WWK Ep 030: 10X Is Easier Than 2X: Dr. Benjamin Hardy on the Science of Scaling
RORY (00:00)
I’m gonna 10X my comp I’m gonna grow 10 times larger than I ever have been able to get to so far. I’m going to get 10 times further than I’ve gotten my entire life in three years. Yep.
I have to tell you, when I first saw this, I my brain processed what you were saying as hyperbole.
DR. BEN HARDY (00:18)
Exactly. That’s what I meant. People take it metaphorically or they don’t take it literally.
RORY (00:26)
You’re about to hear from one of the smartest people on the planet today. And in the space of personal branding, this guy is a master. He is someone who models exactly what we want to see in terms of true thought leadership. We’re going to talk about how do you forward the thinking of what has been done in your space? How do you separate yourself in a in a world of noise? And specifically, we’re going to talk about how to scale your business, how to 10x your business in the next couple years or less. That’s something that he’s helped a lot of people do.
Who am I talking with? I’m talking with my good friend, Dr. Benjamin Hardy. He has a PhD from Clemson. He is a New York Times bestselling author. He has written several books. Some of my favorites: 10X is easier than 2X, Who Not How, and his newest book, The Science of Scaling, which hit the New York Times bestseller list when it came out. He has sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books. He’s had hundred million people read his blog articles. He’s been featured in the Harvard Business Review, Forbes.
fortune, so many great places and he’s become a friend. So he’s an organizational psychologist and he’s gonna talk about how to help you blow up your personal brand, how to develop true thought leadership, and how to scale your business as an entrepreneur. Ben, welcome to the show.
DR. BEN HARDY (01:40)
Good to see you, brother. So great.
RORY (01:42)
Glad to have you.
I want to dive right in with scaling. ⁓ I want to understand what is the difference between growth and scaling? Because everyone listening, you know, here is an expert of some type. Most of them are entrepreneurs. If they’re not entrepreneurs, they’re intrapreneurs, right? They’re they’re operating a you know a division of a company or something like that, or they’ve got, you know, maybe like a side hustle or something.
And I think you hear those terms a lot growth, scale. You say there’s a big difference. What’s the difference?
DR. BEN HARDY (02:14)
So for me, the difference is growth is usually taking where you’re currently at and doing more of it. And so you can know if someone’s growing, if they use where they’re at now or what they’ve accomplished in the past to to like set their objectives. So as an example, if we did a million revenue last year, let’s go for two this year, you can automatically know that that person is growing. Also I think a very easy example is if someone is not literally two Xing on an annual basis, they’re growing. So if someone’s, you know, growing by one percent, that could be considered growth.
Right, that’s definitely not considered scale. ⁓ so if you’re doing less than two X on an annual basis, you’re growing. So
RORY (02:50)
2x
means 100%. Correct. 100% growth. Yep. would have it to so it’s really like you can grow ninety-nine percent once you hit a hundred percent. It’s gotta be at least a hundred percent.
DR. BEN HARDY (03:00)
I’d
say so. I I that that that that starts to get a little close, but for us, scale is an exponential. And for something to be an exponential, it has to be a multiple, and that’s gonna be at least a 10x. And so for us, scale has to be at least a 10x. So
RORY (03:14)
we say it as growth is linear, scale is exponential. Would you agree with that? It is
DR. BEN HARDY (03:20)
Yeah. And so scale is at least 10x. And for us, we actually do put the time constraint on it because you could linearly grow for for decades, right? ⁓ usually, usually you’re gonna hit a plateau, but for us, scale has to be speed as well. It’s not just the the size, but it’s also speed. And so for us, scale is gonna be something that happens in a few years, not in a decade. We usually put the time cap on it three years or less.
RORY (03:44)
Yeah, let’s talk about the speed dynamic because you showed a ch there’s a tr t table, a chart in this book, which you also show in your presentation about what it looks like ⁓ on a you know, if the x-axis is time and the y-axis is growth. Sh explain the difference as best you can w visually what does that what does what is growth look like on that graph versus what does scale look like on that graph.
