SPI 881: The Science of Scaling with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

SPI 881: The Science of Scaling with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I think for most people, scaling is the wrong answer. Most people have thought about scaling wrong for a long time. Which led them to having the wrong goals for their business. And so going from Good to Great requires a very different type of growth. But scaling itself, it doesn’t necessarily have to be harder. It takes a different psychology and a different use of strategy, but it doesn’t actually have to destroy you.

Just as an example, the person who’s doing a million dollars a year, if they say, Ben, I don’t wanna scale. I say, okay, so what do you wanna do? Do you wanna do a million again next year? That’s cool. What I would say though is instead of maintaining or going for maybe 1.5 million or two, let’s just go for 10 or 20 and just look at what that does for your process, for your decision making, for your business. Now you don’t have to be the center of it like you’re used to. You don’t have to be the main one making all the decisions. You don’t even have to be the main talent. It would just change how you do things and it would change the path.

Pat Flynn: This is going to be a monster episode. You just heard a snippet of a part of a conversation, a deep conversation with Dr. Benjamin Hardy. You might know that name from a book called 10x Is Easier Than 2x. He co-authored that with Mr. Dan Sullivan, and that book was a game changer. It was making its way around the entrepreneurial circles.

And the reason that was a game changer is because the reframe of doing something 10 times better or 10 times bigger. Then two times was huge. The idea that, well, if you’re just gonna do something and try to get two times as good or grow two times bigger, you just have to do twice as much work or two times the amount of things that you’re doing.

But 10 x, you cannot possibly just put more effort and expect to get 10 times the results. You have to change the way you’re thinking. And he sort of expanded on that and really brought some science into the idea of scaling. Hence the title of Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s new book, the Science of Scaling, who he co-authored with Blake Erickson.

And the idea of growing your business bigger and faster is something we all wanna do or have thought about, except I do push on the idea of scaling with Dr. Benjamin Hardy here a little bit in the podcast episode, as you heard. And his answer is great, however. Reframing the idea of scaling and how to approach it and goal setting and just time, using time as a tool is a huge thing here in this conversation, and I cannot wait to share it with you.

So I’m not gonna talk any longer, not by myself at least. We’re gonna dive into it right now with the author of the new book, The Science of Scaling, by the way, you can get the audio book for free. He’ll drop that link at the end of the episode and ’cause he just wants more people to understand these principles here in this reframe of what it means to scale, to dream bigger, but actually not just dream, but make things happen.

Here he is, Dr. Ben Hardy. Let’s do this.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy, welcome back to the SPI podcast. Thanks for being here.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Pat. Good to see you, man.

Pat Flynn: I’m excited because your previous book, 10x Is Easier Than 2x was one that made tremendous waves in especially the entrepreneurial space, but it’s obviously helped a lot of other people in all kinds of different ways.

Why write this new book, The Science of Scaling, when I feel like 10x Is Easier Than 2x kind of touches on a lot of the same notes. Why kind of expand on that and amplify it?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: So one of the things, and you probably know this as well, when you actually write a book, you don’t always have all the answers.

I mean, you never have all the answers. Of course, I knew that 10x Is Easier Than 2x accomplished a lot of ground, but in going out and teaching it and actually helping companies through it and stuff like that, it just brought up all sorts of bigger questions, things that need to be solved. And so I felt like I need to go actually more granular and get a little bit deeper to the roots of, of what scaling is and why it doesn’t happen.

And a lot of people have said 10x Is Easier Than 2x kind of shows us the why. This book shows us the how. On a lot deeper level. And so, I mean, even after writing this one, to be honest with you, I’m now writing another book called Surprising Strategy that answers the questions that this book didn’t answer.

Right? And so I don’t think, at least for someone like me, the rabbit hole is pretty endless.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I find the same thing with my books. One book leads to more opportunities for the next book that then expands on it. Just like how Superfans is an expansion of Will It Fly, which starts your business, but if you wanna amplify it and build a following and a loyal group of people behind it, then Superfans is coming into play and you don’t wanna put all that into one book.

So anyway, I am very much appreciative of this book, Science of Scaling, because I feel like it is much more, how do I say, graspable? Like you said, the applications of it are much more, I dunno, they just hit home a little bit more. One of the things that you talk about in the book is this idea of dreaming the impossible dream or thinking of goals that are impossible.

And we hear that all the time. You know, shoot for the stars and you’ll hit the moon, kind of thing. But the way you help us understand how that changes our perspective on the actions we take. Do you have an example from your life or perhaps one from the book on why thinking almost impossible is the way to go.

