Secrets of Super Achievers: Learning the 10x Growth Mindset with Dr Benjamin Hardy

00:00:00.000 | You say 10x is easier than 2x, help people understand how that's actually possible.

00:00:04.240 | A 2x mindset means that you're taking the past and the present and you're using that

00:00:08.320 | foundation to build the future. Well, a 10x mindset is the opposite. A 10x mindset starts

00:00:13.520 | with the future and it even scales it so high that it feels impossible, literally impossible.

00:00:18.400 | And then rather than letting the present shape the future, you're now actually letting the future

00:00:22.720 | shape the present. If you think that something's out of the category of possible, you won't even

00:00:27.680 | think about it. You won't even entertain it. You won't even go for it. And so part of the goal of

00:00:33.200 | kind of a 10x philosophy is to actually pursue things that are impossible so that your brain

00:00:37.760 | can start actually trying to solve it. The basic problem here is that most people just don't imagine

00:00:42.960 | their future selves. They don't take time to think about it, let alone a 10x future self, right? The

00:00:46.640 | truth is your future self is going to be totally different than who you are right now. 3, 5, 10

00:00:49.600 | years from now, you're not going to be the same person. So like when it comes to your future self,

00:00:52.560 | be specific, highly specific, and it can't be specific in 50 ways, maybe specific in three.

00:00:57.280 | Ben, thank you for being here. Really happy to be with you, Chris.

00:01:02.160 | When I first heard 10x, I immediately thought, okay, this sounds like a lot more work. You say

00:01:06.960 | 10x is easier than 2x. Help people understand how that's actually possible. All right. Awesome.

00:01:12.640 | Well, first off, super happy to be with you. Yeah. So let's talk about the difference between

00:01:16.640 | what a 2x psychology is versus a 10x psychology. I'm going to give you a little bit of kind of,

00:01:21.920 | let's call it some foundational psychology. I'm going to keep it really simple, but I just want

00:01:25.600 | to help people understand the foundation before we build the house. So in psychology,

00:01:32.000 | it's really important to understand how people are operating. So what the basis of the research

00:01:39.040 | shows is that most people, they look at time like they think about time on a clock. So as an example,

00:01:45.680 | if I think about my past, the past is behind me. My present is now, and the future is up ahead.

00:01:51.280 | And so that's kind of how we view time is that we can't go back to the past. We're in the present,

00:01:56.240 | and we can't really get to the future, but we're aiming towards something. We can think about our

00:02:00.000 | future and we can set goals and kind of use our future self as an example to kind of map where

00:02:05.040 | we're going in the present. That's kind of how people view time. And that's what would be

00:02:08.800 | considered a linear view of time. The problem is that that's not how it works psychologically.

00:02:13.600 | But that's the basis of a 2x mindset. A 2x mindset means that you're taking the past and

00:02:19.200 | the present, and you're using that foundation to build the future. And so it's very linear.

00:02:24.880 | And basically what it means is that to go 2x, you're usually just doing more of what you already

00:02:29.120 | have. You're just doing more and more of who you already are. I just want to give a little bit more

00:02:34.000 | core psychology, and then we'll just... Honestly, we go wherever you want. But the profound thing

00:02:38.880 | about psychology is that in psychology, time doesn't work that way. In psychology, it's not

00:02:44.480 | the past that determines the present. It's actually the present that determines the meaning of the

00:02:49.040 | past. And this is like a fundamental mindset when it comes to healing trauma, things like that,

00:02:53.440 | is that my past isn't what's determining who I am now. Actually, it's who I am now that

00:02:57.600 | determines the meaning of my past. And the more you get really good at that, the more you can

00:03:02.080 | continuously transform your past in ways that it is happening for you rather than happening to you.

00:03:08.240 | But if you listen to most people's language, they still blame their past for why they are the way

00:03:13.040 | they are right now, rather than taking ownership that it's actually you right now that are shaping

00:03:17.200 | the story, the narrative, the frame, the view of your past. And so that's just one fundamental

00:03:21.680 | component is that it's not the past that determines the present. It's the present that

00:03:26.160 | determines the past. Well, the same thing is true about the future. So again, a 2x mindset means

00:03:31.200 | that I'm going to take the present and I'm going to use that to shape my future. Well, a 10x

00:03:35.520 | mindset is the opposite. A 10x mindset starts with the future. And it even scales it so high

00:03:40.400 | that it feels impossible, literally impossible. So I know that you asked the question, how are you

00:03:45.040 | saying that this is easier? Now I'm actually say it's literally impossible. But you take the future

00:03:49.040 | and you scale it to such a high view that it feels impossible. And then rather than letting the

00:03:53.600 | present shape the future, you're now actually letting the future shape the present. You're

00:03:57.840 | letting the future determine who you are and what you do in the present. In other words, I'm letting

00:04:01.360 | my future self determine who I am in the present. I'm not letting my present self determine who my

00:04:05.680 | future self will be. And so these are very different approaches to time. I was just telling

00:04:11.680 | you straight up, psychologically, the past and the present are just tools. They're just tools for

00:04:15.760 | allowing me to operate in the present. If I have a bad relationship with my past, then I'm going to

00:04:21.120 | be stuck there. And I may have some trauma that happened when I was five years old, and I'm

00:04:25.360 | letting that past dictate me in the present. Although that's the common way, and what I'm

00:04:30.640 | teaching is very advanced psychology. The core phrase right here is called psychological

00:04:36.080 | flexibility. I'm giving you these foundations. We're going to go into 10X versus 2X, but I just

00:04:39.760 | want the listeners and even yourself to have some of these foundations. The super skill in psychology

00:04:45.040 | is called psychological flexibility. The more flexible I am psychologically, the more I can

00:04:49.600 | reshape the meaning of my past. I can let it go. I can recognize that I'm not even my past self.

00:04:54.000 | You're not your past self. The listener is not their past self. I'm not the same person I was

00:04:57.200 | five years ago. I'm not even the same person I was five weeks ago. And the better I get at my past,

00:05:02.240 | the more I can recognize and appreciate, "Oh yeah, here are the ways I'm different. Here's how I see

00:05:05.600 | things differently." The same skill, psychological flexibility, is used to imagine a different future

00:05:10.400 | and then to let that future dictate who I am in the present. Can you give an example of how

00:05:16.000 | someone might apply that to some event in the past? Oh yeah. I'll go big and I'll go small.

00:05:25.520 | The first place that people usually go is something big. I got divorced or I lost a job

00:05:31.120 | or my parents got divorced. So me as an example, my parents got divorced when I was 11 years old.

00:05:35.440 | My father then proceeded to become a drug addict. And so my father was a drug addict all through

00:05:40.080 | high school. Now, of course that could impact my life, but it's up to me right now to shape the

00:05:49.440 | meaning of that. So I can either consider my father a villain or a hero, right? And neither

00:05:56.000 | of those stories are actually true. They're just a framing. They're a view. They're a story. The

00:05:59.680 | idea of a story is that it's just a perspective. But we as people, our identity is shaped by the

00:06:05.760 | story we tell. And so one angle is just reframing the whole story and looking at what does this

00:06:12.480 | story mean? And it's me in the present that determines the meaning of the story. Even if

00:06:18.240 | you really dig into the research on memory, memory is never a retrieval. Often we think about memory

00:06:23.920 | as I'm going to go into the file cabinets of my brain and I'm going to grab this memory. I'm going

00:06:27.600 | to pull it out and I'm going to look at it. That's not how memory is. Memory is what they call a

00:06:31.520 | reconstruction. I'm always reconstructing my memory from the present. And so even now, as I'm

00:06:36.800 | thinking about my dad, I'm going to be rebuilding that memory just like I can be rebuilding some

00:06:40.480 | idea of my future in my head. I'm rebuilding it as I go. And so they say that your past is a living

00:06:45.680 | part of who you are in the present, and you're the one who creates it. But there's one other

00:06:49.760 | really important part. So there's the whole framing of it, the big picture of the story,

00:06:52.480 | but there's also the filtering of it. That's the focus. So as an example, if I'm looking back on

00:06:56.480 | the last five months, as I gave an example, or the last even five weeks, I can look for the ways in

00:07:02.240 | which I've been a loser, right? I can look for all the ways in which I've failed over the last five

00:07:05.840 | weeks. And that's me filtering for and searching for certain things. And that's often what people

00:07:11.360 | do is they'll look for the ways in which things are going wrong. And instead, you can proactively

00:07:16.880 | look for the ways that things are going right. I can look for the ways in which I've made progress

00:07:20.400 | and I've learned things that my past self didn't know. It's just ultimately up to your control.

00:07:26.320 | I'll give a smaller example. So as an example, and we actually do this. We actually do this all

00:07:32.800 | the time. Our brains are always reshaping the meaning of the past constantly. But I just want

00:07:37.440 | the listener to know, and even you know, and hopefully you can ask me questions. I hope

00:07:41.360 | we can make it practical. I just want you to understand that in the present, you're the one

00:07:44.800 | shaping the past. And hopefully we can get to the point where we're talking about how it's

00:07:47.600 | the future that determines the present. But on a small scale, like, let me give an example.

00:07:52.880 | So like I have, we have six kids, we actually have literally a seventh one living with us right now.

00:07:57.440 | It's crazy. So we adopted three kids from the foster system. We also have three of our own.

00:08:00.880 | But right now, you're just talking to me at an odd time. So like I, we literally have a seventh,

00:08:06.320 | you know, 15 year olds from Guatemala living with us, who's, it may be permanent, it may not be.

00:08:11.440 | But I'll give you a small example of how the present can determine the meaning of the past.

00:08:14.800 | Me as a father of six, I'm 35 years old, I fall flat on my face 24/7. I don't even know what I'm

00:08:19.760 | doing. I'm learning on the fly. And as a result, you know, my 15 year old son, we adopted him when

00:08:25.440 | he was 10. I often do stupid stuff, like overreact and get mad at him and stuff like that for stuff

00:08:30.240 | that really doesn't matter. And so like I could, you know, like, maybe a day or two ago, I, you

00:08:36.800 | know, I, I did something where it's kind of like a, you know, a flubbed father thing. But the cool

00:08:43.600 | part is, is that I know that in the present, I can turn that into something that happened for me and

00:08:48.000 | for him, and that I'm not the byproduct of what happened. So I can go back really simply and

00:08:52.000 | apologize, right? And say, "Look, Caleb, super sorry that that happened. Here's where I was

00:08:56.160 | coming from. I see that I was handling that wrong." Boom. The meaning of that conversation has now

00:09:00.800 | changed. And so just, it's just really empowering to know that it does not really matter what

00:09:05.280 | happened. It matters what you do about it in the present, and that you can always flip whatever

00:09:08.960 | happened into something that's useful rather than something that is kind of utilizing you. Like,

00:09:13.280 | how I see it is you can either be used by the past or you can use it.

