EFR 743: Why 10x'ing Your Goals is Easier Than 2x and How to Achieve More by Doing Less with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

0:04:11 - Speaker 3 I want to ask you a question that my audience might know me for asking at the end. If you're waiting till all the way at the end, which you all should be, and that is how Is what you are here to talk to us about today? How will this help us move forward in life? How will your work help us live a life ever forward?

0:04:31 - Speaker 1 perfect. So I actually reflect on that question a little bit different. Uh, just to give like basic view. So I I'm a psychologist and I look at the psychology of time Different than how the average person will look at time. So when you're looking at when you're asking the question how do we live forward? Obviously you're looking ahead to the future, and what I what I think we'll go deep into is how you can take the future and look backwards from the future.

0:05:01 - Speaker 3 Uh-huh, okay, and so most people.

0:05:04 - Speaker 1 So just to give a basic sense most people, when they're thinking about the past, present and future, they believe the past to be behind you, present to be right here in the future, up ahead. And most people they take the past and believe that the past is determining the present, and then they take the present and push it off into the future.

And I think what may surprise you know, hopefully, hopefully it's a surprise Is is that it's it's much more powerful to take the future and let the future dictate the present, and, kind of similarly, to take the present and let that always shape the past. So, rather than having the past determine the present, it's actually the present that determines the past, but it's also the future that determines the present. And when you do that, life really starts flipping in cool ways.

0:05:42 - Speaker 3 Man, this is kind of blowing my mind right now as, as this episode is live, most likely I recorded at least might have gone live a solo episode on mindset. I kind of did my own analysis in pulling from a lot of Carol Deweck's work of growth mindset.

Which is a fantastic book everybody should check out, and I then, at the tail end of it, kind of talked about Probably why you're not moving forward. At least in my experience, whenever I would get stuck, no matter where my mindset was or how much stronger I thought it was getting, I was stuck in either one of three places. Uh, my mindset was stuck in the past. I my inability to be present and work on it here and now, but also getting overwhelmed and anxious about, you know, the future. And although I might have a good mindset in one of those areas, it's being able to tap into all three, to understand the mindset necessary to work out of or to get into or to be with one of those three. So that's weird timing, I'm not gonna lie.

0:06:34 - Speaker 1 So I'm a Deep diver into Caroline's work. Um, I would say in really simple terms, the fixed mindset is a over definition of your present self. You know you. You believe that who you are in the present is who you're going to be in the future.

0:06:52 - Speaker 3 You don't believe you can change. I was born this way. This is how smart I am, my capabilities, my privilege or lack of absolutely yeah, and it's, it's, it's an over.

0:07:02 - Speaker 1 You've basically over solidified your past and present and then you push that off into the future, whereas a growth mindset means that you're not overly tied to who you are in the present. You're more. You're more open to who you'll be in the future, which you know will be a different version of yourself, far more capable and and uh, there's a great concept from Um. What's his name? Oh gosh, harvard psychologist, he'll come to me, but the whole, oh, daniel Gilbert, I apologize, daniel Gilbert said that. Uh, who?

you are right now is as fleeting as the present moment. And so yeah and we'll get you know. But basically, the main idea here is is that you want to develop mastery over your past and mastery over your future. And mastery over your past means that you're continuously reframing it, you're continuously Uh, increasing its value. The past should be an asset, and so that's, that's kind of.

The main point is is that the present determines the meaning of the past, not the opposite way, and that's that's just a core psychological concept. A core neuroscience concept is it's not the past that determines the present, it's always the present that determines the meaning of the past, but also, simultaneously, it's the future that should determine the meaning of the present.

0:08:06 - Speaker 3 And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we're off.

0:08:08 - Speaker 1 Amazing that is, is that you let the future and your vision of your future self, who you imagine yourself to be, to be not only the story, but the frame, the filter for everything you do in the present.

0:08:18 - Speaker 3 You know, and speaking of this, really I think par lays us right into the core of your new work. And if you guys are checking out the video, um, I'm holding up his book here, which I'll have linked for everybody down the show notes 10x is easier than 2x, and I remember this coming across my desk, so to speak, and immediately that title caught my attention and as I kind of dove into the work, I realized this really is the secret sauce, especially when it comes to mindset for anything we're working on personally, but especially a lot of your references and examples. And you're looking at entrepreneurship, looking at the business minded person who just wanting to just not keep doing more, just to maybe get more results. You know the whole concept of 2x if I do double the work, I get double the pay. I get double the benefits, double the whatever. You're getting us to go? No, no, no, no, no, no. Not three, not four, not. We're going 10, 10x, the bold statement this is easier than 2x. How is that possible and why?

0:09:13 - Speaker 1 Such a beautiful question. It was a question that drove me deep, for over the years. So, uh, this is a book that I co-authored with Dan Sullivan, third book we wrote together. We wrote a book called who, not how. Then, we wrote the gap in the game. This was kind of the the climax of the trilogy and he had written a Little chapter of one of his books called 10x is easier than 2x. Uh, I later found when digging into it that other people have said similar things. You know, 10x is easier than 10% growth.

0:09:41 - Speaker 3 Uh, yeah, yeah and so there's.

0:09:43 - Speaker 1 There's other people who have said it, but grand cardone comes to mind too.

0:09:46 - Speaker 3 He's like 10x everything right. Yeah, he's pretty extreme with everything.

0:09:48 - Speaker 1 Yeah, he's a he's opposite of this philosophy. He's very into more, more, more, more, more, and so he's more of the grinding mindset, and so this book definitely takes actually quite an opposite approach in terms of okay uh, how to approach 10x yeah.

Um yeah, so let's let's talk about why it's easier. There's there's multiple reasons, one being that if you're gonna go for 2x of anything, what that means is that you're mostly doing what you've done in the past. So, like, if you want to double your income, you know you're just taking your current, your past and current self and you're pushing that off into the future.

0:10:20 - Speaker 3 Like I'm making 60k, you're working 40 hours a week. If I want to make 120, I need to work 80 hours a week. Just basic math.

0:10:27 - Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, I mean you it's. It's very brute force, it's very linear, meaning, like you're, you're just kind of Doing more of the same, but you're doing it a lot more, you're working harder. It's not very transformational, it's just it's just doing more, and so 10x being the opposite, it's taking a seemingly impossible goal in your future, and emphasis on the word impossible. You want it to be impossible because only once you start pursuing something that you genuinely believe to be impossible Will you stop operating from your past assumptions. Yeah, so like.

And a lot of this honestly comes from decision-making theory. There's an amazing theory called constraint theory, a lot of research on this from a guy named dr Alan Bernard phenomenal guy and he's studied why impossible goals are more practical than possible. He's been studying that for 20 years brilliant guy. But one of the main reasons is is that if you're going for call it 10x, obviously that requires an enormous amount of imagination. You know, albert Einstein said imagination is more important than your knowledge Absolutely.

But here's, here's kind of the clincher, and you know, I'll give you a few examples. But if, like say, you're going for 10% increase in your revenue, one of the problems with that is is that if you're going to go for a 10% increase or even a 2x increase, basically there's a million different potential pathways of getting there. There's a lot of different things you could do, which makes it really hard to determine the strategy. Makes it really hard to determine the 80 from the 20, you know using the 80 20 principle.

If you're going for linear growth, Honestly most of what you're doing right now can stay because, you can't. You can't determine which ones are the like, the high levers, whereas if you're going to go for 10x, almost nothing you're doing right now would work. You know, if you want to, you know, go from $60,000 a year to $600,000 Almost nothing you're doing right now would equate to that.

I can get on board with that, absolutely yeah and so that actually makes it really practical because it helps you find the few things With the big upside, call it the 20% that has 80% of the upside. And so, like I'll give an example of my son, caleb, because I think this one really helps people see it my son and you know he's 15 years old, we live in Orlando, orlando is a huge mecca for tennis and he's a he's a sophomore. So he's 15 years old, wants to play college tennis.

0:12:29 - Speaker 3 You share this in the book.

0:12:30 - Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah but I think it really helps people to see it. So, yeah, his goal is to play college, but he wants you know. His coach basically asked him why don't you go for pro? And Caleb it was that would be an impossible goal for Caleb, like it was not even on his radar. And that's that's one of the beauties of beginning to think, and in terms of impossible goals is, first off, you don't know how to do it. And so, if you don't know how to do it, that's actually the most beautiful place to be, because it stops you from operating from your past and starts you asking new and fresh questions.

0:12:58 - Speaker 3 But not to cut you off, but I think someone listening right now is probably going. There's so much probable fear wrapped around that we're gonna you're stepping into uncharted territory. So how can I know what to do if I literally have not only don't know what to do, but you're telling me to scrap everything I know how to do to get even more results?

0:13:18 - Speaker 1 leading up to this point, Luckily you can, luckily you have a huge body of past to continue to build off of. So it's. I'm not saying that you have to delete your, your brain and stuff like that You're bringing so much to the equation it's not wipe clean.

0:13:31 - Speaker 3 We got to reboot everything. It's just probably all the things that got you here Won't be all the things that will get you there at least 80% of what got you here won't get you there. Oh, that's a lot. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot.

0:13:41 - Speaker 1 So like I want to like get into some of the mechanics of why it's actually literally easier. Um, but using the 80 20 principle, which is one of the core frameworks we use for that book.

If you're gonna go for 2x growth, you can keep 80% of what you're doing. That's one of the main ideas Is you can keep 80% of what you're doing right now to go for 2x. It's very it's it's just a continuation of what you're doing, but you got to like improve that 20 and it's so. Therefore, it's very much a using your past and present to dictate the future, whereas 10x is letting an impossible future dictate what you do in the present. And because it's so high, because it's so seemingly impossible, it's an. It's a much more intense filter and so almost everything gets filtered out. 80% of what you're doing right now has got to go.

It's the opposite 80% of what you're doing got you here but won't get you there. It's your past self, whereas you've got to find those key 20% and go 10 times deeper and get 10 times better.

So Um 10x is really about quality, not quantity, it's about going really, really deep on a few things, getting enormously good at what you do, um, but just just to like finish this little tidbit about my son. So in Orlando there are literally Hundreds of potential coaches hundred, like there's hundreds of potential pathways pathways being for him to just get better at tennis. Well for him to get into college. So, that was, if you know, I'm comparing Going to college or going pro as college being realistic for him pro being impossible.

So, college being 2x, pro being 10x in this case, um, there's literally hundreds of potential pathways for him to get into college. He could go into the high school team. There's tons of like literally hundreds of coaches in Orlando academies, so there are conceivably hundreds of different pathways to getting him to the college goal. But if we were realistic, if we were not realistic, but if we were committed to the pro goal, if he was genuinely committed, almost all of those pathways wouldn't get him there. Literally, there may be a handful of coaches that could genuinely get him there, and so that just goes to the idea that seemingly impossible or 10x goals have far less Paths, which is really actually a good thing, because it helps you to weed out most of the things that don't matter and just look For the few things with huge upside, and so that's part of it, it's just it's. It's a lot more simple. 10x is a lot more simple.

