:01:50So would you say that you, and there is a beautiful three-step process, by the way, that I'll share with you, which you were just describing, which is beautiful. But you did it. I mean, wouldn't you say that you've achieved many things that your past self thought were impossible? Yes. But you're just saying now you don't think it's as likely. Well, not necessarily that. It's just that - I would say it's more likely now because now you're way more skilled. Yeah. And it's like a meta skill. I'm skilled at getting skilled. I know you are. I'm also skilled at bullshitting myself, and I know that I'm skilled at bullshitting myself.

1:02:23Yeah, but you can weed that out faster. You know, the point, I actually don't like the idea of, quote-unquote, brainwashing yourself, even though we all do, over time, reshape our beliefs and our values and stuff like that. How I look at it is what you were just talking about. Imagine a future self. It doesn't matter how seemingly impossible it is, and you do have to think about it. Like, as you were describing, you were visualizing it, but also feeling. So like the three-step model is you go from thinking to feeling to knowing. And like, this is where like thinking about it's the first part that most people don't even like imagine their future self or imagine what it would be like, let alone getting to the feeling stage that you were describing.

1:03:01And so stage one is honestly imagination and thinking about it and actually like entertaining what you would want and actually like playing with that idea in your mind, thinking about it. It's like the idea of thoughts become things, but emotionally, usually we resist that because it just feels too far away. that's where you're like I don't believe it like it doesn't feel right doesn't feel and so a big part of it honestly is getting to a place first off gratitude obviously gratitude helps future based gratitude and stuff but a lot of it is like actually allowing yourself to be okay with like you actually could have that like allowing yourself because rather than just emotionally rejecting it entirely and saying like that there's no way I'm a loser I don't deserve that or blah blah blah like or like that's just like there's all those like negative emotions and those emotions to say more about you than they say about the task.

1:03:44They just say how you feel about the task. Or they say, but you want to actually like, just like you would, at some point, you allowed yourself to buy the house you have. Maybe your past self would have not thought that that was reasonable. But at some point, you just allowed yourself that decision. Maybe you allow yourself to, you know, to do whatever it is you allow yourself to do. And so part of that feeling is, is you're imagining it. Then you actually allow yourself to say, I'm actually okay with that. Like you actually soften the emotions and start to allow yourself to feel okay and maybe even accept that it's okay.

1:04:14Like acceptance that I'm okay with this. Like I actually feel good about this. I don't have to like make myself feel trashy about this. Like I actually feel good about this. And then the lower stages is the knowing stage. Like one of my favorite quotes from Stephen Covey, he said, to know and not do is to really not know. So like you want to get to a place of knowing, you know, and I know that like, and you probably got there like with your writing and like in the achievement of various goals where you got to a place where like, you knew that you could have it. You knew you could go get it and that you were going to take the actions.

1:04:46Even if there wasn't a huge amount of evidence, like you got to that place of knowing and maybe you built that through evidence, through that confidence. But I like the quote from Florence Shin. She's kind of like this mystic writer, but she says, she says, faith knows it has already received and acts accordingly. And I do think that it's important to get to that level where like, you do feel like, you know, like you're at that place of knowing. Like it's not to say like you're overly attached, right? It's just like this place of like, this is who I am, this is what I'm gonna go for. And I'm not really that worried about what anyone else thinks about it anymore.

1:05:15Like, I'm just gonna go for this, this is who I am. It's almost like a point of no return psychologically where like you're gonna go for it and it would actually be more painful not to. And like, you really don't care if it fumbles or blunders. And you also have stopped worrying about what other people think. And I actually think that imposter syndrome is mostly the fear of what other people think. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, and so you really stop worrying about that. And that goes straight back to removing everything that's not the David and getting back to intrinsic motivation and doing what you want, which is freedom.

1:05:45All of those things, the imposter syndrome, fear of failure, those are based on need not want and their slavery tools. Like they're the things that own you because you're not free of those things. And so you got to strip those things away and be free of them and go for what you want. It's very true. I mean, I'm thinking of one very classic case of imposter syndrome in another area of my life that I'm thinking of right now. And I do care what people think of me. I think people are looking at this and saying, this is ridiculous. Why is this guy there? I think you're awesome. And what's funny is you don't know what other people think about you, man.