DR. BEN HARDY (04:11)
Yeah,
so you just like have a have a slope, a a growth slope is gonna be very like small, like it’s gonna be very linear, whereas ⁓ scale is gonna be like very sharp. It’s gonna be sharp upwards, gonna have an intense slope, which is also an intense learning curve, right? And so just as an example, like if you want to go from zero to a hundred, right, that that could be considered growth. Whereas if you want to get to zero to ten thousand, right? That’s just those are just random numbers, but the numbers are bigger, but also the timeline is shorter. And so it just forces a different path.
RORY (04:39)
It
forces a different path. Yeah. When you when you look at going to a hundred if you go from zero to a hundred linearly, that would be like ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty that and that’s what you’re talking about is growth. But if you go, if I shorten the time horizon, yep. And I go, well, I I can’t get to a hundred and ten years. I gotta get there in th in three, as you guys say. Now all of a sudden you have to go ten, sixty, a hundred or you know, something like that, and it and it shoots up. Yep. So
How do we scale? So I love that definition. All right. So I I I love the idea of going growth is linear, scale is exponential, ⁓ and then shortening the time horizon is a part of requiring it to be exponential. So then how do we how do we identify what
Is going to scale our business. Like when you say 10x is easier than 2x, or you say, you know, like what you guys do at scaling.com, and by the way, shout out to Blake Erickson. So he’s the co-author of this book, longtime member at Brand Builders Group, one of the people I have the most respect for, one of the best young entrepreneurs in the nation. ⁓ and you guys are business partners, co-authors. ⁓ so major shout out to Blake.
DR. BEN HARDY (05:51)
Like
he gives you a lot of credit, by the way, for so much of what he’s learned.
RORY (05:54)
I mean, ⁓ that’s I that’s very generous and I appreciate it. I mean, that kid is he’s a superstar. I mean, I say a kid because he’s so young, but like he he’s got more going on than most like 50 year old entrepreneurs. ⁓ so he’s really, really wonderful. So when you guys at scaling dot com, what you guys do is you you’re you will tell them tell them what the promise is. What because you have ⁓ you have a criteria to even like be considered to be kind of a part of this community. What what’s the criteria?
DR. BEN HARDY (06:23)
Criteria is you can’t first off you have to be at a million revenue. Like that’s a we we don’t it’s we’re not a you know VC firm. We’re not like looking to like find unicorns. We want someone to have some establishment. and then we so that’s like a base, you gotta be at least at a million revenue, but also we require as you come in there, you’re gonna commit to 10xing in three years. So if you’re at one million, you have to at least commit ⁓ both to you know, you might not have the perfect pathway. That’s why we give you a strategist, that’s why we give you case studies, that’s why we we help you through the process, but you have to at least be committed to 10xing.
in three years or less. Yeah. And so like that has to be completely established on the inside because we don’t want to bring people in who part of our philosophy was is we want the only room where everyone’s 10xing. Like and we want, we want everyone in there to be scaling because I’ve been in a ton of rooms and ⁓ a ton of communities where
They’re in it’s an entrepreneurial room, right? People are in there getting training, they’re masterminding or whatever, but only like two or three percent of people are actually like becoming outliers, right? It’s a very bell curve normal distribution where most people are actually fairly stagnant, even though they’re in an entrepreneurial room community getting training, et cetera. Only a few were just rapidly 10xing.
Right. And I’d been in so many of those rooms. I was often one of those outliers. And so we just decide we want to create a room where that’s the only thing happening. And so we require 10X from the beginning. So, you know, we have a comp we have companies in scaling.com that are doing over a billion revenue, but they we require the same commitment of them as well. If they’re not willing to 10x, and we take it very literally too. Like this is something that I think was a mistake of mine when I wrote 10x is easier than two X.
is because I talked about 10x both quantitatively and qualitatively, qualitatively being like transformation, value. Okay. I think a lot of people took it too metaphorically and they didn’t literally set a 10X goal and then use that 10X goal to reverse engineer and re engineer their business.