00:09:15.840 | So let's take an example of someone who's looking for a job right now and kind of

00:09:21.920 | interviewed three times and it was a disaster. The idea is, you know, to stop thinking,

00:09:29.440 | "Okay, I did this three times incorrectly." And more think, "Okay, maybe here are the things

00:09:35.120 | that I did wrong. Now I know them. And now in my future self, I'm not going to do them anymore. So

00:09:39.360 | I'm actually even better because of it." Would that be a way to apply?

00:09:43.600 | Yeah. So like, events have no meaning in and of themselves. So those three things,

00:09:49.040 | those three failed job applications, they don't have to be considered negatives. That is meaning

00:09:55.840 | that is placed upon it by the person. And now they're making it personal. And now they're like,

00:10:00.800 | literally equating it to their self-worth. "Oh, I must be..." And so all of that stuff is psychology

00:10:06.080 | being placed on those three things. I don't place my psychology on those three things.

00:10:09.760 | If I heard about your friend who failed three job applications, do you think I'm going to

00:10:15.120 | personalize that towards myself? And I'm going to feel like a loser for that friend's...

00:10:18.160 | So I'm not personalizing it. So one key thing is just not personalizing your own things.

00:10:22.320 | But yeah, for those three things, that person can flip those three things into something amazing.

00:10:30.160 | Clearly, they can learn from it. What were all the things that they learned from one, two, and three?

00:10:34.400 | How did they actually get better from one, two, and three? So this is now just analyzing the past

00:10:38.400 | in different ways. What was different about one, two, and three? Now, based on where they're at

00:10:41.760 | now, what do they now know that they wouldn't have known before? Maybe now they can go out and get a

00:10:44.880 | totally different job because now they know certain things they would have never known before.

00:10:48.320 | It's just always knowing that in the present, you have power over your past, and that in the present,

00:10:52.640 | you can take whatever happened in the past, even if it was something terrible, and you can flip it

00:10:56.480 | into something absolutely amazing. I think a really good phrase for that would be "anti-fragile."

00:11:00.640 | Just no matter what happens, you're now better as a result.

00:11:02.800 | Okay. So that's reframing the past. Are there other kind of core fundamental things that you

00:11:08.480 | need to be thinking about for a 10x mindset? No, no, no. I just want the orientation of time

00:11:13.200 | to be this way, that it's not the past. Most people, they're using time like they think about

00:11:18.480 | the outside time. They're thinking, "Okay, it's the past that determines the present,

00:11:22.160 | and it's the present that determines the future." The more powerful approach is that it's always

00:11:26.000 | the future that determines who I am in the present, which if you really think about it,

00:11:28.960 | that makes a lot of sense. As an example, I wanted to get a PhD. So obviously, that goal

00:11:33.600 | shaped me getting into PhD programs. I didn't go off and do something different. I followed my goal.

00:11:39.840 | So it makes sense. But when you really get down to it, there's a lot of research that shows...

00:11:45.520 | And this is Harvard research and stuff. There's a guy named Daniel Gilbert. He gave a TED Talk

00:11:49.920 | called "The Psychology of Your Future Self." But the thing that's really interesting is this,

00:11:54.000 | and it fits very much with a 2x mindset. So honestly, we're pretty much at the point where

00:11:57.680 | we can drill into 10x versus 2x and get as strategic as you want. And usually, I honestly

00:12:02.480 | don't go this far, but I know you just said you like having deeper conversations. And so I'm just

00:12:06.320 | happy to give that, honestly, some of the more fundamental psychology. But what happened with

00:12:10.160 | Daniel Gilbert's research is this, and there's a lot of research on this at this point.

00:12:13.360 | When most people think about their future self, what they do is they take who they are now,

00:12:19.920 | and they use that view of my current self, so the person you're talking to right now.

00:12:24.400 | And I just use that as the basis for who I think I'll be in the future. Even in 5 years,

00:12:28.160 | 10 years from now, I'm like, "Yeah, how could I see myself being someone different? This is

00:12:32.320 | the only person I think I am." And they call it the end of history illusion in psychology.

00:12:38.560 | But the main thing here is that it leads people to assuming that they're going to pretty much

00:12:42.960 | be the same person even long into the future. And even teenagers do this. And the research

00:12:46.880 | shows that teenagers, they think that they're going to grow as much as people in their 60s,

00:12:51.760 | 70s, and 80s actually do. So even youth don't think they're going to change that much when

00:12:55.600 | we're all going to transform a lot. But the basic problem here is that most people just don't

00:13:01.040 | imagine their future selves. They don't take time to think about it, let alone a 10x future self.

00:13:05.120 | But most people, they don't take the time to actually imagine and think about a totally

00:13:10.320 | different future self. The truth is your future self is going to be totally different than who

00:13:12.800 | you are right now. Three, five, 10 years from now, you're not going to be the same person.

00:13:16.560 | You're not going to see the world the same way. But if you're someone who's actively using your

00:13:20.800 | imagination to create that future self, and then to the idea of using a 10x mindset, you're making it

00:13:27.280 | seem absurd. There's no way that that could be my future self. There's no way that that's possible.

00:13:31.680 | What you want to do is ultimate. Yeah.

00:13:34.560 | Just break down the difference. You're not saying you need to imagine your future.

00:13:39.680 | You need to imagine your future self. I'm thinking about who you are in the future.

00:13:42.960 | Yeah, yeah. Maybe give an example. Because I think some people hear like, "Oh,

00:13:46.400 | imagine your future self." And they immediately jump to, "Okay, I've got this job. I've got this

00:13:51.120 | hat." And those aren't the self part. That's the future part. What's the difference there? Maybe

00:13:56.240 | through an example. That's a really cool question. Obviously, when you're thinking about your future

00:14:00.880 | self, probably inherent in that is your future. What is my future self doing? What's their life

00:14:05.520 | like? What are they up to? Let me give an example. When I was a PhD student, my future self was

00:14:14.400 | someone who... And I did not have these skills or capabilities or anything at that point. But my

00:14:19.200 | future self was someone who was a professional author. I had never had a blog or anything like

00:14:23.840 | that. But I wanted to be making high six figures to provide for my family. That was the future

00:14:29.200 | self I was assuming back when I was a first year graduate student. I want to be a professional

00:14:34.000 | author. I want to be able to write books for a living and provide for my family. And that version

00:14:38.640 | of my future self could do things that the current version of me could not, such as think in certain

00:14:42.480 | ways, teach in certain ways, write... I was honestly just writing really good books. And I

00:14:47.680 | had none of those capabilities at that point when I was thinking about it. But that was who I wanted

00:14:52.480 | to be. That was what I wanted my life to look like. And from where I was sitting, that was

00:14:56.880 | seemingly impossible. The odds of, for example, getting a six-figure book deal, that's 1% of 1%.

00:15:01.920 | But I think one thing that's really important here is that that might seem impossible if you're

00:15:09.520 | judging that future based on your current situation, or worse yet, if you're judging it on

00:15:14.080 | your past. The cool part about using the future to determine the present is that now you don't

00:15:19.760 | have to deal with typical odds or things like that. It really doesn't matter what your current

00:15:23.120 | situation is. You're letting the future, whatever you want that to be, be the driver of what you do

00:15:27.920 | here and now. That's the driver of the decisions you make. It's the driver of the friends you have.

00:15:33.360 | It's the driver of the choices you make. And so now the present really isn't the determining factor.

00:15:39.680 | The future is the determining factor and how committed you are to that future.

00:15:43.360 | - Yeah, one thing that brings to mind is looking back at examples in your past of times that things

00:15:51.680 | happened that you never would have thought were possible. I remember my wife worked at Lyft and

00:15:59.360 | she was running the partnerships team. And because of that, there was a time where they were exploring

00:16:03.440 | a partnership with NASCAR. And we ended up going to the Daytona 500 and getting VIP treatment in

00:16:11.680 | the pit lanes. Now, I wasn't a big NASCAR fan, so this was never going to be in my future. But had

00:16:16.960 | I been a big NASCAR fan, I don't know if I could have connected the dots to imagine a world where

00:16:21.280 | I would have been able to have that access. And then randomly, my wife, through a partnership,

00:16:25.600 | it happened. And so what's going through my mind right now as I think about my future self

00:16:30.320 | is just trying to embrace the fact that in my past, things have happened that I never would

00:16:36.000 | have thought possible and kind of just kind of almost making it second nature to expect that

00:16:40.880 | that is possible as I try to make that kind of vision for my future self. Because there are

00:16:45.600 | things that I would love to be able to do. Let's take an example. Let's say you want to give a

00:16:51.200 | TED Talk. You're like, well, I don't know how that would happen. It's like, well, you don't need to

00:16:53.920 | know how it happened. You just need to know that it is a thing and that other things that you didn't

00:16:59.120 | think could happen have happened. And leave it at that for now. I love what you just said.

00:17:05.440 | I love what you just said on so many different levels. One thing I would invite you to ponder

00:17:10.240 | on, and you can ponder this directly and the listener can as well, but

00:17:12.960 | go back to the beginning of 2023. So you and I are filming this or recording this in November of

00:17:20.000 | 2023. So go back 10 months to the version of you at the beginning of this year. January 1st, you,

00:17:26.160 | Chris, is sitting there. Are there things that have happened so far in 2023 that the version of

00:17:31.280 | you at the beginning of this year would have thought were impossible? My wife is full time

00:17:35.040 | on all the hacks with me now. And if you would ask me January 1st, whether that would be possible,

00:17:39.840 | I probably would have said no. I mean, if you had really pushed me, I probably would have gotten to

00:17:43.360 | the point that I would have said maybe there's a way, right? It's possible. But what is, you know,

00:17:50.800 | what is Amy going to be doing at the end of the year? It would have been very low on the list.

00:17:54.960 | There you go. See, so that's really awesome. Yeah, I love what you're saying. So I'm happy

00:18:03.840 | now to kind of explain in really simple terms the difference between 10x and 2x. But I think we have

00:18:07.840 | a little bit of the foundation in place. One of the things you said that I think is extremely

00:18:11.920 | important is the idea that there are certain things, if you're looking back, that your past

00:18:16.640 | self would have never anticipated, never expected. They couldn't have even seen it coming, let alone

00:18:23.520 | plan for it. And now it's just now part of your normal life. That's the thing about us living in

00:18:28.000 | the present. And that's the thing about how memory works is that our memories are really funny.

00:18:34.320 | Our memories try to make things in the past really smooth and tidy, even though they were

00:18:38.240 | not smooth and tidy. To the idea of the future, one really important point is that if you think

00:18:43.680 | that something's out of the category of possible, you won't even think about it. You won't even

00:18:49.040 | entertain it. You won't even go for it. And so part of the goal of kind of a 10x philosophy

00:18:55.120 | is to actually pursue things that are impossible so that your brain can start actually trying to

00:19:00.720 | solve it. Usually, your brain is only solving what it's working on. And so if you actually

00:19:04.640 | start going for an impossible goal, there's a really great quote from this by Dan Sullivan.