0:15:45 - Speaker 3 Right. Yeah, you know. What comes to mind for me when you're describing this is kind of, I think, a Gut check question that we need to ask ourselves. Should we entertain the idea of going 10x Is are we willing to stay 80 comfortable, or are we willing to let a lot of that go, step into fear and uncertainty but growth, and are we willing to just stay 20 comfortable? I mean, that is a very I think that's it perfect.

0:16:13 - Speaker 1 If you want to stay 80 comfortable, you're going to X. If you want to be 20 comfortable, then you have the shot to go 10x. Ain't nobody in this show?

0:16:23 - Speaker 3 Ready to stay 20 comfortable 80% comfortable.

0:16:25 - Speaker 1 Excuse me nobody in my audience.

0:16:26 - Speaker 3 That's for damn sure. I mean we can go into the fear stuff, we can go wherever you want to go and and how you deal with that I want to bring up.

0:16:31 - Speaker 1 you know, in your work you kind of break down the like two main sections.

0:16:35 - Speaker 3 There are principles and then applications. So I would love to kind of let's talk about some of the principles here, please, so we can lay the groundwork to just get Everybody on the same page of okay, this is what I'm doing, this is what I don't need to be doing, and this is what a 10x mindset, 10x day kind of looks like. You start everything off by talking about how the goal determines the process, and this might Not be news for a lot of people. You know, reverse engineering a goal, many people and they set out on upon a goal Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this, and then I'm gonna do that, and boom, boom, boom, and then that equates to the goal. If I'm hearing you correctly, we need to get outlandish with the goal, we need to have this loon shot, if you will, and then reverse engineer backwards. Is that basically the similar concept? Yeah, rather than letting the present dictate, the goal right.

0:17:19 - Speaker 1 You imagine the goal and let the goal dictate the goal. Right, you imagine the goal and let the goal dictate the present, and if the goal is really, really high, it's a lot. It's a much more intense filter, filter being you know how you, how you, what you say yes and no to. It's a much higher standard, and so it filters out almost everything, because most things Won't get you to that moonshot, whatever it is, and so it forces you to be really honest that almost everything you're doing right now has very little upside so like one of the things that Bernard talks about.

Which is really phenomenal Is he says there are four core ways that people waste their time. The first one is is that they continue to do what he would call the wrong things, wrong things being anything that is only marginally taking you towards your goal, or even, potentially, things that are now taking you backwards. So that's number one is that they're doing the wrong things. The number the number two thing is is that they're not doing the quote unquote right things. And the right things, from his perspective, are the few things with extreme upside, like okay, and and and. So those would be like the 20% of activities that create 80% or more of the results. So they're not doing those. The third thing he says is that they're doing the right things but doing them in the wrong way. So this would be like where you know you may be doing something that has really big upside, but you're not in a flow state or you're multitasking, or you're only like you're doing it at the end of the day rather than when you're in a flow state.

So you're not, you're not actually deliberately practicing, you're not getting better.

0:18:39 - Speaker 3 You're doing the right things, but you're missing out on, kind of like, maximizing their potential.

0:18:43 - Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, and maybe you're, maybe because you know like if you think about, if you think about your attention, maybe you're still Maintaining a lot of your 80%. So like maybe your brain is really scattered, kind of like multiple tabs open on a computer. You're not delegating or deleting those wrong things and so you may be doing the right things, but like honestly, you're fried or your brain's going to multiple directions, so you're not getting better, um.

the fourth one is just that, uh, you're not learning from your experience, therefore, you're continuously repeating errors one, two and three.

0:19:12 - Speaker 3 We're not fully aware and present in our process.

0:19:14 - Speaker 1 You're not learning, we're not regulating yeah you're not reflecting and reviewing and saying you know what most of what I did this last week actually didn't have big upside.

0:19:23 - Speaker 3 Or was I just spinning the wheels? Yeah, was I busy or was I productive?

0:19:27 - Speaker 1 Yeah. So there's a really good quote that says all progress starts by telling the truth.

That's alcoholics, anonymous right there All progress starts by telling the truth, and so I think regularly people aren't looking back and saying huge chunks of what I'm spending my time doing aren't really moving me towards the big goal, or I'm not finding new and effective people or pathways, or I didn't really design my week well enough so that the few things that really matter I'm getting really good at those, and so they just continue to go through the cycle. Continue to X.

0:19:54 - Speaker 3 That last one was huge for me. Unbeknownst to me about this principle, but I think over the last maybe year that's been a very conscious kind of thought and something I'll even say out loud to myself. I try to catch myself in bouts of work when I'm just, in my opinion, crushing it, when I'm noticeably grindstone doing the work. When I come to the end of a task, or even maybe the end of a day, I look back and I'll ask myself Chase, you seem busy, were you busy or were you productive? And that's kind of my way to evaluate. All right, you know what I was doing stuff. But I was just doing stuff because I was able to fill my to-do list, just to get a bunch of busy work done. What did I actually do? Did I set myself up to do less tomorrow? Am I going to be more efficient tomorrow or did I just?

You know there's a lot of some studies out there will show or give you just personal examples about how people will literally just write things on a to-do list even though they know they're going to do them anyway, just so you can get the satisfaction to check them off. But that's another story I want to ask some people might have an idea of what 10X of their goal looks like. You know, I got this big pie in the sky vision. I've got total world domination. I want to be the best in this, in this field, or whatever. But I think maybe one of the limiting factors to get people to 10X is I don't even know what 10X of my goal looks like. I don't even know how. I don't know what that feels like. I can't imagine anything more than this big goal I have right now, but maybe now so far, after listening to this conversation, I'm like shit, that's only 2X. How do we even get there?

0:21:26 - Speaker 1 That's often the case, Honestly, like even with companies doing hundreds of millions a year in revenue, even sometimes billions, like they. Even they, you know, are mostly operating from their past at this point. Operating from the past, and often it's a successful past, and it can be really humbling if you're someone, especially if you're someone who's been successful, where your past is pretty good, your strategy's made a difference. It's moving you forward to just like continue forth rather than. There's a really good book actually called the 80-20 Individual by Richard Koch.

He's really cool. He's really, you know, he's the one who's really popularized it. But he says if it's not, if it's not broken, you better fix it.

0:22:04 - Speaker 2 Meaning like if it's you know if you're waiting for things to plateau out, then you're not.

0:22:10 - Speaker 1 you're not changing fast enough, and so how I look at it is I look at the future and the past as drafts, like the draft of the letter, the draft of an email, like it's constantly iterating, like you know. Back to that quote from Daniel Gilbert, who I am right now is as fleeting as this moment.

And so, like I'm likely slightly different you are too from even who we were 10, 15 minutes ago, and I think it becomes really useful looking at the past as a draft again. My present is. What determines the meaning of the past is is that I'm not the same person I was, you know, a week ago or even 24 hours ago. But I also know that my future self is going to be a different person Even tomorrow. Certainly, in like a week, two weeks, my future self could be massively different. And that's back to the idea of future self and growth mindset.

So, kind of getting to your point now, imagination is more important than knowledge.

Imagination is a skill just like reframing the past as a skill, by the way, that takes just as much imagination, just as much creativity to actually get useful value out of the past, even traumas, but to to think about the future it's.

It's something you continuously get better at and you can start to kind of think more lateral, like I think the most basic way of looking at 10X is to take your number one goal or focus or passion or whatever results you're getting in a like, in a way that you love, say for me, book sales. So like I could think is my 10X, just to simply sell 10 times more copies. You know my books have sold a million copies, and so one logical one is is I could say all right, in the next three years I'll sell 10 million copies and then I'll reverse engineer that, and that you know that 10X goal would certainly lead me to the 20% of things that would matter, and it would also force me to identify 80% of what I'm doing right now which just genuinely got me here, but it would not get me to 10.

So like that's one way is is you could literally just 10X it like you can.

0:23:49 - Speaker 3 You can make it quantitative and would that be kind of a good starting point for people that are maybe struggling to get to? What a 10X goal could be is to just literally go with the numbers first?

0:23:58 - Speaker 1 I think that that's a really healthy start. You know, one way of looking at the past and the futures is that they're drafts, but they're also fundamentally just tools. The past and the future are tools for operating effectively in the present.

And so like if my past is something that I believe is driving my present, rather than something I'm driving, then it's going to like load me up. I'm going to feel like I don't have a lot of opportunity or agency, because I believe my past is determining me and so you. The only reason I'm saying this is you want your past to be a tool that's improving your present.

You know like if I've gone through something challenging, I've got a lot of lessons from that past, but you also want your future to be a tool for clarity. That's what you know back to the idea of filter.

All goals are really tough filters because they don't help you to determine what's useful and what's not, whereas really big goals help you filter. They help you to actually, like, look at your current approach, your current use of time, maybe even the current team or current people around and say this is these, these situations or what I'm doing is more reflection of my past, not the future. So I think that you know, using the past and the future as tools for operating effectively in the present is really what positive psychology is all about, and so, yeah, that's. That's a great place to start.

0:25:05 - Speaker 3 I don't know if you wanted to comment there, but yeah, One thing definitely comes to mind what you're just saying now and really kind of the majority of your work, but especially in setting this 10x goal.

I didn't really get to the goal setting process myself in this, but one of the things that came to mind first was I absolutely recognize how much of me it's going to take.

More specifically, I'm going to need other people, and first thing came to mind for me was the people in my life that could support in any capacity me getting to a 10x in my life. But it really made me think of, wow, I'm going to need not even just a number of people, but I would need somebody like this. I would need somebody who is the guy, the girl in this area, that area, or even just characteristics of myself, the things that got me to where I am today, that it now just becomes a matter of time and delegation. Like I have these great attributes and values and skill sets, but I'm hitting a threshold of time and if I want to 10x my goals, like I can get there. I can do more of those things, but how much better would it be if I can just, you know, more or less kind of copy and paste, but pass that off. Basically.

0:26:15 - Speaker 1 So you hit another fundamental reason why thinking 10x bigger is easier than 2x. Usually, if someone's going for 2x, they're not necessarily phenomenal leaders. They're more likely to put the burden on themselves and just like grind themselves out there.

They've got more of the grinding mindset, even a more of a manager mindset, versus a transformational leader mindset. Going 10x is fundamentally not about quality. This is the key. This is like a crucial distinction is it always comes down to quality. It's about less, less but better, and so that has to do with, you know, your attention being one like your attention can't be on that 80% of stuff.

Either it has to be deleted or delegated to someone else. Your mind can only be focused on less and less and less and you're going to go really, really deep. One of my favorite books on the topic is called Catching the Big Fish, and he compares your mind to like the ocean If your mind is scattered around 100 different things, you're up at the surface as all you can see is little fish, and so the only way to really see some of the big fish, the big opportunities, like where you start thinking really differently about what's possible in your future, is to go really, really deep, and that requires taking time. It requires not having 50 tabs open on your mental computer, which you know busts up your cognitive load, like you got to have more time to really think and so your attention is on less and you're going really deep. But also by having the big vision you definitely need more people Like it immediately turns you into a leader, where you've got to trust yourself more, but you also have to start trusting other people to pick up the pieces and to start handling it, and so it immediately turns you into a leader, but also turns everyone else into leaders moving with you.