RORY (08:08)
Yeah,
so I want to talk about that. But I and I just want to like double tap on what you said there, because you you you say it all the time and you you go through that, and it’s like your requirement is someone who is going to make a commitment to 10x their business in less than three years. That is a really big commitment, and it is a very unusual.
Person. It’s a very extraordinary. It’s a very non-aver to even commit to something like that, to even sort of like audaciously say, I’m gonna 10X my comp I’m gonna grow 10 times larger than I ever have been able to get to so far. I’m going to get 10 times further than I’ve gotten my entire life in three years. Yep. That’s a radical, that’s a radical commitment from them, and it’s a radical.
promise that you are promoting. You’re not promising it to them, but it’s a it’s a it’s a challenge that you’re you’re throwing down. ⁓ I have to tell you, when I first saw this, I my brain processed what you were saying as hyperbole.
DR. BEN HARDY (09:20)
Exactly. That’s what I meant. People take it metaphorically or they don’t take it literally.
RORY (09:23)
Yeah, and and or and just as like a marketing gimmick. Okay. So I thought it was like, ⁓ you know, here here’s somebody like ⁓ y you know, it’s like, the you know, the billionaire mindset. And it’s just like, well, you’re just like throwing something out there, like no it but you actually have much much to my satisfaction, ⁓ and much to proving me wrong, you have a framework and a and a set of strategies.
And you’ve codified an actual scientific form of thinking for how this is possible. and the way the way that it’s possible is inherent in the goal itself. So can you talk to us about the talk to us about the floor and the focus and why the goal of 10x isn’t just a superlative, but the goal itself is the strategy.
DR. BEN HARDY (10:19)
Hundred percent. Yeah. And I think a lot of people when they use that word strategy, they think about strategy as pathways to goals. Like that’s how I kind of I think people think about like what’s the strategy or like do you have five strategies to get there? And for me, strategy is mostly about the objective you choose. Right. So it it actually starts with what is the goal we’re going for? What are we after? So like when when ⁓ the US was deciding to go to the moon, like going to the moon was the strategy, right?
And so it’s like now we can figure out how to do that, but getting to the moon was a strategy. So the goal is actually mostly like is like I would consider ninety percent of the strategy, the goal itself that you choose. Getting there now we can figure that out. But choosing the objective is the most fundamental aspect of strategy.
RORY (11:01)
And I think that what you just said there, the goal is ninety percent of the strategy. I think that is a radical insight and a unique insight to where people think of the goal as a destination only. You and your work, what you guys have said is no, the goal is the strategy. Explain that though. Like, how is the destination the strategy?
DR. BEN HARDY (11:07)
Hundred percent.
Hundred percent. So
It kind of goes so one of my favorite quotes comes from a a psychologist named Roy Baumeister. Roy Baumeister is one of the kind of founders of the whole field of positive psychology. And what he said is that the self, he’s talking about like you or me, our self is not a thing, but it’s a process. And it uses the future to organize the present. Okay. And so this goes against a hundred years of Freud based psychology that’s very past based. A lot of the research of a hundred years and a lot of the philosophy of psychology was that if I wanted to understand who a human was, all I have to do is understand their past.
past. Yep. And and the view is is that the past predicts the future. And so if I want to know who Rory’s future is, all I gotta do is look at Rory’s past. If I know about who Rory was five years ago, I’ll know who he’ll be in five years from now. And I
RORY (12:12)
I would say that is actually 1000% true if nothing changes. Sure. Your past will will will continue. Sure. But and that’s what and that’s exactly what most people do, which is part of your point, is they’re doing everything based on a a a lens of the past.
