You say 10x is easier than 2x, help people understand how that's actually possible. A 2x mindset means that you're taking the past and the present and you're using that foundation to build the future. Well, a 10x mindset is the opposite. A 10x mindset starts with the future and it even scales it so high that it feels impossible, literally impossible.

And then rather than letting the present shape the future, you're now actually letting the future shape the present. If you think that something's out of the category of possible, you won't even think about it. You won't even entertain it. You won't even go for it. And so part of the goal of kind of a 10x philosophy is to actually pursue things that are impossible so that your brain can start actually trying to solve it.

The basic problem here is that most people just don't imagine their future selves. They don't take time to think about it, let alone a 10x future self, right? The truth is your future self is going to be totally different than who you are right now. 3, 5, 10 years from now, you're not going to be the same person.

So like when it comes to your future self, be specific, highly specific, and it can't be specific in 50 ways, maybe specific in three. Ben, thank you for being here. Really happy to be with you, Chris. When I first heard 10x, I immediately thought, okay, this sounds like a lot more work.

You say 10x is easier than 2x. Help people understand how that's actually possible. All right. Awesome. Well, first off, super happy to be with you. Yeah. So let's talk about the difference between what a 2x psychology is versus a 10x psychology. I'm going to give you a little bit of kind of, let's call it some foundational psychology.

I'm going to keep it really simple, but I just want to help people understand the foundation before we build the house. So in psychology, it's really important to understand how people are operating. So what the basis of the research shows is that most people, they look at time like they think about time on a clock.

So as an example, if I think about my past, the past is behind me. My present is now, and the future is up ahead. 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, and we can't really get to the future, but we're aiming towards something.

We can think about our future and we can set goals and kind of use our future self as an example to kind of map where we're going in the present. That's kind of how people view time. And that's what would be considered a linear view of time. The problem is that that's not how it works psychologically.

But that's the basis of a 2x mindset. A 2x mindset means that you're taking the past and the present, and you're using that foundation to build the future. And so it's very linear. And basically what it means is that to go 2x, you're usually just doing more of what you already have.

You're just doing more and more of who you already are. I just want to give a little bit more core psychology, and then we'll just... Honestly, we go wherever you want. But the profound thing about psychology is that in psychology, time doesn't work that way. In psychology, it's not the past that determines the present.

It's actually the present that determines the meaning of the past. And this is like a fundamental mindset when it comes to healing trauma, things like that, is that my past isn't what's determining who I am now. Actually, it's who I am now that determines the meaning of my past.

And the more you get really good at that, the more you can continuously transform your past in ways that it is happening for you rather than happening to you. But if you listen to most people's language, they still blame their past for why they are the way they are right now, rather than taking ownership that it's actually you right now that are shaping the story, the narrative, the frame, the view of your past.

And so that's just one fundamental component is that it's not the past that determines the present. It's the present that determines the past. Well, the same thing is true about the future. So again, a 2x mindset means that I'm going to take the present and I'm going to use that to shape my future.

Well, a 10x mindset is the opposite. A 10x mindset starts with the future. And it even scales it so high that it feels impossible, literally impossible. So I know that you asked the question, how are you saying that this is easier? Now I'm actually say it's literally impossible. But you take the future and you scale it to such a high view that it feels impossible.

And then rather than letting the present shape the future, you're now actually letting the future shape the present. You're letting the future determine who you are and what you do in the present. In other words, I'm letting my future self determine who I am in the present. I'm not letting my present self determine who my future self will be.

And so these are very different approaches to time. I was just telling you straight up, psychologically, the past and the present are just tools. They're just tools for allowing me to operate in the present. If I have a bad relationship with my past, then I'm going to be stuck there.

And I may have some trauma that happened when I was five years old, and I'm letting that past dictate me in the present. Although that's the common way, and what I'm teaching is very advanced psychology. The core phrase right here is called psychological flexibility. I'm giving you these foundations.

We're going to go into 10X versus 2X, but I just want the listeners and even yourself to have some of these foundations. The super skill in psychology is called psychological flexibility. The more flexible I am psychologically, the more I can reshape the meaning of my past. I can let it go.

I can recognize that I'm not even my past self. You're not your past self. The listener is not their past self. I'm not the same person I was five years ago. I'm not even the same person I was five weeks ago. And the better I get at my past, the more I can recognize and appreciate, "Oh yeah, here are the ways I'm different.

Here's how I see things differently." The same skill, psychological flexibility, is used to imagine a different future and then to let that future dictate who I am in the present. Can you give an example of how someone might apply that to some event in the past? Oh yeah. I'll go big and I'll go small.

The first place that people usually go is something big. I got divorced or I lost a job or my parents got divorced. So me as an example, my parents got divorced when I was 11 years old. My father then proceeded to become a drug addict. And so my father was a drug addict all through high school.

Now, of course that could impact my life, but it's up to me right now to shape the meaning of that. So I can either consider my father a villain or a hero, right? And neither of those stories are actually true. They're just a framing. They're a view. They're a story.

The idea of a story is that it's just a perspective. But we as people, our identity is shaped by the story we tell. And so one angle is just reframing the whole story and looking at what does this story mean? And it's me in the present that determines the meaning of the story.

Even if you really dig into the research on memory, memory is never a retrieval. Often we think about memory as I'm going to go into the file cabinets of my brain and I'm going to grab this memory. I'm going to pull it out and I'm going to look at it.

That's not how memory is. Memory is what they call a reconstruction. I'm always reconstructing my memory from the present. And so even now, as I'm thinking about my dad, I'm going to be rebuilding that memory just like I can be rebuilding some idea of my future in my head.

I'm rebuilding it as I go. And so they say that your past is a living part of who you are in the present, and you're the one who creates it. But there's one other really important part. So there's the whole framing of it, the big picture of the story, but there's also the filtering of it.

That's the focus. So as an example, if I'm looking back on the last five months, as I gave an example, or the last even five weeks, I can look for the ways in which I've been a loser, right? I can look for all the ways in which I've failed over the last five weeks.

And that's me filtering for and searching for certain things. And that's often what people do is they'll look for the ways in which things are going wrong. And instead, you can proactively look for the ways that things are going right. I can look for the ways in which I've made progress and I've learned things that my past self didn't know.

It's just ultimately up to your control. I'll give a smaller example. So as an example, and we actually do this. We actually do this all the time. Our brains are always reshaping the meaning of the past constantly. But I just want the listener to know, and even you know, and hopefully you can ask me questions.

I hope we can make it practical. I just want you to understand that in the present, you're the one shaping the past. And hopefully we can get to the point where we're talking about how it's the future that determines the present. But on a small scale, like, let me give an example.

So like I have, we have six kids, we actually have literally a seventh one living with us right now. It's crazy. So we adopted three kids from the foster system. We also have three of our own. But right now, you're just talking to me at an odd time. So like I, we literally have a seventh, you know, 15 year olds from Guatemala living with us, who's, it may be permanent, it may not be.

But I'll give you a small example of how the present can determine the meaning of the past. 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 doing. I'm learning on the fly. And as a result, you know, my 15 year old son, we adopted him when he was 10.

I often do stupid stuff, like overreact and get mad at him and stuff like that for stuff that really doesn't matter. And so like I could, you know, like, maybe a day or two ago, I, you know, I, I did something where it's kind of like a, you know, a flubbed father thing.

But the cool part is, is that I know that in the present, I can turn that into something that happened for me and for him, and that I'm not the byproduct of what happened. So I can go back really simply and apologize, right? And say, "Look, Caleb, super sorry that that happened.

Here's where I was coming from. I see that I was handling that wrong." Boom. The meaning of that conversation has now changed. And so just, it's just really empowering to know that it does not really matter what happened. It matters what you do about it in the present, and that you can always flip whatever happened into something that's useful rather than something that is kind of utilizing you.