When most people go, well, I would never do that because it’s inherently the, by definition it is impossible, so why would I ever do that?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Yeah. It’s kind of a, a counterintuitive thought. The foundation behind the thought is it more root psychology, which is just what is time in psychology and time psychologically, like the past and the future are, are simply tools we use to navigate our present and, even just secondarily to that, the future is actually the primary tool for navigating the present. Although the past provides nice information, the future is simply a tool for making decisions in the present. And really the way we do that is through goals. And so when you start shooting for, you know, you could call it a 10 x goal or an impossible goal, once you start going for the higher goal, that goal starts to wreak havoc on your present in beautiful ways, disruptive, beautiful ways. And that’s really its point is, is that you want a goal that’s so, so big or so urgent that it forces you to relook at your present and forces you to relook at what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And you know, there’s a great quote from John Doerr. He said that a goal properly set is halfway reached. He’s a billionaire, venture capitalist who’s been involved in a lot of the big companies like Google, but the reason why the gold properly set is halfway reached is ’cause it helps you identify the many things you’re now doing, the many things you’re now doing that are based on either like faulty assumptions or just bad thinking. And so the bigger goal is just a really beautiful tool for self-honesty, for self introspection, and ultimately for for better strategy. And so that’s really its point for me, myself, one example that I sometimes share was just becoming an author.

I was a first year PhD student. This was back 10 years ago in 2015, and first year PhD student, three foster kids, and I really wanna be an author. And I had no website, no, no platform, no nothing. And so I didn’t really know the science of impossible goals or things like that, but I was trying to find one goal that would simultaneously solve everything else I wanted to accomplish.

And simply writing a book wasn’t enough to do that, right? I really wanna be an author bad, and so I scaled that goal up to how do I get a six figure book deal? I didn’t know that that was the 1% of 1% of book deals, but that one goal if solved would help me get out of my university position. I didn’t wanna be a research assistant.

I just wanted to do my classes and get a PhD and become a professional author. It would also help provide for my family, it’d gimme more time. So that one goal, although it seemed impossible, doing it in two or three years, forced me to find a path to getting hundreds of thousands of email subscribers.

That path wouldn’t have emerged for me if I was just trying to write a book, if I was just solving for how do I become an author? I wouldn’t have figured out how to get hundreds of thousands of email subscribers, but because getting a six figure book deal required that it led me down that path, which then solved everything else, I could just focus on my family while a PhD student.

And so that, that’s one example of, of using an seemingly impossible goal as a tool for finding a better path.

Pat Flynn: Did you combine that with what you talk about in terms of compression of time? Did you set a time limit on that goal?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I did.

Pat Flynn: To force yourself to make that happen sooner. What, how did you do that?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: So, and by the way, I, I, that was one thing that was not addressed in 10 x and is actually one of the, one of the many counter thoughts that me and Dan have. Dan actually which I love Dan, but he’s a believer in giving yourself 25 years because he wants to reduce the stress of time. I’m more a believer of give yourself way less time than you think you need as a filtering tool for stripping away bad thinking.

For me, I really wanted to get the book deal before the end of my PhD, so I gave myself four years, but then I ended up getting the book deal within an 18 months. The loose goal was I wanted to become a professional author before my PhD.

Pat Flynn: This idea of compression of time is really key. There’s a law that you talk about in the book that I talk about all the time myself.

That’s Parkinson’s law. You are gonna take as much time as you give it. So instead of giving it 25 years, what if you gave it three years? I think you talked about in the book a story about somebody who was developing a software or something and was able to do it and in almost impossible time because when you combine an impossible goal with a very short time period you only have so much time to think about the actions to take. You have to take action because you don’t have the time to think. And whether it’s called a force function or, or however you wanna describe it, it actually works. But a lot of us avoid that. We, we don’t want the pressure. How do you accept the additional pressure that will be added onto you when you create those impossible goals and you compress that time?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Yeah. It’s such a good question and it’s one of the things we’re trying to help people do with this framework is help people understand that. Like a different nature of time and goals. Like people often think of goals as things you write down and you know, you hope to hit ’em. But like what we’re saying is everything you do is driven by a goal.

And so we’re just trying to be a better filter, a more honest filter. And so the first one is just recognizing it’s just a tool. If you hit the goal or not, doesn’t make you a winner or a loser. It doesn’t make you a worthy or not worthy. It doesn’t make you happy or not happy. There’s all these emotional things that people start to go into with goals that that’s just simply not necessary and it’s not really the point of the goal.

The point of the goal is simply to begin to allow you to filter more accurately in the present and to be a lot more honest, like, and so, you know, the beautiful part about going for the extremely impossible goal and then bringing the timeline to a a degree where it’s just ridiculous is not to feel pressure.

Interestingly, actually, it can reduce pressure because it allows you to eliminate most of what you’re now doing because from that perspective, most of what you’re now doing becomes pretty, pretty dead end. And so its purpose is primarily to help you filter and find better pathways if you allow it to, which is what its primary purpose is.