DR. BEN HARDY (12:26)
And we even consider that growth. We when you use the past to shape your future, right? We did five million revenue last year, so let’s go for six. You’re living in that incremental, very slow world. But back to back to Baumeister, and really it’s pretty revolutionary, but to me it’s very natural as well, that humans use their future to organize the present, right? So we use our model or our view of the future, or in other words, our goals. and Victor Frankel talked deeply about this in even Man’s Search for Meaning, right? Man’s Search for Meaning, him talking about his experience in the concentration camps. He said that the only thing that would work
When you’ve had everything removed from you, stripped from you, right? He’s talking about people who are dying in the concentration camps. He said that the only thing that would work is to have a goal that gives your life meaning. Like, and he said it’s the pu peculiarity of people that they can only live by looking to the future. So the most critical aspect of a human being is their future, right? That’s what modern, like that’s what positive psychology shows, that’s what neuroscience shows, is that our future is actually the thing we use to shape, filter, organize our present. And so when you understand that.
You start to understand that human beings operate off of goals, right? And you definitely don’t want your goals to be based on the past. And so when you understand that humans operate off of goals, and we use our goals to organize our present, whether that’s ourselves and our skills, our abilities, when I decided I wanted to go get a PhD, that shaped, you know, ⁓ the research I did and getting, you know, letters of recommendation and getting into a PhD program, right? ⁓ when you decide you wanted this studio, right? That goal allowed you to organize this beautiful room.
Right. And even your business and things like that. And so we use the future to organize the present. ⁓ and so that then takes us to strategy and like what is the future? What is the goal we set? ⁓ John Dore, who’s the billionaire who he basically helped Steve Jobs, all the people at Google, he said that a goal properly set is halfway reached. And so for us, that takes us to the idea of scale versus growth. And that the the first thing you really want to do is you want to scale your goal, right? When you take a goal, say, you know, say
Say I’m a I’m like a million dollar business, right? if I scale my goal to a hundred like a ten X, right? And I would say at least a ten X, so at least ten million, and I give myself a short amount of time, what that goal does is it it forces me to relook at the present. That goal, in our words, we actually say it raises the floor because it eliminates most options. When you go for 10 X or more, most things can’t get you there. And that’s really the point. Like to go for 10X or or even 50 X.
very few things can get you there. Very few pathways can get you there. And so it naturally raises the floor, meaning it un it naturally eliminates most options. Most options can’t get you to 10X. And so it forces you to filter and find the few that can, which most people are not doing that. Most people because they’re operating towards a more linear future, they’re not looking for the most powerful pathways.
RORY (15:06)
Yeah. So I and I wanna I wanna again, I wanna punctuate that moment right there is to go when you so a lot of people feel pressure, like if they set a goal 10X, what that would create for them is pressure and like obligation and like, I don’t think I can do that. And they it’s like, but what you’re saying is you’re going, it’s not the pressure of hitting the goal. It’s that is the strategy because
The moment you say, I’m gonna do something 10 times greater than what I’ve done, all almost every option that you’ve been pursuing becomes irrelevant. If I wanna grow by 10 or 20%, there are a hundred ways I could get there. If I want to grow by 10x, which would be a thousand percent, right? Would be 10x. Yep. If I’m gonna grow a thousand percent, the hundred options quickly reduces to like two or three.
And so the f the strategy is that it it provides focus. It shouldn’t create pressure. It like eliminates a whole bunch of stuff and it reveals what matters, right?
DR. BEN HARDY (16:14)
It reveals what matters, it reveals what has leverage, it reveals potentials that you didn’t know were there because you weren’t looking for them. Yeah. And it and it really fits exactly with strategy because, you know, Michael Porter, who created the field of strategy, he said that the the essence of strategy is deciding what not to do, right? And it really has to do with eliminating most options. And so when you actually set your goal appropriately or effectively, which for us is both in scale and timeline, we want the scale to be extreme and we want the timeline to also be extreme.