Like, how I see it is you can either be used by the past or you can use it. So let's take an example of someone who's looking for a job right now and kind of interviewed three times and it was a disaster. The idea is, you know, to stop thinking, "Okay, I did this three times incorrectly." And more think, "Okay, maybe here are the things that I did wrong.

Now I know them. And now in my future self, I'm not going to do them anymore. So I'm actually even better because of it." Would that be a way to apply? Yeah. So like, events have no meaning in and of themselves. So those three things, those three failed job applications, they don't have to be considered negatives.

That is meaning that is placed upon it by the person. And now they're making it personal. And now they're like, literally equating it to their self-worth. "Oh, I must be..." And so all of that stuff is psychology being placed on those three things. I don't place my psychology on those three things.

If I heard about your friend who failed three job applications, do you think I'm going to personalize that towards myself? And I'm going to feel like a loser for that friend's... So I'm not personalizing it. So one key thing is just not personalizing your own things. But yeah, for those three things, that person can flip those three things into something amazing.

Clearly, they can learn from it. What were all the things that they learned from one, two, and three? How did they actually get better from one, two, and three? So this is now just analyzing the past in different ways. What was different about one, two, and three? Now, based on where they're at now, what do they now know that they wouldn't have known before?

Maybe now they can go out and get a totally different job because now they know certain things they would have never known before. It's just always knowing that in the present, you have power over your past, and that in the present, you can take whatever happened in the past, even if it was something terrible, and you can flip it into something absolutely amazing.

I think a really good phrase for that would be "anti-fragile." Just no matter what happens, you're now better as a result. Okay. So that's reframing the past. Are there other kind of core fundamental things that you need to be thinking about for a 10x mindset? No, no, no. I just want the orientation of time to be this way, that it's not the past.

Most people, they're using time like they think about the outside time. They're thinking, "Okay, it's the past that determines the present, and it's the present that determines the future." The more powerful approach is that it's always the future that determines who I am in the present, which if you really think about it, that makes a lot of sense.

As an example, I wanted to get a PhD. So obviously, that goal shaped me getting into PhD programs. I didn't go off and do something different. I followed my goal. So it makes sense. But when you really get down to it, there's a lot of research that shows... And this is Harvard research and stuff.

There's a guy named Daniel Gilbert. He gave a TED Talk called "The Psychology of Your Future Self." But the thing that's really interesting is this, and it fits very much with a 2x mindset. So honestly, we're pretty much at the point where we can drill into 10x versus 2x and get as strategic as you want.

And usually, I honestly don't go this far, but I know you just said you like having deeper conversations. And so I'm just happy to give that, honestly, some of the more fundamental psychology. But what happened with Daniel Gilbert's research is this, and there's a lot of research on this at this point.

When most people think about their future self, what they do is they take who they are now, and they use that view of my current self, so the person you're talking to right now. And I just use that as the basis for who I think I'll be in the future.

Even in 5 years, 10 years from now, I'm like, "Yeah, how could I see myself being someone different? This is the only person I think I am." And they call it the end of history illusion in psychology. But the main thing here is that it leads people to assuming that they're going to pretty much be the same person even long into the future.

And even teenagers do this. And the research shows that teenagers, they think that they're going to grow as much as people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s actually do. So even youth don't think they're going to change that much when we're all going to transform a lot. But the basic problem here is that most people just don't imagine their future selves.

They don't take time to think about it, let alone a 10x future self. But most people, they don't take the time to actually imagine and think about a totally different future self. The truth is your future self is going to be totally different than who you are right now.

Three, five, 10 years from now, you're not going to be the same person. You're not going to see the world the same way. But if you're someone who's actively using your imagination to create that future self, and then to the idea of using a 10x mindset, you're making it seem absurd.

There's no way that that could be my future self. There's no way that that's possible. What you want to do is ultimate. Yeah. Just break down the difference. You're not saying you need to imagine your future. You need to imagine your future self. I'm thinking about who you are in the future.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe give an example. Because I think some people hear like, "Oh, imagine your future self." And they immediately jump to, "Okay, I've got this job. I've got this hat." And those aren't the self part. That's the future part. What's the difference there? Maybe through an example. That's a really cool question.

Obviously, when you're thinking about your future self, probably inherent in that is your future. What is my future self doing? What's their life like? What are they up to? Let me give an example. When I was a PhD student, my future self was someone who... And I did not have these skills or capabilities or anything at that point.

But my future self was someone who was a professional author. I had never had a blog or anything like that. But I wanted to be making high six figures to provide for my family. That was the future self I was assuming back when I was a first year graduate student.

I want to be a professional author. I want to be able to write books for a living and provide for my family. And that version of my future self could do things that the current version of me could not, such as think in certain ways, teach in certain ways, write...

I was honestly just writing really good books. And I had none of those capabilities at that point when I was thinking about it. But that was who I wanted to be. That was what I wanted my life to look like. And from where I was sitting, that was seemingly impossible.

The odds of, for example, getting a six-figure book deal, that's 1% of 1%. But I think one thing that's really important here is that that might seem impossible if you're judging that future based on your current situation, or worse yet, if you're judging it on your past. The cool part about using the future to determine the present is that now you don't have to deal with typical odds or things like that.

It really doesn't matter what your current situation is. You're letting the future, whatever you want that to be, be the driver of what you do here and now. That's the driver of the decisions you make. It's the driver of the friends you have. It's the driver of the choices you make.

And so now the present really isn't the determining factor. The future is the determining factor and how committed you are to that future. - Yeah, one thing that brings to mind is looking back at examples in your past of times that things happened that you never would have thought were possible.

I remember my wife worked at Lyft and she was running the partnerships team. And because of that, there was a time where they were exploring a partnership with NASCAR. And we ended up going to the Daytona 500 and getting VIP treatment in the pit lanes. Now, I wasn't a big NASCAR fan, so this was never going to be in my future.

But had I been a big NASCAR fan, I don't know if I could have connected the dots to imagine a world where I would have been able to have that access. And then randomly, my wife, through a partnership, it happened. And so what's going through my mind right now as I think about my future self is just trying to embrace the fact that in my past, things have happened that I never would have thought possible and kind of just kind of almost making it second nature to expect that that is possible as I try to make that kind of vision for my future self.

Because there are things that I would love to be able to do. Let's take an example. Let's say you want to give a TED Talk. You're like, well, I don't know how that would happen. It's like, well, you don't need to know how it happened. You just need to know that it is a thing and that other things that you didn't think could happen have happened.

And leave it at that for now. I love what you just said. I love what you just said on so many different levels. One thing I would invite you to ponder on, and you can ponder this directly and the listener can as well, but go back to the beginning of 2023.

So you and I are filming this or recording this in November of 2023. So go back 10 months to the version of you at the beginning of this year. January 1st, you, Chris, is sitting there. Are there things that have happened so far in 2023 that the version of you at the beginning of this year would have thought were impossible?

My wife is full time on all the hacks with me now. And if you would ask me January 1st, whether that would be possible, I probably would have said no. I mean, if you had really pushed me, I probably would have gotten to the point that I would have said maybe there's a way, right?

It's possible. But what is, you know, what is Amy going to be doing at the end of the year? It would have been very low on the list. There you go. See, so that's really awesome. Yeah, I love what you're saying. So I'm happy now to kind of explain in really simple terms the difference between 10x and 2x.

But I think we have a little bit of the foundation in place. One of the things you said that I think is extremely important is the idea that there are certain things, if you're looking back, that your past self would have never anticipated, never expected. They couldn't have even seen it coming, let alone plan for it.

And now it's just now part of your normal life. That's the thing about us living in the present. And that's the thing about how memory works is that our memories are really funny. Our memories try to make things in the past really smooth and tidy, even though they were not smooth and tidy.

To the idea of the future, one really important point is that if you think that something's out of the category of possible, you won't even think about it. You won't even entertain it. You won't even go for it. And so part of the goal of kind of a 10x philosophy is to actually pursue things that are impossible so that your brain can start actually trying to solve it.