So, yeah, you mean you're focusing on less. You're also not doing it yourself, and so there's all sorts of reasons why it helps, but the more you do it, the more 10X you go, the more other people will have to be involved.

0:28:10 - Speaker 3 What about the money with this? Because I mean, as you're just unpacking that, I'm realizing oh, if I want to grow my team, if I want to hire, I want more experts or more people, even with the same skill sets as me. That's going to take time, that's going to take money. Can we 10X our goals with our current financial situation? Or how do we do that? If we need to add more people, if we need to go deeper, if we need to have more quality time instead of just more time, how can we financially support this along the way?

0:28:35 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean it's not like you're going to build the team immediately, but you can add pieces Like for a lot of people. As an example, even just getting an assistant to like even a part-time assistant that you pay you know X amount of dollars it could be someone in the Philippines.

0:28:47 - Speaker 3 Like a VA or something right, yeah, exactly.

0:28:50 - Speaker 1 So like 20 hours of your week, that's like a first step. So like one of the stories that I talk about in the book is a lady named Linda and she's a real estate agent back in like the late 80s and you know, most real estate agents where she lived didn't have assistance and so like they literally did everything. They would answer emails, they'd post this, like they would do a thousand different tasks and also go out and do showings and like, and so she learned that if she got an assistant to handle most of the logistical stuff, most of the organizational stuff, most of the busyness stuff, she could then show more properties and that was the properties.

0:29:24 - Speaker 3 equates to closing more deals, totally.

0:29:27 - Speaker 1 And so yeah, so like again, 80, 20,. Certain activities have much higher impact, much higher upside, and so she hired her first assistant and then and then and here's one of the things with this mindset is that if you view hiring someone as a cost, then then you're going to feel like it's it's rough. But if you view it as an investment, it's an investment in in yourself, but it's an investment in your time. That call it 15 or 20, 20 bucks an hour. That now is being handled by someone who can focus on it, whereas Linda before wasn't that focused.

because, honestly, she was doing a thousand different things, but now she can do the things that have big upside and so by making that initial investment, yeah, can be a little scary, but you can't really afford not to, because when you start putting your attention on the higher upside things, immediately you know she said every time she hired some someone or hired a new assistant, her income doubled.

0:30:19 - Speaker 3 Oh damn, all right yeah, so what?

0:30:22 - Speaker 1 happened. Her story is phenomenal, her story is crazy, but basically the main idea was she hired that first assistant. She was the first person in her city to do that, because she was in a small town in Texas and most of them just they just had their way of doing things, and so she hired that first assistant. She was young, she hired that first assistant, her income doubled and then her assistant was just freaking overloaded.

And so then her assistant she had an assistant for the assistant, the assistant needing assistant, you know, and this kind of fits with also 80, 20 thinking, but that there were certain things that the assistant liked, and so it's like what are the few things that you really like? Doing 80% things that honestly just got to get done but you don't like. Let's design a role for those 80% things and let's offload those on you so that you can focus on the things that you're good at and want to get better at.

So they got another assistant immediately, income doubled again and so now like the team's operating a lot better. But now Linda realizes, you know, so the business is growing because she's applying leadership, because she's going deeper in fewer things like for herself. But then she realizes, you know, I don't really like working with and I forget the exact I don't like working with buyers, I want to like work. You know, she says I don't want to work with people selling their property.

She doesn't want to work with people buying property, she wants to work with people selling. And so then she gets another agent who focuses on buyers, you know, and like that's his responsibility. Now she only focuses on just sellers. So she's just dialing deeper and deeper and deeper. I know it gets to the point where you know she ends up having her own like full on franchise. And then she, but over time she'd have to let go of more and more. Right.

In the beginning she had to let go of all the logistical stuff and give it to that other person. You know, and a lot of people have a hard time with the control, with trust. Like you got to let that go.

0:31:58 - Speaker 3 I think that's it. You go deep. Yeah, I think that's it for most people.

0:32:01 - Speaker 1 They don't trust that other people can handle it Exactly.

0:32:04 - Speaker 3 I mean, that's a whole nother conversation in and of itself, but you guys got to check out the book for more details on that one. You kind of already hit on this. I want to talk about how 10 X is really letting go of 80% of the things in your life and focus and going all in on the 20%. And also, you know, raising the standards. I think standards, no matter what we're talking about, are crucial. We I'm going to butcher the quote, but you know we don't it's something about. You know we rise to the standard, rise to the quality of our standards, or fall to the quality of our habits, or something like that.

0:32:35 - Speaker 1 I think it's something along the lines of like, we don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our standards, or something along those lines. I know that. I know that he talks a lot about systems, but standards are there.

0:32:44 - Speaker 3 And so I think that's why standards are so important. You actually have four in here, the four C's formula, when it comes to resetting our standards or rising to new standards to get us to 10 X. Can you unpack that for us please? Yeah, absolutely.

0:32:55 - Speaker 1 Man. So how I look at it is, as I look at 10 X as mostly psychology. Whatever the result is, it's the byproduct of psychology, and psychology is fundamentally about identity, time and leadership. We've already been kind of talking about time being, attention, the quality of your attention, the depth of your attention. You know, having less on your mind, but you're going deeper, obviously. We've been talking about leadership and trust. So identity is huge. Identity is two things it's the story you have of your past, present and future selves. It's just the narrative. You can look at it as the framing. It's how you frame things. So it's two things. It's the framing or the story, but it's also your standards or your filters. So I look at it as it's story and standards. Another way of saying that is framing and filtering, and now we're talking about the filtering or the standard side. One way of looking at standards is it's that which you're most committed to. That's another way of looking at identity is.

it's not only the narrative you have, but it's also genuinely what you're committed to, and you can know what you're committed to by observing not only your results but also your behaviors.

0:33:58 - Speaker 3 Yeah, what does this look like? How can someone kind of reflect on?

0:34:00 - Speaker 1 their current yeah, yeah, and we always fall to our minimum standard. And so, as an example, I mean you can honestly just know your standards by watching what you say yes to.

And so if I just being blunt, like, if I'm chilling on Facebook or social media or any form of whatever I say yes to is a reflection of my standard and it's a reflection of my floor. So you can look at it as it's your floor and your ceiling and it's the floor that most people don't focus on. And so raising the standards and we'll go into the four C's of Dan's, the four C's formula but raising the floor is where you start really letting go of your past self. So, like to the idea of letting go of the 80%, yes, absolutely yeah, the 80% is your past self.

It's what got you here, but it won't get you there, and so raising your floor doesn't mean just eliminating the bad stuff you know, like the really bad habits, the addictions or the toxic people. It's also it's also letting go of the really good stuff that doesn't meet the filter and so, like I'll give an example, you know you ask any question you want in terms of how to make this more useful for you. Please, yeah, yeah.

You know, I'll give an example, like in raising, in raising a standard, like you could change. You know, on your podcast you could raise the standard on, like who you have on the show as an example, but like I, as like an author or even a speaker, could raise, raise their price, right, maybe you double the price, just as an example. And now all of a sudden, you know you're starting, you're committing to that new minimum standard because the minimum standard is your minimum commitment, which is your identity.

And so if you, you know, if you're raising that standard and that standard is above your current like flow, like it's going to, it's going to be really hard sometimes to say no to certain things that you're habitually used to saying yes to. So, as an example, double my fee, and so you know I get incoming opportunities to speak and I say this is the new fee and they're like no, like that's out of our budget. You know we'll pay this and it's below the standard. The question is, do you say yes?

0:36:02 - Speaker 3 Do you say no? Do you come down, Do you?

0:36:04 - Speaker 1 yeah, you were talking about earlier. You were saying comfort.

And so you know if and you don't immediately, you don't immediately normalize new standards. It takes time, it's like deliberate practice. But the more you actually say no to the things you used to say yes to even the things you said yes to last month. Maybe last month that was the standard and you said yes. But now you're actually saying no to something that is good, something that's compelling, something that even a year ago would have been a dream, but now you're saying no to it. Now you're showing massive commitment to the new standard right, because standard- your future self, yeah, your higher self.

You're letting the future create the filter, but also the standard is the true commitment, and once you start truly committing to that because if I fall and I say yes to that, then I'm still showing that, that's still the standard. I'm still committing to that.

But if you say no to something, that's even honestly awesome in light of the new standard now, and that's where it takes commitment and courage. So Dan's Four C's are really just a beautiful framework. You can look at it in a few ways, but in terms of raising the floor and letting go of the 80% you're committing to the new standard and that commitment does lead to courage. It takes massive courage to start saying no to the stuff that no longer fits the standard, whether that's-.

0:37:23 - Speaker 3 Courage means saying no just as much as it means saying yes. I'm glad you said that absolutely.

0:37:27 - Speaker 1 Oh yeah, I mean it's terrifying to let go of the 80%. I'll give an example. I'll give two examples that are deeply recent, so one being writing books with Dan Sullivan so we've written three phenomenal books together changed my life. Dan is one of honestly the best thinkers in the world, but if you're taking the ideas of this book seriously, you let the future dictate what you do in the present, not the past. And we've written three phenomenal books together. But if I just continued because it's working, then I'm letting the past dictate my present. That's 2X.

And so you're always continuously using your confidence, your best results, but also imagination, to imagine a new future, and you're letting the 10X future be the filter, and often that filter will require you to really gut check certain things that got you here but won't get you there Hell yeah. And so it ultimately led us to saying this is the last book, even though we actually initially had plans to do 10. Yeah that's the last book, because the future dictated the strategy for the present, not the present dictating the strategy for the future.

And so it filtered out phenomenal things. But even more recently, letting go of even my coaching business that I've had for four years. It makes up literally 60, 70% of my family's income and I told all my people, all my clients, that it's going away at the end of this year and there's a when did that go? I mean, a lot of them are freaking bummed. They're like what are you gonna do? Next.

0:39:00 - Speaker 3 For you.

0:39:02 - Speaker 1 Oh, I mean well. So there's a great quote from Aristotle. He said that nature appores a vacuum. Have you heard that before? And so the idea of the vacuum is nature hates empty space. If there's empty space, it's gonna quickly be filled. And so Soature, soature, and so if it's a plot of dirt, it's gonna be filled with weeds. If it's five minutes, we're probably gonna quickly throw social media. We're gonna fill it because we don't want five minutes to sit and think. We don't wanna be alone.

0:39:27 - Speaker 3 Hell of five seconds really.

0:39:29 - Speaker 1 Yeah, so what it did for me is it was a forcing function for me to create that vacuum where I could sit and honestly create the space for operating and thinking about the next 10x. And so it was. I mean I'm still I mean I don't even have clearly fully the answer yet but I have the space and by creating the space it's crazy how much starts coming, how many really unique opportunities start coming that you would have never even been paid, even able to notice, because you were so focused on what you were doing.