1:06:21No, it's true. Like, so the case I'm thinking of is there's this. So I'm, as my listeners know, I'm really into playing chess. And that's a big goal of mine is to get back to where I was. Is that a 10x for you, man? It is a TEDx for me. I mean – I love it. So I was a chess master in the 90s and – I didn't even know that about you. Yeah, and I was playing in tournaments. I was New Jersey junior champion and whatever. So then I came back to it 25 years later. I stopped for 25 years and I want to get back to where I was or even better. You could get better, dude. You could get way better. I know that sounds ridiculous.

1:06:59You could get better, but obviously it would have to be a priority enough to let go of other things. Yeah, no, it's been a priority. I have a coach. I study every day. I started playing in tournaments again. A hundred percent of people, except for my coach and a few others say, there is no way I can do this. I'm older. My kids are smarter and sharper and whatever, but whatever, all this is happening. And then, so the biggest, most famous chess magazine in the world asked me to write articles for them. And so my article appears every month or quarter, whenever the magazine comes out and every other writer is like a former world champion of chess or like a, a super grandmaster, like people who were famous when I was a kid are writing great articles.

1:07:49And then there's my article and I totally feel imposter syndrome. Although one, you know, grandmaster of chess told me, no, you forget you're the grandmaster of writing. They're not writers. And that's why the magazine wants you to write there. And so, but it's definitely, there's imposter syndrome every single time. I can't even like open the magazine when I get it and read my own article because I feel like, oh my God, it's right next to this world champions article. So there's, there's two thoughts here. One is, I love the quote, you know, you don't see the outside world, you only see your own reaction to it.

1:08:24So you see your reaction to the article, which is, oh, I feel imposter syndrome. I feel like a loser. That doesn't mean that that's other people's reaction, but it's good to study your own reactions. Second thing though is this, we've talked a lot about how people project the present onto the future, right? And they assume that their future is not going to be any different, but the same thing is true of the past. We project the past onto the present and we do that so much so that we don't realize how much we're different from our past self. Truth is, you're probably quite different from your past self.

1:08:53Even three, six months ago, you're probably a lot better at chess than you think you are because you still might be overly projecting your past onto the present and thinking that you're actually the same chess player you were three, six months ago. That goes back to gap and gain. My guess is you're actually a lot better at chess right now than you think you are because you might be overly identifying with your past self three, six, 12 months ago. Yeah, that's definitely true because kind of you learn something and this holds, I think for every area, you learn something and it usually takes six to 12 months before what you learn today is really absorbed into how you function, you know, later.

1:09:30Like you, you don't learn something and immediately apply it. Like when your son learns a new way to serve the ball, he doesn't immediately like serve perfectly every game. He has to now learn to really integrate this new method into his play. So it's probably true that my play doesn't reflect my knowledge. But then I'm also aware that everybody always thinks they're better than they are at almost everything. So I'm more aware of my Dunning-Tool-Go bias. I would say in your case, given the radical imposter syndrome, that you probably think you're worse than you are. Yeah, that could be. You know what I mean?

1:10:03In this context, with who you're kind of worried about their thoughts, you're probably radically devaluing where you're at. And I'm not saying that you're a grandmaster. I'm not saying dilute yourself. So I'm just saying, like, yeah, I would just say it's easy. Like, one of the aspects of integration is even on a daily basis, you can say, how am I a different chess player than I was at the beginning of the day? Even if you didn't play chess, chances are you actually, chances are some of the things settled and you actually maybe had some insight that, like, you actually are better at chess than you were 24 hours ago, even if you didn't play.

1:10:36But maybe you're not. But part of getting better is actually trying to think about and recognize how you might be. certainly how much better you were than you were a month ago. And rather than just not even thinking about it, you actually define how you're different and better than you were a month ago. And maybe it's all you guys do is grab the journal and just write out a list of bullet points. Some of the like your 10 ideas in the morning. It's like, well, what are 10 ways that I'm actually a different chess player than I was a month ago? And after you lay those things out, you know, I know this move better.