Its purpose is not pressure, but it does force rigorous thinking and rigorous decision making, like as an example. Ourself as a team, we have, you know, our own quote unquote impossible goal for our company. And because the goal’s so high, it forces us to keep focused, to be honest with you. Like when a lot of alternative options and pathways present themselves, which they do all the time, even really big ones, you know, you have to ask, does this support the goal?

If it doesn’t either accelerate the goal or improve the goal sometimes it’s cool just to, to go a different direction, but a lot of times we, we say yes to so many things that aren’t that thoughtful. That’s really the beauty of it, is it forces a lot more honesty and rigor in how you make decisions.

Pat Flynn: I have a recent example.

You and I were talking about my Pokemon stuff right before this, when we hit record, I started a sort of experiment on TikTok and reels and shorts to see if I could go daily and see if I could, you know, build a following without linking to anything else that I have previously had, but using Pokemon and what I know about it to do that.

So I told myself that I was gonna go daily for 60 days, and that was the goal. 60 days. It’s the one thing I can control. I can’t control the views, I can’t control, you know, how the algorithm works, but I can control showing up and just getting it done. And something really interesting happened, you know, even though by day 30 halfway through the experiment, I wasn’t getting views, like I was hoping, I was able to cut down my production time with my videos from 45 minutes to down to 15 minutes.

In fact, I only had a maximum of 45 minutes to work every single day on this new channel, on these videos. And because of that, I didn’t have the time to overthink or to overproduce. I had to get done what I needed to get done to stick with this goal. And then I also had 30 points of data halfway through that told me what was kind of working and what wasn’t.

And by day 35, 1 of those videos hit 750,000 views and this brand new shorts experiment, which I’ve now kept up for 350 days, it’s not, hasn’t even been a year yet, has seen four and a half billion views across those three channels and about 10 million views a day. And it wasn’t because I had A overlearned, but also I think because I had to compress my time, that forced me to just get the thing done and get it out there. And then over time I could, you know, 1% improve every day versus a hundred percent improve today. And a lot of what you’ve written in the book has, has definitely helped with that. But an an important component of this that I’ve seen, especially with, with our students at SPI is the discipline to keep going.

You know, yes. Impossible goals, great compression of time, cool, forces you to focus. But you have a chapter called Raise the Floor. We always hear about like the ceiling and like putting yourself in an opportunity to have a higher ceiling, which is great. But I haven’t ever really heard anybody talk about raising the floor.

What does that mean exactly? And why is this such an important part of the process?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: It’s actually, I would consider it the crux of the process. The floor is essentially, there’s a lot of different ways I look at it, but one is just, it’s the dividing line between yes and no, and fundamentally it’s about no.

So Steve Jobs said innovation is saying no to a thousand things. Right? He also said, focus is about what you say no to. So he’s someone who defined focus as saying, no, Michael Porter, who created the field of competitive strategy, he said that strategy is essentially what you say no to. Right? And so the floor defines what you say no to.

So it therefore reflects kind of your baseline of, of who you are and what you do. It could also reflect your average performance, right? Like we all have a floor in terms of how we perform. If you think about the difference between like a Steph Curry and like some other NBA player, you don’t know his name, it’s because Steph Curry’s floor is a lot higher, his average performance it’s like 25 points a game. Right? Whereas some other performer might get there once every 20 games. Right? So the floor is really the dividing line between the pros and the amateurs and saying no becomes the fundamental part of raising the floor, stripping out things that you used to say yes to, and so to the idea that your frame or your goal determines your floor once you start going for higher goals, the floor naturally goes up, meaning there’s just less options. Like you can’t say yes to the things that you used to say yes to before. If you wanna be in alignment with the goal, you have to focus on better things. And raising the floor becomes really the hard part for people. ’cause often it means, you know, letting go of, whether it be projects, it could be letting go of team members, it could be letting go of clients.

It’s about letting go of things that shouldn’t be there. So one of the core quotes that I shared in the book is from Elon Musk, and he said that the most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist at all. And so part of raising the floor is eliminating things that shouldn’t exist because they’re just not really that effective to the goal.

And just because you’re doing it now doesn’t mean that you should perpetuate it into the future.

Pat Flynn: What did Elon say? He said something like, the best part is the part that’s not even required or something like that. I mean, simplification is in his DNA.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: He says, remove false requirements.

Pat Flynn: Remove false requirements.

And it’s interesting ’cause when you start out as a business owner, especially, you have certain requirements and over time, unless you zoom out and kind of audit your stuff. Every once in a while you might continue to do the things that you have been doing. I mean, this was the big realization that I had when reading 10 X versus 2 x, which is if I wanna grow 10 x can’t do the same things I have been doing.

