Hello and welcome to another episode of All the Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money and travel. I'm your host Chris Hutchins, and today we're going to talk about achieving more in your life than you ever thought possible by exploring the psychology of exponential growth and transformation with Dr Benjamin Hardy. We'll do that by focusing on how you can create and leverage a 10x mindset, which by the way, Dr Hardy says with the right tactics is actually easier than 2x.
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That's meet fabric dot com slash all the hacks. M E E T fabric dot com slash all the hacks. Policies issued by Western Southern life insurance company not available in certain states prices subject to underwriting and health questions. Ben, thank you for being here. Really happy to be with you Chris. Why first heard 10 X I immediately thought, okay, this sounds like a lot more work. You say 10 X is easier than 2 X help people understand how that's actually possible.
Let's talk about the difference between what a 2 X psychology is versus a 10 X psychology. I'm going to keep it really simple, but I just want to help people understand the foundation before we build the house in psychology. It's really important to understand how people are operating. What the basis of the research shows is that most people they look at time like they think about time on a clock. If I think about my past, the past is behind me. My present is now in the future is up ahead.
We can't go back to the past. We're in the present and we can't really get to the future, but we're aiming towards something. We can think about our future and we can set goals and use our future self as an example to kind of map where we're going in the present. That's what would be considered a linear view of time. The problem is that's not how it works psychologically. That's the basis of a 2 X mindset.
A 2 X mindset means that you're taking the past and the present and you're using that foundation to build the future. It's very linear and basically what it means is that to go to X, you're usually just doing more of what you already have. You're just doing more and more of who you already are. In psychology, time doesn't work that way. It's not the past that determines the present. It's actually the present that determines the meaning of the past.
This is like a fundamental mindset when it comes to healing trauma. The more you get really good at that, the more you can continuously transform your past in ways that it is happening for you rather than happening to you. If you listen to most people's language, they still blame their past for why they are the way they are right now rather than taking ownership that it's actually you right now that are shaping the story, the narrative, the frame, the view of your past.
That's just one fundamental component in it is that it's not the past that determines the present. It's the present that determines the past. The same thing is true about the future. Again, a 2 X mindset means that I'm going to take the present and I'm going to use that to shape my future. A 10 X mindset is the opposite. 10 X starts with the future. It even scales it so high that it feels impossible. I know that you asked the question, how are you saying that this is easier?
Now I'm actually saying it's literally impossible. But you take the future and you scale it to such a high view that it feels impossible. And then rather than letting the present shape the future, you're now actually letting the future shape the present. In other words, I'm letting my future self determine who I am in the present. I'm not letting my present self determine who my future self will be. So these are very different approaches to time.
Psychologically, the past and the present, they're just tools for allowing me to operate in the present. If I have a bad relationship with my past, then I'm going to be stuck there. I may have some trauma that happened when I was 5 years old and I'm letting that past to dictate me in the present. Although that's the common way, what I'm teaching is very advanced psychology.
I just want the listeners and even yourself to have some of these foundations that the super skill and psychology is called psychological flexibility. The more I can reshape the meaning of my past, I can let it go. I can recognize that I'm not even my past self. You're not your past self. The listeners not their past self. I'm not the same person I was 5 years ago. I'm not even the same person I was 5 weeks ago. The better I get at my past, the more I can recognize and appreciate.
Oh, yeah, here are the ways I'm different. Here's how I see things differently. The same skill, psychological flexibility is used to imagine a different future and then to let that future dictate who I am in the present. Can you give an example of how someone might apply that to some of that in the past? I'll go big and I'll go small. The first place that people usually go is something big. I got divorced. I lost a job or my parents got divorced.
So me as an example, my parents got divorced and I was 11 years old. My father then proceeded to become a drug addict. Of course that could impact my life. It's up to me right now to shape the meaning of that. I can either consider my father a villain or a hero, right? Neither of those stories are actually true. They're just a framing. They're a view. The idea of a story is that it's just a perspective. We as people are identity is shaped by the story we tell.
So one angle is just reframing the whole story. Looking at what does this story mean? It's me in the present that determines the meaning of the story. Memory is never a retrieval. Often we think about memory as I'm going to go into the file cabinet to my brain and I'm going to grab this memory and pull it out and I'm going to look at it. That's not how memory is. Memory is what they call a reconstruction. I'm always reconstructing my memory from the present.