1:11:04I see this angle better. I've got this model. Like then you actually, that is the process of integrating it where you're like, oh, I can see the distance between my current and my past self. That's a good technique because that also builds confidence. Like if you say, if you recognize and acknowledge and say, oh, this is what I'm better at, even if you're not like a lot better at it, it still gives you confidence in that area. It does. I mean, confidence again is a byproduct. It's a byproduct of past performance and it's a byproduct of recognition of capability and skill that you've developed or even just wins you've had or even just learnings you've had.

1:11:40You can even build confidence when things don't go well, because now you know better. Well, this has been fascinating, Ben. I had such a fun time the last time you were on, and I had such a fun time this time. I want to read out loud the title of the book, 10X is Easier Than 2X by Benjamin Hardy. I forget, did you co-author this with Dan Sullivan? Yeah, Dan Sullivan, Benjamin Hardy. Yeah, this is our third book in the trilogy and likely the last. Why the last? We've all gone 10x and time for new adventures. What's your next thing? I'm still trying to figure that one out, man. It's like you go through hero's journeys.

1:12:23You know what I mean? You go through a next level and you think about this goes back to the idea of letting the future become the filter of the present, not the past, just because something was epic. Even medium back in the day. You know, back when I was on medium and it was incredible and I got that six figure book deal, I didn't just keep doing medium like that became part of my 80 percent because now I had a new future self, a new a new jump. It's kind of like once you're on a mountain, you can see new mountains that you couldn't see at the bottom. And so, you know, you know, from where you're at now, the next 10 X is is different.

1:12:53It's not a linear path. And so that future then becomes the drive, you know, the filter for what you say yes and no to. And so back when I got the book deal, just as an example, it filtered out writing on Medium, even though I was the top writer, because my new 10x was not about becoming a 10 times more bigger blogger. It was about a different level of mastery. And so, you know, same thing is kind of happening here, where it's like, we've done a lot of things, you know, my books have pretty much reached a million copies. And like, I've gone through a lot of growth. But now from where I'm at now, and this goes to the idea that my, you know, your future self is different than your future self is different than your current self.

1:13:29I'm now different in what I value, what I care about, what I want than what I wanted four or five years ago when I set up that collaboration. I now want something different. And they even want things that are different. So the futures are no longer aligned. We're all in the game. We're all celebrating, not mad about what happened. It's freaking amazing. I mean, our books have been really successful and they've led to a lot of beautiful growth. And so now the future is different. And the future is what dictates the present, not the past. so interesting i i bet i bet i know what your next thing is right harlequin romance novels i know that's always been your passion you you've read hundreds of them now you're ready yeah i mean that's what i've been doing that's what i've been doing in my you know you guys don't know what i do in my secret life i've been reading romance novels forever and i've finally shifted it now i'm finally being real to my dream like you're you're like your golf guide but by the way have you ever done um what's it called when you um impressions do you do impressions of of people no should i sometimes okay like for instance when i was just looking at the title of your book i had to flip away from this screen to look at the the title of your book and i always forget titles for whatever reason my memory is not as good as it used to be but um you you sounded like michael j fox i thought i was talking to michael j fox i guess you try to do an impression of michael j fox like not now but like practice it a little bit next time you come on the podcast you do it I'll do it.

1:14:52I'll spend the first five minutes on the podcast next time just being Michael J. Fox. Yeah. And then I can say this is an interview with Michael J. Fox. That'd be pretty dang awesome. But Dr. Benjamin Hardy, 10X is easier than 2X. I was about to say 10X is the new 2X, but the title is 10X is easier than 2X, how world-class entrepreneurs achieve more by doing less. Thanks once again, Benjamin Hardy. I look forward to seeing your next level up and having you back on the podcast. I'll come back with the romance novels. We'll have some fun with that. Excellent. See you, brother.