I have to rethink everything in order to make that happen. Which is why I think this is again, a perfect sort of continuation of that thought process in this chapter about raising the floor. I thought it was really interesting ’cause you had mentioned Zion Williamson, who plays for the Pelicans, who I had been following on Instagram when he was in high school, this Monster basketball player, it just like, he kind of defied physics really. And everybody, including the Pelicans obviously had invested so much into this person, into the star, and he’s gone nowhere. And it’s because of the certain choices that he’s made. You know, showing up to basketball camp, you know, 50 pounds overweight and just like, again, to your point, probably saying yes to things that he shouldn’t have said yes to.

And a lot of the star players that you see in all kinds of sports and all kinds of businesses and, and high level performers are the ones who know when to say no to things and lean into the things that they know that they can master. But it’s hard because when you grow as a business, like let’s think about the business owner who is starting to get some momentum, who’s now seeing all these new opportunities come their way.

It’s so easy to say yes to all those things because you might not feel like you’ll ever have those opportunities before ’cause you’ve never been down that road. So it’s good to like hear that. Yes, say no to more things. How do you define what those things are? Do you have any filtration processes? How do you help a person define what is meaningful to them and where they should say yes versus where they should say no?

How do they know where to put that floor?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: The goal always determines the floor. That’s why it’s so important to always start with the end in mind, right? And know what you’re optimizing for and what you’re not, and, and then having to have hard, honest conversations, right? I consider the level of the floor as the level of honesty a person has with themselves and with their team, and with just people around them, right?

It takes hard honesty to sometimes say. We can’t keep doing this right? Like that. And, and then, and then to deal with the consequences of that as well as to consider the costs of maintaining it, which are huge. And so the goal is what sets the floor. And the floor is anything that is below the floor is just stuff that is a distraction to the goal, or it’s not powerful enough to the goal.

Right. Like you might be doing a lot of things that are decent and good, but they’re not gonna get you to the goal. And so you have to then rethink your plan and go find something with more leverage or more impact. And that’s hard. It’s hard to let go of things. You know, I’ll, I’ll give two recent examples.

So in Scaling.com, like our goal is to get obviously a, a ton of members, right? But as an author, I often think. Like for a long time, my goal was to optimize for book sales, but I had to let go of that goal because it wasn’t optimizing for the right thing. Book sales matter actually, it’s not really book sales that matter.

It’s about people learning the material and having the right people come in. And so I actually had to let go of book sales as something that we were optimizing for at all, because if we start optimizing for this, then it might take our system one direction versus. Like the real thing we’re trying to do.

And so I had to let go of that goal. Like one of my favorite quotes is, we’re kept from our goal, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. We’re kept from our goal, not by the obstacles that are stopping us. It’s we’re kept from our goal. ’cause we keep taking clear paths to lesser goals. We keep optimizing for other things.

We keep saying yes to other things. And so when we brought on Joseph Nguyen, do you know Joseph by chance?

Pat Flynn: Joseph Nguyen from Don’t Believe Everything You Think?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Mm-hmm.

Pat Flynn: Yes.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Yeah, he’s amazing. He, he’s a brilliant self-published author, and I would argue he is a much better marketer than me. And so we brought him on as a partner in the team.

And because of him and his marketing methods, a lot of mine became obsolete. Like a lot of my thought process on how to scale a book or other things became obsolete because frankly, his were better. Right? And so one of those was doing a ton of podcasts. I had scheduled. 50, 70 podcasts that I was gonna do for the rest of this year, as well as a bunch of keynotes.

’cause those are things that are seemingly good strategies for spreading a book. And then once Joseph was here and we had different types of marketing options for the book and other things, it dawned on me, but it dawned on me even after months of having Joseph on the team, half my schedule is not gonna help us hit the goal.

And so I ended up, you know, letting go of all of ’em but like seven, you know, and yours is one of the ones, Hey, you’re generous about Thank you. You well, well, well, no, no, no. You’re the one who’s generous to have me here, Pat. Literally. But, and, and all those other ones were awesome, but it was, again, nothing against them.

It was more being honest, like, am I optimizing the right thing? Being focused and being busy are obviously two different things. And if just because you’re exerting a lot of effort or doing something that’s decent, doesn’t mean it’s gonna hit the goal. And so we had to let go of those podcasts. And so you, it’s a beautiful thing to ask, is this actually moving us to the goal or is this optimizing something that’s below the floor, or is this optimizing for something else completely?

And and those are just hard questions you have to ask yourself, which is beautiful.

Pat Flynn: And not just ask yourself, but get an outside perspective from, I mean, you regularly brought Joseph, you know Yeah. Regularly. Absolutely. I, I, I call him champions in, in your life. And to have Joseph come on is really cool. I met him in Tennessee at an author’s retreat last year.