And we use that as a tool for eliminating almost all options. We really want the goal. We use the goal as a tool, right? Not as a stressor, not as a pressure, but simply as a psychological tool for firstly eliminating most options, because most options can’t get you very far. Most options are gonna be competitive. They’re gonna the the things that most other people are already doing. They’re not gonna have extreme leverage.
RORY (17:02)
They’re
incremental. yeah. Yeah.
DR. BEN HARDY (17:05)
Yeah, and and and and it just it’s you have to just understand, and as people who understand the eighty twenty principle know, that most things don’t produce all the results. The eighty twenty principle says that a few things create almost all the results, and everything else really doesn’t do very much. And so we wanna use that understanding to say we wanna set a goal that’s gonna naturally force out all the incremental ideas. It’s gonna force out all the bad ideas and all the distractions and all the dead end pathways, and it’s gonna force us to find only the few.
With the 10x upside. We still have to go find those. We have to go exploit those, right? We have to go work on those and navigate those and focus on them. But it fits exactly with what Steve Jobs said, which is innovation is saying no to a thousand things. Right. So the thousand things we want to say no to are the incremental concepts that can’t get us very far anyway, so that we can then go and innovate and focus on and build teams around the few pathways that can. That becomes our focus.
RORY (17:54)
Yeah, and and it it is the it is the huge goal that clarifies the few levers that can actually get you there. And that I think is where you go. You it’s it’s the goal is the strategy because it it reveals that. It it it creates a new frame. Yeah. It creates a new frame, you’re you’re you’re you’re you’re seeing the world. And you know, I ⁓
I process things through data. I process things through observation. I also process things through personal like experience. And I look at, you know, when I share my story of like, you know, I was raised by a single mom. When I was born, we lived in a trailer. We had no money. We had no famous friends. We had no super well-educated friends. We had no rich friends. If you and and most of the people who are born in those types of situations,
There’s generational poverty. Their past tends to repeat itself. But my mom, that you know, one of the things she always said is she’s like, you can do anything that you can dream of. And so my whole life, it was like, ⁓ so I got really big into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Karate Kid. Right. And so I was like, ⁓ I was watching Karate Kid. You remember Karate Kid? So ⁓ you and I have many things in common. So, you know, I was like, I want to be a black belt.
DR. BEN HARDY (19:03)
Yeah. And I love n Ninja Turtles.
RORY (19:13)
And so that was like the first major goal in my life was like I was 10 years old, I became a black belt. And it was like I didn’t worry about that I had never done martial arts. I was like, I want to be a black belt. And then my mom said, You’re gonna go to college. And she said this to me. She said, You are going to college and you are going to get a full ride scholarship because I will have no money, I promise you. And you’re going. So you need to figure out not just how to get there, you need to figure out how to get a full ride scholarship.
And she set that for me. And that re was a a reverse engineering from that future. And I got a full ride scholarship. You know, Blake and I have a a common passion of I went, I went door to door for five years in college. And so, you know, we’ve spent a lot of time in direct sales. And it was like, I want to be number one. And then it was the world championship of public speaking. And then it was a New York Times bestselling author. And then it was an A-figure entrepreneur. And then we, you know, effectively.
Exited, lost our first company, and it was like, how do we get back there? And when I look at my whole life, it is a series of impossible goals that have been reverse engineered ⁓ versus going, here’s where I am, what what should someone like me be capable of? And that’s what most people do. And it’s that same, so I I see that in my personal life, and it’s like you’ve codified that same principle empirically and quantum.
quantitatively for entrepreneurs.