00:19:08.800 | Dan Sullivan was the co-author of this book. I wrote three books with him. He's 80 years old.

00:19:12.480 | He's been coaching extremely high successful entrepreneurs for 50 years. And so he's got some

00:19:18.400 | really amazing ideas. But basically, one of his quotes that I love is he says, "Your eyes can

00:19:24.320 | only see and your ears can only hear what your brain is looking for." So I say that to say that

00:19:30.560 | you can actually train your brain to find the needle in the haystack. In psychology, we actually

00:19:34.560 | call it selective attention. So the main thing here is that you want to make your vision something

00:19:39.840 | that you think is impossible. Here's kind of how I think about it in really simple terms.

00:19:44.320 | Think about your future self or your next 10x. You can think about a 10x kind of like you going

00:19:49.360 | through a cycle in life. In the next three years, my life might look ridiculously different. I might

00:19:54.640 | have 10x the net worth. I might have sold 10 times more books. It doesn't have to literally be 10x,

00:19:58.880 | but it's you at a totally different level, even at a level that you can't fully even

00:20:02.640 | fathom right now. And one of the ways that I think is useful to look at it,

00:20:06.160 | I actually think that you can go through that process, that cycle, every three to five years.

00:20:12.080 | I actually think going for it in three years. So I invite you, as I'm explaining this, to actually go

00:20:15.840 | back three years. Think back on where your life was at three years ago, end of 2020. And I want

00:20:21.120 | you to think how fundamentally different your life is, your lifestyle, your focus, your vision.

00:20:25.520 | Think about how different it is from at the end of 2020. I just want you to think about that,

00:20:29.600 | because chances are your life is incomparably different than where it was three years ago.

00:20:35.520 | I believe you've gone 10x, as we're describing it, which is going through a fundamental leap.

00:20:39.760 | Well, one thing that I want you all to think about and I want you to think about is

00:20:44.160 | each 10x, how I view it, so mine is call it three years away.

00:20:48.480 | You not only achieve more externally. In psychology, they have it in two camps.

00:20:54.480 | You have achievement, which is external accomplishment. You also have aspiration,

00:20:57.600 | which is honestly internal development, true growth, character development, skill development.

00:21:01.840 | I believe that every "10x," so me in the next three years, you in the last three years, and you

00:21:08.480 | in the next three, whatever it is. It doesn't have to exactly be three. I just challenge you to try

00:21:12.240 | to go for it every three years. You actually achieve and grow more in that 10x in those three

00:21:18.400 | years than you have in all of your life combined to this point. I'll give an example on Dan Sullivan.

00:21:23.840 | So Dan Sullivan actually doesn't do it every three years. He does it every 10. I just am

00:21:27.200 | younger, maybe, and I like breaking stuff. He is 80 years old. And so he's saying, "Okay,

00:21:32.640 | I'm 80 years old. I'm going into a new decade. I want to grow and accomplish more in the next

00:21:37.600 | decade than I have all the way up everything leading up to age 80. From zero to 80, in the

00:21:41.840 | next 10 years, I'm going to grow and accomplish far more than I have all to this point."

00:21:45.920 | I think right now, I'm in the mindset, and I imagine most people listening,

00:21:50.080 | of they've connected this idea of being able to think bigger, but there's probably some fundamentals

00:21:55.440 | to that process of what you need to know to go through the mechanics that I think would be good

00:22:00.240 | to touch on. Let me just provide the initial framework, and then, honestly, we'll go straight

00:22:04.000 | into the hows of honestly how to achieve impossible goals fast. That's about really what it is.

00:22:09.040 | So the difference between 10x and 2x, we frame it based on the 80/20 principle. So the 80/20

00:22:15.520 | principle is very famous, very successful. 80% of your success comes from 20% of what you do,

00:22:19.760 | right? We really kind of framed that in a different way and based it on identity.

00:22:24.320 | But the main idea here is this. If you want to go for 2x in anything, or if that's your

00:22:27.920 | orientation towards life, if that's your approach towards life, what that means is that you're

00:22:31.680 | taking the past and the present, and you're using that to create the future. And using the 80/20

00:22:36.160 | principle, what that means is if you want to go for 2x, you can keep 80% of everything you're

00:22:39.920 | doing right now. Literally. If you want to double your podcast, you're well on your way.

00:22:44.320 | You can keep 80% of yourself, 80% of how you're doing things. You just have to improve 20%.

00:22:48.960 | You're already just riding most of the momentum. So you can keep 80%.

00:22:52.480 | But if you want to go for 10x, given that it's a seemingly impossible future,

00:22:57.520 | and you're letting that future filter and determine who you are in the present,

00:23:00.880 | because it's so big, because it's so seemingly impossible, almost nothing you're doing right

00:23:05.840 | now is going to get you there. That's one of the beauties of going for impossible goals.

00:23:09.120 | And there's actually a lot of research on this, is that if you're going for a small goal,

00:23:13.200 | even a 2x goal, which may seem big, but if you're going for, "I want to make 10% more money this

00:23:19.360 | year," or "I want to make 20%," or even 2x, because it's so similar to the present,

00:23:24.640 | almost everything you're doing right now will work. That's why 80% of what you're doing right

00:23:29.280 | now you can keep. But if you're going for something that big, going for something that 10x,

00:23:34.080 | because it is so big, almost nothing you're doing right now is going to work.

00:23:38.400 | And so the main point here is that 80% of what you're doing right now has to go.

00:23:42.880 | 80% of what you're doing right now got you here, but it won't get you there.

00:23:46.240 | And so that future becomes a massive filter. That's part of why you want to use your future

00:23:50.880 | as a filter, because it allows you to be really sensitive to almost everything I'm doing right

00:23:55.840 | now is not 10x. Almost everything I'm doing right now reflects my past, but not that future.

00:24:00.800 | And so to go 10x, you can only keep the few things that really matter, and you've got to get

00:24:06.640 | 10 times better at those few things, and you've got to let go of literally 80% of what's going on.

00:24:12.080 | 80% of what you're doing now is noise, and it's honestly holding you back.

00:24:16.640 | So that's one of the keys is you want a future that's so big, call it impossible,

00:24:22.320 | but then you can actually look at your present from that future, and you can recognize that

00:24:26.480 | almost everything you're doing right now, call it 80%, is now a distraction. It's now a waste

00:24:31.120 | of time. And then it forces you to find the few things that really matter, those few things with

00:24:34.800 | huge upside, and to go deep on those. Are you getting rid of the things that

00:24:39.120 | are in that 80%? Or are you finding a way to outsource them? Or how do you think about

00:24:44.640 | trimming the fat of that 80%? It's everything. So there are two.

00:24:51.680 | There are two ways of looking at it. I think fundamentally, it's now no longer a part of your

00:24:57.200 | life. So when it comes to time, your time and my time is fundamentally a byproduct of my attention

00:25:06.080 | and your attention. So attention is more fundamental than time. If my attention is

00:25:11.200 | scattered on the 80% of things, and I'm at the surface of a thousand things, then my time is

00:25:15.200 | going to be all over the place. I'm not going to get much use out of that time. And so the first

00:25:20.400 | answer to the question is really about absolutely the 80% has nothing to do with your time or

00:25:25.280 | attention anymore. Now, whether or not it just gets deleted or whether it gets delegated depends

00:25:30.080 | on it. As an example, yeah, there may be certain things that it's worth keeping, but absolutely,

00:25:39.520 | you have nothing to do with it anymore. Fully delegated. And in some situations, that may make

00:25:44.720 | sense. And in a lot of situations, it's just got to go. It's not like it goes in a negative way.

00:25:53.120 | It's more just a recognition that it's what got you here, but not there. And so you honestly can

00:25:58.080 | have gratitude for it. The 80%, by the way, from a psychology standpoint, is the things that you're

00:26:03.120 | already extremely good at. I consider you actually already have mastery over it. So this could be

00:26:08.960 | someone's job. And emotionally, we hold onto these things out of security. The 80% is about

00:26:13.760 | security. The 20% is about freedom. You're choosing it, but it's scary. It takes commitment

00:26:17.840 | and courage to go for the 10x and for the future, whereas you keep the 80% because it's secure.

00:26:23.840 | And it's not just a job, right? It's not just a role. It could be, honestly, me waking up and

00:26:29.920 | staring at my phone. That might be in my 80%. But if I keep doing that, there's no way I'm

00:26:33.600 | going to get to my future. But I do it because it's comfortable. It's something I'm really good

00:26:37.360 | at. I'm really good at waking up and looking at my phone. I'm really good at-- so everything in

00:26:41.280 | the 80% are things that you do out of emotional security, out of habit. And I'll give some

00:26:47.120 | granular examples. And there are deeper concepts here. Like one of the things I talk about is

00:26:54.240 | raising the floor, which is raising your minimum commitment and then beginning to say no to

00:26:57.840 | everything below that commitment. Like as an example, if I want to massively raise my floor,

00:27:02.560 | like the floor on what I say yes to-- and by the way, from a psychology standpoint,

00:27:05.680 | your floor as a person is your minimum standard. And as people, we all have standards, right? We

00:27:11.360 | all have a standard. But you can know your standard by what you say yes to, right?

00:27:15.520 | And so if I sit and scroll on Facebook for four hours a day, then obviously that's a part of--

00:27:20.080 | that's within my standards because I say yes to it. If I then rose the standard really,

00:27:24.160 | really high and said, this is the new standard. This is the minimum standard. This is the minimum

00:27:27.920 | commitment, right? And your identity is what you're most committed to. Then I now have to

00:27:32.240 | say no to things that I used to say yes to. And I have to use that as the filter or the

00:27:36.080 | determining factor in what I say yes and no to. That then starts to be pretty intense.

00:27:40.560 | But let me give a personal example of something going on right now. This one's a little bit

00:27:45.440 | more intense. So the 80% could be a lot of things, by the way. The 80% could be a habit.

00:27:51.360 | It could be a friend. It could be a person. It could be a job. A lot of people-- I hate to even

00:27:56.480 | voice this one. But sometimes when I share this with people, some people are like, it's my husband,

00:28:01.120 | right? Because they've been in a horrible marriage. I'm not trying to push divorce.

00:28:04.400 | But a lot of people, they know that there are a lot of things that are out of alignment. And

00:28:08.640 | that if they're really committed to that future and let that future shape who they are-- there's

00:28:12.080 | a lot of things that they're holding onto right now just out of emotional security.