And hope to see him again this year as well. And he was just blowing all of our minds with the new way that he was promoting his book, especially through social media and TikTok. And it just was like, we’re all doing this podcast. Like, is that actually the right thing to do? Now, I still did about 50 of them and, and they worked really well, and I took advantage of some amazing relationships that I had built over the years and helping others.

And I, I didn’t wanna discount that opportunity, but. I am thinking different now, not because I’m thinking different, but because somebody else has shown me there are potentially other better ways to do things, especially as as times and things change and systems change. Speaking of systems, man, the part in the book about simplifying systems was so powerful to me because there was a quote, I think it was along the lines of the system is built to keep the system the system or something like that.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Yeah. The system is designed to defend the system.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I was like, holy crap. Because it’s been such a hard thing to try and upgrade the system and change things because you build off of what you’ve started with and it’s like, it almost feels like starting from scratch again sometimes, which is very scary to do in order to build what you need now and what got you here won’t get you there.

But tell me about why this is important. What, what does this really mean in terms of simplification of systems and why do we fall into these traps?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Obviously when you’re coming to fast growth, a complex system, well, I already shared with you the idea that all human psychology is shaped by goals. My goals shape what I see and including your audience.

Like the reason they’re listening to Pat Flynn is ’cause Pat Flynn’s relevant to their goals in one way or another. That’s why they’re listening to this podcast. But the other thing that’s really important, which is often mistaught or misunderstood is, is that all human systems are also shaped by goals.

There’s a great book on this called Thinking In Systems by Dr. Della Meadows. She was a systems analyst, but every human system, which a business is a system, all the things here, the software we’re using, all these things are, are shaped by goals and they have purposes. And so you can’t really scale quickly a complex system that by nature is moving in multiple different directions.

A complex system means that there’s competing goals and priorities and that it’s going in different directions. And so part of the beauty of the impossible goal, or going for a higher goal and a more urgent goal is it forces you to more streamline your system towards the things that actually matter and work.

And the reason why that’s difficult for people is because back to the idea of optimizing. People often would rather maintain parts of their system out of avoidance reasons. They wanna avoid rocking the boat or avoid firing that client or avoid, you know? And so they maintain aspects of their system, not because it’s effective, but because they’re afraid of letting go of what they already have and what they’ve been doing, and disappointing people.

But you can’t scale complexity. Steve Jobs said that further. He said that we have to work really hard to make your thinking simple. You have to work hard to actually create a focused path and to be willing to let things go that are lesser goals, even though they may have made sense to your past self or may have been meaningful or even tied to current revenue.

Even Jim Collins said Just ’cause, just ’cause something’s been your core business for 20 years doesn’t mean it can form the basis of a great concept. And so you have to sometimes be willing to let go of what you’ve been doing so that you can actually build something that’s simple and focused and direct and can move.

Pat Flynn: What did you have to give up to start focusing on being an author full-time?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Oh, I mean, I’ve gone through so many phases, man. Like I, I don’t even know if I consider myself an author anymore, even though like that’s my primary role. But number one, I had to let go of my university position. So like when I was a graduate student, I was the only student at Clemson who wasn’t on what’s called an assistantship. An assistantship is where essentially the university pays for your tuition as a PhD student because you’ve got some university position. So I was the only PhD student paying my own way because I didn’t wanna spend 20 hours a week in a research assistantship.

I wanted to be writing blogs on Medium.com and go and going viral. And so I essentially had to become a black sheep in a PhD program. I, I, I don’t know. It’s a really good question. I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of psychological things you have to let go of, of course, other people’s opinions, you know, these things, just putting yourself out there.

One of the things I had to let go of to become the type of author I wanted to be was I needed to let go of needing to be the top voice. One of the reasons why I wrote with Dan Sullivan, he was actually more niche than I was when I started writing books with Dan, but I really wanted to shift into the business and entrepreneurial space, and I felt like he was a really awesome partner and avenue to do that.

And so I went from already having major books to partnering with a fairly niche coach and putting myself as second author to him. From a strategic standpoint, it might have seemed like a bad idea, but it was because I wanted to optimize in a totally different direction. Before that, I was like wanting to be, you know, like a James Clear, right?

And like write mainstream books and sell millions of copies, and instead I decided that I wanted to optimize a different direction, and I think that this is an important point, which is there’s no right or wrong, it’s just what do you value? And so for me, I valued impacting a million leaders versus 50 million common folk, which is nothing, you know, it’s just, it’s just the goal.

It’s just deciding which way you wanna go.