DR. BEN HARDY (20:42)
Yeah, and I I just want to say I love your story, Rory. Like I love the, you know, I I wasn’t there, obviously, you know, in that trailer park or wherever you were with your mom. But I love that something about your mom told you, like, no, like I don’t care what your present is. You’re not defined by the present. You’re not defined by our generations behind us, even though like we we can still honor them and love them, but like
Here’s a goal. Go get go get a black belt, right? Or you’re going to college. I love that she just planted those, but I also love that you honored your mom and like trusted her and said, I will go and do that. Like a lot of children won’t actually trust their parents. And so I just I love the young version of you, and that says a lot about who you are, that you honored your mom enough to say, I will go do that. And so she planted a much bigger future in your life.
And then you went and did it. And so I just think your story is special. And so I I just think one of the things I love about your story is that you really don’t want the past to determine your future. As as good as the past could have been, ⁓ you don’t want the past to determine your future. You always want your future to determine to determine your present. And that’s why a strategy is so much about choosing a different future and and choosing a future that then
gives your life new meaning and gives your life new direction and requires you to stretch in ways that you never did before. I mean Frankel himself again just said that humans don’t need a tensionless state. Like we all want a tensionless state. He said what we all need is the striving and struggling for a worthy goal. And he says, but it’s a freely chosen task, right? And so choosing effective goals is the most fundamental aspect of being a human being. It’s choosing a goal that then reshapes and redirects your present.
And it allows and it requires you to make trade offs and it requires you to ask, you know, is this thing that I want worth it in in light of this new th this new opportunity or this new potential that I could step into?
RORY (22:31)
And it it it’s choosing a goal reshapes your thinking. It reshapes your perspective. It re it reshapes what you’re paying attention to. ⁓ so one of the things that you talk a lot about is future self. I mean, that’d be one thing that you’d be like, you know, you you if if we had to say you you’re the world’s leading expert, it might be in like future self thinking. ⁓ can you just can you just touch on
⁓ we’ve talked a lot about this, but you’ve got a framework in this book that’s simple. It’s three circles and it you talk about, you know, past, present, future. Can you just walk us through directionally what most people do versus what scalers do?
DR. BEN HARDY (23:12)
yeah. So, you know, in our so we think about time I as a psychologist, I think about time not as like what’s on the clock, you know, and even physicists don’t do that either. But I think about the time that you’re carrying around in your mind, right? Your past that you’re carrying around in your mind. So we all have a past self and we all also have a present self and a future self, right? And most people spend because we’ve been trained to do this and because it’s natural, the l older you get to to over index on your past self, we spend way more way way more of our time being defined by our past.
RORY (23:40)
Which
like more time thinking about our past being defined by your
DR. BEN HARDY (23:42)
Well, it’s really interesting. I think we’d be
defined by it. Humans still spend ten x more time thinking about their future. ⁓ we spend ten x more time thinking about our future, d whether it’s just trying to think about, you know, how to pay the bills or or whatnot. ⁓ but we we index too much on defining ourselves by the past.
RORY (24:01)
Like
our identity, most of us for most of us our identity is determined by our past.
DR. BEN HARDY (24:06)
We do that naturally, ⁓ even though it’s not the best way to do it. ⁓ so I would just say from like a ⁓ a direction of time, most people use their past to shape their present and they use their present to shape their future. ⁓ and and what happens with this is is that and this is just how people have been kind of trained to think. And it also makes sense because when we think about a clock, the clock’s moving forward, right? It goes from twelve to one to two to three. So we just we think about our own time that way, even though that’s not the best way to think about it. ⁓ and so
I think that the the real downside of that, and there’s a lot of research on future self of future self, is is that when you use your past and present to shape your view of your future self, your future self isn’t very different. You know, people think about their future self ten years into the future and they really just think it’s the same person they are today. So in psychology they actually call that the end of history illusion. So the idea is is that, you know, I’ve had all these experiences in the past that have brought me here.
But now if I just think about who my future self will be in ten years from now, it’s basically gonna be the same person I am today. And so they call that the end of history illusion.