So even now as I'm thinking about my dad, I'm going to be rebuilding that memory just like I can be rebuilding some idea of my future in my head. I'm rebuilding it as I go. So they say that your past is a living part of who you are in the present and you're the one who creates it. There's one other really important part. So there's the whole framing of it. The big picture, the story, but there's also the filtering of it. That's the focus.
So as an example, if I'm looking back on the last five months, as I gave an example or the last even five weeks, I can look for the ways in which I've been a loser. I can look for all the ways in which I failed over the last five weeks. And that's me filtering for and searching for certain things. And that's often what people do is they'll look for the ways in which things are going wrong. And I said, you can proactively look for the ways that things are going right.
I can look for the ways in which I've made progress. I've learned things that my past self didn't know. It's just ultimately up to your control. In the present, you're the one shaping the past. And hopefully we can get to the point where we're talking about how it's the future that determines the present. But on a small scale, let me give an example. We have six kids. We actually have literally a seventh one living with us right now. It's crazy. So we adopted three kids from the foster system.
We also have three of our own 15 years from Guatemala living with us. And maybe permanent, it may not be. But I'll give you a small example of how the present can determine the meaning of the past. Me, as a father of six, I'm 35 years old. I fall flat on my face 24, seven. I don't even know what I'm doing. I'm learning on the fly. As a result, my 15 year old son, we adopted him when he was 10. I often do stupid stuff like overreacting, get mad at him and stuff like that.
For stuff that really doesn't matter. Maybe a day or two ago, I did something where it was kind of like a flubbed father thing. The cool part is that I know that in the present, I can turn that into something that happened for me and for him. And then I'm not the byproduct of what happened. So I can go back really simply and apologize, right? And say, look, Caleb, super sorry that happened. Here's where I was coming from. I see that I was handling that wrong.
Boom. The meaning of that conversation has now changed. It's just really empowering to know that it doesn't really matter what happened. It matters what you do about it in the present and that you can always flip whatever happened into something that's useful rather than something that is kind of utilizing you. How I see it as you can need to be used by the pastor, you can use it. Let's take an example of someone who's looking for a job right now, interviewed three times and it was a disaster.
The idea is, yeah, the idea is to stop thinking, okay, I did this three times incorrectly. And more think, here are the things that I did wrong. Now I know them. And now in my future self, I'm not going to do them anymore. So I'm actually even better because of it. Those three failed job applications. They don't have to be considered negatives. That is meaning that is placed upon it by the person. And now they're making it personal. And now they're like literally equating it to their self-worth.
And so all of that stuff is psychology being placed on those three things. That person can flip those three things into something amazing. What were all the things that they learned from one, two, and three? How did they actually get better from one, two, and three? This is now just analyzing the past in different ways. What do they now know that they wouldn't have known before?
Maybe they can go out and get a totally different job because now they know certain things that they would have never known before. It's just always knowing that in the present you have power over your past and that in the present you can take whatever happened in the past. Even if it was something terrible and you can flip it into something absolutely amazing. I think a really good phrase for that would be anti-fragile. Just no matter what happens, you're now better as a result.
Okay. So that's reframing the past. Are there other kind of core fundamental things that you need to be thinking about for a 10X? Most people they're using time like they think about the outside time. They're thinking, okay, it's the past that determines the present and it's the present that determines the future. The more powerful approach is that it's always the future that determines who I am in the present, which if you really think about it that makes a lot of sense.
As an example, I want to get a PhD. So obviously that goal shaped me getting into PhD programs. I didn't go off and do something different. I followed my goal. There's a guy named Daniel Gilbert. He gave a TED Talk called the Psychology of Your Future Self. And there's a lot of research on this at this point. When most people think about their future self, what they do is as they take who they are now, they use that view of my current self.
So the person you're talking to right now, and I just use that as the basis for who I think I'll be in the future. Even in like five years, 10 years from now, how can I see myself being someone different? This is the only person I think I am. They call it the end of history, illusion, and psychology. But the main thing here is that it leads people to assuming that they're going to pretty much be the same person even long into the future. And even teenagers do this.
They think that they're going to grow as much as like people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s actually do. So even you don't think they're going to change that much when we're all going to transform a lot. The basic problem here is is that most people don't imagine their future self. They don't take time to think about it. Let alone a 10x future self, right? The truth is your future self is going to be totally different than who you are right now. Three, five, 10 years from now.