Usually, your brain is only solving what it's working on. And so if you actually start going for an impossible goal, there's a really great quote from this by Dan Sullivan. Dan Sullivan was the co-author of this book. I wrote three books with him. He's 80 years old. He's been coaching extremely high successful entrepreneurs for 50 years.

And so he's got some really amazing ideas. But basically, one of his quotes that I love is he says, "Your eyes can only see and your ears can only hear what your brain is looking for." So I say that to say that you can actually train your brain to find the needle in the haystack.

In psychology, we actually call it selective attention. So the main thing here is that you want to make your vision something that you think is impossible. Here's kind of how I think about it in really simple terms. Think about your future self or your next 10x. You can think about a 10x kind of like you going through a cycle in life.

In the next three years, my life might look ridiculously different. I might have 10x the net worth. I might have sold 10 times more books. It doesn't have to literally be 10x, but it's you at a totally different level, even at a level that you can't fully even fathom right now.

And one of the ways that I think is useful to look at it, I actually think that you can go through that process, that cycle, every three to five years. I actually think going for it in three years. So I invite you, as I'm explaining this, to actually go back three years.

Think back on where your life was at three years ago, end of 2020. And I want you to think how fundamentally different your life is, your lifestyle, your focus, your vision. Think about how different it is from at the end of 2020. I just want you to think about that, because chances are your life is incomparably different than where it was three years ago.

I believe you've gone 10x, as we're describing it, which is going through a fundamental leap. Well, one thing that I want you all to think about and I want you to think about is each 10x, how I view it, so mine is call it three years away. You not only achieve more externally.

In psychology, they have it in two camps. You have achievement, which is external accomplishment. You also have aspiration, which is honestly internal development, true growth, character development, skill development. I believe that every "10x," so me in the next three years, you in the last three years, and you in the next three, whatever it is.

It doesn't have to exactly be three. I just challenge you to try to go for it every three years. You actually achieve and grow more in that 10x in those three years than you have in all of your life combined to this point. I'll give an example on Dan Sullivan.

So Dan Sullivan actually doesn't do it every three years. He does it every 10. I just am younger, maybe, and I like breaking stuff. He is 80 years old. And so he's saying, "Okay, I'm 80 years old. I'm going into a new decade. I want to grow and accomplish more in the next decade than I have all the way up everything leading up to age 80.

From zero to 80, in the next 10 years, I'm going to grow and accomplish far more than I have all to this point." I think right now, I'm in the mindset, and I imagine most people listening, of they've connected this idea of being able to think bigger, but there's probably some fundamentals to that process of what you need to know to go through the mechanics that I think would be good to touch on.

Let me just provide the initial framework, and then, honestly, we'll go straight into the hows of honestly how to achieve impossible goals fast. That's about really what it is. So the difference between 10x and 2x, we frame it based on the 80/20 principle. So the 80/20 principle is very famous, very successful.

80% of your success comes from 20% of what you do, right? We really kind of framed that in a different way and based it on identity. But the main idea here is this. If you want to go for 2x in anything, or if that's your orientation towards life, if that's your approach towards life, what that means is that you're taking the past and the present, and you're using that to create the future.

And using the 80/20 principle, what that means is if you want to go for 2x, you can keep 80% of everything you're doing right now. Literally. If you want to double your podcast, you're well on your way. You can keep 80% of yourself, 80% of how you're doing things.

You just have to improve 20%. You're already just riding most of the momentum. So you can keep 80%. But if you want to go for 10x, given that it's a seemingly impossible future, and you're letting that future filter and determine who you are in the present, because it's so big, because it's so seemingly impossible, almost nothing you're doing right now is going to get you there.

That's one of the beauties of going for impossible goals. And there's actually a lot of research on this, is that if you're going for a small goal, even a 2x goal, which may seem big, but if you're going for, "I want to make 10% more money this year," or "I want to make 20%," or even 2x, because it's so similar to the present, almost everything you're doing right now will work.

That's why 80% of what you're doing right now you can keep. But if you're going for something that big, going for something that 10x, because it is so big, almost nothing you're doing right now is going to work. And so the main point here is that 80% of what you're doing right now has to go.

80% of what you're doing right now got you here, but it won't get you there. And so that future becomes a massive filter. That's part of why you want to use your future as a filter, because it allows you to be really sensitive to almost everything I'm doing right now is not 10x.

Almost everything I'm doing right now reflects my past, but not that future. And so to go 10x, you can only keep the few things that really matter, and you've got to get 10 times better at those few things, and you've got to let go of literally 80% of what's going on.

80% of what you're doing now is noise, and it's honestly holding you back. So that's one of the keys is you want a future that's so big, call it impossible, but then you can actually look at your present from that future, and you can recognize that almost everything you're doing right now, call it 80%, is now a distraction.

It's now a waste of time. And then it forces you to find the few things that really matter, those few things with huge upside, and to go deep on those. Are you getting rid of the things that are in that 80%? Or are you finding a way to outsource them?

Or how do you think about trimming the fat of that 80%? It's everything. So there are two. There are two ways of looking at it. I think fundamentally, it's now no longer a part of your life. So when it comes to time, your time and my time is fundamentally a byproduct of my attention and your attention.

So attention is more fundamental than time. If my attention is scattered on the 80% of things, and I'm at the surface of a thousand things, then my time is going to be all over the place. I'm not going to get much use out of that time. And so the first answer to the question is really about absolutely the 80% has nothing to do with your time or attention anymore.

Now, whether or not it just gets deleted or whether it gets delegated depends on it. As an example, yeah, there may be certain things that it's worth keeping, but absolutely, you have nothing to do with it anymore. Fully delegated. And in some situations, that may make sense. And in a lot of situations, it's just got to go.

It's not like it goes in a negative way. It's more just a recognition that it's what got you here, but not there. And so you honestly can have gratitude for it. The 80%, by the way, from a psychology standpoint, is the things that you're already extremely good at. I consider you actually already have mastery over it.

So this could be someone's job. And emotionally, we hold onto these things out of security. The 80% is about security. The 20% is about freedom. You're choosing it, but it's scary. It takes commitment and courage to go for the 10x and for the future, whereas you keep the 80% because it's secure.

And it's not just a job, right? It's not just a role. It could be, honestly, me waking up and staring at my phone. That might be in my 80%. But if I keep doing that, there's no way I'm going to get to my future. But I do it because it's comfortable.

It's something I'm really good at. I'm really good at waking up and looking at my phone. I'm really good at-- so everything in the 80% are things that you do out of emotional security, out of habit. And I'll give some granular examples. And there are deeper concepts here. Like one of the things I talk about is raising the floor, which is raising your minimum commitment and then beginning to say no to everything below that commitment.

Like as an example, if I want to massively raise my floor, like the floor on what I say yes to-- and by the way, from a psychology standpoint, your floor as a person is your minimum standard. And as people, we all have standards, right? We all have a standard.

But you can know your standard by what you say yes to, right? And so if I sit and scroll on Facebook for four hours a day, then obviously that's a part of-- that's within my standards because I say yes to it. If I then rose the standard really, really high and said, this is the new standard.

This is the minimum standard. This is the minimum commitment, right? And your identity is what you're most committed to. Then I now have to say no to things that I used to say yes to. And I have to use that as the filter or the determining factor in what I say yes and no to.

That then starts to be pretty intense. But let me give a personal example of something going on right now. This one's a little bit more intense. So the 80% could be a lot of things, by the way. The 80% could be a habit. It could be a friend. It could be a person.

It could be a job. A lot of people-- I hate to even voice this one. But sometimes when I share this with people, some people are like, it's my husband, right? Because they've been in a horrible marriage. I'm not trying to push divorce. But a lot of people, they know that there are a lot of things that are out of alignment.

And that if they're really committed to that future and let that future shape who they are-- there's a lot of things that they're holding onto right now just out of emotional security. One thing that I'm doing right now-- and I'll give two hyper practical examples for myself as people are thinking through.