RORY (25:03)
like growth, like in a business sense, it’s how you’re talking about it’s like incremental change, but you’re more or less the same person. Yeah. In a few years.
DR. BEN HARDY (25:12)
So how we prefer to help people think about it, and it fits back with that Baumeister quote, is is rather than the past and present shaping the future, for for me, it’s the future that always shapes the present, right? Whatever view and model you have of your future, and mostly that’s your goals, whatever goals you have, those are actually the things most dominantly shaping who you are in the present. And it’s you in the present that shapes and reshapes the meaning of your past.
And so for us, like if there was an arrow of time psychologically, it’s not moving forward, it’s actually moving backwards. The past shape or the present, sorry, the future shapes the present and then the present shapes the past. And and this is really how memory works, by the way, is is that it’s always you in the present that always they call it reconstruction. Memory is always a reconstruction. It’s actually a creative process. Like if I want to go and think about my childhood, I don’t grab from a file cabinet.
I have to like literally conjure up and think about my past. And I then think about it in a different and specific way. So if I want to think about, you know, my neighborhood when I grew up, I now have to like go back and think about that, right? And so we’re always reconstructing or recreating our past in the present. But it’s also up to us to determine what’s the angle we look at that past, what’s the meaning we give to that past. What does it mean and what does it mean for us now and later? So if I think about, you know, your childhood, you know, and you growing up, you know, you could use easily use that past ⁓ as an excuse or to blame.
you know, the society or your situation or your parents, right? But instead you you can also look at that from a hundred different ways. That situation with your mom, that series of events, and say, what do those mean? Why are those blessings? Why are those assets? What’s the value of those? What how can I use that to have a better future and to inspire millions of people, right? You can use the past in any way you want. And so it’s the present that shapes the past. but it’s the future that shapes the present. And one of the most powerful things that I take from this is
With the linear model, ⁓ it as I said, it’s prediction based. So if with the linear with a linear model, your past determines your future, which means that your past and your future are very much the same. Whereas the other way where you let the future shape the present and you let the present shape the past, you actually it forces a recognition of difference. Like it forces a recognition that things aren’t the same. So if I look at the pre if if I’m looking from the present at my past, if I’m thinking about Ben Hardy a year ago.
Because I know that it’s me in the present that is looking at that, I can look at what’s different. How’s Ben Hardy different from who he was a year ago? You know, how do I look, how do I, how do I treat my children differently? How do I, how do I value things differently? What have I learned in the last year that I didn’t know a year ago? And so I think it’s very personally beautiful. And there’s actually research on this as well, that you actually want to separate your past from your present, but you don’t want to be mad at your past. I don’t want to be mad at Ben Hardy from a year ago, even though, you know, Ben Hardy a year ago was pretty ignorant, like compared to what I am now. And I’ve
If I would have if I could go back a year ago, I would do things very differently. But I don’t need to be mad at at my former self’s decision making or thought process. I can just actually respect that there’s difference. ⁓ and I can be blown away at how much things have changed. And I and seeing and recognizing how much things have changed and how much I’m not the same as my past self, ⁓ creates that psychological flexibility, which allows me then to think very differently about my future self. And that’s really when you start to like when you dig into the research on future self, one of the most critical insights.