00:28:16.400 | One thing that I'm doing right now-- and I'll give two hyper practical examples for myself

00:28:21.200 | as people are thinking through. I actually told you about this before. So I actually believe in

00:28:25.520 | pursuing impossible goals on a 90-day basis. So I was talking to you about the bigger picture,

00:28:29.600 | 10x. That's my future self in three years. And it's huge. It's impossible. I don't even know

00:28:34.640 | how to do it. That's actually one of the benefits is that you don't know how to do it. If you don't

00:28:38.080 | know how to do it, then you're no longer operating from your past knowledge. Now you have to go and

00:28:41.520 | find those new pathways, those new people. And so that's the whole idea of your brain-- we'll

00:28:45.600 | find what it's looking for. So I pursue impossible goals on a 90-day basis simply because I don't

00:28:52.320 | know how to do it and simply because it's such a high filter that it forces me to say no to almost

00:28:56.800 | everything I'm now doing. And it forces me to filter from that really high floor where I have

00:29:01.920 | to just make hard decisions 24/7 and only do the few things-- call it those 20% things that really

00:29:06.560 | have huge upsides. So as an example, two examples-- one short-term, one long-term. And then we go

00:29:11.360 | wherever, but I'm just giving you the practicals. So I have some ridiculous impossible goals even

00:29:16.640 | literally between now and the end of the year. There's like two or three of them. Probably not

00:29:20.400 | going to achieve any of them, to be honest with you. And it does not even really matter.

00:29:23.280 | But the point is that there's such a high filter that then you have to choose different things.

00:29:29.040 | So I gave you the example of my 90-day goals between now and the end of the year-- so big,

00:29:33.760 | so intense, and there's not a lot of them-- that then I had to look at my calendar for the last 90

00:29:38.160 | days of the year and just realized-- my assistant was like, "Ben, if you're actually going to get

00:29:42.400 | anywhere near doing those, we have to wipe almost everything off your calendar. You have 20 podcast

00:29:47.360 | schedules," as an example. We got rid of almost all of them. And so that stuff became part of the

00:29:53.280 | 80%. And it used to be in my 20. It used to be really good. But when you start going for really

00:29:58.160 | high goals, stuff gets filtered out a lot harder. And then you have to make the hard decisions. Am

00:30:02.160 | I going to let this stuff go? It wasn't just podcasts. It's other things. But the whole point

00:30:06.640 | here is that when the future is really big, then you have to filter the present a lot harder.

00:30:11.040 | And then it's up to you if you want to let go of some of the stuff that no longer fits,

00:30:14.720 | and if you want to go all in or even more in on the stuff that will really take you places.

00:30:19.760 | Now, you said, "It's so ambitious. You're probably not going to achieve it."

00:30:24.480 | When I was in Venture Capital, one of the things that I would always say about founders is that

00:30:30.640 | they almost have this irrational belief that they're going to succeed in something that

00:30:34.320 | seems impossible. It seems like you both have these really ambitious 10x goals,

00:30:39.360 | but you seem pretty rational about the fact that you're not going to achieve them.

00:30:42.240 | Does that make it harder to actually make progress? Harder to be in that 10x mindset

00:30:48.880 | if you don't fully commit to the fact that it might happen?

00:30:51.680 | I didn't say I'm not fully committed. I just said I don't care if I achieve it.

00:30:55.280 | That may sound like a contradiction, and it's not. I'm tweeting, Mike. No, go ahead.

00:31:02.240 | I might have misheard, but I thought you also said not only you might not achieve them,

00:31:08.000 | but practically, they might not be possible. I guess if you believe that they might not be

00:31:14.000 | possible, can you also commit to them fully? Can you be fully committed?

00:31:18.080 | Yeah.

00:31:18.720 | It's a beautiful question. It's a beautiful question. The answer is yes,

00:31:22.480 | and what's interesting is, the only reason that you don't think they're—the only reason—Dr.

00:31:28.000 | Alan Bernard, he's a brilliant decision-making theorist, and he works with huge companies and

00:31:32.960 | stuff like that, but he's basically one of the most knowledgeable people on a concept called

00:31:37.120 | constraint theory. For everyone who—I'm not going to get into the mumbo-jumbo of it,

00:31:41.040 | but this is one of the core theories in decision-making and in business strategy.

00:31:45.440 | But the main thing is that he actually does invite people to pursue impossible goals,

00:31:50.400 | one, so that they stop operating on their past assumptions,

00:31:54.800 | and two, so that they can start finding the few paths or people that might get them there.

00:32:01.680 | So that's the 20% of things that create all the results. And so he asks the question,

00:32:05.520 | and he has us ask the question, "That would be impossible unless." Unless what? Unless what?

00:32:11.600 | And so that goal that may seem impossible, it would be impossible for sure from your current

00:32:17.760 | situation, but what would need to be true for it to even potentially become potentially possible?

00:32:22.480 | By even just entertaining that, again, your eyes can only see and your ears can only hear

00:32:26.000 | what your brain is looking for. And so once you start thinking about it and maybe getting

00:32:30.000 | more information and start actually moving forward, then you might actually start finding

00:32:34.240 | some of the pathways. But another thing as well is that if you actually start letting go of things

00:32:39.840 | that we're calling the 80%, things that are good but not great, or things that have maybe 2x

00:32:45.680 | potential, but you already know they don't have 10 or 100x potential. As an example, like me,

00:32:51.840 | I'm letting go in 2024 of what effectively is about 70% of my business income. I'm letting go

00:32:58.800 | of it so that I can go all in on something that... Because I believe that that side of my business

00:33:03.120 | only has "2x potential." If I keep investing in it, yeah, I can make great money. But I know that

00:33:10.000 | it doesn't have... It will hold up. It'll really limit my ceiling in terms of what's possible if

00:33:17.280 | I keep investing in it. And so I'm willing to let that go so that I can put more energy and effort

00:33:22.800 | into this thing that I know it's not guaranteed, but I know it has 10 or 100x potential if I really

00:33:28.720 | go into it. And so, yeah, I mean, you have to make those tough decisions if you want to go for this.

00:33:34.800 | And let's talk about those tough decisions because I think someone hearing you just say that is

00:33:40.080 | probably thinking, "Okay, I've got this job. I've got a family." And practically, most people do not

00:33:45.120 | have a family as large as yours. So you could speak from authority in that regard. But if I want

00:33:51.920 | to go in on my 10x future, I got to quit my job. My job is my income. You don't have to quit it

00:33:57.040 | today. But yeah, go ahead and ask. Ask the question. Yeah. I got to quit my job. I got to

00:34:00.720 | lose my income to bet on this thing because I need the time in my day to make it happen.

00:34:04.400 | That's probably a pretty scary thing for almost everyone to do or process.

00:34:10.480 | Yeah. So there's two things here. The difference between wanting something and needing it. No one

00:34:16.000 | needs a 10x future. But the goal is that you start doing things that you want, not things that you

00:34:20.640 | think you need. And what I'm saying is that something isn't the 80% because you think you

00:34:24.080 | need it. Even an addiction is something that someone's doing, not because they want to anymore,

00:34:27.840 | but because they literally think that they need it. That could be literally a straight up addiction,

00:34:32.640 | or it could be a job. You're only doing it because you think you need it, not because you want it.

00:34:38.080 | And this kind of psychology and this kind of approach to life, what often happens to people,

00:34:42.640 | and I know your audience, because you told it to me, a lot of these people are honestly

00:34:46.240 | great, successful people. A lot of times people only do things because they have to.

00:34:50.480 | And once you get to a certain place in your life where you actually have your needs met,

00:34:53.760 | people stop having goals because they honestly can't think of anything more that they need.

00:34:59.120 | And the higher psychology, call it what Maslow would call self-actualization, is you actually

00:35:05.760 | do things out of want, out of intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic motivation.

00:35:09.520 | In the philosophy terms they call it, you go from freedom from to freedom to. So freedom from means

00:35:16.320 | you're freeing yourself from, right? You're freeing yourself from poverty, from ignorance,

00:35:19.760 | from whatever it may be. And that's often how all we're thinking about is escaping from things we

00:35:24.560 | no longer want. I don't want to have to do X, Y, and Z. But the only purpose of doing all that is

00:35:30.800 | to get to the point eventually where you have the freedom to do something because you actually want

00:35:35.840 | to do it. But to the practical point, if someone's listening and they're saying, "Okay, if I actually

00:35:43.360 | was to entertain what I want, and I actually was to allow myself to even think about it,

00:35:47.600 | maybe journal about it, imagine it for a second, because I stopped doing that a long time ago,

00:35:51.520 | and instead I'm letting my past, my present dictate my future."

00:35:56.400 | I mean, it takes time, just like Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than

00:36:00.880 | knowledge." But it takes time to give yourself the space. One of the core stories that we told

00:36:05.440 | in this book is we told the story about Michelangelo, Michelangelo being the sculptor in

00:36:09.760 | Italy who sculpted the beautiful David, right? And the Pope asked David, "How the heck did you do it?"

00:36:16.320 | And he said, "I just took away everything that's not David." And so if you could think about it

00:36:21.200 | this way, you're stripping away more and more of the layers of the ways in which you're not being

00:36:27.360 | honest to yourself. It's very hard to be fully honest with yourself. There's a lot of different

00:36:31.200 | things coming at us. Yeah, I got to pay the bills. Yeah, I've got to, whatever it may be,

00:36:36.720 | the distractions of the world. There's a lot of things that block you from being able to actually

00:36:41.280 | consider, let alone think about what you truly want to do, and then to begin actually thinking

00:36:46.960 | about how to go about doing it. But I just like the idea of the layers of stripping away everything

00:36:51.040 | that's... And the 80% is what we're talking about that you want to strip away, which is the things

00:36:54.960 | that you don't actually want, but you're only doing because you think you need them. And so it

00:36:59.760 | takes time. Every time you're making progress. The thing that I will say is you don't have to

00:37:04.400 | strip away the 80% all at once. That's actually something I would advise against doing. Not only

00:37:09.120 | do I think it's... I actually don't think it's possible. There's things in my 80% right now that

00:37:13.200 | I'm holding onto that I'll get... You get rid of them over time. By actually getting rid of them

00:37:18.320 | though, what I mean is you're uncommitting to them. Because everything in your life right now

00:37:22.160 | is in your life because you're still committed to it. All the clothes in your closet are there

00:37:26.000 | because you're committed to it. If you threw some of them away, now they're no longer a part

00:37:30.800 | of your commitment. Everything in your life right now is there because you're still committed to it.

00:37:34.560 | That's the idea of death standards. That's the idea of identity. Once you actually...

00:37:38.000 | - Can you uncommit to something without getting rid of it? Could you say, "I've decided I'm no

00:37:42.080 | longer committed to this job. I'm going to pursue a 10X life, which involves... I'm no longer going

00:37:47.600 | to be a dentist. I'm going to own a winery." And you could say, "I'm now committed to that,

00:37:53.920 | but I don't have to shut down my dental practice tomorrow to not commit to it."