I actually told you about this before. So I actually believe in pursuing impossible goals on a 90-day basis. So I was talking to you about the bigger picture, 10x. That's my future self in three years. And it's huge. It's impossible. I don't even know 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 know how to do it, then you're no longer operating from your past knowledge. Now you have to go and find those new pathways, those new people. And so that's the whole idea of your brain-- we'll find what it's looking for. So I pursue impossible goals on a 90-day basis simply because I don't know how to do it and simply because it's such a high filter that it forces me to say no to almost everything I'm now doing.

And it forces me to filter from that really high floor where I have to just make hard decisions 24/7 and only do the few things-- call it those 20% things that really have huge upsides. So as an example, two examples-- one short-term, one long-term. And then we go wherever, but I'm just giving you the practicals.

So I have some ridiculous impossible goals even literally between now and the end of the year. There's like two or three of them. Probably not going to achieve any of them, to be honest with you. And it does not even really matter. But the point is that there's such a high filter that then you have to choose different things.

So I gave you the example of my 90-day goals between now and the end of the year-- so big, so intense, and there's not a lot of them-- that then I had to look at my calendar for the last 90 days of the year and just realized-- my assistant was like, "Ben, if you're actually going to get anywhere near doing those, we have to wipe almost everything off your calendar.

You have 20 podcast schedules," as an example. We got rid of almost all of them. And so that stuff became part of the 80%. And it used to be in my 20. It used to be really good. But when you start going for really high goals, stuff gets filtered out a lot harder.

And then you have to make the hard decisions. Am I going to let this stuff go? It wasn't just podcasts. It's other things. But the whole point here is that when the future is really big, then you have to filter the present a lot harder. And then it's up to you if you want to let go of some of the stuff that no longer fits, and if you want to go all in or even more in on the stuff that will really take you places.

Now, you said, "It's so ambitious. You're probably not going to achieve it." When I was in Venture Capital, one of the things that I would always say about founders is that they almost have this irrational belief that they're going to succeed in something that seems impossible. It seems like you both have these really ambitious 10x goals, but you seem pretty rational about the fact that you're not going to achieve them.

Does that make it harder to actually make progress? Harder to be in that 10x mindset if you don't fully commit to the fact that it might happen? I didn't say I'm not fully committed. I just said I don't care if I achieve it. That may sound like a contradiction, and it's not.

I'm tweeting, Mike. No, go ahead. I might have misheard, but I thought you also said not only you might not achieve them, but practically, they might not be possible. I guess if you believe that they might not be possible, can you also commit to them fully? Can you be fully committed?

Yeah. It's a beautiful question. It's a beautiful question. The answer is yes, and what's interesting is, the only reason that you don't think they're—the only reason—Dr. Alan Bernard, he's a brilliant decision-making theorist, and he works with huge companies and stuff like that, but he's basically one of the most knowledgeable people on a concept called constraint theory.

For everyone who—I'm not going to get into the mumbo-jumbo of it, but this is one of the core theories in decision-making and in business strategy. But the main thing is that he actually does invite people to pursue impossible goals, one, so that they stop operating on their past assumptions, and two, so that they can start finding the few paths or people that might get them there.

So that's the 20% of things that create all the results. And so he asks the question, and he has us ask the question, "That would be impossible unless." Unless what? Unless what? And so that goal that may seem impossible, it would be impossible for sure from your current situation, but what would need to be true for it to even potentially become potentially possible?

By even just entertaining that, again, your eyes can only see and your ears can only hear what your brain is looking for. And so once you start thinking about it and maybe getting more information and start actually moving forward, then you might actually start finding some of the pathways.

But another thing as well is that if you actually start letting go of things that we're calling the 80%, things that are good but not great, or things that have maybe 2x potential, but you already know they don't have 10 or 100x potential. As an example, like me, I'm letting go in 2024 of what effectively is about 70% of my business income.

I'm letting go of it so that I can go all in on something that... Because I believe that that side of my business only has "2x potential." If I keep investing in it, yeah, I can make great money. But I know that it doesn't have... It will hold up.

It'll really limit my ceiling in terms of what's possible if I keep investing in it. And so I'm willing to let that go so that I can put more energy and effort into this thing that I know it's not guaranteed, but I know it has 10 or 100x potential if I really go into it.

And so, yeah, I mean, you have to make those tough decisions if you want to go for this. And let's talk about those tough decisions because I think someone hearing you just say that is probably thinking, "Okay, I've got this job. I've got a family." And practically, most people do not have a family as large as yours.

So you could speak from authority in that regard. But if I want 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 today. But yeah, go ahead and ask. Ask the question. Yeah. I got to quit my job.

I got to lose my income to bet on this thing because I need the time in my day to make it happen. That's probably a pretty scary thing for almost everyone to do or process. Yeah. So there's two things here. The difference between wanting something and needing it. No one needs a 10x future.

But the goal is that you start doing things that you want, not things that you think you need. And what I'm saying is that something isn't the 80% because you think you need it. Even an addiction is something that someone's doing, not because they want to anymore, but because they literally think that they need it.

That could be literally a straight up addiction, or it could be a job. You're only doing it because you think you need it, not because you want it. And this kind of psychology and this kind of approach to life, what often happens to people, and I know your audience, because you told it to me, a lot of these people are honestly great, successful people.

A lot of times people only do things because they have to. And once you get to a certain place in your life where you actually have your needs met, people stop having goals because they honestly can't think of anything more that they need. And the higher psychology, call it what Maslow would call self-actualization, is you actually do things out of want, out of intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic motivation.

In the philosophy terms they call it, you go from freedom from to freedom to. So freedom from means you're freeing yourself from, right? You're freeing yourself from poverty, from ignorance, from whatever it may be. And that's often how all we're thinking about is escaping from things we no longer want.

I don't want to have to do X, Y, and Z. But the only purpose of doing all that is to get to the point eventually where you have the freedom to do something because you actually want to do it. But to the practical point, if someone's listening and they're saying, "Okay, if I actually was to entertain what I want, and I actually was to allow myself to even think about it, maybe journal about it, imagine it for a second, because I stopped doing that a long time ago, and instead I'm letting my past, my present dictate my future." I mean, it takes time, just like Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." But it takes time to give yourself the space.

One of the core stories that we told in this book is we told the story about Michelangelo, Michelangelo being the sculptor in Italy who sculpted the beautiful David, right? And the Pope asked David, "How the heck did you do it?" And he said, "I just took away everything that's not David." And so if you could think about it this way, you're stripping away more and more of the layers of the ways in which you're not being honest to yourself.

It's very hard to be fully honest with yourself. There's a lot of different things coming at us. Yeah, I got to pay the bills. Yeah, I've got to, whatever it may be, the distractions of the world. There's a lot of things that block you from being able to actually consider, let alone think about what you truly want to do, and then to begin actually thinking about how to go about doing it.

But I just like the idea of the layers of stripping away everything that's... And the 80% is what we're talking about that you want to strip away, which is the things that you don't actually want, but you're only doing because you think you need them. And so it takes time.

Every time you're making progress. The thing that I will say is you don't have to strip away the 80% all at once. That's actually something I would advise against doing. Not only do I think it's... I actually don't think it's possible. There's things in my 80% right now that I'm holding onto that I'll get...

You get rid of them over time. By actually getting rid of them though, what I mean is you're uncommitting to them. Because everything in your life right now is in your life because you're still committed to it. All the clothes in your closet are there because you're committed to it.

If you threw some of them away, now they're no longer a part of your commitment. Everything in your life right now is there because you're still committed to it. That's the idea of death standards. That's the idea of identity. Once you actually... - Can you uncommit to something without getting rid of it?

Could you say, "I've decided I'm no longer committed to this job. I'm going to pursue a 10X life, which involves... I'm no longer going to be a dentist. I'm going to own a winery." And you could say, "I'm now committed to that, but I don't have to shut down my dental practice tomorrow to not commit to it." - That's part of the process.