There's a kind of a motto or not a motto, but like a parable that I once heard that a person's too busy looking for the bronze coins that they don't even notice all the gold coins all around them.

And in psychology we call it selective attention. It goes back to filtering. You see what you're filtering for. Whatever you focus on, you create more of, and so we're all filtering for something and whatever you're filtering for, you see, you see more of it. My kids, when they first got interested in Tesla, we started seeing Teslas all over the road.

Oh, awareness theory, absolutely, yeah, I mean, they call it selective attention, right, yeah, yeah, same it's literally all about filtering, and that fits a lot with your goals and your identity, and so you're seeing only what you're filtering for, and so when you create that vacuum now, all of a sudden your mind can start seeing stuff and stuff starts presenting itself to you. That's like whole, like wow, I was really playing small. And so I'm my past self to the idea of comfort, would have quickly jumped into something next, just like you know, five seconds.

0:40:57 - Speaker 3 Because that's what you always did yeah, yeah.

0:40:59 - Speaker 1 But I think that there's something really powerful and it also fits honestly just with like negotiation, like negotiating with yourself, but like one of the ideas of negotiation, and honestly like a big, big fundamental concept. That we're really talking about here is what's called psychological flexibility.

0:41:13 - Speaker 3 What's that?

0:41:14 - Speaker 1 Flexibility being like it's the ability to see things from different angles but also handle uncertainty, handle difficult emotions. So one aspect of flexibility would be like I don't have to see my past the same way I used to see it, like I can be open that actually there possibly are different ways of seeing it. But it's also the willingness to kind of like sit with uncertainty, sit with maybe uncomfortable emotions.

Absolutely and so the only reason I bring this up is like, rather than needing to fill those five seconds or like having the answer, which, honestly, my past self would have done it's like I'm actually gonna sit and I'm not going to quickly say yes to what comes. I'm actually gonna sit and like think about this and be open to something new and yeah, and I mean when I'm ready, I'll make a quick. You know I'll make a decision, but I can sit with the uncertainty, maybe even for six, eight months, before I have an answer.

0:42:08 - Speaker 3 That for me I'm not in my head so much over here, because that is an area that has again didn't know the term of the time, but absolutely 10X my life, business, a lot of things over the years. Whenever something would come up, and you know it was not according to plan and would force me to stay stuck in the past and also the present and not be able to see a different future. It was miserable, but as I developed my capability, this psychological flexibility you're talking about, to sit with and to develop a better relationship with what is happening here and now, it no longer has any toll on me whatsoever.

0:42:48 - Speaker 1 Oh, totally, because you're like an elastic, you're like a, you know you're like, you know you've stretched you're flexible.

0:42:52 - Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm, in a way, better relationship with the present moment to actually not be so stress-induced and to just panic, but to actually be able to sit there in that vacuum and to allow to come in what needs to come in so that I can then develop a better future. And it's just been one of the most transformational tools I think of. My entire life is really getting better with this flexibility in the moments when they come up good, bad or ugly.

0:43:18 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean psychological flexibility also fits a lot with pursuing impossible goals because, remember, you don't know how to do it and so you've gotta be comfortable not having the answer. Often we wanna have the path, we wanna know how we're gonna get there, and if you got a goal that fundamentally you don't even know if it even is possible you know, you think about Elon Musk trying to get a Mars, like you know, is this possible? But also you've gotta be comfortable not having the answer yet and being open to the idea of like, I don't know the answer, we can figure it out, but I don't need to. I don't need to, I don't need to pretend I have the answer or to quickly force it.

0:43:56 - Speaker 3 I just need to put myself on the path to where the answers will be.

0:43:59 - Speaker 1 Yeah, and I also am open to the fact that, like a lot of what I think I know right now is going like, is fundamentally ignorance and that, and so that fits with the idea. Like I love the quote from Bernay Brown. She says it's better like rather than trying to be right, it's much better to try to get it right.

0:44:16 - Speaker 3 Ooh, I like that one.

0:44:17 - Speaker 1 Yeah, but fits again straight up fixed mindset versus growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset really wanna be right, whereas people with a growth mindset know that they're already wrong. But they want to be less wrong. They're willing, you know. So they know that their future self even in a week is gonna have different perspectives, and so they're not too tied back to the idea. They're not too tied to their current self.

0:44:36 - Speaker 3 Exactly.

0:44:37 - Speaker 1 So yeah, that's the flexibility side.

0:44:40 - Speaker 3 Powerful stuff here. Powerful stuff here. You also talk about the concept of freedom when it comes to embracing abundance and rejecting scarcity. We might kinda have touched on this, I think, with what we were just talking about. I would say, you know, when we're stuck in the moment and we're not thinking about the future self and we're not 10xing, you know that scarcity but abundance, this abundance mindset is growth mindset. It's. You know, I know what I know. I know what I don't know and I know, in my path to knowing more I'm gonna realize how much I don't know of the things that I thought I know. Right now You're gonna like to your point. You know, really, let go of all this ignorance. Freedom from and freedom to, I think, is a great kind of nuance here. Can you describe for us what do you mean by that, please?

0:45:19 - Speaker 1 Absolutely so. In psychology, all behaviors and even all goals are one of two things they're either approach-oriented or avoidance-based, and so, like everything you do, everything any human does is to approach something they want or to avoid something they don't want.

0:45:36 - Speaker 3 And Towards comfort, away from fear.

0:45:39 - Speaker 1 Sure, yeah, it might be comfort, but it's towards something you either think you want or even something you know, something that, yeah, mostly it's towards something you want. So you're approaching something you want or you're avoiding something you don't want. If you're avoiding something you don't want, then you're projecting a future that's negative, and so what you're trying to do is you're trying to, like, avoid that future. Right, I honestly have found, as a parent and this is something that has hit me like a ton of bricks lately is that I have been very avoidance-oriented towards particularly our older three kids, who are now teenagers that we adopted from the fall.

Yeah, like we're like. Even my language is like trying to steer them away from certain things that I want them to avoid, which means, obviously, that the future I'm projecting is something that I don't want. And so, like you know, which is obviously showing my belief in my future, which is true.

Good catch, good catch, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, so this fits with freedom from and freedom to and so like. When it comes to freedom, there are different levels of freedom. Freedom from it means you're trying to free yourself from things you don't want, and so that could be freeing yourself from poverty, freeing yourself from ignorance, and that's a lot of what, like the government does is they're trying to like, create equality, right and like to the best they can, freeing from negative things. But even when you say, have most freedom froms taken care of, like you're in an environment where, like, most things are generally taken care of, the much harder freedom is freedom to, and freedom to fits with with Maslow's like top of hierarchy of needs.

Yeah, so like most of the lower ones are freedom from like. Freedom from like danger right.

You know, freedom from Freedom from being homeless, freedom from starving, yeah, freedom from the elements, freedom from ignorance, but the highest one self-actualization is really about freedom too, which is literally now that you have a lot of your quote unquote needs met. What are you gonna do about it? Like and so like. This is like you have to actually choose what you're gonna do. You have to, and that's so. Freedom, too, means like freedom towards what. What are you going to choose to do with your life? Are you going to actually choose to do something, or are you gonna let outside forces dictate who you are and what you do? And so that higher freedom is individual. I mean, you know there may be people, literally in a like a cell, that have more freedom too, because they're choosing. They still choose how they wanna live, whereas you may have all the external freedoms you want, but you're not internally free.

0:48:03 - Speaker 3 Look at Victor Frankel. I mean hell, amen, that's it.

0:48:07 - Speaker 1 Yeah, he, and he even talked about like the last of freedoms is to choose your response to the situation, and he was very much along these lines of if you don't have a future that you're most committed to, you know a way to live for as he would call it. Then the present loses all meaning. You can't operate in the present.

Oh, my God yeah, you know so like this is really very Frankel-esque, but yeah, so freedom too is about actually deciding what you're gonna go for. Actually, you know, deciding what you want rather than doing what you think other people think you should want or doing what you think you need. A lot of people have you know, and it fits with the scarcity mindset, but they do what they think they need Rather than ultimately just deciding this is absolutely what I want.

My future self may change my mind on this, but like I'm going for this and I really am okay if other people disagree or don't, you know, don't want me to this is what I'm choosing, and that takes a lot of, again, commitment and courage to choose freedom, and 10X is really about freedom. Freedom is the outcome and in our minds, you know, as we wrote about it, 10x is the process 10X is a framework.

It's a process for creating greater freedom and Dan laid out, you know, his four freedoms, which he teaches entrepreneurs, which is freedom of time freedom of money, freedom of relationships and freedom of purpose. And so and these are all qualitative it's about higher qualities of time doing what you want with your time.

And you know in owning, having freedom to utilize your time the way you want, but also freedom of money, meaning you know you're no longer the slave of money but, like you're creating money and income in ways that you want, at quantities that you want.

0:49:43 - Speaker 3 How perfect is that? I mean, I think everybody's probably nodding their head Like I want that yeah 10X is the process.

0:49:49 - Speaker 1 Every time you go 10X you're going to in 10X being, it doesn't have to be quantitative, I mean it could be just going to a next level. Think about it as an example. I look at 10X mostly as qualitative, and what I mean by that is is it's from one level to the next, so like if a baby is crawling, going from crawling to walking is what I view as a 10X. The walker has fundamentally different freedoms than the crawler. Absolutely yeah, yeah and like, so like they have way more options.

I can attest to this because I had twins and one of them learned how to walk four months before the other, wow. And so one of them was like literally running around the house, running up the stairs and like the other one was like crawling behind and so like going from like in a in, like a societal sense, going from horse and buggy to a car, that's qualitative, we're still talking. We're still talking like transportation, but when you now have a car like, you can do so many things more.

0:50:37 - Speaker 3 Yeah, we can still get from point A to point B, but how we get there, how long it takes to get this comfort level, accommodations, logistics I mean you're really, really stretching that. It's way more than just A to B.

0:50:47 - Speaker 1 Yeah, so like that is kind of a good way of looking at 10X is it's whatever your next level is, but every time you apply this process where you and I actually have a question for you on this, oh okay, no, seriously. So like, think about, we're recording this in September, right, september 2023. I want you to think about this has anything happened in 2023, whether it's your current situation and you don't have to say what it is but has any either thing happened or result occurred or experience happened so far in 2023 that your past self, at January of 2023, would have thought would have been impossible?

0:51:25 - Speaker 3 You know, immediately it comes to mind my book.

So I've also been working on a book for years, years, and my past self, beginning of this year, would not have thought that as of last week I finished my proposal and it happened in a really roundabout way, kind of case in point to what we were talking about earlier, of being in a vacuum Things in my work. There were a lot of areas where things were just smooth, sailing and coasting and like didn't need a lot of my time and attention. Also, you know, had a drop off with some other projects. So I found myself with just more time because, honestly, things were very efficient, and also more time because, you know, I didn't have as many projects. And so what did I do to fill the time after developing a better relationship with that neutral space? I was like you know what, Chase dammit, go back and finish work on your book. So I did and if you would ask me in January, would this be the year? Like, nah, it's probably gonna be next year and I've been saying that for like six years.