00:37:57.600 | - That's part of the process. Yeah. So if that person who's a dentist or has a job,

00:38:05.520 | is starting to entertain... And it doesn't have to be work-related, by the way. But it can be,

00:38:10.400 | certainly. And we can use that as an example. But let's just say we start to explore our future

00:38:15.120 | self. And even a 10X future self that seems impossible to us, but that would be incredible

00:38:20.080 | if we were honest with ourselves and with other people, which we're scared to do. By the way,

00:38:23.440 | a really great quote from Alcoholics Anonymous is, "All progress starts by telling the truth."

00:38:28.960 | So if I'm going to start to actually think about this, and entertain it, and be open to it,

00:38:33.200 | and imagine it, and get excited about it... And by the way, there are three levels.

00:38:37.280 | First, you go from seeing or thinking to feeling, and then you eventually get to the place of

00:38:41.680 | knowing. Those are all three levels of getting connected to your future self. First, seeing,

00:38:45.360 | then feeling, getting emotionally connected, committed, then ultimately getting to the place

00:38:48.080 | of knowing, which is ultimately confidence. But what this person could do is... A lot of people

00:38:56.560 | have heard the quote, "Never let the urgent get in the way of the important." What I'm saying

00:39:00.720 | is that 10X future self or your future self is what's important. It's not urgent. It's what you

00:39:05.200 | want. It's not what you need. What's urgent is what you think you need. And that's why it's

00:39:09.520 | keeping all of your time. And so if you just even start placing a little bit more of the

00:39:13.760 | important before the urgent, it doesn't have to mean you have to get rid of the job all at once,

00:39:17.760 | but let's start exploring it. Maybe right now you're spending one hour a week or less. Maybe

00:39:23.760 | right now you're spending zero hours a week even thinking about, "What if we could engineer in

00:39:27.040 | just three to five hours a week?" Where you're actually starting to explore that, think about it,

00:39:30.400 | invest in it, ask questions about it. You're still keeping that job, but maybe we know that in three

00:39:34.560 | to six months, you're going to replace yourself, or you're going to start hiring on someone else,

00:39:38.400 | and you're going to spend now in six months from now, you're going to have half of your time in

00:39:42.640 | the 20%. Right now, you've got all your time in the 80%, and you're stripping more and more away.

00:39:47.200 | Also, honestly, if we're just talking about the average American, the average American spends

00:39:52.560 | five, eight hours on their phone a day. And so there's a lot of stuff in the 80% that can be

00:39:56.720 | stripped away that's honestly just bad habits. It doesn't all have to be work-related. You could

00:40:02.800 | strip away five hours a week on stuff that you already know is a distraction and just invest

00:40:07.760 | that in the 20%. And over time, the goal is to build your life in that way.

00:40:12.000 | So you said it's not all work. What are some examples you've seen of

00:40:16.560 | 10X for future selves on the personal side?

00:40:20.960 | Yeah. So as an example, and this is why one of the things that I think is really important here,

00:40:29.280 | that's a different conversation, is I don't view 10X purely quantitatively.

00:40:33.440 | Even though it's a number and we're saying 10X, often what happens is people only start to think

00:40:38.720 | about things like money because it's quantitative, it's easy. I really look at 10X as a qualitative.

00:40:44.480 | What I mean by that is it's a change in quality. So as an example, a child going from crawling to

00:40:49.920 | walking, I consider that a 10X. The things you can do as someone who can walk are fundamentally

00:40:56.800 | different than things you can do as a crawler. But also a transformation has occurred. You're

00:41:01.120 | no longer operating the same way and you now have new capability, new potential as a walker versus

00:41:05.840 | a crawler. And you fail a thousand times to get there. From a bigger picture standpoint, going

00:41:13.280 | from horse and buggy to a car, I consider that a 10X. We're still talking transformation, right?

00:41:18.080 | Or sorry, we're still talking about... What's the word? Transportation. We're still talking

00:41:23.920 | about transportation, horse and buggy. But now with a car, now you're not even playing the same

00:41:30.320 | game, right? And so you could think about your future self in similar ways where it's like,

00:41:36.800 | what's the version of you that's doing something different that is more in alignment with what you

00:41:44.960 | really want to be doing? And even though it's not quantitatively a 10X, qualitatively, it may be.

00:41:50.560 | Like the quality of who you are and the way you're doing, how you're doing it may be different. I

00:41:54.000 | could think about it in terms of me with my kids. I don't have to literally go 10X like in numbers,

00:41:59.840 | but I can see myself having a much different connection with my kids, especially the three

00:42:04.480 | we adopted and the teenagers where it's like, we're really engaged on a different level.

00:42:10.800 | And so it just takes time to actually clarify what does that look like at a totally different

00:42:17.040 | quality of life, quality of relationship. It could be you living in a different place, right?

00:42:20.640 | And so I try to think about it in terms of quality more than quantity.

00:42:25.840 | So what I hear is, I remember I had an interview with someone who's, funny enough, also had a lot

00:42:30.480 | of children and said that, I can't remember when during the week, but there's like a four-hour

00:42:34.880 | period during the week where the whole family just hangs out in like this room of the house,

00:42:39.760 | they call the library and they all read books together or play games and they just kind of all

00:42:42.880 | hang out. And someone might say like, I don't ever have time for that. That is the 10X version of

00:42:49.040 | myself is to have this like uninterrupted four-hour distraction-free family time.

00:42:53.840 | That could have a 10X impact long-term, especially if you think long-term and ripple effects,

00:42:59.600 | that could have a 10X impact.

00:43:01.120 | Yes, but it doesn't mean that they were spending 40 minutes and now they're going to 400 minutes,

00:43:05.440 | you know, like from a 10X standpoint.

00:43:07.760 | I agree. No, and I agree. And I think that really think, I love what you just said. Yeah,

00:43:13.120 | that it could be a 10X for me, for me to do a date night with my wife once a week.

00:43:18.640 | And quantitatively, that actually might be true. No, but what I'm saying is like,

00:43:22.880 | that might change, that might have ripple effects that over time maybe change,

00:43:27.920 | you know, change everything. So yeah, I like to think about it in those terms.

00:43:31.920 | So if I try to recap where we've been so far, understanding that kind of time is really

00:43:39.040 | an abstract concept where you can use it in different ways. And if you learn to master it

00:43:44.640 | and use your present as a way to shape your past and use your future as a way to shape your present,

00:43:50.720 | you can kind of change your mindset. You can set really ambitious goals for yourself,

00:43:56.080 | for your work. Think about what world would look like in a 10X world for you,

00:44:00.160 | not just a 2X world, and then start to cut away at all the stuff that is getting in the way.

00:44:06.640 | Where do most people, so that makes sense. I should do that. We should all do that.

00:44:10.480 | Where do you think people get stuck? Like what are the challenges to doing this

00:44:13.680 | that make it less obvious to implement than it might sound right now?

00:44:20.400 | I love your questions. I'll go a few different places. The first one is actually that people,

00:44:26.640 | even high, almost honestly, especially high achievers, you wouldn't think this, but they

00:44:31.440 | often have a very unhealthy relationship with their past. And it's because of how they approach

00:44:35.920 | their future. So as an example, even you, right? Someone who has a very successful podcast and

00:44:42.080 | stuff like that, married, has a great life. Often, and me and Dan actually wrote a different book on

00:44:46.800 | this topic, and we wrote it on purpose before we wrote 10X, because if you're going for 10X,

00:44:51.200 | obviously the future keeps getting bigger and bigger. Thus, the goalpost keeps getting moved.

00:44:54.960 | And often what happens is, no matter how much you achieve and accomplish and experience,

00:45:00.000 | if you're always measuring yourself against the future,

00:45:03.760 | then, and this creates what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill, right? Where it's like,

00:45:09.520 | it does not matter how much you've got compared to your past self, right? By all intents and

00:45:13.760 | purposes, you might be living the dreams and way beyond of your past self. But because we

00:45:19.200 | so quickly adapt in the present, and because we're always going for something bigger and bigger in

00:45:22.480 | the future, if you're always measuring yourself against that future, then you're always going to

00:45:27.680 | feel like a loser in the present, no matter where your life is. You might be competing with other

00:45:31.760 | people. Now you're in a higher socioeconomic status. And so now you're comparing yourself

00:45:36.320 | with people with Ferraris and stuff like that. And you're always feeling like a loser. It does

00:45:39.120 | not matter, right? All that stuff is relative. And so the first key is actually this. And this

00:45:46.240 | goes to the idea of mastery over your past. That no matter what I'm going for, yes,

00:45:50.640 | and this is one of the main points actually that I was going to make before when you were saying,

00:45:54.080 | how can you be fully committed to impossible goals and yet be okay if you don't achieve them?

00:45:58.720 | It goes to the point of, it does not matter what I accomplish in the next 90 days. I'm the one who

00:46:05.040 | determines what it means, right? I control my past. You, absolutely, your opinion has nothing

00:46:09.440 | to do with my past. The only person whose opinion that matters about my past is me. And so I get to

00:46:14.720 | then look at my past and look at all the ways in which I've grown, accomplished. I get to frame

00:46:18.240 | it in a positive, or I can frame it in a negative if I want and feel like a loser, but that's not

00:46:22.480 | going to help me. And so I think just a super important point for everyone to always understand,

00:46:27.920 | in my opinion, if you want to be happy and enjoy the ride, is that it's always you in the present

00:46:33.600 | and really, you're always measuring yourself backwards. That's what we kind of call it in

00:46:38.400 | the book. The book is called The Gap and the Gain, but rather than measuring yourself in the gap of

00:46:42.560 | where you want to be, which is kind of like a horizon, right? There's a horizon moving forward

00:46:46.800 | in the desert. It does not matter how many steps you take forward. You're never going to reach the

00:46:51.840 | horizon, right? That's your future self. That's your ideals. But what happens to people, and

00:46:58.000 | especially high achievers, is that they're always measuring themselves against that horizon. And as

00:47:04.000 | a result, they now feel like they're actually not doing that great in the present. So it actually

00:47:08.000 | diminishes your present and largely diminishes your past because you're not where you could be

00:47:12.880 | or should be, or you're not as good as that person. And the last thing you want to do is

00:47:16.480 | diminish your present and your past. The whole purpose of what we're talking about here is using

00:47:20.320 | the past and the future to increase the present. And so I just think it's really important to

00:47:25.520 | accurately measure your progress. You as an example, you talked about how this year you've

00:47:28.960 | accomplished things that your past self would have thought were impossible. That's beautiful.