Yeah. So if that person who's a dentist or has a job, is starting to entertain... And it doesn't have to be work-related, by the way. But it can be, certainly. And we can use that as an example. But let's just say we start to explore our future self. And even a 10X future self that seems impossible to us, but that would be incredible if we were honest with ourselves and with other people, which we're scared to do.

By the way, a really great quote from Alcoholics Anonymous is, "All progress starts by telling the truth." So if I'm going to start to actually think about this, and entertain it, and be open to it, and imagine it, and get excited about it... And by the way, there are three levels.

First, you go from seeing or thinking to feeling, and then you eventually get to the place of knowing. Those are all three levels of getting connected to your future self. First, seeing, then feeling, getting emotionally connected, committed, then ultimately getting to the place of knowing, which is ultimately confidence.

But what this person could do is... A lot of people have heard the quote, "Never let the urgent get in the way of the important." What I'm saying is that 10X future self or your future self is what's important. It's not urgent. It's what you want. It's not what you need.

What's urgent is what you think you need. And that's why it's keeping all of your time. And so if you just even start placing a little bit more of the important before the urgent, it doesn't have to mean you have to get rid of the job all at once, but let's start exploring it.

Maybe right now you're spending one hour a week or less. Maybe right now you're spending zero hours a week even thinking about, "What if we could engineer in just three to five hours a week?" Where you're actually starting to explore that, think about it, invest in it, ask questions about it.

You're still keeping that job, but maybe we know that in three to six months, you're going to replace yourself, or you're going to start hiring on someone else, and you're going to spend now in six months from now, you're going to have half of your time in the 20%.

Right now, you've got all your time in the 80%, and you're stripping more and more away. Also, honestly, if we're just talking about the average American, the average American spends five, eight hours on their phone a day. And so there's a lot of stuff in the 80% that can be stripped away that's honestly just bad habits.

It doesn't all have to be work-related. You could strip away five hours a week on stuff that you already know is a distraction and just invest that in the 20%. And over time, the goal is to build your life in that way. So you said it's not all work.

What are some examples you've seen of 10X for future selves on the personal side? Yeah. So as an example, and this is why one of the things that I think is really important here, that's a different conversation, is I don't view 10X purely quantitatively. Even though it's a number and we're saying 10X, often what happens is people only start to think about things like money because it's quantitative, it's easy.

I really look at 10X as a qualitative. What I mean by that is it's a change in quality. So as an example, a child going from crawling to walking, I consider that a 10X. The things you can do as someone who can walk are fundamentally different than things you can do as a crawler.

But also a transformation has occurred. You're no longer operating the same way and you now have new capability, new potential as a walker versus a crawler. And you fail a thousand times to get there. From a bigger picture standpoint, going from horse and buggy to a car, I consider that a 10X.

We're still talking transformation, right? Or sorry, we're still talking about... What's the word? Transportation. We're still talking about transportation, horse and buggy. But now with a car, now you're not even playing the same game, right? And so you could think about your future self in similar ways where it's like, what's the version of you that's doing something different that is more in alignment with what you really want to be doing?

And even though it's not quantitatively a 10X, qualitatively, it may be. Like the quality of who you are and the way you're doing, how you're doing it may be different. I could think about it in terms of me with my kids. I don't have to literally go 10X like in numbers, but I can see myself having a much different connection with my kids, especially the three we adopted and the teenagers where it's like, we're really engaged on a different level.

And so it just takes time to actually clarify what does that look like at a totally different quality of life, quality of relationship. It could be you living in a different place, right? And so I try to think about it in terms of quality more than quantity. So what I hear is, I remember I had an interview with someone who's, funny enough, also had a lot of children and said that, I can't remember when during the week, but there's like a four-hour period during the week where the whole family just hangs out in like this room of the house, they call the library and they all read books together or play games and they just kind of all hang out.

And someone might say like, I don't ever have time for that. That is the 10X version of myself is to have this like uninterrupted four-hour distraction-free family time. That could have a 10X impact long-term, especially if you think long-term and ripple effects, that could have a 10X impact. Yes, but it doesn't mean that they were spending 40 minutes and now they're going to 400 minutes, you know, like from a 10X standpoint.

I agree. No, and I agree. And I think that really think, I love what you just said. Yeah, that it could be a 10X for me, for me to do a date night with my wife once a week. And quantitatively, that actually might be true. No, but what I'm saying is like, that might change, that might have ripple effects that over time maybe change, you know, change everything.

So yeah, I like to think about it in those terms. So if I try to recap where we've been so far, understanding that kind of time is really an abstract concept where you can use it in different ways. And if you learn to master it and use your present as a way to shape your past and use your future as a way to shape your present, you can kind of change your mindset.

You can set really ambitious goals for yourself, for your work. Think about what world would look like in a 10X world for you, not just a 2X world, and then start to cut away at all the stuff that is getting in the way. Where do most people, so that makes sense.

I should do that. We should all do that. Where do you think people get stuck? Like what are the challenges to doing this that make it less obvious to implement than it might sound right now? I love your questions. I'll go a few different places. The first one is actually that people, even high, almost honestly, especially high achievers, you wouldn't think this, but they often have a very unhealthy relationship with their past.

And it's because of how they approach their future. So as an example, even you, right? Someone who has a very successful podcast and stuff like that, married, has a great life. Often, and me and Dan actually wrote a different book on this topic, and we wrote it on purpose before we wrote 10X, because if you're going for 10X, obviously the future keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Thus, the goalpost keeps getting moved. And often what happens is, no matter how much you achieve and accomplish and experience, if you're always measuring yourself against the future, then, and this creates what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill, right? Where it's like, it does not matter how much you've got compared to your past self, right?

By all intents and purposes, you might be living the dreams and way beyond of your past self. But because we so quickly adapt in the present, and because we're always going for something bigger and bigger in the future, if you're always measuring yourself against that future, then you're always going to feel like a loser in the present, no matter where your life is.

You might be competing with other people. Now you're in a higher socioeconomic status. And so now you're comparing yourself with people with Ferraris and stuff like that. And you're always feeling like a loser. It does not matter, right? All that stuff is relative. And so the first key is actually this.

And this goes to the idea of mastery over your past. That no matter what I'm going for, yes, and this is one of the main points actually that I was going to make before when you were saying, how can you be fully committed to impossible goals and yet be okay if you don't achieve them?

It goes to the point of, it does not matter what I accomplish in the next 90 days. I'm the one who determines what it means, right? I control my past. You, absolutely, your opinion has nothing to do with my past. The only person whose opinion that matters about my past is me.

And so I get to then look at my past and look at all the ways in which I've grown, accomplished. I get to frame it in a positive, or I can frame it in a negative if I want and feel like a loser, but that's not going to help me.

And so I think just a super important point for everyone to always understand, in my opinion, if you want to be happy and enjoy the ride, is that it's always you in the present and really, you're always measuring yourself backwards. That's what we kind of call it in the book.

The book is called The Gap and the Gain, but rather than measuring yourself in the gap of where you want to be, which is kind of like a horizon, right? There's a horizon moving forward in the desert. It does not matter how many steps you take forward. You're never going to reach the horizon, right?

That's your future self. That's your ideals. But what happens to people, and especially high achievers, is that they're always measuring themselves against that horizon. And as a result, they now feel like they're actually not doing that great in the present. So it actually diminishes your present and largely diminishes your past because you're not where you could be or should be, or you're not as good as that person.

And the last thing you want to do is diminish your present and your past. The whole purpose of what we're talking about here is using the past and the future to increase the present. And so I just think it's really important to accurately measure your progress. You as an example, you talked about how this year you've accomplished things that your past self would have thought were impossible.

That's beautiful. Don't forget that. Actually write that out. And so I'm always reminding myself, not just reminding, but I'm actually documenting. This is part of creating the past and mastering the past is actually becoming aware of all the ways in which I've actually accomplished things even in the last week.

And I would forget about those things and even downplay them if I'm always only wishing I was at my future. Again, we're using the future as the filter and the decision making factor in the present, but we're not living in that future. We're bringing that future to the present.