You're not going to be the same person. You're not going to see the world the same way. But if you're someone who's actively using your imagination to create that future self, to the idea of using a 10x mindset, you're making it seem absurd. There's no way that could be my future self. There's no way that's possible. You're not saying you need to imagine your future or you need to imagine your future self.
Because I think some people here like, oh, imagine your future self and they immediately jump to, okay, I've got this job. I've got this hat. And those aren't the self part. That's the future part. What's the difference there? It's going to be through an example. That's a really cool question. Obviously, when you're thinking about your future self, probably inherent in that is your future. What is my future self doing? What's their life like? What are they up to? Let me give an example.
When I was a PhD student, I did not have these skills or capabilities or anything at that point. But my future self was someone who was a professional author. I had never had a blog or anything like that, but I wanted to be making high six figures to provide for my family. That was the future self I was assuming. I want to be a professional author. I want to be able to write books for a living and provide for my family, right?
And that version of my future self could do things that the current version of me could not, such as thinking certain ways, teaching certain ways. And I had none of those capabilities at that point when I was thinking about it. That was who I wanted to be. That was what I wanted my life to look like. The odds of, for example, getting a six figure book deal, that's like 1% and 1%. That might seem impossible if you are judging that future based on your current situation.
Or worse yet, if you're judging it on your past, like it really doesn't matter what your current situation is. You're letting the future be the driver of what you do here and now. That's the driver of the decisions you make. It's the driver of the friends you have. It's the driver of the choices you make. And so now the present really isn't the determining factor. The future is the determining factor and how committed you are to that future.
One thing that brings to mind looking back at examples in your past of times that things happened that you never would have thought were possible. I remember my wife worked at Lyft and she was running the partnerships team. And because of that, there was a time where they were exploring a partnership with NASCAR. We ended up going to the Daytona 500 getting VIP treatment in the pit lanes. Now I was a big NASCAR fan, so this was never going to be in my future.
But had I been a big NASCAR fan, I don't know if I could have connected the dots to imagine a world where I would have been able to have that access. And then randomly, my wife threw a partnership and happened.
And so what's going through my mind right now as I think about my future self is just trying to embrace the fact that in my past things have happened that I never would have thought possible, almost making it second nature to expect that is possible as I try to make that vision for my future self. Because there are things that I would love to be able to do, let's take an example. Like let's say you want to give a TED talk. You're like, I don't know how that would happen.
Well, you don't need to know how it would happen. You just need to know it is a thing and that other things that you didn't think could happen have happened. I'd love what you just said on so many different levels, one thing I would invite you to ponder on and you can ponder this directly. Go back to the beginning of 2023 to the version of you at the beginning of this year.
Are there things that have happened so far in 2023 that the version of you at the beginning of this year would have that were impossible? My wife is full time on all the hacks with me now. And if you would ask me January 1st whether that would be possible, I probably would have said no. If you had really pushed me, I probably would have gotten to the point would have. You probably would have said maybe there's a way, right? Yeah, it's possible.
You would be like, yeah, what is Amy going to be doing at the end of the year? It would have been very low on the list. That's really awesome. One of the things you said that I think is extremely important is the idea that there are certain things. If you're looking back that your past self would have never anticipated, never expected, they could have even seen it coming.
Our memory is try to make things in the past really smooth and tidy, even though they were not smooth and tidy to the idea of the future. One really important point. If you think that some things out of the category of possible, you won't even think about it. You won't even entertain it. You won't even go for it. Part of the goal of kind of a 10x philosophy is to actually pursue things that are impossible so that your brain can start actually trying to solve it.
There's a really great quote from this by Dan Sullivan. I wrote three books with him. He's 80 years old. He's been coaching extremely high success launchers for 50 years. Basically, one of his quotes that I love is he says, your eyes can only see and your ears can only hear what your brain is looking for. So I say that to say that you can actually train your brain to find the needle in the haystack. Psychology we actually call it selective attention.
You want to make your vision something that you think is impossible. Here's kind of how I think about it in really simple terms. You could think about a 10x kind of like you going through a cycle. In the next three years, my life might look ridiculously different. I might have 10x than that worth, right? I might have sold 10 times more books. It doesn't have to literally be 10x, but it's you at a totally different level, even at a level that you can't fully even fathom right now.