00:47:31.920 | Don't forget that. Actually write that out. And so I'm always reminding myself, not just reminding,

00:47:38.560 | but I'm actually documenting. This is part of creating the past and mastering the past is

00:47:42.480 | actually becoming aware of all the ways in which I've actually accomplished things even in the last

00:47:48.240 | week. And I would forget about those things and even downplay them if I'm always only

00:47:55.040 | wishing I was at my future. Again, we're using the future as the filter and the decision making

00:47:59.760 | factor in the present, but we're not living in that future. We're bringing that future to the

00:48:05.040 | present. But just on a really simple terms, on a weekly basis, look back and write down all the

00:48:11.440 | wins. Write down all the ways in which you've made progress. You can even write down the things that

00:48:14.640 | went wrong that now you now know better, now the lessons. You could write down the ways in which

00:48:18.560 | you're different from your past self. Do that on a monthly basis. Go back to the beginning of the

00:48:21.440 | year. Go back three years to COVID. Write down all the things that you've actually accomplished,

00:48:25.920 | the key experiences you've had. Write down the things that you now know that you probably didn't

00:48:29.520 | know back then. That's the whole idea of keeping proper perspective. And if you can do that,

00:48:35.920 | then playing the game of going for massive futures is awesome because I don't need that

00:48:41.760 | future. Remember, I want it. And also I'm extremely blown away by even where I'm at.

00:48:46.000 | And I'm always reminded of that. So I just think that that's a crucial first step is staying in

00:48:51.120 | that what we call a gain mindset rather than a gap mindset. I think that that's an initial keynote,

00:48:55.840 | and if there's anything you want to say there. But I think that that's a fundamental foundation

00:48:59.680 | of a healthy psychology. Okay. So I think that's really helpful because what I want to try to get

00:49:05.440 | at is what are the things that people trying to push forward that create this 10x mindset,

00:49:12.880 | kind of push their life forward to a place they want to be, where are they going to get stuck?

00:49:16.160 | So it sounds like one place they'll get stuck is this. It's not necessarily framing everything in

00:49:22.400 | the right way. And so not looking at their past in the right way and whatnot. So where else...

00:49:29.040 | There's some other big spots. Yeah. I love it.

00:49:30.480 | Yeah. Where else do people get stuck?

00:49:31.680 | Let me give you... Can I give you an example?

00:49:35.040 | Yeah.

00:49:35.280 | Where would you get stuck? If you're thinking about your 10x, where are you going to get stuck?

00:49:40.080 | If you're thinking about your next big leap, you've already made some big ones. If you're

00:49:44.720 | thinking about your next big leap, what's going to get you stuck?

00:49:46.720 | I have a few. So one is prioritization. If you have... You envision this 10x version of yourself,

00:49:54.080 | there's probably more than one vector in which you're changing. So I'm not just changing what

00:49:59.040 | I do professionally, or who I hang out with, or what I say no to. It's all of those things and

00:50:05.120 | more. So figuring out where to start and what to focus on first, I think is one. Figuring out

00:50:11.520 | next steps in really ambitious things probably is another big one because you don't know that

00:50:18.880 | next step because it's not obvious. Those are a couple things that come to mind. On the spot.

00:50:24.320 | I love it. I mean, to me, I love it. And those are great spots. So one of them that I think

00:50:31.680 | is really helpful. So there's a classic book, "Good to Great" from Jim Collins. And one of the

00:50:36.480 | things that he talks about in that book is, and I'm using a business example, but I could also

00:50:40.000 | use this as a personal example. Very few companies go on to become excellent, great. Even very few

00:50:45.840 | companies go on to keep existing. Even really, really good companies that we think are good

00:50:50.240 | right now are not going to exist in five or 10 years. And what's the difference between the two?

00:50:53.840 | That's what that whole book is about. And one of the main things is that... So good will stop

00:50:58.400 | existing. Just remember that. Good is going to stop existing. It's going to fail. Good will fail.

00:51:02.640 | Only the great can even have a shot at succeeding, let alone continuing to exist. I'm just talking

00:51:06.960 | business, but this also fits with life. So the companies that become great let go of everything

00:51:12.960 | that is merely good. And so they are hyper-focused. One of the things you even told me at the beginning

00:51:18.960 | of this conversation is you like having deep conversations, right? And so the only way to get

00:51:24.080 | really good at something is to actually be focused. You use the word prioritization. And so one of the

00:51:28.560 | things that he says in that book is that if you have more than three priorities, you have zero.

00:51:32.640 | And so when you're thinking about your "10x future self," I think it's useful to think in

00:51:37.680 | terms of three priorities. What are the three core areas of life that I want to 10x? One could be

00:51:43.040 | professional. One could be personal. One could be spiritual. It could be your family. Think about

00:51:46.880 | your future self in terms of three priorities. There are three key areas that you're going to

00:51:50.000 | massively 10x. And then those priorities actually determine strategy. They determine focus. They

00:51:54.800 | determine the pathways. They determine the decisions. And so you don't need to think about

00:51:58.240 | your future self in 50 different vectors. It's actually just two or three. You've got two or

00:52:02.880 | three areas of life that you're massively going to focus on, invest in, and honestly, "take 10x."

00:52:08.880 | Take to a totally different level. There's a great quote that says, "It's better to be a meaningful

00:52:14.160 | specific than a wandering generality." So when it comes to your future self, be specific, highly

00:52:18.720 | specific, and it can't be specific in 50 ways. Maybe specific in three. I think that's one.

00:52:23.920 | So have a very specific, high future self in a few areas of priority.

00:52:29.600 | When it comes to then the practical pursuing short-term goals, I love, again, like I said,

00:52:36.720 | 90-day timeframes. I don't have to accomplish my future self in 90 days, but I can tell you

00:52:41.680 | that if I'm actually using my future self as the decision-making factor, and if I'm stripping away

00:52:46.880 | some of the 80% that I admit is holding me back, and if I'm actually starting to advance on some

00:52:53.040 | of those things that I don't know how to do yet, I'm maybe starting to learn about some of the

00:52:56.000 | pathways, or I'm starting to make some of the decisions that I wouldn't make three weeks ago,

00:52:59.840 | but I'm now starting to make now, maybe hire that person, maybe X, Y, and Z. Over a 90-day

00:53:05.600 | time period, you can actually do a lot, especially if you're operating from the future. And then at

00:53:10.880 | the end of those 90 days, look back, as I said, frame it in the positive, learn from it, and then

00:53:15.840 | set the next 90 days. And be willing to go for goals you probably won't achieve. The purpose of

00:53:21.360 | those goals is so you can properly filter the 80 from the 20, and then just let go of as much as

00:53:25.840 | you can, and make as much progress in the 20 as you can each 90 days. And you'll be shocked at

00:53:29.760 | how much your life can change on 90-day timeframes, whereas in 6, 12 months from now, you look back,

00:53:34.480 | and you're like, "Oh, yeah, so many things that I didn't even think were possible now are normal."

00:53:39.760 | And maybe in those timeframes, you did let go of something big, like a job or something. Me,

00:53:45.040 | as an example, that thing that I told you guys that I'm letting go of, it took a year for me to

00:53:51.520 | come to that conclusion, because I'm letting go of, honestly, something massive. It's not like I

00:53:55.520 | just jumped on it, but now I'm getting more and more committed to that 20% and to the peak of the

00:54:01.920 | next future self. And so, yeah, sometimes some things you can let go of fast, some things it

00:54:08.080 | might take a year of preparation to let it go. And for things that you could easily let go fast,

00:54:13.440 | but maybe it isn't obvious. Any advice there? You mentioned closet and clothes at one point,

00:54:23.440 | and I'm thinking, "Okay, in my closet, I bet there's at least half of the stuff in there

00:54:27.680 | that I don't need." And I totally understand why. Is it that you don't need or that you don't want?

00:54:34.640 | Probably both, to be honest. I have dress shirts that I'm probably never going to wear again. And

00:54:42.560 | I'm like, "I don't even like them, but I have them." But it's like, "Well, maybe one day I'll

00:54:46.800 | need this thing." There's a lot of that that goes through my mind, which is we just have some stuff

00:54:52.000 | and it's like, "Well, I don't know. How often are we really entertaining in the backyard with..."

00:54:56.720 | A lot of that stuff's in the 80%.

00:54:57.840 | Yes, totally agree. But it doesn't really take up space. I also am thinking we just cleaned out

00:55:06.560 | the kitchen and I was like, "Gosh, we have a lot of outdoor plastic glasses." If we wanted to have

00:55:12.560 | people over for whatever reason, I don't know why, we have two different... We have outdoor

00:55:18.640 | champagne glasses and outdoor wine glasses. We probably bought some bulk set of plastic wine.

00:55:23.040 | And I'm like, "Gosh, this is just stuff. I feel like we never use this." And my wife's like,

00:55:26.240 | "We should get rid of it." I'm like, "Yeah, but we don't really need the space for something else."

00:55:29.680 | Can you talk a little bit about why getting rid of it would add value even if you have the space?

00:55:36.000 | So this is what I was talking about before with raising the floor and using a new floor.

00:55:40.320 | And that you actually brought up the point of... Well, you actually brought up this point and I'm

00:55:46.720 | really glad you're going here because I'm learning a lot about you in a good way. But

00:55:49.680 | you think that you're not committed to those things because they're just there. We got space

00:55:55.360 | for them. So they're not impacting you. What I'm saying to you is this, the fact that they're in

00:56:00.480 | your house says a lot about you. The fact that they're in your house says that that is who you

00:56:06.960 | are. Because if it was not who you were, they would not be in your house. And so the fact that

00:56:13.360 | you are still holding onto those things, even in your orbit, says a lot about your current floor.

00:56:17.600 | And that if you rose the floor... And I'm not making a value judgment on your floor versus

00:56:21.040 | my floor. I'm saying we're all different people and we all have different things that we value

00:56:25.280 | and things that we're committed to. But when you raise the floor to a certain point,

00:56:28.880 | where now no longer could you... Would it ever make sense for you to wear that shirt? It's not

00:56:38.000 | even a part of your identity. And to the idea of your floor is your identity. What happens is that

00:56:44.480 | when you actually now get rid of it, saying you get rid of that set, you're now proving through

00:56:50.080 | your actions that you're a different person than you were in the past. That that no longer resonates

00:56:55.120 | with what you consider valuable or useful or... And I know you're talking about physical items

00:57:02.000 | in the house, but that same thing fits with anything that you're allowing to have any

00:57:05.920 | bandwidth on your attention. And so you can know a lot about who a person is by what they're saying

00:57:13.680 | yes to. And what they're saying yes to is how they spend their time, what's in their environment,

00:57:19.120 | who's in their environment, what they say yes and no to. And so the fact that it's still in

00:57:23.920 | your environment means you're still saying yes to it, which is a huge indicator of your identity.