Pat Flynn: Casual readers who are probably less likely to take action, perhaps. I know you wanna see results and with Scaling.com and everything that you’re building, like you are getting those results for your clients as well, which is really amazing to see. I do wanna ask you a question. This might be out of left field.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Be hard with me, man. Do whatever you want. I’m ha I just love chatting with you, Pat. Do whatever you want.

Pat Flynn: I know a lot of people who have attempted to scale and they did and they got burnt out. They hated the decision to scale. When is scaling a bad thing?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Such a great question, man.

I think for most people, scaling is the wrong answer. I think most people don’t want to go through the psychological release of what it means to scale. A lot of people need to be the center. They need to be the primary decision maker. They need to do it their way. Scaling is gonna force you to have to rethink your assumptions, rethink how you do things like me.

Let go of what I thought was the important way. Like it requires a lot of what I’ll call psychological flexibility. So I, I think for a lot of people, scaling isn’t the right thing. I think that what we’re trying to do with this conversation is say that most people have thought about scaling wrong for a long time.

Which led them to having the wrong goals for their business. A lot of people from a four hour work week perspective, which you and I both adopted, didn’t scale for business growth, but scaled for time freedom related. You know, it was scaling for lifestyle, which is what Tim taught beautifully and which was awesome.

But those principles aren’t actually the principles for, for growing something massive. They’re principles that are great for getting, I think Tim even admits it, they’re good for, for getting to like 90% of mastery, but they’re not good for getting to 100% of mastery. And so going from Good to Great requires a very different type of growth.

It is more rigorous, but one of the things that we’re trying to help people understand here is, is that scaling itself, it doesn’t necessarily have to be harder. It takes a different psychology and a different use of strategy, but it doesn’t actually have to destroy you. You know, even to the point of 10x Is Easier Than 2x, right?

Like a lot of what we teach is that when you start going for bigger goals, it actually forces better decisions. Now, not everyone wants to grow, but just as an example, the person who’s doing a million dollars a year, if they say, Ben, I don’t wanna scale. I say, okay, so what do you wanna do? Do you wanna do a million again next year?

Do you wanna do 1.5 next year? Do you wanna do a million while actually having like half the time at work? All that’s cool. What I would say though is if instead of maintaining or going for maybe 1.5 million or two, if you actually just move the goal. Again, no stress, no pressure. It’s just rather than going for 1.5 or two, let’s just go for 10 or 20 and just look at what that does for your process, for your decision making for your business.

Pat Flynn: Just as an exercise.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Everything’s an exercise, you know, just like you do experiments, I do all this as a tool. It’s just a filtering tool. No hard decisions. It’s just if you instead went for scale. And let’s just say instead of maintaining or whatever, being afraid of growth, let’s just like actually look at what would it actually take to get to 20 or 50 million in your business.

Not that you have to do this, not that you wanna do this. Of course it would change your role, it would change things a lot. But if you did do that, could there be a path? Now you don’t have to be the center of it like you’re used to. You don’t have to be the main one making all the decisions. You don’t have to be the bottleneck of everything.

You don’t even have to be the main talent. You may shift over and be a lot of the strategy and you might bring in new talent, right? It would just change how you do things and it would change the path. What I think happens for the non scaling entrepreneurs is that they get too attached to the path and the process.

They say, this is the path I love. So I’m just gonna stay on this path, which is fine. You know, you just have to ask, are you addicted to the path or are you willing to grow and be willing to try on new paths? That’s kind of how I look at it.

Pat Flynn: This is such an interesting conversation. It reminds me of, I mean, on the opposite end of scaling huge would be an author like Paul Jarvis, which is the Company Of One.

It’s like, I’m just gonna stay one. I’m gonna make this much money per year, and I’m only gonna do these things. And that’s great too. I think everybody has to kind of figure out where they wanna lie within that. But at the same time, you had mentioned at some point in the book, and I think it was more toward the end, about the idea of scaling beyond you, and you were just hinting at this, which is, and especially for companies of one, for example, what happens if something happens to you?

Right, a lot of businesses that rely on just a singular person. Are playing a dangerous game when it comes to the longevity of that and or the legacy that it can offer to passing it down to kids and whatnot versus building something to sell, which, which is another book, which is great because then you’re developing these systems that whether or not you scale 10, 20, a hundred times X or not, you’re actually building it to remove yourself from the process, which is.

In my opinion, more smart passive income to take yourself away from the process so you can have more time and freedom and et cetera, no matter how big you wanna grow or how small. This idea of scaling beyond yourself, tell me a little bit more about what that. Means, does that mean building to sell essentially, or what else is entailed with that?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: It doesn’t have to be to sell. It just means that you are no longer the center of the business. You actually can still be a fundamental part of it, but it just means that you don’t have to be the center. You’re not the king or the queen of the castle, like it’s not all built around you, but that your goal is so big, actually, your role becomes less central. It’s still very fundamental and important, especially if you’re like talented and wanna be a part of it. But just that now other people need to get involved and very talented people as well that bring other ideas and maybe better ideas. Yet we’re all working as a team now, right?