0:52:19 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean I can also test this. Like there's lots of things, even just ideas, that I'm pondering or playing with that would have been so outside the reference frame of who I was at the beginning of the year. A lot of it because of space I've created, but I think that often people don't take the time to reflect on genuinely where their current self is.

0:52:39 - Speaker 3 Please say that again. Yes, that's so important.

0:52:41 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean this goes back to mastery of your past, that your current self is actually the framer of your past, and typically, because especially people listening to stuff like this are so forward oriented, which is great. It's a forward podcast and I'm all for that. The future is freaking powerful and it should be the frame for operating in the present.

But typically, because of that orientation, often people don't take even any time to measure their progress and orient towards where they were compared to where they're at now, and I find enormous value in looking at where I'm at now versus, say, where I was at the beginning of the year.

And just saying how am I different from who I was at the beginning of the year? And if I actually sit and think about it, I'm now. It goes back to the idea of filtering, like the gold coins versus the bronze coins. Often people just don't create certain filters and so you can actually design the filter and I can look at the filter of my past and say in what ways am I different? What impossible things am I now achieving that my past self would have never even thought about?

These are just certain frames or filters for looking at the past, and you can get really good at this. I mean, I can even think back on who I was a week ago and I can say how is current version of me? How am I different from who I was a week ago? What do I now know that I didn't know a week ago? What's now possible that I would have never thought was possible even a week ago? What are some important forms of progress that I've had? And you get better and better at this and you start to first off, your past becomes phenomenally more valuable to you.

0:54:11 - Speaker 3 Oh yeah.

0:54:12 - Speaker 1 And it fits, with flexibility because I can now see, even a week ago or even 24 hours ago, that I'm not the same guy and so I am changing. I am transforming fundamentally opposite of a fixed mindset. I'm not the same person I was a week ago. That doesn't mean I have any negative emotions toward my past self. There's no value in that I have massive love and respect for my past self. Yet I have different standards.

I filter things different. I would not say yes to some of the things my past self would say yes to, and so I just think that that form of reflection is a huge aspect of developing mastery over the continuously updating draft and tool of your past, but it also can propel a lot of confidence and a lot of imagination and positive expectation towards what you could do in the future.

0:54:54 - Speaker 3 So true, so true. I'm gonna pause there real quick and swap out this light. She gone, she gone. I'm gonna actually look at my next. I think we'll move into the applications.

0:55:05 - Speaker 1 Whenever you want man. Is this going all right so far?

0:55:08 - Speaker 3 Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, it's amazing, amazing, mind-boggling content and I already even read the book. Just rehashing so many things, I have something I'm gonna get to here in a minute. I made a note here about this billion dollar vision story as it ties into this writing your $15 million check.

0:55:27 - Speaker 1 I wanna hear this I got a really interesting experience. I wanna hear about it. What are you talking about, Dude? Tell us man, Tell the story. So, Do we wanna wait or I'll bring it up again?

0:55:36 - Speaker 3 But basically some friends of mine were asked about working on their company and things like that, and it was kind of like a 10x moment of instead of we're trying to grow this, trying to grow that. Someone asked them what is it gonna take to get your company to a billion dollars? And they're just like, fuck it, just-.

0:55:53 - Speaker 1 Almost nothing they're doing now.

0:55:54 - Speaker 3 Exactly. It's like it changed everything and they have completely changed everything.

0:55:57 - Speaker 1 That's the goal, it shapes the process, the filter.

0:55:59 - Speaker 3 I'm gonna bring that up. It's a great great connection here. Okay, so we'll go in next to the gap in the game.

0:56:08 - Speaker 1 Sure, yeah, wherever you want to go.

0:56:09 - Speaker 3 Alright. So Isaac talking, speaking of future, talking to Isaac here in the future, we'll go and jump back in here. Man, so in the last half of the book you're second portion, excuse me. You talk about these 10x applications. Now we got you know the principles laid down. You have this amazing concept of the gap in the game, and I pulled this quote here directly from your work because I think it's so perfect. You're, a level of capability in the future depends upon your measurement of achievements in the past. You can't move forward and grow into you acknowledged how far you've come and have it properly measure your gains. What secrets to 10xing our future are hidden in our past accomplishments?

0:56:48 - Speaker 1 Absolutely, and I got to give Dan the credit that's a direct quote from Dan.

0:56:52 - Speaker 3 Okay, shout out Dan.

0:56:53 - Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Dan is an amazing thinker. I just want to let you know like he's pretty niche. And so, like a lot of people, don't know who he is, but, like Dan, is almost eight years old and he's been coaching high end entrepreneurs for 50 years Wow literally, like he is the coach of a lot of the people that we probably think of as influencers, like you know, and so he is phenomenal, and so this gap and gain idea fits a lot with everything we've been talking about.

I look at everything from fundamental psychological principles a lot of what we've been talking about, the psychology of time. Time is holistic, not sequential. When I say holistic, I mean the past, present and future are all happening right now, and it's who you are in. The present is based on how you're operating in your past.

0:57:33 - Speaker 3 Oh, I'm with you, yeah, yeah. So I'm looking at we can tackle this concept is I'll say it everybody, it's game changing. Oh yeah, game changing. Get out of thinking of that was then, this is now and that's in the future. It's all thinking, it's all now. You will. It'll hurt your brain for a little bit, but I promise you the level to which you will begin to think differently about everything, but more specifically your life and your capabilities, your skill sets, your fortitude, your resiliency. Everything will change, I promise you.

0:58:01 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, one thing that is helpful is that everyone's been doing it. I mean, you know no harm, no foul.

0:58:08 - Speaker 3 It's just. It's it's nature, it's nurture, it's common law, common knowledge. It's just the status quo.

0:58:16 - Speaker 1 Totally yeah. So the gap in the game, Dan and I literally wrote an entire book on it.

That was our second book together and there is a chapter in this book really framing it from a 10x perspective. But just to give the the nuts and bolts of the idea, what Dan found and this was 25 plus years ago and how how his company strategic coach operates is that they do essentially workshops every 90 days. So people come every 90 days, they discuss their progress, they discuss their goals and they go through different thinking frameworks for clarifying strategy process stuff like that. And so what Dan found is is that most of these people being extremely high achievers, often, no matter how much they accomplished, they tended to devalue that progress. They tended to not feel like they were doing enough for that. They weren't where they could have or should have.

0:59:03 - Speaker 3 Oh, like I didn't really do that much, or I should, yeah, like oh like you know, like yeah, we got this new client.

0:59:07 - Speaker 1 or like you know we did this or that, but you know it wasn't as much as it could have been or it should have been, like we couldn't, you know, like how many of us have been there.

0:59:14 - Speaker 3 I'm sure everybody can raise their hand Like fundamental yeah like.

0:59:16 - Speaker 1 It's very common for a lot of reasons, but how Dan framed it is is that we all have ideals for our future and those ideals are like a horizon, and in psychology it's likened to what they call the hedonic treadmill, that it literally doesn't matter what you've accomplished, like the, the mile marker keeps moving right, which is fine, it's actually really useful, but the thing is is in the gap and again is really a model of how are you measuring yourself? How are you?

measuring yourself? We certainly want a 10x feature and we want to be letting that future filter us. But am I measuring myself against it, meaning I'm always thinking I should be there versus be here? And so to the idea of the horizon no matter how much you're sprinting towards the horizon, you're never gonna get to the horizon, right?

Yeah, and so if you're always measuring yourself against the horizon and saying that's where I should be, but, like, you can never get there, and so that's the gap is you're always measuring yourself against where you think you should be, and it's very like should oriented, and so that mindset can really lead people to feeling like failures, no matter what they've accomplished, because, like, no matter where they're at, where they're at now is fundamentally diminished because it's not over there, right.

Yeah, and so now you feel like a loser here, but also you've just devalued your, all your progress, and so the gain is really an orientation of measuring yourself backwards against your past self.

1:00:36 - Speaker 3 Oh, brilliant, yeah, so there's, a quote from Ernest Hemingway.

1:00:38 - Speaker 1 Ernest Hemingway was a famous novelist and he basically said that true nobility is not about being superior to other people, it's about being superior to your former self. And so the main idea is is rather than measuring myself against my constantly evolving horizon or ideals, how about I measure myself backwards against where I was before, whether that was three years ago, 90 days ago, last week? I'm looking backwards and measuring my progress literally to that quote that you just read. You can't really know how far you've come unless you measure yourself against where you were and you get to choose the reference point.

1:01:11 - Speaker 3 I get to you know, and this is the most brilliant part, right there. I hope the listener picks up on that. We don't need to automatically go back to all the way in the beginning or just yesterday. Go back to a point of your choosing so that you can have this fair assessment. Yeah, I mean, the choice is yours.

1:01:25 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean we all have reference points in in, like when you're growing up, going to public school, the reference point is which is the, which is the form of measurement is typically like a grade on a test and like you're automatically competing against other people on the grade. You're taught to measure and compare against other people, to compete, and with social media and so many other things, the reference points are coming from society or from, like algorithms that are sending you stuff, and so people are tend to tend to have been trained to have external reference points which are constantly moving in, which are given to them by outside forces, and so it leads you to essentially always comparing, competing, wanting to like keep up with the Jones is keep you know and it keeps you on this hedonic treadmill where you're constantly seeking the next thing and never being happy, and so so the reference point that you want to have is more of an internal referencing point, where you're no longer having external reference points.

You're literally referencing backwards against your past self, and you're continuously measuring your, measuring your genuine progress. People aren't really well trained to do this, especially like really like hard driving entrepreneurs. It doesn't mean you're not looking forward, right. It doesn't mean you're not operating from your future.

Yeah but it just means that you're measuring yourself against where you were and you're recognizing holy cow like look at where I am genuinely against, where I was even 90 days ago. Look at all the things that happened. I was totally downplaying those. And back to the idea of filtering. When you actually get better and better at filtering the past for your progress, it's you start to not only like magnify its value and like actually appreciate what genuinely happened. And typically what will happen is this people will realize way more has happened than I thought.

1:03:07 - Speaker 3 It's. We downplay our accomplishments and even just progress. Absolutely, we're in so much. That's, that's what I think. The things we're doing most if they take nothing else from this conversation is stop discrediting the work that you have done.

1:03:24 - Speaker 1 It, stop it. And a lot of times people will say, Well, why should I worry about that? Like it doesn't matter anymore? That's where I'm going and it's like Okay, I get that, but if you are continuously devaluing your past and not feeling like you're enough, what? What is to make you think that at any future point you'll feel any different? Exactly You're never going to be enough.

1:03:42 - Speaker 3 Exactly.

1:03:43 - Speaker 1 The gap or the thing that you're seeking is internal and you're just honestly avoiding your reality.