I actually think that you can go through that process, that cycle every three to five years. So I invite you as I'm explaining this to actually go back three years. And I want you to think how fundamentally different your life is, your lifestyle, your focus, your vision, because chances are your life is incomparably different than where it was three years ago. I believe you've gone 10x as we're describing it, which is going through a fundamentally leap. In psychology, they have it in two camps.
You have achievement, which is external accomplishment. You also have aspiration, which is honestly internal development, true growth, care character development, skill development. I believe that every quote unquote 10x, so me in the next three years, you in the last three years and you in the next three, whatever it is, doesn't have to exactly be three. I just challenged you to try to go for every three years. You actually achieve and grow more in that 10x in those three years.
Then you have in all of your life combined to this point. I'll give an example on Dan Sullivan. So Dan Sullivan actually doesn't do it every three years. He does every 10. I just some younger, I like breaking stuff. He is 80 years old. And so he's saying, I want to grow and accomplish more in the next decade. Then I have all the way up everything leading up to age 80 from zero to 80. And the next 10 years, I'm going to grow and accomplish far more than I have all to this point.
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I'm in the mindset and I imagine most people listening of they've connected this idea of being able to think bigger, but there's probably some fundamentals to that process of what you need to know to kind of go through the mechanics that I think will be good to touch on. In the basic term, I think that this describes the difference between 10x and 2x. We frame it based on the 80 20 principle. So the 80 20 principle is very famous, very successful.
80% of your success comes from 20% of what you do. If you want to go for 2x, you can keep 80% of everything you're doing right now. Literally. If you want to double your podcast, you're well on your way. You can keep 80% of how you're doing things. You just have to improve 20%. You're already just riding most of the momentum.
If you want to go for 10x, given that it's a seemingly impossible future and you're letting that future filter and determine who you are in the present, because it's so seemingly impossible, almost nothing you're doing right now is going to get you there. That's one of the beauties of going for impossible goals. There's actually a lot of research on this. If you're going for a small goal, even a 2x goal, which may seem big, but if you're going for, I want to make 10% more money this year, right?
Or I want to make 20% or even 2x. Because it's so similar to the present, almost everything you're doing right now will work. But if you're going for something that big, almost nothing you're doing right now is going to work. 80% of what you're doing right now has to go. 80% of what you're doing right now got you here, but it won't get you there. That future becomes a massive filter. That's part of why you want to use your future as a filter.
It allows you to be really sensitive to almost everything I'm doing right now is not 10x. Almost everything I'm doing right now reflects my past, but not that future. To go 10x, you can only keep the few things that really matter and you've got to get 10 times better at those few things. 80% of what you're doing now is noise and it's honestly holding you back.
That's one of the keys is you want a future that's so big, call it impossible, but then you can actually look at your present from that future and you can recognize it almost everything you're doing right now. Call it 80% is now a distraction. It's now a waste of time and then it forces you to find the few things that really matter. Those few things with huge upside and to go deep on those.
Are you getting rid of the things that are in that 80% or are you finding a way to outsource them or how do you think about trimming the fat of that 80%. It's everything. There are two ways of looking at it. I think fundamentally it's now no longer a part of your life. When it comes to time, your time and my time is fundamentally a byproduct of my attention and your attention. Attention is more fundamental than time.
The first answer to the question is really about absolutely the 80% has nothing to do with your time or attention anymore. Now whether or not it just gets deleted or whether it gets delegated depends on it. There may be certain things that it's worth keeping, but absolutely you have nothing to do with it anymore. And in some situations that may make sense. In a lot of situations, it's just got to go. It's more just a recognition that it's what got you here, but not there.
The 80% by the way from a psychology standpoint is the things that you're already extremely good at. The 80% is about security. The 20% is about freedom. You're choosing it, but it's scary. It takes commitment and courage to go for the 10x and for the future. Whereas you keep the 80% because it's secure. And it's not just a job, right? It's not just a role. It could be honestly me waking up and staring at my phone.
That might be in my 80% that if I keep doing that, there's no way I'm going to get to my future. But I do it because it's comfortable. Everything in the 80% are things that you do out of emotional security, out of habit, out of habit. I'll give some granular examples. There are deeper concepts here. One of the things I talk about is raising the floor, which is raising your minimum commitment and then beginning to say no to everything below that commitment.