But just on a really simple terms, on a weekly basis, look back and write down all the wins. Write down all the ways in which you've made progress. You can even write down the things that went wrong that now you now know better, now the lessons. You could write down the ways in which you're different from your past self.

Do that on a monthly basis. Go back to the beginning of the year. Go back three years to COVID. Write down all the things that you've actually accomplished, the key experiences you've had. Write down the things that you now know that you probably didn't know back then. That's the whole idea of keeping proper perspective.

And if you can do that, then playing the game of going for massive futures is awesome because I don't need that future. Remember, I want it. And also I'm extremely blown away by even where I'm at. And I'm always reminded of that. So I just think that that's a crucial first step is staying in that what we call a gain mindset rather than a gap mindset.

I think that that's an initial keynote, and if there's anything you want to say there. But I think that that's a fundamental foundation of a healthy psychology. Okay. So I think that's really helpful because what I want to try to get at is what are the things that people trying to push forward that create this 10x mindset, kind of push their life forward to a place they want to be, where are they going to get stuck?

So it sounds like one place they'll get stuck is this. It's not necessarily framing everything in the right way. And so not looking at their past in the right way and whatnot. So where else... There's some other big spots. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Where else do people get stuck?

Let me give you... Can I give you an example? Yeah. Where would you get stuck? If you're thinking about your 10x, where are you going to get stuck? If you're thinking about your next big leap, you've already made some big ones. If you're thinking about your next big leap, what's going to get you stuck?

I have a few. So one is prioritization. If you have... You envision this 10x version of yourself, there's probably more than one vector in which you're changing. So I'm not just changing what I do professionally, or who I hang out with, or what I say no to. It's all of those things and more.

So figuring out where to start and what to focus on first, I think is one. Figuring out next steps in really ambitious things probably is another big one because you don't know that next step because it's not obvious. Those are a couple things that come to mind. On the spot.

I love it. I mean, to me, I love it. And those are great spots. So one of them that I think is really helpful. So there's a classic book, "Good to Great" from Jim Collins. And one of the things that he talks about in that book is, and I'm using a business example, but I could also use this as a personal example.

Very few companies go on to become excellent, great. Even very few companies go on to keep existing. Even really, really good companies that we think are good right now are not going to exist in five or 10 years. And what's the difference between the two? That's what that whole book is about.

And one of the main things is that... So good will stop existing. Just remember that. Good is going to stop existing. It's going to fail. Good will fail. Only the great can even have a shot at succeeding, let alone continuing to exist. I'm just talking business, but this also fits with life.

So the companies that become great let go of everything that is merely good. And so they are hyper-focused. One of the things you even told me at the beginning of this conversation is you like having deep conversations, right? And so the only way to get really good at something is to actually be focused.

You use the word prioritization. And so one of the things that he says in that book is that if you have more than three priorities, you have zero. And so when you're thinking about your "10x future self," I think it's useful to think in terms of three priorities. What are the three core areas of life that I want to 10x?

One could be professional. One could be personal. One could be spiritual. It could be your family. Think about your future self in terms of three priorities. There are three key areas that you're going to massively 10x. And then those priorities actually determine strategy. They determine focus. They determine the pathways.

They determine the decisions. And so you don't need to think about your future self in 50 different vectors. It's actually just two or three. You've got two or three areas of life that you're massively going to focus on, invest in, and honestly, "take 10x." Take to a totally different level.

There's a great quote that says, "It's better to be a meaningful specific than a wandering generality." So when it comes to your future self, be specific, highly specific, and it can't be specific in 50 ways. Maybe specific in three. I think that's one. So have a very specific, high future self in a few areas of priority.

When it comes to then the practical pursuing short-term goals, I love, again, like I said, 90-day timeframes. I don't have to accomplish my future self in 90 days, but I can tell you that if I'm actually using my future self as the decision-making factor, and if I'm stripping away some of the 80% that I admit is holding me back, and if I'm actually starting to advance on some of those things that I don't know how to do yet, I'm maybe starting to learn about some of the pathways, or I'm starting to make some of the decisions that I wouldn't make three weeks ago, but I'm now starting to make now, maybe hire that person, maybe X, Y, and Z.

Over a 90-day time period, you can actually do a lot, especially if you're operating from the future. And then at the end of those 90 days, look back, as I said, frame it in the positive, learn from it, and then set the next 90 days. And be willing to go for goals you probably won't achieve.

The purpose of those goals is so you can properly filter the 80 from the 20, and then just let go of as much as you can, and make as much progress in the 20 as you can each 90 days. And you'll be shocked at how much your life can change on 90-day timeframes, whereas in 6, 12 months from now, you look back, and you're like, "Oh, yeah, so many things that I didn't even think were possible now are normal." And maybe in those timeframes, you did let go of something big, like a job or something.

Me, as an example, that thing that I told you guys that I'm letting go of, it took a year for me to come to that conclusion, because I'm letting go of, honestly, something massive. It's not like I just jumped on it, but now I'm getting more and more committed to that 20% and to the peak of the next future self.

And so, yeah, sometimes some things you can let go of fast, some things it might take a year of preparation to let it go. And for things that you could easily let go fast, but maybe it isn't obvious. Any advice there? You mentioned closet and clothes at one point, and I'm thinking, "Okay, in my closet, I bet there's at least half of the stuff in there that I don't need." And I totally understand why.

Is it that you don't need or that you don't want? Probably both, to be honest. I have dress shirts that I'm probably never going to wear again. And I'm like, "I don't even like them, but I have them." But it's like, "Well, maybe one day I'll need this thing." There's a lot of that that goes through my mind, which is we just have some stuff and it's like, "Well, I don't know.

How often are we really entertaining in the backyard with..." A lot of that stuff's in the 80%. Yes, totally agree. But it doesn't really take up space. I also am thinking we just cleaned out the kitchen and I was like, "Gosh, we have a lot of outdoor plastic glasses." If we wanted to have people over for whatever reason, I don't know why, we have two different...

We have outdoor champagne glasses and outdoor wine glasses. We probably bought some bulk set of plastic wine. And I'm like, "Gosh, this is just stuff. I feel like we never use this." And my wife's like, "We should get rid of it." I'm like, "Yeah, but we don't really need the space for something else." Can you talk a little bit about why getting rid of it would add value even if you have the space?

So this is what I was talking about before with raising the floor and using a new floor. And that you actually brought up the point of... Well, you actually brought up this point and I'm really glad you're going here because I'm learning a lot about you in a good way.

But you think that you're not committed to those things because they're just there. We got space for them. So they're not impacting you. What I'm saying to you is this, the fact that they're in your house says a lot about you. The fact that they're in your house says that that is who you are.

Because if it was not who you were, they would not be in your house. And so the fact that you are still holding onto those things, even in your orbit, says a lot about your current floor. And that if you rose the floor... And I'm not making a value judgment on your floor versus my floor.

I'm saying we're all different people and we all have different things that we value and things that we're committed to. But when you raise the floor to a certain point, where now no longer could you... Would it ever make sense for you to wear that shirt? It's not even a part of your identity.

And to the idea of your floor is your identity. What happens is that when you actually now get rid of it, saying you get rid of that set, you're now proving through your actions that you're a different person than you were in the past. That that no longer resonates with what you consider valuable or useful or...

And I know you're talking about physical items in the house, but that same thing fits with anything that you're allowing to have any bandwidth on your attention. And so you can know a lot about who a person is by what they're saying yes to. And what they're saying yes to is how they spend their time, what's in their environment, who's in their environment, what they say yes and no to.

And so the fact that it's still in your environment means you're still saying yes to it, which is a huge indicator of your identity. And so when you raise the floor and now you start stripping out things that no longer fit the new floor, fit the new filter. Filter being the filtering system of what you're saying yes and no to.

You raise that floor. Now there's a lot of things that are below that you used to say yes to that now you're now saying no to out of choice. If you want to, if you want to stick with the new floor, you're doing it out of choice. You're the one who raises the floor or not.