00:57:28.240 | And so when you raise the floor and now you start stripping out things that no longer fit the new

00:57:32.400 | floor, fit the new filter. Filter being the filtering system of what you're saying yes and no

00:57:37.200 | to. You raise that floor. Now there's a lot of things that are below that you used to say yes

00:57:42.320 | to that now you're now saying no to out of choice. If you want to, if you want to stick with the new

00:57:46.960 | floor, you're doing it out of choice. You're the one who raises the floor or not. But raising the

00:57:51.600 | floor is really important. I'll give an example. A lot of people think about their potential,

00:57:57.360 | a professional athlete. A professional athlete will never see its peak or even create new peaks

00:58:03.280 | if it doesn't also raise their floor. The floor could be their habits, who they say yes to.

00:58:07.840 | Most people, because their floor is so low, they'll never even get anywhere close to where

00:58:15.200 | they really want to go because they're so hung up in so many different ways by what they're saying

00:58:20.400 | yes to. It could be bad habits, X, Y, and Z. The main thing I want to get here, and I've probably

00:58:24.800 | over labored the point, is just I see you saying yes to it proves that that's who you are. If you

00:58:31.600 | said no to it, you'd prove that that's who you are. And it's a big thing to watch yourself start

00:58:35.760 | saying no to things for a higher reason and to start filtering things, whether it's a job, whether

00:58:40.720 | it's saying yes to certain things on your calendar, whether it's saying yes to things in your

00:58:43.440 | environment. Watching yourself say no for a really clear reason shows that you're no longer the same

00:58:48.080 | person. Yeah, what just clicked for me was committing to like, I want to be a person that

00:58:55.600 | is only wearing clothes I love. And so the bar isn't, is there probably a time where I might

00:59:02.640 | need this thing? It's like, well, if I don't love this thing, I'm a person that's only going to be

00:59:06.080 | wearing things that I love. So yeah, I don't need it. It's like connecting the dots between

00:59:11.920 | who you want to be to whether you need a thing that seems to be, for me, at least, what clicks?

00:59:18.080 | Well, I just think it's really important for everyone to realize that if something is in

00:59:21.920 | your life, you're still committed to it. Because if you weren't committed to it,

00:59:24.800 | it would not be in your life. Yeah, you're, you're almost forcing yourself to.

00:59:29.760 | It's funny, I come back to actually, I come back to this principle in investing in personal finance

00:59:36.080 | a lot, which is, you know, you're holding on to a stock. And I always tell people, like, if you're

00:59:40.240 | not selling it, you're effectively making the decision every day to buy it. Like, it's not

00:59:44.320 | quite the same. But if you because it's very close to the same, it's very, yeah, there's capital gains

00:59:49.360 | context here. But like, if you own a bunch of stock at a company, and you're saying, well, I

00:59:53.600 | don't really want it, but it's at the wrong price. Well, you're kind of also saying, if you sold it

00:59:57.920 | today, you would buy it at today's price. And so you're, you're, well, you're, you're actually

01:00:02.480 | hitting a lot of the deep psychology behind why we hold on to the 80%. And this is what you're

01:00:07.360 | talking about right now is sunk cost bias, or a little bit of sunk cost bias, which is that

01:00:11.600 | the reason you're keeping it is because you're already invested in it. Even though you know,

01:00:16.080 | that if you didn't own it, you wouldn't invest in it. Now, if you didn't already have

01:00:20.800 | those dishes in your closet, you probably wouldn't go and buy them today. And you're like,

01:00:27.920 | well, yeah, but I don't need to buy them. They're free. Okay, well, obviously, then you're valuing

01:00:32.160 | them above what they're worth to you. And that's that that's also called the endowment effect,

01:00:35.760 | which is overvaluing something because you have it. And so there's a lot of these what they call

01:00:40.640 | cognitive biases for the reasons we hold on to the 80%. One of them truly is what you're describing,

01:00:46.240 | which is why people hold on to a stock that they don't they would not buy today. And that's that

01:00:50.880 | they overvalue it because they own it. That's the endowment effect. The sunk cost biases is that

01:00:55.040 | because they're so invested in it, and this is where things get, this is where things go a bad

01:00:59.120 | direction. Because you're already so invested in it, say it's a relationship, right? Or it's

01:01:04.400 | or your job or something like that. Everything in your 80%, by the way, you're very invested in

01:01:08.320 | your past self invested a lot into it. And now it's it's here. But now using the new future,

01:01:15.120 | it's inviting you to let it go. But often we keep investing in something because we've invested so

01:01:20.000 | much in it. And so now we're, we're actually forcing it to be a part of our future selves

01:01:23.600 | live, even though it makes no, no, no logical sense. The other principle that I just want to

01:01:28.720 | share here is what psychologists call the consistency principle. And that and this one

01:01:33.440 | really, really holds people hostage in their 80%. Which is is that as people, we really love to be

01:01:39.040 | viewed as consistent to other people. And so I might keep doing things that I like I deep down

01:01:44.960 | don't want to keep doing, but I keep doing them because I want to be viewed by the outside world

01:01:49.520 | as consistent. And, and so what that does is it leads people to being consistent with their past

01:01:54.160 | self. But what happens in what I'm inviting you to do, which is a really high bar of,

01:01:58.480 | of psychology, like, again, I use the term psychological flexibility. If you have a huge

01:02:03.840 | future, and you're letting that be the determining factor for who you are in the present, you're

01:02:08.560 | going to be very different in the present than who you were even yesterday. Not like I'm not saying

01:02:12.240 | you're gonna go and like, buzz your head and do something crazy. I'm just saying, like, you're

01:02:16.960 | letting your future determine who you are in the present. And by virtue, that future is very

01:02:21.120 | different from your present. And so of course, you're gonna start doing things that look different

01:02:24.320 | from what you were doing yesterday. And you have to be comfortable with the fact that a lot of

01:02:28.720 | people are not going to get it. They might even disagree with it. And one other really important

01:02:35.120 | point is this is most people really don't care. Most people might think it's interesting that

01:02:39.440 | they're focused on their own stuff. Like you're not the center of everyone else's world. You're

01:02:42.480 | the center of your own world. And so definitely don't make other people that are deciding factor.

01:02:49.680 | Certainly like the people who matter, right? The people who fit with your future self, your spouse,

01:02:53.200 | right? Those are the people that obviously it matters. But most of the people in the outside

01:02:56.240 | world that we're trying to like hold up a reputation to, they don't really care. And

01:03:02.480 | you absolutely shouldn't care. Like they shouldn't be the determining factor

01:03:05.680 | on why you make certain choices. - So if we just double click for a second more on the endowment

01:03:12.480 | and sunk costs, like what advice do you have people who are still struggling to get through

01:03:16.320 | those? The thing that holds a lot of people back, at least in people like me, I guess.

01:03:22.160 | - I mean, I'll give some hard examples. And I know I'm speaking as an entrepreneur here. And I know

01:03:32.880 | that not a lot of the people here who are entrepreneurs, but relationships in general,

01:03:36.960 | right? It could be your friends. In my case, I'm just saying this directly. Like there are three

01:03:41.200 | team members that at the end of the year, I know I'm gonna have to let go of. Because again, I told

01:03:45.680 | you this thing that was a big part of my business. I'm effectively letting it go so that I can prove

01:03:51.440 | to myself how committed I am to my 20%. And now there's a lot more skin in the game, literally a

01:03:55.600 | lot of money for myself that I'm letting go of in the short run to actually go deep on a few things

01:04:01.760 | that I think are gonna be massive for my future self. But a big part of letting, honestly, a big

01:04:06.560 | part of why I was afraid to let that go is 'cause that means letting go of three of the team

01:04:11.040 | members. One of them has been on my team for five years who I freaking love. And there's just not

01:04:14.640 | gonna be a role for her now with the direction I'm going. And so that is devastating to me.

01:04:19.600 | And so in a lot of ways, because I've been so invested in that relationship, and because we've

01:04:26.320 | done so much great stuff together, I could see myself holding on to that and having that again,

01:04:31.520 | kind of like the clothes in the closet or the jewelry, the stuff in the dishes and the stuff.

01:04:38.880 | I could hold on to that part of my business. But this then becomes something very different than

01:04:42.320 | your clothes. This ends up becoming something that I now have to put dozens or even hundreds

01:04:47.680 | of hours of my 2024 into. And I'm holding on to it because I'm afraid of essentially letting go

01:04:53.760 | of this relationship or changing it. And I could see myself doing that. And so that's an example,

01:05:00.880 | I guess you could say. And so I guess a main point here is this. I know that's on the relational side.

01:05:07.040 | And we can do that with friends. When you're going to a new place, a lot of the friends that got you

01:05:10.800 | here, it's not like they're no longer your friends, but your relationship will change.

01:05:13.680 | You can't hang out with them every day. That's just going to be the case when you're making

01:05:18.080 | changes. And you can either learn to embrace that or you can let it be a really painful experience.

01:05:24.160 | And I think that one of the ways of embracing it is just to appreciate what it was. It's almost

01:05:31.680 | like what Marie Kondo literally talks about. It's not that simple of being grateful for the shirt

01:05:36.800 | that you're getting rid of. But that's part of what I'm calling the gain mindset. I am so freaking

01:05:44.560 | amazed by those five years with that person. I'm celebrating that. I'm not going to downplay that

01:05:48.800 | because now it's over. But at the same time, my future is shaping this. And so I think you can

01:05:54.640 | just get to the point where you don't have to overly bemoan the loss. I think a lot of people,

01:05:59.280 | they overblow letting something go. And they almost have to go through the five stages of grief.

01:06:05.840 | I don't think you have to do that. I think that you can really be grateful for it. That's part

01:06:09.200 | of owning the past. I'm super grateful for that. I always will be. But I'm also really stoked about

01:06:14.240 | the big decisions I'm making. And so I don't know. It's just a part of the process. You can be fast

01:06:20.400 | or slow about it. I think you can be emotionally intelligent about it, though, where you have huge

01:06:26.320 | empathy. I have huge empathy for those three people. But I don't have to take responsibility

01:06:29.920 | for them. Again, I'm making choices for my future self. And I can let them have responsibility for

01:06:36.640 | their own future selves as well. >> Yeah. It's funny. Had we not had

01:06:40.960 | this conversation, this wouldn't have been true. But now there actually is a drag of seeing a shirt

01:06:45.040 | in my closet that I know I should get rid of but haven't. And in some ways, it's motivating me more

01:06:51.040 | to go do it. So just the sheer talking about it and understanding and thinking about who it would

01:06:58.000 | make me is making me want to make that change sooner. >> One thing I will just say is, again,

01:07:07.280 | I used the orientation of time. In psychology, we would say time is holistic rather than

01:07:15.200 | sequential. Sequential would be that the past is behind this present. I'm saying it's holistic.