So it, it goes from me to team.

Pat Flynn: Almost like a Mr. Beast, right? Like he’s the center of the business. It’s his name, but he’s working with loads of talented people to help him scale, even though it’s just still a personal brand in his business. He’s like that. That’s what that reminded me of when I was reading that part of your book, which was you can still be in the business like you were saying, but you have to find the right talent around you in order to scale bigger, but still maintain that sense of self and hopefully enjoyment in what it’s that you’re doing.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: For sure. Yeah. I find that there’s again, there’s different people who want different things. I think that the, the Jarvis thing is really interesting.

I wonder with him, what is he really optimizing for? You know, it’d be a really interesting question to, and it would be a beautiful conversation to have. I think often in those cases, they really are optimizing for their own enjoyment in business, which is, there’s nothing wrong with that, and I still think he loves his clients.

I think that he does important work. Again, I don’t actually know too much what it is, but when you go for something bigger and it forces focus right to good, to great, it forces you to actually get really good at something not semi good, but it forces you to get like. Mr. Beast good at something versus being a little bit more broad.

And so that’s a challenge. But I, I think that Mr. Beast is, is a really interesting case. ’cause even though, like it’s his brand. Yeah, he’s very focused on scale. Honestly, he might be more focused on than anyone else.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. To be honest with you, I mean, he’s living out of his studio and, and yeah, just basically working out eating well and filming videos and just getting better.

And I know that he’s going into the deep trenches of, of data and analytics and he is working with all these people to help him grow as big as possible. And I mean, he’s at the top. He’s still doing all of that. I mean, there’s no stopping him.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Yeah, he’s, he’s a beast. Literally, Mr. Beast. But he’s a really good example of someone who is pretty singular focused.

Like he was very clear for a long time that he wanted to own YouTube. Like that was his only goal. Of course now he’s transitioned to chocolate and other things, but you know, he was very focused and he, he was also playing from a big game. He was actually one of the case studies I threw in, in 10x Is Easier Than 2x.

‘Cause it was like, it’s a similar but infinitely scaled compared to what I did. But the goal shapes the path. And like for me, when it was like I wanna become a professional author versus I wanna be an author, I had to have a very high floor on the books I wrote. And I think that for him, because he didn’t just wanna be a big YouTuber, like he wanted to be the YouTuber, the floor for his videos if you really think about it, the floor for every video he makes is so high on what he’s optimizing for, which is views and things like that, that he can’t really squeak out like some video that most people could squeak out.

Pat Flynn: Which to land the plane on this conversation. You know, for somebody at that level, at a high performance level, at the top, essentially, how do you deal with the increasing standard that you have that can often suppress more creativity? You feel kind of locked in. You feel almost even worried. I’ve fallen into that trap before. Even in the, in my blogging days, my blog started to get so big that I started to question every word I wrote in every blog post ’cause it needed to be perfect. How does one psychologically work around that or understand what’s going on there?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I think that that’s a such a beautiful question. At least for me. I don’t have the perfect answer for that, but for me. I’m going as deep down the rabbit hole as I can in the thing that I think is really interesting and I don’t feel like my creativity is suppressed.

I wonder if you asked that question to, to Beast if he would say his creativity is suppressed. Like for me, like for example, like this year on the second half of this year, we’re releasing four books. We’re releasing the Science Of Scaling. We’re releasing two audio books. Time Is A Tool, and then Raise Your Floor, which are just deep dive interviews with people who’ve applied ’em. And then we’re releasing a book called Surprising Strategy. And the interesting thing about surprising strategy is that like, although the standard is high, and again this goes back to different standards, right? His standard is views. That’s difficult, right?

There is constraints with that. And so it depends on what you’re optimizing for, for us, like I’m not really optimizing for like, is my book gonna sell 50,000 copies? I’m more optimizing for like. Is this book gonna solve the problems of my clients? Like, is this book gonna help answer their questions and help them scale?

And so like I have infinite creativity to like learn and figure things out in that direction. And I have a very high standard for that, but I don’t have a high standard for how many copies it sells. Right? And so I think that, you know, standards are, are also relative. Like what is, what is the standard? For Beast, it might solely be views, right? And so that limits some of his options. For me, it’s solely for how is this gonna help someone scale? So that does limit a lot of my options. So at least my answer to that question is my creativity feels pretty unbounded because I feel like I get to go as deep as I want and I’m really trying to go granular versus, I mean, being honest with you, I just said no to writing a book with Tony Robbins.