But raising the floor is really important. I'll give an example. A lot of people think about their potential, a professional athlete. A professional athlete will never see its peak or even create new peaks if it doesn't also raise their floor. The floor could be their habits, who they say yes to.

Most people, because their floor is so low, they'll never even get anywhere close to where they really want to go because they're so hung up in so many different ways by what they're saying yes to. It could be bad habits, X, Y, and Z. The main thing I want to get here, and I've probably over labored the point, is just I see you saying yes to it proves that that's who you are.

If you said no to it, you'd prove that that's who you are. And it's a big thing to watch yourself start saying no to things for a higher reason and to start filtering things, whether it's a job, whether it's saying yes to certain things on your calendar, whether it's saying yes to things in your environment.

Watching yourself say no for a really clear reason shows that you're no longer the same person. Yeah, what just clicked for me was committing to like, I want to be a person that is only wearing clothes I love. And so the bar isn't, is there probably a time where I might need this thing?

It's like, well, if I don't love this thing, I'm a person that's only going to be wearing things that I love. So yeah, I don't need it. It's like connecting the dots between who you want to be to whether you need a thing that seems to be, for me, at least, what clicks?

Well, I just think it's really important for everyone to realize that if something is in your life, you're still committed to it. Because if you weren't committed to it, it would not be in your life. Yeah, you're, you're almost forcing yourself to. It's funny, I come back to actually, I come back to this principle in investing in personal finance a lot, which is, you know, you're holding on to a stock.

And I always tell people, like, if you're not selling it, you're effectively making the decision every day to buy it. Like, it's not quite the same. But if you because it's very close to the same, it's very, yeah, there's capital gains context here. But like, if you own a bunch of stock at a company, and you're saying, well, I don't really want it, but it's at the wrong price.

Well, you're kind of also saying, if you sold it today, you would buy it at today's price. And so you're, you're, well, you're, you're actually hitting a lot of the deep psychology behind why we hold on to the 80%. And this is what you're talking about right now is sunk cost bias, or a little bit of sunk cost bias, which is that the reason you're keeping it is because you're already invested in it.

Even though you know, that if you didn't own it, you wouldn't invest in it. Now, if you didn't already have those dishes in your closet, you probably wouldn't go and buy them today. And you're like, well, yeah, but I don't need to buy them. They're free. Okay, well, obviously, then you're valuing them above what they're worth to you.

And that's that that's also called the endowment effect, which is overvaluing something because you have it. And so there's a lot of these what they call cognitive biases for the reasons we hold on to the 80%. One of them truly is what you're describing, which is why people hold on to a stock that they don't they would not buy today.

And that's that they overvalue it because they own it. That's the endowment effect. The sunk cost biases is that because they're so invested in it, and this is where things get, this is where things go a bad direction. Because you're already so invested in it, say it's a relationship, right?

Or it's or your job or something like that. Everything in your 80%, by the way, you're very invested in your past self invested a lot into it. And now it's it's here. But now using the new future, it's inviting you to let it go. But often we keep investing in something because we've invested so much in it.

And so now we're, we're actually forcing it to be a part of our future selves live, even though it makes no, no, no logical sense. The other principle that I just want to share here is what psychologists call the consistency principle. And that and this one really, really holds people hostage in their 80%.

Which is is that as people, we really love to be viewed as consistent to other people. And so I might keep doing things that I like I deep down don't want to keep doing, but I keep doing them because I want to be viewed by the outside world as consistent.

And, and so what that does is it leads people to being consistent with their past self. But what happens in what I'm inviting you to do, which is a really high bar of, of psychology, like, again, I use the term psychological flexibility. If you have a huge future, and you're letting that be the determining factor for who you are in the present, you're going to be very different in the present than who you were even yesterday.

Not like I'm not saying you're gonna go and like, buzz your head and do something crazy. I'm just saying, like, you're letting your future determine who you are in the present. And by virtue, that future is very different from your present. And so of course, you're gonna start doing things that look different from what you were doing yesterday.

And you have to be comfortable with the fact that a lot of people are not going to get it. They might even disagree with it. And one other really important point is this is most people really don't care. Most people might think it's interesting that they're focused on their own stuff.

Like you're not the center of everyone else's world. You're the center of your own world. And so definitely don't make other people that are deciding factor. Certainly like the people who matter, right? The people who fit with your future self, your spouse, right? Those are the people that obviously it matters.

But most of the people in the outside world that we're trying to like hold up a reputation to, they don't really care. And you absolutely shouldn't care. Like they shouldn't be the determining factor on why you make certain choices. - So if we just double click for a second more on the endowment and sunk costs, like what advice do you have people who are still struggling to get through those?

The thing that holds a lot of people back, at least in people like me, I guess. - I mean, I'll give some hard examples. And I know I'm speaking as an entrepreneur here. And I know that not a lot of the people here who are entrepreneurs, but relationships in general, right?

It could be your friends. In my case, I'm just saying this directly. Like there are three team members that at the end of the year, I know I'm gonna have to let go of. Because again, I told you this thing that was a big part of my business. I'm effectively letting it go so that I can prove to myself how committed I am to my 20%.

And now there's a lot more skin in the game, literally a lot of money for myself that I'm letting go of in the short run to actually go deep on a few things that I think are gonna be massive for my future self. But a big part of letting, honestly, a big part of why I was afraid to let that go is 'cause that means letting go of three of the team members.

One of them has been on my team for five years who I freaking love. And there's just not gonna be a role for her now with the direction I'm going. And so that is devastating to me. And so in a lot of ways, because I've been so invested in that relationship, and because we've done so much great stuff together, I could see myself holding on to that and having that again, kind of like the clothes in the closet or the jewelry, the stuff in the dishes and the stuff.

I could hold on to that part of my business. But this then becomes something very different than your clothes. This ends up becoming something that I now have to put dozens or even hundreds of hours of my 2024 into. And I'm holding on to it because I'm afraid of essentially letting go of this relationship or changing it.

And I could see myself doing that. And so that's an example, I guess you could say. And so I guess a main point here is this. I know that's on the relational side. And we can do that with friends. When you're going to a new place, a lot of the friends that got you here, it's not like they're no longer your friends, but your relationship will change.

You can't hang out with them every day. That's just going to be the case when you're making changes. And you can either learn to embrace that or you can let it be a really painful experience. And I think that one of the ways of embracing it is just to appreciate what it was.

It's almost like what Marie Kondo literally talks about. It's not that simple of being grateful for the shirt that you're getting rid of. But that's part of what I'm calling the gain mindset. I am so freaking amazed by those five years with that person. I'm celebrating that. I'm not going to downplay that because now it's over.

But at the same time, my future is shaping this. And so I think you can just get to the point where you don't have to overly bemoan the loss. I think a lot of people, they overblow letting something go. And they almost have to go through the five stages of grief.

I don't think you have to do that. I think that you can really be grateful for it. That's part of owning the past. I'm super grateful for that. I always will be. But I'm also really stoked about the big decisions I'm making. And so I don't know. It's just a part of the process.

You can be fast or slow about it. I think you can be emotionally intelligent about it, though, where you have huge empathy. I have huge empathy for those three people. But I don't have to take responsibility for them. Again, I'm making choices for my future self. And I can let them have responsibility for their own future selves as well.

>> Yeah. It's funny. Had we not had this conversation, this wouldn't have been true. But now there actually is a drag of seeing a shirt in my closet that I know I should get rid of but haven't. And in some ways, it's motivating me more to go do it.

So just the sheer talking about it and understanding and thinking about who it would make me is making me want to make that change sooner. >> One thing I will just say is, again, I used the orientation of time. In psychology, we would say time is holistic rather than sequential.

Sequential would be that the past is behind this present. I'm saying it's holistic. The past, present, and future are all happening right now. But it's really powerful to use the future as a filter. When I say filter, it's a filtering thing. Yes, no. And so when you have a 10x future, the reason it's so powerful is that it is a powerful filter for what you say yes and no to.