You're avoiding yourself, you're trying to fill a hole with external whatever in the hole is inside, and so even they're like honestly even even the basic practice of and there's a huge amount of research on this like, literally, at the end of the day, just like reflect, generally reflecting on three things you're grateful for from that day there's a lot of research that shows this will not only make you happier but allow you to sleep better. You can apply that like the reason you do that is because, at the end of the day, rather than scrolling and looking at social media, if you just look back and just ask the question back to the I did filtering, training your brain to look for different things you just say what are three things that I'm grateful for from this day? It forces you to start to look for them and train for them and you'll then find, actually, you know what, there's a hundred things that could be grateful for today. Oh yeah.

And you realize I wasn't even. I just walked straight past all that stuff.

1:04:39 - Speaker 3 They're not on your radar, but now they are. So now you're going to see these things in real time, most likely tomorrow, the next month, the next year, whatever. But it starts now, and this is again. I love this concept the through line we have here of your past as your present as your future. It's just a matter of which one are you going to be acknowledging at any given moment.

1:04:57 - Speaker 1 Yeah, and I love it, I mean, and so the beauty of this is is that you are training your past just like you would train a pet. You're training your past, you're training a more effective past.

you're training and you're just like you're training yourself to find increasing value from your experiences, rather than thinking your experiences determine you. You're determining your experiences, you're determining the value and the like, the true value of it, and you're making your past an increasing asset that keeps paying your present and future more, and so it's just really powerful to do that and recognize how different you are from your past self, and what it does is is how you view your past typically creates the expectations for what you'll create in your future. And so you know, to your question of how does you know getting better and better quote unquote being in the gap or being in the game, you know, help you to 10x in the future. Well, people listening to this have gone 10x. This is, this is a big idea. You've gone 10x before, like everyone who's hearing this has gone 10x in some certain way.

1:05:55 - Speaker 3 We have.

1:05:55 - Speaker 1 Oh, I mean, you have many times. If you really look at it yeah, yeah, I would argue, you've gone 10x in multiple ways even in the last three years, like it could be in the size of your podcast or the quality of your podcast, it could be, in the quality of your filters, what you say yes and no to.

1:06:09 - Speaker 3 Yeah, you know, thank you for checking that. You're checking me really. I mean again, I just kind of this is a great gut check for me. I'm really just going, oh yeah, like I get incrementally better or I fine tune this or we increase the video quality Genuinely.

1:06:21 - Speaker 1 Look at now, it's just three years ago, they're true. I'm guessing, if you really dug into it, there's multiple areas you've 10xed.

1:06:28 - Speaker 3 Yeah, alright, alright, he got me.

1:06:30 - Speaker 1 Everybody, remember it's quality, it's not always quantity, often it's, I mean, it's yeah, it's not always quantity, often it's quality, but it's really powerful.

And this is kind of a walkthrough that we have people do, as we invite people to look at their, their, their previous stages or levels and the multiple and the times in which they've gone from one level to the next. And I really look at, 10x is qualitative, not quantitative, meaning it's from one level to the next, going from crawling to walking, and so I literally, you know, use myself as an example like you know, when my I was 11 years old, oldest of three boys, my parents get divorced when I'm 11. My father is super depressed and becomes a drug addict, right, I mean, that happened. And for me, one of the 10x is was, honestly, after high school, like getting on like a church mission, like that was huge, doing service and stuff. Like to me, even just getting there required me to let go of a huge amount of 80%, one being like had to let go of playing 16 hours of World Warcraft today, like that's a big part of like the 80% I had to let go of that huge, huge.

You know. Remember the 80% is your past identity, it's your past story and you're certainly not your past self. But a lot of people have solidified their past self and so some of the 80% I had to let go of just to get on that mission was I had to let go of all sorts of resentment, anger, stories about my parents and why they had caused so many problem.

I can imagine, I had to forgive my dad, so that was part of my 80% and freeing myself from freedom from that so that I could actually move on and move forward. But I mean I use other examples even you know, getting into a PhD program was huge. I mean I got rejected the first 15 times I tried 15,.

I applied to 15, wow, my first time and got rejected them all, and so that goal was so massive that it really forced me to figure out a few really crucial things you know becoming and this is one thing that I think is really helpful, because one of your questions before was like how do you decide the 10x? And for me it really fits with future self. So, like the first story I told in this book was Michelangelo right and Michael the David sculpture.

1:08:35 - Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so like losing his mentor and all this crazy stuff, and just you know by all other anybody else would have stopped.

1:08:43 - Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. And the great part about Michelangelo, number one like, it gives you a reference frame. If you want to like, use one as an example of someone who changed the world. Right, like, and most people would not not go for a 10x like that. Most people don't believe they can put a dent in the universe.

So again to the point of imagination we get what we filter for most people's imagination for what their life could be is nowhere near that. And you know we get what we shoot for largely. But the reason I used him as an example and it's and I'm gonna now then kind of get it to the point of how do you choose the next 10x is his path was very nonlinear, like he didn't just like keep doing the same thing. He went from making sculptures to eventually painting the Sistine Chapel, to eventually like becoming an architect and so but one of the things that you know, the Pope asked him when, like, so he made the David. He spent four years going really deep on that. And again, it's about quality, not quantity. You won't go 10x if you're just trying to grind your way there you can't, you can't to x, your way to x to x is grinding.

you have to create that space and go really deep to catch big fish, and and so, ultimately, Michelangelo created the space. He had a huge ambition. You know like he was, he wanted to do something phenomenal, something way above his reach, and ultimately he created the David sculpture, 17 feet tall, and by going that deep, it created all sorts of opportunities. He was in a fundamentally different level of freedom freedom of time relationship.

You know all of a sudden he had relationships with the Pope and freedom of purpose. Now he was like, had opportunities to do all sorts of projects. But the Pope asked him you know what is the secret of the David? And he said you know, it was simple.

I just took away everything that was not David he stripped away and someone brought this to my attention recently and I'd never heard it this way. But they were saying you know, the granite or like the marble that he was getting rid of was was good marble. Like often getting rid of that 80%, stripping away everything, that's not the David You're. Often you're getting rid of really good stuff. Like me writing books with the am like I would have had a great future if I kept writing more books with him.

I'm sure you're getting rid of phenomenal stuff sometimes because you're letting the future dictate the president, you're choosing freedom over security. The 80% is security, and so I really look at your, your next 10x or the next 10x future self, as the David. And like and so you want to think like what's the next level for me? And it might not be more of what you're now doing, it might, you know. That's why you want to like really get in touch with yourself and really ask yourself what do I absolutely want?

1:11:21 - Speaker 3 I think that truly is probably one of the biggest limiting factors and scariest thoughts for people. How 10x? Because when you think about it, I'll take myself. For example, I went to school for exercise science that my master's in health promotion been a certified health coach through the American Council on exercise since 2015. Sure, Look around me right now. Yep, I'm not in a gym. I don't coach anybody.

1:11:49 - Speaker 1 You went 10x. It's qualitative, not quantitative.

1:11:51 - Speaker 3 And he was from doing that.

1:11:53 - Speaker 1 You know, at some point you made a massive jump and you had to strip away a lot of the 80%.

1:11:56 - Speaker 3 I did and I left all that behind. And why I think it's so scary for a lot of people is because you think the 10x goal is more is 10x of the thing you're already doing.

1:12:05 - Speaker 1 You're already doing.

1:12:06 - Speaker 3 In my case, it meant letting go of all that. It meant shutting down my health coaching business. It meant letting go of identity. I'm still paying for my grad school, for something that I don't even use. To a certain degree, I think the argument could be made. You know a lot of my guests are on the health and wellness space and so I can, you know, hold the conversation pretty well with them. So it definitely still serves me. But you know, I'm not in the same way that I thought it did. I went to grad school because I thought it was going to help my job, help my career. I left my job. I started my own business. I'm no longer in that space anymore For me to 10x my life and 10x my business. I had to let all that go and step into something entirely different.

1:12:47 - Speaker 1 It's, it's literally about identity, and that's why I didn't finish my thousand.

1:12:51 - Speaker 3 That's why I think most people are afraid, or you kind of. Maybe you're carving out the space for that, and there's that, that gut feeling of like there's this thing that I've always thought about doing, or there's this role that I want to play, or there's this job, there's this business, there's this, there's there's this other thing that is not my thing right here, right now. What the hell does that mean? But that's the thing I'm gonna challenge a listener, that's the thing I'd be willing to bet you need to go 10x on.

1:13:18 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean. All progress starts by telling the truth.

1:13:21 - Speaker 3 You know, we already said that a lot of.

1:13:23 - Speaker 1 That's the truth about the 80% that you gotta let go of. Back to Alan Bernard's four things that we waste our time on. So, being honest about the 80% of things that you're honestly wasting your time on, you know. So that's, that's one. But you know. Back to freedom, to honesty about what you genuinely want. Most people they're so piled on by the busyness of their 80%, or just all these external reference points all these external things that like they literally can't hear their own voice and so like.

if you start to get really honest about what you most want, you know and it and I will say every time you go 10x, it's going to be a huge shift in identity.

You know, as an example like I went from, like you know, student to blogger to author, now leadership trainer huge blogger, by the way, yeah yeah, yeah, I mean, I was a huge blogger and that was part of, you know, one of my 10x's, which was like to get a six figure book deal, like that was. That was the, that was the David that allowed me to have a 20% of deep mastery, but, like, ultimately I had to let go of that. You know, like, once I went 10x, I blogged for like three years. Blogging was very successful and it got me to the David, deep mastery. And, by the way, a lot of this really is about mastery, mastery being you know, dan calls it unique ability.

But like it's about going deeper and deeper into developing really unique mastery and doing stuff that only you can do where, like, there is no competition. And you can't do mastery or you can't. You can't do mastery by being good, like it's the difference between good to great, and if you even read the book good to great, you study these companies that went from good to great. It's always about letting go of most things and just getting phenomenal at the few.

Yeah, and every time you go through this process you're going to go through an identity shift. You know it's, it's very similar to you, know you study anyone like they went from like personal trainer to the gym owner, to like franchisee, to like influencer.

1:15:15 - Speaker 3 Like there's, there's a look at Madonna. I mean that's a wild example, but like how people like her and these, you know, these rock stars and pop icons, they transform themselves, they come up with these new identities you know, every so often. I mean I think creatives are a great way to go and to look at, for I mean 10 xing talk about 10 xing identity.

1:15:35 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean you look at companies like, as an example, there's a company that, like I advise, and they are doing 100 million in revenue and they got there as a supplement company. But like they know and like they're a niche supplement, they know that to get like from 100 million in revenue to a billion, they probably have to be a technology company.

1:15:57 - Speaker 3 Really Supplements to technology.