is the that you want to appreciate that your future self is a different person than who you are today. Yeah. They actually do see the world differently. They do have different values. They, you know, and so you want to start to tap into those differences and even to choose and create those differences. My you know, your future self could largely be in an extremely different situation than you. Care about different things, have totally different leverage capability, options. ⁓ and that when you start to appreciate that, then you stop having such a fixed mindset. Well
RORY (28:51)
It’s it’s it’s it as an adult, it’s kind of like hard to believe that I’d be exponentially different. But when you look at kids, it’s it’s God’s divine design. You go like, think about a one-year-old versus a 10-year-old. They are exponentially different in every way. So then how come there’s not an exponential difference between a 40-year-old and a 50-year-old? There should there should be. Yeah. And not just there could be, right? It’s like there there there should be. ⁓
DR. BEN HARDY (29:12)
I think
RORY (29:18)
And I think that’s what’s so cool, where the goal is the strategy. The goal having a 10X goal reshapes the way you see the world. It reshapes what you pay attention to. It reshapes what you look at. And and one of the last things I just I want one of the last points I wanna make that I’ve drawn out from you and learned from you that I think is relevant to everyone in our audience. And I think you are an example of this as well, is as experts, as mission driven messengers, our job
is to find the levers in the areas we study. Right. So we work with personal brands. So we have to figure out what are the exponential levers that launches a personal brand forward. Right. That’s why New York Times bestselling books and speaking and there’s these things that we spend, we overindex our time on and we try to find the the most the the the the most key strategies, the levers that are going to create the biggest results. So
The science of scaling, as you teach it and talk about it, is a goal setting framework. It’s a business strategy. But I also think for thought leaders and experts, it should be a filter by which we choose what to study and we choose what to teach, right? As you go, AI is going to present an infinite amount of information to everybody. Our job is to try to filter and discover and find what are the one or two most
Consolidated, succinct ideas that move the thinking forward, that move people forward in our space. And that’s what you’ve done with this book. ⁓ So you’ve you’ve modeled it. And that to me is what a thought leader represents. Because it’s like you’re leading the thinking of what’s been done in a space. And if all of us as messengers go out and we ask the question, ⁓
How do I help my clients succeed faster? What is the, what are the few discoveries that really matter? What are the, what are the few strategies that are actually gonna change the lives? Not just so I can sell stuff to people, but so that I can actually create a meaningful difference in someone’s lives. You go, that is how you at sub 40 years old have become one of the leading thinkers in the entire world with you know hundreds of thousands of books.
million maybe millions of books sold at this point. If not, soon soon to be. ⁓ have you sold millions of books? A couple of million yeah so
DR. BEN HARDY (31:49)
Yeah, a couple of millions.
⁓
RORY (31:53)
That’s amazing. So
but but also the the this filter applies to our personal goals, our professional goals, and I think to the work that we do at ⁓ as thought leaders. So Ben, thank you for this work. this is clarifying and inspiring and empowering and practical. And you know, so and and thanks to Blake for partnering with you to help, you know, you guys bring this to the world.
y’all need to go get a copy of The Science of Scaling. ⁓ go to scaling.com also and you know if you’re if you’re an entrepreneur who’s gonna commit to growing 10X, ⁓ you know, you should be you should be talking to these guys and looking what they’re doing. So I really appreciate you, brother. And is there anywhere else you want people to go to to find about you guys?
DR. BEN HARDY (32:40)
No. When you’re ready to 10X your business in three years, come to Skunny.com. We’re happy to we’re happy to guide you through that process. And I just say one of the last things I want to just mention on what you said. I think what you said, you and I, you’re right, have have a lot of ⁓ shared insight. I think the the fact that you’re looking for those few levers that make the t you know, make almost all the results and you’re looking for that in your field, in your craft and you’re willing to dig
harder and deeper than than anyone else in your space is why you’re a master. And I think that that’s to me, that’s that’s what we call power law thinking, right? Power laws or if it’s with the 8020 are the few things that create almost all the results. And it’s just that recognition. And that’s why, you know, that’s part of why our framework works is because it forces that type of thinking. When you start to go for the impossible goal or the 10X goal, it strips out everything except for the few things that can work at that level, right? Only the few things with that level of leverage. The few things and those are the from my perspective, if you want to scale
Those are the those are the only things you can focus on. Whereas everything else becomes noise. And so I just I just love that that’s how you operate and that’s why we wrote about you in this book, is because that’s that’s that’s what you represent in your field. So I just thank you for your example, brother.
RORY (33:45)
Yeah, we wish you all the best, man. Thanks for being here. Yeah.