You know, he wanted to write a book on decision making with me. I did say no to that, but not because my creativity was limited more because like it just wasn’t optimizing for what I’m really trying to solve right now.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Well you were practicing what you’re talking about in the book and knowing when to say no and what your goals are, so that’s cool.

He, he did do the forward, I think in this book.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: He did, and he’s awesome. Honestly, that was the hardest no I’ve had in business.

Pat Flynn: And probably one that’s gonna be very beneficial, especially down the road. And who knows, there might be a time where that might make sense for you. But right now, and this is very much an alignment with what I talk about in my book as well, it’s just like knowing when to say no and when knowing when to opt out of things.

So you can lean into the things more that you’ve already committed to is, is great. And we’re seeing that from you. And again, Ben, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for indulging me with it and, and allowing me to poke a little bit and, and ask more questions about it.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Keep poking. I love it.

Pat Flynn: But where can people go pick up the book and, and support you with it?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I mean we’re luckily with Joseph talk about a super who and old models going away. This is my last book with my publisher ’cause he’s the master of self-publishing. And so one of the things that he helped us do is just give the audiobook away for free.

Right? So Scaling.com/audiobook is where people can get it if they want the audiobook for free, obviously you can just go grab scaling in the Science of Scaling anywhere, you know. But Scaling.com/audiobook if you wanna get the book for free. That’s pretty much it.

Pat Flynn: That’s amazing. And it’s just set up. You don’t need to even sign in, I don’t think.

And you can listen to it at two x speed if you want to Right on that website. That’s really cool. How does that help you? I’m curious, what’s the strategy there, if you don’t mind me asking for getting people to just listen to the book?

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: I mean, our main goal, honestly, obviously for the company is to, our impossible goal is to have 5,000 members in the program and have them all be 10 Xing.

Right. Scaling aggressively. Right. I’ve been in so many coaching programs, even in Strategic Coach. Right. Which I helped Dan grow. My experience in those programs was, is that it was the outliers that were actually scaling and growing. And that most people, even in training programs, whatever they may be, are getting pretty minuscule results.

And so part of what we’re trying to solve for is just like filtering on the front end and just requiring. A 10 x goal from the beginning, and then people wanting to be held accountable to that. So we’re trying to do that in the company, but to the idea of giveaway the book. Well, because we’re not really optimizing for selling the book, of course we are gonna sell the book.

We might even sell a lot of copies. I’m sure we actually will, but the main thing is we just want people to actually understand the material. And so it doesn’t matter if we give it away for free. And most people do listen to audio books these days, at least in this category. And so it’s like, if we can give it away for free, we’ll give it away for free, whatever.

Pat Flynn: I really resonate with that. That’s why I wrote Lean Learning.

It has nothing to do with really other parts of my business. It’s just a message that needs to be out there and, and I want it to be an agent of change in that. And people can do then what they want with it. And I also know that, and I know that you know this as well, when you put it out there and when you help people, it always comes back in return one way or another.

And it can come back monetarily, it can come back through relationships, it can come back in exposure all kinds of different ways. And that’s a great lesson. And you’re demonstrating that here, especially ’cause you could have easily made a lot of money selling the audiobook in this space. Like you said, most people listen to the audiobook and you’re giving it away for free.

So I’m just curious about that and I’ll, I’ll probably end up chatting with Joseph in, in Tennessee about this and, and learn even more from him. But I mean, we’re falling into those traps with all the information that’s around us now and how inspirational it can be. It’s actually just taking us away. So in a very similar way, I’ve tried to approach the book with a, hey, everybody thinks this, but actually this. And you did that as well with a lot of like, Hey, in order to grow to 10 x, you think you need to just do more of what you’re doing. But no, actually you need to completely rethink the way that you’re approaching this. And I love that about the book, which is really why I resonate with not just the book but you and all the messages that you’re sharing.

So everybody go check out the book. And again, I think it’s Scaling.com/audiobook is where you want to go. And Ben, this is great. I hope we get to chat again in the future and not cross paths in person one day and share a coffee together. I’d love that. Thanks Ben. Appreciate you.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Pat, good to see you, man.

Pat Flynn: Alright, what a monster conversation.

I think this reframe again, of setting impossible goals to force yourself to think differently about things. Again, very à la 10x Is Easier Than 2x, which I really love, and I think this book’s gonna make a big impact on a lot of people. You can go get the audiobook for free, and of course, all the resources and links are mentioned at SmartPassiveIncome.com/session881.

We are less than 120 episodes now to the big 1000, which is insane. So thank you so much for being here with me on this journey, along with the amazing entrepreneurs that are here that come on the show to help you. We got a lot more coming your way, so be sure to subscribe. Don’t miss out, and I look forward to serving you in the next episode.

Cheers everybody. Thank you.