1:15:58 - Speaker 1 Yeah, but they're still doing supplements, but they're not framed as a supplement company you know, like that you know, or they're like a really niche supplement, but now they're you know, and so like that's often the shifts that you'll have to make because, remember, you're operating from the future and so it's like, okay, if we're going to get to a billion in revenue, like we can't, we can't stay in this niche, like what you know what, what is the most likely vehicle?

or pathway or identity that's going to get us there, and usually it's a reframe. Once you get to 10 x, you know you're. You do have a different identity, but your business has a different identity. Everything around you has a different identity, and being willing to let go of the old and to do it in a celebratory manner like you know, you're not your past self and even stripping away the 80%, it does not mean that you're. You're like disposing of it because it's bad. You're freaking, celebrating the heck out of it, but also you're not clinging.

1:16:48 - Speaker 3 There's no shame to it. It's, it's, it's clarity, it's honestly clarity.

1:16:53 - Speaker 1 So the idea of letting go people often view it as a loss right. It's a huge gain. Like you are, you're letting go of something that was massively informative in getting you here In this. In extreme forms, this even fits with addiction that like addictions a huge component of what I've studied. You know my dad being like a heavy drug addict and stuff and and not anymore like he's. He's he's totally not anymore. But like my first book was called willpower doesn't work and like addiction is a huge frame of how I look at things. Sure.

Sure, and one of my friends is named Joe Polish. He talks a lot about how addiction is not like it's not a problem. It's actually the solution to a problem. It's not necessarily an effective solution, but it's your best coping mechanism right now for trying to like get through something. And the other reason I say it in that way is that eventually, at a certain point, what got you here won't get you there.

At a certain point you got to let it go and so, like you know, it becomes part of your 80%. But I'm only saying that even an addiction is something that got you here but won't get you there and at some point you let it go and by letting it go it's a massively forward. And you do have to let go of the coping, you know. Let go of whatever the floor is and raise the floor a much higher filter and you start. You know, you stop, you stop doing some of the things that got you, even the great things.

1:18:16 - Speaker 3 Truly.

1:18:17 - Speaker 1 And so it's a continuous process, but I love what you're saying and it truly is something to celebrate, like I celebrate my past self in all of their. You know all the epic things my past self did, and even the things that you know I would consider things I would never do now. That's just where they were at. That's. That was where the best tools that got them there and, at a certain point, my future in the filter said it's not going to make it for where I want to go now.

My identity is my future self, not my past self, and when you really start to connect with the identity of your future self and let that be the fuel for what you do. Then it becomes a lot more easy to recognize that you're no longer that past self and the stuff you were doing before don't filter in and you, just you, let it go with ease and with grace and celebration honestly.

1:18:59 - Speaker 3 One concept I want to bring up here.

A little story time I would love to get your intake on is, there's immense power to be had and I think we can tie it into going 10x, to surrounding yourself with people like minded people but beyond. If we're struggling right now to get to 10x, to even understand what 10x of our life or goal could be, here, I'm here to tell you, putting yourself in the environment of people who, in your opinion, have 10x their life, have 10x their business, you are going to find yourself pondering. You're going to find yourself asking questions or be asked questions that will get you to 10x. Case in point, two very good friends of mine here in LA run what used to be predominantly, first, a fitness apparel company that just so happened to do community events, secondary, you know, back burner kind of stuff. They were at this dinner of entrepreneurs, small business owners and this one co founder, ceo of this organization, multiple seven figure business, if not even, I think, pushing eight. Ask them the question they begin to talk about. You know what's next? You know this is how we're growing, scaling.

And he was just like what's it going to take for you to go from where you are now to a billion dollar company? And my, my body was just like chase. I was speechless for the first time, really like ever. I didn't even. I never thought about that, I never fathomed what, what our company would look like, what that revenue would look like, what that meant for our lives.

And what they have done since then is they have completely shed majority. I'd say they've shed 80% of the apparel stuff and now they're going just all in an events and since doing so, their biggest event this year that's kind of their flagship one they've been doing the last couple of years nearly tripled in attendance, in partnerships and revenue and content. I mean literally any way. Qualitatively and quantitatively they can measure it at least tripled. Last time I checked and talk about, just you know, being able to 10x by by environment Totally. If you're not even in a place to be asked that question, you know what are you doing. So if you're struggling to do, how do I get 10x? What does that even look like? You can take that off your shoulders right now. Just go put yourself in the environment of people who have totally.

1:21:13 - Speaker 1 I mean, yeah, I love the quote. I think it's a zigzaglar.

He said your input shapes your outlook right, and so it's like you know, even listening to conversations like this, listening to podcasts, like actually recognizing that 80% of the input you know, most of it's it's past right, yeah stuff, but also recognizing that most of the stuff and most of the people in your life you know and this is something that entrepreneurs have to deal with is if they're going to go 10x, they have to just recognize that, like a huge chunk of their team is not coming on the journey. You know what I mean.

Like that's just that's just. That's just the fact of the matter. And so, yeah, I mean often, if you think about like high school kids, like a lot of their goals or their views of their future, their expectations of their future come from those who they surround themselves with their friends.

You know lots of research on that, that you know teenagers often think about their future and their expectations for their future more based on their peers than their parents, and so I've seen this in my own life. I mean being in, and there's a great book. I'm actually make a different book's suggestion, so this is another Richard Kosh book.

1:22:14 - Speaker 3 We're gonna have so many books listed in the resources on the show notes here, but I mean great homework, Richard Kosh he wrote the 80 20 individual but his book Unreasonable Success.

1:22:24 - Speaker 1 I recently read that book and the reason I like it so much and I've learned so much from it is as he talks about people who have done unreasonable things, like Michelangelo, einstein. You know what I mean. Like people who, like they weren't just successful, like it was, like they like pretty out there cats.

They kind of like change the world a little bit, a little bit, but he talks about like some of the factors of these people and one of one of them. Like I'll share the top three, but the one I really want to talk about is number three but like one of them being like like a really sense of, like a sense of identity that they can do amazing things, like huge self beliefs like he even talks about Winston Churchill and about how.

Winston Churchill, even as a teenager, like thought he would become the Prime Minister, stuff like that, yeah, like. But he explains where this self belief comes from. So you got self belief, which isn't typically innate. Usually it's developed, yeah, and over time, continuously a lot of it from what we're talking about referencing the past and stuff getting better and better at framing that. But the second one is what he calls like. He calls it herculean expectations, but like, self belief is about like what you believe you can do, or even what you believe your future self can do, or what you believe God can do through you. But you've got like these beliefs that you can do things that like other you know, like that's just rare.

1:23:40 - Speaker 3 You've got to believe like I can move mountains.

1:23:41 - Speaker 1 Yeah, totally. And, like you know, steve Jobs is like I'm going to put a dent in the universe, right Like Elon. Musk is like, like, literally believes he's going to go to Mars right. And so like. So the second one is expectations. Expectations are not about yourself, they're about the outcomes. So, it's like you have positive expectations.

1:23:59 - Speaker 3 That's powerful Wow.

1:24:00 - Speaker 1 Yeah, expectations are about like the belief that good things will happen, or that you can make great things happen, or you know that you'll figure it out, and that like it's that like expectation effect, self fulfilling prophecy. But the thing that continuously up levels those first two things your self belief and also your expectations, and huge amounts of research on, on what you expect, even like if you, if you expect something will make you sick or something like that. Like that stuff impacts like how your body processes things.

1:24:28 - Speaker 3 Oh, in your work, you talk about it, but it's no stranger here. You know placebo effect, no sebo effect. If we believe the medicine is the medicine, then we're way more likely to heal. If we're in belief that the side effects of the medicine or sugar pill are real, then we're most likely going to get the side effects, whether it's actually in there or not.

1:24:48 - Speaker 1 Yes, I mean, expectations are huge and there's there's lots of different angles on the research on that. One of them is just called the pygmalion effect, pygmalion effect being that we typically rise or fall to the expectations of those around us. And so if you think that people expect you to show up, as you know, like he failed again, you know you're gonna show up that way and so. But the third one that he talks about is what he calls transformative experiences, and so he says, like, if you look and study the lives of people who have done unreasonable things, you will be able to point back it really important transformative experiences and and those are also things that you can continuously create an engineer and transformative experiences are experiences. You know, you've heard the quote. You know a mind that is stretched by a new experience can't go back to its former shape, right, or its former dimensions.

1:25:37 - Speaker 3 No, I don't think I've heard that. I like that, that's all of our Wendell Holmes Jr.

1:25:40 - Speaker 1 He said a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its former dimensions.

1:25:43 - Speaker 3 Amen to that, absolutely.

1:25:45 - Speaker 1 But so so these transformational experiences are things that reshape what you think is possible. There are things that reshape what you think about yourself or what you can expect. And so you know your story of your friend. That was a transformative experience. Having being in the atmosphere of someone who said, you know, how could you get to a billion? Like that stretched his, his thinking, in his mind and so he most likely never would have thought that himself. No, it would have been outside, is his reference for absolutely.

Yeah, and, and so you want to. You want to have as many of those as possible, you know. So I mean you could think back on how many transformative experiences have I had in the last month, like when, when did I? What was an experience I had, whether it was through a success or whether it was through some form of exposure, being around someone or some idea that actually, like, altered my view of what was possible, whether that be for myself, or or my expectations for what I could do, and so you want to have those regularly.

and often it does come by being in proximity of people who are?

living at just a totally different space you know space and that what seems impossible to you is completely normal to them and like they just being in those situations or those environments yeah, helps you look at things differently. I mean, I've had plenty of those experiences and I seek those words. It's like I actively want to put myself in deep water, where it's like I don't know how to swim, like I don't even know that I'm in water, you know, and being around people who, who?

yeah, so I mean you want that and you can seek it, and you can stretch and and eventually you do adapt to those who are around you and, using the future as a filter, you do want to be around the type of people who are more reflection of your future self than your past self.

1:27:24 - Speaker 3 Two ways that work really well for me to kind of have these transformational experiences. I feel like I keep one foot in the quote real world and one in, you know, fantasy world. One is through stuff like this having conversations with experts, community leaders, reading books, listening to podcasts, kind of more tangible things. You know scientific, factual, you know left brain kind of stuff. The other is I'm a big movie fan. I love watching fantasy, medieval, like crazy wild stuff.

1:27:51 - Speaker 1 I don't read it.

1:27:53 - Speaker 3 Exactly. You know, and I don't read fiction a whole whole lot, but you know I used to and you know, for me that kind of falls also into, like social media, when I'm scrolling or I'm watching TV, watching movie, whatever kind of getting out of A plus B equals C and just getting into A plus B equals gobbledygook. You know who knows. But that does stretch my capacity and stretch my wonder and stretch my ability to just understand here and now. But to just begin to think differently. And I think that's the most important thing I'm trying to make here is by reading things that I can put a pulse on, put a finger on and go, okay, I'm not doing that, but that I can think differently about it and I can do it and I should get a different result.

That can 10x me, maybe, or just completely stepping away from the known universe and just allowing all kinds of wonder and all to step in. I mean talk about thinking and acting and doing creatively. You're never going to get there, otherwise. You need to be in again. The environment here is crucial. You need to be in a book like that, you need to be in a movie like that, you need to be in, you know help, maybe even like a good breathwork class or yoga, you know, some kind of transform, or transformative, altered state of consciousness, should I even say sometimes.