01:07:19.440 | The past, present, and future are all happening right now. But it's really powerful to use the

01:07:23.600 | future as a filter. When I say filter, it's a filtering thing. Yes, no. And so when you have

01:07:30.320 | a 10x future, the reason it's so powerful is that it is a powerful filter for what you say yes and

01:07:36.560 | no to. And so it can be an orientation towards life, not just something you do. It's a filtering

01:07:42.720 | system. Me as an example, I've had a messy car for a while. And just this morning, I cleaned it

01:07:49.280 | out because I just said, that's not my future self. That's in the 80%. The stuff in my car,

01:07:55.040 | that's the 80%. I went and just threw it away. Even stuff that I could have gone and hung back

01:07:58.720 | in my closet. No, one of the shirts I just threw it away. Not my future self. But it really just

01:08:03.600 | becomes an orientation. And it allows you to really do make big leaps. I'm saying this on

01:08:11.520 | the personal side. First off, I invite anyone listening to think about the times you've done

01:08:19.120 | this. Chances are, all of us have done this at different stages where you actually got committed

01:08:23.440 | to something in the future. And over time, you went all in on that. Even if it was going to

01:08:26.880 | college or whatever it may have been. And over time, you had to let go of aspects of what were

01:08:32.240 | big parts of your life back then. Me as an example. Me going in high school, a lot of big parts of my

01:08:37.680 | life. Going to high school. It became part of my 80%. But even the friend group. Me, I was huge on

01:08:42.720 | snowboarding and playing video games. I played World of Warcraft 15 hours a day. Snowboard all

01:08:48.080 | the time. And then I had the bigger future that invited me to let that stuff go. And so I had to

01:08:52.400 | let go of the stuff that was important in that chapter in my life. And by had to, I said I chose

01:08:56.800 | to. I could have held onto that. And like some of my friends, still been playing 15 years later

01:09:01.360 | because they just couldn't let that go. And by the way, I think a really huge book on this topic.

01:09:07.200 | Have you ever read Man's Search for Meaning? No.

01:09:10.000 | Okay. Well, that's one of the most important. It's one of the most important books of the

01:09:16.160 | last 150 years. It's written by a guy named Viktor Frankl. It's all about his experiences

01:09:20.800 | in the concentration camps. This book was written in the '50s. So he was a Jewish psychiatrist who

01:09:26.640 | lived through the Holocaust. And his whole book is about the psychology of the Holocaust and what

01:09:32.800 | happens when you get everything, literally everything taken from you. And now you're

01:09:36.240 | watching your wife get killed. Your mom gets put in a gas chamber. You're sleeping on the floor.

01:09:40.800 | He literally just walks you through the psychology of all of it. And in that book,

01:09:46.080 | he talks about the fundamental importance of having a future to hope for, to strive for,

01:09:51.280 | to live for. Because if you lose that future, then in the present, especially if you're in

01:09:56.400 | a horrible situation like a concentration camp, then there's really no purpose for anything.

01:10:01.040 | And then he talks about how that's when people literally gave up the ghost. In those situations,

01:10:06.800 | they're already starving to death. But once they lost hope in the future, they passed.

01:10:10.320 | And so that's just back to just core psychology. It's really... One of his quotes in that book is

01:10:18.640 | he says, "What people need is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and the struggling

01:10:23.200 | for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task." It's just powerful as people... Not that you

01:10:29.120 | have to be gunning all the time for your future self. Certainly, there's plenty of time for

01:10:32.800 | enjoyment. Actually, there's plenty of time for recovery. And all that stuff is part of the

01:10:37.200 | process. But to have a future that is stretching you and inviting you to make some big decisions

01:10:42.080 | and to let go of stuff that no longer is who you are. I think it's really important to realize

01:10:47.520 | that you're not your past self. Not to overly identify with your past self. That's part of

01:10:52.480 | having a growth mindset. One thing that's really interesting as well, though, is not to overly

01:10:55.680 | identify with your current self. So even Daniel Gilbert, he's a Harvard psychologist. He said that

01:11:01.040 | the person you are right now is as fleeting as the present moment. And so I don't need to

01:11:05.760 | over-identify with the things that I want now. My future self is going to want different things.

01:11:11.840 | It doesn't mean I don't have any core foundations as a person. It's just recognition. I don't have

01:11:15.280 | to overly cling to things. There's certain things that my past self was really attached to. One of

01:11:19.680 | them being World of Warcraft. Me, my current self right now, you couldn't pay me to play that game.

01:11:25.120 | But even stuff three months ago that I was paid for, you couldn't pay me to do now

01:11:31.040 | because I'm not my past self and because my floor keeps going up. And so that's part of

01:11:36.560 | psychological flexibility is the ability to let things go as well. Not only the ability to make

01:11:40.960 | new commitments and use that commitment to truly be committed, but the ability to uncommit

01:11:46.640 | to things that you were once committed to. - And what would you say to someone who's at

01:11:50.560 | this point and they're like, "I'm all in. I want to do this, but I don't actually know what that

01:11:54.480 | future self looks like." Are there some exercises or some practices to kind of figure that out?

01:11:59.040 | - So Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

01:12:02.960 | Imagination is a skill. It's not like you're going to be amazing at it from the beginning.

01:12:08.320 | It's something you get better and better at every week, every month. I honestly think

01:12:11.760 | there's a lot said about journaling. Journaling is really powerful. And I think even if you gave

01:12:19.040 | yourself 10 minutes a week to just journal and think about the things that you want,

01:12:23.840 | think about your future self, think about what things could be like in three years from now.

01:12:27.040 | Also think about how different they are from three years ago. I think just giving yourself the space

01:12:31.920 | to think about it. I mean, for me, I journal about 15 minutes every morning and I think about

01:12:37.200 | the things I've accomplished. I also think about the things I'm dealing with now, but I also think

01:12:40.800 | about my future self and just giving yourself the time. And I also think giving yourself not only

01:12:46.080 | the time, but the space. What I mean by space is put yourself in different environments. It could

01:12:49.520 | be that you, once a quarter, take a day off and actually go do something that's fun and give

01:12:56.320 | yourself a little space to think. But on a daily or weekly basis, it doesn't need to be that much

01:13:00.560 | time, but actually give yourself the space to think about it, to write about it. And maybe

01:13:04.800 | over time, you'll start to talk about it with certain people. But just practice the joy of

01:13:10.320 | giving yourself the space to think, to imagine, and then maybe even a little bit to strategize.

01:13:15.200 | Think about, "How would I go about that?" I honestly just think it's a continuous process,

01:13:20.240 | but think about it. Think about your future self. Think about what you would want.

01:13:22.960 | Think about what would be amazing. Think about what you would most value. Just give yourself

01:13:27.760 | the time to think about it. - But it sounds like there shouldn't

01:13:30.400 | be expectation that you need to figure this out in a day or two. It might take you weeks,

01:13:37.440 | months to figure out what that is. - Well, one thing I just want to say

01:13:42.080 | is that everyone already has a future self. There's already so many things that you're now doing

01:13:48.560 | because of your future self. As an example, you're probably going to work, right? Because

01:13:53.760 | if you weren't thinking about your future self two weeks from now, paying the bills,

01:13:59.280 | you probably wouldn't be going, right? Or thinking about your long-term future self

01:14:03.280 | and wanting retirement, right? And so you just have to acknowledge that almost everything you're

01:14:07.840 | already doing is because of some view of your future self. But now it's actually thinking

01:14:14.880 | about it. In psychology, they often call it the default future, that people have that default

01:14:18.560 | future that they're just like... It's the future that they've already pre-committed to, even if

01:14:22.880 | it's not the one that they would want. It's just like, "Yeah, I'm going to retire at age 65."

01:14:26.400 | It's like it's the default future that now is largely shaping so much of what we're already

01:14:31.360 | doing. So I think a step is honestly just stepping back a little bit and looking at your life and

01:14:36.240 | being like, "Okay, I am going to work 40-60 hours a week. Why? Because I need to pay." There are

01:14:42.880 | reasons why. And then starting to actually give yourself permission to the idea of want, and

01:14:48.800 | thinking about, "What would I want? What could I..." And beginning in that direction.

01:14:52.640 | So yeah, no, that's really interesting. And so if someone's not sure what their future self

01:14:58.320 | should be, it sounds like a good step is to write down what it is now because it already exists.

01:15:04.000 | You already have an idea. I think that's huge. Admit what your

01:15:07.200 | view of your future self already is and what you've already pre-committed to in your mind.

01:15:10.960 | As in a weird example, people already have in their mind the age-ish that they're going to die.

01:15:15.680 | People have already had all these pre-commitments in their mind about what their future self is.

01:15:21.840 | This is super helpful. Okay, I feel like I'm ready to go do these exercises. Anything we missed?

01:15:25.920 | Anything people need to be keeping in mind that we haven't talked about before we wrap up?

01:15:30.240 | No, I just try to catch the language of "shoulds." The future self isn't a "should" thing.

01:15:36.880 | The future self is a "want" thing. And I know that that might sound different, but

01:15:42.240 | as an example, my relationship with my kids becomes a lot different when I approach it

01:15:51.360 | because I want to, not because I have to. There is no "should" with me being a father of six kids,

01:15:56.960 | or even being a good father. And so when you actually start to give yourself the permission

01:16:02.000 | of like, "What would I want?" Then it can start to come from an intrinsic place. And then you can

01:16:08.000 | start to really create it. But no, I really don't think there's... I mean, obviously I wrote a book,

01:16:13.120 | Be Your Future Self Now. 10x is easier than 2x. These are books you can dive into and have deeper

01:16:17.920 | dives into. But it really is a constant process. As an example, the future self that I'm imagining

01:16:24.720 | is quite different than the future self I was imagining even at the beginning of this year,

01:16:28.000 | or even three months ago. And so it's a nonstop process. That's why the past and the future are

01:16:32.160 | simply tools. They're not things that are fixed in place. They're things that are constantly

01:16:37.440 | evolving and changing. And so you don't have to have... I look at it like the draft of a book.

01:16:42.320 | I don't need... My future self is not a finished draft. Yes, it can get more and more crystal

01:16:46.720 | or vivid. It can get more specific, and I can really start to develop incredible plans,

01:16:50.800 | which I am doing. But at the same time, in a month from now, I'm going to probably know a lot

01:16:55.120 | of things I don't know. And maybe those are going to tilt my plan, shift them. And so I just think

01:16:58.800 | that's part of just viewing it as a continuous process. I love it. I hope that's really helpful.

01:17:04.640 | You've got these two books. Obviously, anyone listening that wants to go deeper, they can find

01:17:08.640 | them both wherever books are sold. Anywhere else people can stay on top of everything you're

01:17:12.560 | working on? I would just say probably YouTube. YouTube, Benjamin Hardy, Dr. Benjamin Hardy.

01:17:19.440 | Those are all turned into podcasts. My website is benjaminhardy.com. If you go to futureself.com,

01:17:26.400 | if you're in the United States, futureself.com, you can actually download the free Kindle

01:17:30.480 | of Be Your Future Self now. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here.

01:17:34.720 | Thank you for asking cool questions.

Secrets of Super Achievers: Learning the 10x Growth Mindset with Dr Benjamin Hardy

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