And so it can be an orientation towards life, not just something you do. It's a filtering system. Me as an example, I've had a messy car for a while. And just this morning, I cleaned it out because I just said, that's not my future self. That's in the 80%.

The stuff in my car, that's the 80%. I went and just threw it away. Even stuff that I could have gone and hung back in my closet. No, one of the shirts I just threw it away. Not my future self. But it really just becomes an orientation. And it allows you to really do make big leaps.

I'm saying this on the personal side. First off, I invite anyone listening to think about the times you've done this. Chances are, all of us have done this at different stages where you actually got committed to something in the future. And over time, you went all in on that.

Even if it was going to college or whatever it may have been. And over time, you had to let go of aspects of what were big parts of your life back then. Me as an example. Me going in high school, a lot of big parts of my life. Going to high school.

It became part of my 80%. But even the friend group. Me, I was huge on snowboarding and playing video games. I played World of Warcraft 15 hours a day. Snowboard all the time. And then I had the bigger future that invited me to let that stuff go. And so I had to let go of the stuff that was important in that chapter in my life.

And by had to, I said I chose to. I could have held onto that. And like some of my friends, still been playing 15 years later because they just couldn't let that go. And by the way, I think a really huge book on this topic. Have you ever read Man's Search for Meaning?

No. Okay. Well, that's one of the most important. It's one of the most important books of the last 150 years. It's written by a guy named Viktor Frankl. It's all about his experiences in the concentration camps. This book was written in the '50s. So he was a Jewish psychiatrist who lived through the Holocaust.

And his whole book is about the psychology of the Holocaust and what happens when you get everything, literally everything taken from you. And now you're watching your wife get killed. Your mom gets put in a gas chamber. You're sleeping on the floor. He literally just walks you through the psychology of all of it.

And in that book, he talks about the fundamental importance of having a future to hope for, to strive for, to live for. Because if you lose that future, then in the present, especially if you're in a horrible situation like a concentration camp, then there's really no purpose for anything.

And then he talks about how that's when people literally gave up the ghost. In those situations, they're already starving to death. But once they lost hope in the future, they passed. And so that's just back to just core psychology. It's really... One of his quotes in that book is he says, "What people need is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and the struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task." It's just powerful as people...

Not that you have to be gunning all the time for your future self. Certainly, there's plenty of time for enjoyment. Actually, there's plenty of time for recovery. And all that stuff is part of the process. But to have a future that is stretching you and inviting you to make some big decisions and to let go of stuff that no longer is who you are.

I think it's really important to realize that you're not your past self. Not to overly identify with your past self. That's part of having a growth mindset. One thing that's really interesting as well, though, is not to overly identify with your current self. So even Daniel Gilbert, he's a Harvard psychologist.

He said that the person you are right now is as fleeting as the present moment. And so I don't need to over-identify with the things that I want now. My future self is going to want different things. It doesn't mean I don't have any core foundations as a person.

It's just recognition. I don't have to overly cling to things. There's certain things that my past self was really attached to. One of them being World of Warcraft. Me, my current self right now, you couldn't pay me to play that game. But even stuff three months ago that I was paid for, you couldn't pay me to do now because I'm not my past self and because my floor keeps going up.

And so that's part of psychological flexibility is the ability to let things go as well. Not only the ability to make new commitments and use that commitment to truly be committed, but the ability to uncommit to things that you were once committed to. - And what would you say to someone who's at this point and they're like, "I'm all in.

I want to do this, but I don't actually know what that future self looks like." Are there some exercises or some practices to kind of figure that out? - So Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Imagination is a skill. It's not like you're going to be amazing at it from the beginning.

It's something you get better and better at every week, every month. I honestly think there's a lot said about journaling. Journaling is really powerful. And I think even if you gave yourself 10 minutes a week to just journal and think about the things that you want, think about your future self, think about what things could be like in three years from now.

Also think about how different they are from three years ago. I think just giving yourself the space to think about it. I mean, for me, I journal about 15 minutes every morning and I think about the things I've accomplished. I also think about the things I'm dealing with now, but I also think about my future self and just giving yourself the time.

And I also think giving yourself not only the time, but the space. What I mean by space is put yourself in different environments. It could be that you, once a quarter, take a day off and actually go do something that's fun and give yourself a little space to think.

But on a daily or weekly basis, it doesn't need to be that much time, but actually give yourself the space to think about it, to write about it. And maybe over time, you'll start to talk about it with certain people. But just practice the joy of giving yourself the space to think, to imagine, and then maybe even a little bit to strategize.

Think about, "How would I go about that?" I honestly just think it's a continuous process, but think about it. Think about your future self. Think about what you would want. Think about what would be amazing. Think about what you would most value. Just give yourself the time to think about it.

- But it sounds like there shouldn't be expectation that you need to figure this out in a day or two. It might take you weeks, months to figure out what that is. - Well, one thing I just want to say is that everyone already has a future self. There's already so many things that you're now doing because of your future self.

As an example, you're probably going to work, right? Because if you weren't thinking about your future self two weeks from now, paying the bills, you probably wouldn't be going, right? Or thinking about your long-term future self and wanting retirement, right? And so you just have to acknowledge that almost everything you're already doing is because of some view of your future self.

But now it's actually thinking about it. In psychology, they often call it the default future, that people have that default future that they're just like... It's the future that they've already pre-committed to, even if it's not the one that they would want. It's just like, "Yeah, I'm going to retire at age 65." It's like it's the default future that now is largely shaping so much of what we're already doing.

So I think a step is honestly just stepping back a little bit and looking at your life and being like, "Okay, I am going to work 40-60 hours a week. Why? Because I need to pay." There are reasons why. And then starting to actually give yourself permission to the idea of want, and thinking about, "What would I want?

What could I..." And beginning in that direction. So yeah, no, that's really interesting. And so if someone's not sure what their future self should be, it sounds like a good step is to write down what it is now because it already exists. You already have an idea. I think that's huge.

Admit what your view of your future self already is and what you've already pre-committed to in your mind. As in a weird example, people already have in their mind the age-ish that they're going to die. People have already had all these pre-commitments in their mind about what their future self is.

This is super helpful. Okay, I feel like I'm ready to go do these exercises. Anything we missed? Anything people need to be keeping in mind that we haven't talked about before we wrap up? No, I just try to catch the language of "shoulds." The future self isn't a "should" thing.

The future self is a "want" thing. And I know that that might sound different, but as an example, my relationship with my kids becomes a lot different when I approach it because I want to, not because I have to. There is no "should" with me being a father of six kids, or even being a good father.

And so when you actually start to give yourself the permission of like, "What would I want?" Then it can start to come from an intrinsic place. And then you can start to really create it. But no, I really don't think there's... I mean, obviously I wrote a book, Be Your Future Self Now.

10x is easier than 2x. These are books you can dive into and have deeper dives into. But it really is a constant process. As an example, the future self that I'm imagining is quite different than the future self I was imagining even at the beginning of this year, or even three months ago.

And so it's a nonstop process. That's why the past and the future are simply tools. They're not things that are fixed in place. They're things that are constantly evolving and changing. And so you don't have to have... I look at it like the draft of a book. I don't need...

My future self is not a finished draft. Yes, it can get more and more crystal or vivid. It can get more specific, and I can really start to develop incredible plans, which I am doing. But at the same time, in a month from now, I'm going to probably know a lot of things I don't know.

And maybe those are going to tilt my plan, shift them. And so I just think that's part of just viewing it as a continuous process. I love it. I hope that's really helpful. You've got these two books. Obviously, anyone listening that wants to go deeper, they can find them both wherever books are sold.

Anywhere else people can stay on top of everything you're working on? I would just say probably YouTube. YouTube, Benjamin Hardy, Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Those are all turned into podcasts. My website is benjaminhardy.com. If you go to futureself.com, if you're in the United States, futureself.com, you can actually download the free Kindle of Be Your Future Self now.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for asking cool questions.