1:28:59 - Speaker 1 Oh yeah, I mean, could not agree more. And I think one thing that's downplayed is the the level of quote, unquote, peak or transformative experiences. You can buy yourself you know, you're talking about, you know, sitting and reading a book, or or or, honestly, even just journaling and noticing, maybe with more power how much has happened in the last year and just being like whoa like we're hopping in a float tank.

1:29:25 - Speaker 3 Wow yeah, I mean that'll do it too.

1:29:28 - Speaker 1 Yeah, so I think that it's. I think it's a regular process, it's a regular practice. Again, it's it's practice getting better and better at thinking differently and having more regular experiences that shift you all you know, and so that you can recognize that you're not your past self and begin operating with different levels of future self.

I mean, I, you know, just talking here, I'm here in LA. You know, I live in Florida but I love, I love, you know even just the plane ride. You know like five hours of plane, listen to a few. You know great book but lots of time journaling and just thinking and and and then being in different spaces meeting, you know meeting someone like you being out walking, listening to books and getting ideas that I wouldn't have not have had.

Oh, yeah, and then you know actually playing with, playing with different future potentials like you know, in psychology they call it perspective just the idea that you know we are operating largely based on the futures we see for ourselves. Okay. And so giving yourself permission to just play with different ideas like play with the idea that you could be a billionaire.

1:30:29 - Speaker 3 play, just play with the idea, yeah.

1:30:31 - Speaker 1 Not. That might be way outside your, your even value system, and so what's the version of that for you? Maybe you're like an evangelist, I don't know. But just play with the idea that that could be possible. And you know you don't. Your future self is different than you expect, and so just actually allow yourself.

That's part of psychological flexibility to actually imagine it, think about it and strategize backwards from it as a tool. You don't have to go for it, but just think about it. Take, take whatever your goal is and make it 10 times bigger or 10 times different or better, 10 times more honest. But just Just give yourself that space to think about it and begin to think backwards from it and you know, you get more and more comfortable with it and eventually you go from thinking to feeling, to knowing. You know where you, you know, eventually you go from thinking to actually like becoming emotionally open to it, emotionally accepting of it, emotionally. It's so important about it.

And you know, I love the quote from Goddard never Goddard. He said assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled. Assume the feeling. And so you, you want to.

You know, emotions are really powerful you know I would say they're just as powerful thoughts and they're honestly the energy behind the thoughts. And so you want to think, feel and then get to the place of like acceptance and knowing, like level of confidence, faith, positive expectation and and and so I think it's a continuous process. But you know, actually, I mean even on this trip I have mentally thought about and maybe even Played with the idea of like I can do this, getting that feeling and knowing level of Goals, even in the next three years, that are ten times bigger than I thought I would go for.

Literally like, I'm just like you know I actually, you know, I actually maybe could achieve ten times more by doing less in better ways. Maybe I can, you know, do ten times more. Not do ten times more, but achieve or grow right. In the next years than I thought I could, and even the ten, the ten times goal before was huge. But oh, actually, actually, there are pathways to doing it even 10x beyond that.

1:32:30 - Speaker 3 It's infinite expansion, yeah, infinite expansion.

1:32:33 - Speaker 1 Yeah and so, but like I'm playing with it in my mind and it's not just thoughts in my head, like I'm like you know, like it's something I'm getting excited about.

1:32:41 - Speaker 3 Well, there's so much more that I will pause here.

1:32:47 - Speaker 1 Anything else you think would be useful to dive into, or we're gonna begin to wrap up here.

1:32:54 - Speaker 3 I had a couple final questions I think I was gonna ask you. Anytime anybody writes a book, I'm always curious. You know the experience. You know what did you what?

was kind of like solidified for you and we know what was kind of maybe left open. You might have already touched on it earlier, but let's do that and then I'll wrap up, okay, so, as someone who's written the book on 10xing your goals, I'm always curious when I speak with an author. Two things what was Absolutely like. Yes, I set out to kind of prove this or write about this, and I was, you know, not necessarily right, but I found what I was looking for like kind of vindicated in something and what was maybe something that Completely just blew your mind that you weren't expecting. Maybe you were proven wrong in an area, but what? What kind of came out of left field for you as well.

1:33:46 - Speaker 1 So there's so many things. I mean again, there was just a germ of an idea and even some things, for example, that Dan had taught or that I'd heard in other places that I had heard, but I didn't actually either believe or I couldn't comprehend one as just an example that to go 10x you have to genuinely focus on less. Like, if you want to 10x as a company, if you want to 10x your revenue, like you can't, you know, and even Steve Jobs did this, like you got you can't focus on more products. You actually have to focus on often less and like, getting really good at the vital few.

I think you did that pretty well, yeah, like but I, I had heard that, but I didn't, like I didn't actually believe it when I, when I first wrote the book, another. And so like I, I as an example, like when I, when I set out to do a book I I'm not the expert like I did not know 90% of this I jumped into deep water and Really had to like figure stuff out. So, as an example, like the 8020 model that we've been talking about, I was a big lover of the 8020 principle, but I didn't.

We had never created the framework for it. 10x versus 2x. Okay, you know that didn't exist before we wrote this book, and so, like I loved the idea of, like the importance of letting go of the 80%, about how the 80% is really a reflection of your past identity versus your future self, and so like I didn't Appreciate the value of letting go and of doing less and of stripping more and more away and focusing on quality versus quantity. I think that I typically have a bias towards quantity.

1:35:19 - Speaker 3 Honestly, I think a lot of people do. When it comes to goal-setting and achieving doing, being more right, yeah, more kind of implies quantity.

1:35:27 - Speaker 1 Yeah, it does, and it's really. It's really about quality, you know, quality of the filter, quality of the standards, quality of your time, money and purpose and relationships, and so you know that that the whole idea of stripping things away and doing less that was. That's still something that is hitting me really hard, I think one of the things you know. A lot of what we've talked about even I learned since the book as an example, like the past, present, future, model.

Although, like those are things I've known, really just the idea of 10x being the filter system from your future and letting the future filter and dictate the present, like I.

You know, my prior book to this one was called be your future self now, and that was a lot of the research on the importance of being connected to your future self and letting your emotional connection and your identity of your future self Impact your present decisions. So it's like if I'm really connected to and I have respect and love and understanding of my future self, like I'll likely you know there's a lot of research on this like invest towards the future, I'll start investing in my retirement or I'll make better health decisions.

But I didn't really fully appreciate like scaling the goal to impossible levels and that like that, as a filter, really simplifies the present it weeds out the 80% helps you find those, and so I mean, there's just so many things that like I really didn't even get and understand, that like I'm still understanding.

I'll say one last thing that like I didn't fully appreciate and I'm still like learning its value and like, even when I wrote it, you guys got to see his face. When he's talking about this, you can tell, this is just imprinting on him yeah.

1:37:05 - Speaker 3 Well, so our first book was called who, not how. The first book, I mean it, was not my first book.

1:37:11 - Speaker 1 That was my third major book. But it was my first book with Dan. And who not? How? Is just the idea that, rather than you doing all the how yourself, you ask who can do this either with me or for me, right, like in the case of Dan?

like he doesn't write these kind of books Like I'm the who that did it and, and you know, back to Richard caution, the 80, 20 individual. What he talks about in that book, which is very in alignment with this 10x is easier than 2x is that in any form of movement or in any even community, there's always a select few individuals that are creating almost all the results, and so like in that book he quotes Bill Gates and Bill Gates having a company of 130,000 people.

Microsoft, bill Gates, directly said If you took away our top 20, 20 people, just 20 out of 100 people, if you took away our top 20 people, just 20 out of 130,000, if you took away our top 20 people, this company would like like cease to exist. Wow, and so that's saying something I did not value the importance of, of of teaming with those 20% individuals that make 100x the difference. I'm experiencing this truly, even since writing the book that, like you know, we asked. You asked the question, you know you were asking the question about money earlier and it's like you know, how do you fund the 10x if, like right now, you've got the constraints of genuinely, you might not have the money to do it? So how do you get one of those 80, 20 people? Or how do you, you know if, how do you hire someone who's already really good at what they do if you can't afford it? And the thing that I am learning and it takes back to leadership trust One of the things I'm learning more and more trust the who, trust the who.

That's what I did. A leadership training recently with the company and they said we have to trust the who.

1:39:05 - Speaker 3 Like that but.

1:39:06 - Speaker 1 I'm. You know that's tough to do sometimes when you're someone who thinks you know all the answers. But I you know but the thing here is is that if you can either partner with various people, team with them, get them on your team, get them for your cause. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Outliers. Oh great, I mean yeah it was no outliers. But sorry, I'm thinking about the tipping point.

1:39:27 - Speaker 3 Another great one, but the tipping point.

1:39:29 - Speaker 1 He talks about certain types of people that create these tipping points, these epidemics. You know he talks about mavens, people who are like first movers, innovators. He talks about sales people and connectors. These are these 80, 20 people that like their, the size of their impact is different. And he even talks about in that book, drug addicts. That if you like study crime in cities like I'm back, we're here in LA chances are literally even here in LA you could boil down 90% of the crime or more. Wow. To probably a dozen people.

Wow. There are a dozen people in LA.

1:40:01 - Speaker 3 Having that massive ripple effect.

1:40:03 - Speaker 1 That are driving most of the crime Damn Seriously. I mean, they have lots of cronies and stuff like that. But and so I did not respect or understand the value of teaming with and partnering with certain people and the out weighted effect they could have. And even since writing that book, I mean I've brought on an individual who classifies, I would classify as an 80 20 individual and within a month to three months, has changed my business, has changed. The opportunities Damn and so just the value of investing in 80, 20 who's?

and in developing partnerships with them and that it completely changes the game and you could even you know partner in ways where maybe you don't have to pay them, maybe you create a partnership.

1:40:52 - Speaker 3 Exactly More than just financial transaction.

1:40:55 - Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, transformational over transactional and just you know. That's something that I'm still learning, but the fact that I know it more and more, like I already know that my future can be 10 hundred X and it can be a lot easier because I know that there are certain people if I work with and if I team with and if I can be one of those people for someone else Like Game over.

The game is over because most people are racing to the bottom they're just hiring, you know, as a cost and they're just trying to get people to fill roles and delegating and and they're micromanaging and over controlling because they've got trust issues and it's like when you can trust the who and when you can start getting those 80, 20? That's just like there is no competition.

1:41:33 - Speaker 3 Well then, this has been amazing transformational conversation, transformational book. I love diving into this and anybody that wants to learn more please check out the show notes, video notes. 10 X is easier than 2X will have all of this and your contact information linked down for everybody. This one got me thinking. It still has me thinking and I can't wait to kind of share more my 10 X with you down the road.

1:41:56 - Speaker 1 Yeah, it's gonna be fun.