So if I sit and scroll on Facebook four hours a day, that's within my standards because I say yes to it. If I then rose to standard really high and said, this is the new standard, this is the minimum standard, this is the minimum commitment, right? And your identity is what you're most committed to. Then I have to say no to things that I used to say yes to and I have to use that as the filter or the determining factor on what I say yes and no to. So the 80% could be a lot of things.
The 80% could be a habit. It could be a friend. It could be a person. It could be a job. One thing that I'm doing right now, I'll give two hyper practical examples for myself. I actually believe in pursuing impossible goals on a 90 day basis. So I was talking to you about the bigger picture, 10X. That's my future self in three years and it's huge. It's impossible. I don't even know how to do it. That's actually one of the benefits.
If you don't know how to do it, then you're no longer operating from your past knowledge. Now you have to go and find those new pathways, those new people. That's why Dave, your brain will find what it's looking for.
So I pursue impossible goals on a 90 day basis simply because I don't know how to do it and simply because it's such a high filter that it forces me to say no to almost everything I'm now doing and it forces me to filter from that really high floor where I have to just like make our decisions 24 seven and only do the few things called those 20% things that really have a few jobs. So like as an example, I have some ridiculous impossible goals, even literally between now and the end of the year.
Probably not going to achieve any of them to be honest with you and it does not even really matter. I gave you the example of my 90 day goals between now and the end of the year. So big, so intense. There's not a lot of them. My assistant was like, if you're actually going to get anywhere near doing those, we have to wipe almost everything off your calendar. You have 20 podcasts. You'll live as an example. We got rid of almost all of them.
That stuff became part of the 80% and it used to be in my 20. It used to be really good, but when you start going for really high goals, stuff gets filtered out a lot harder and then you have to make the hard decisions. Am I going to let this stuff go? It wasn't just podcasts, it's other things, but the whole point here is that when the future is really big, then you have to filter the present a lot harder.
You tap to you if you want to let go of some of the stuff that no longer fits and if you want to go all in or even more in on the stuff that will really take you places. Now you said, you know, it's so ambitious. You're probably not going to achieve it. When I was in Adventure Capital, one of the things that I would always say about founders is that they almost have this like a rational belief that they're going to succeed in something that seems impossible.
It seems like you both have these really ambitious 10x goals, but you seem pretty rational about the fact that you're not going to achieve them. Does that make it harder to actually be in that 10x mindset if you don't fully commit to the fact that it might happen? I didn't say I'm not fully committed. I just said I don't care if I achieve it. That may sound like a contradiction and it's not.
I might have misheard, but I thought you said not only you might not achieve them, practically they might not be possible. If you believe that they might not be possible, can you also commit to the goal? Can you be fully committed? It's a beautiful question. The answer is yes. Dr. Alan Bernard, he's a brilliant decision-making theorist. Basically, one of the most knowledgeable people on a concept called constraint theory.
This is like one of the core theories in decision-making and in business strategy. He actually does invite people to pursue impossible goals, one, so that they stop operating on their past assumptions, and two, so that they can start finding the few paths or people that might get them there. That's like the 20% of things that create all the results. He asks the question and he has us ask the question, that would be impossible unless.
That goal that may seem impossible, it would be impossible for sure from your current situation, but what would need to be true for it to even become potentially possible? By even just entertaining that, again, your eyes can only see, your ears can only hear what your brain is looking for. Once you start thinking about it and maybe getting more information and start actually moving forward, then you might actually start finding some of the pathways.
Another thing is, well, if you actually start letting go of things that we're calling the 80%, things that are good but not great, or things that have maybe two exponential, but you already know they don't have 10 or 100 exponential. As an example, like me, I'm letting go in 2024 of what effectively is about 70% of my business income. I'm letting go of it because I believe that side of my business only has quote unquote two exponential.
If I keep investing in it, yeah, I can make great money, but I know it will really limit my ceiling in terms of what's possible if I keep investing in it. I'm willing to let that go so that I can put more energy and effort into this thing that I know it's not guaranteed, but I know it has 10 or 100 exponential. If I really go into it, you have to make those kind of tough decisions if you want to go for this.
Let's talk about those tough decisions because I think someone hearing you just say that is probably thinking, okay, I've got this job. I've got a family and practically most people do not have a family as large as yours. You could speak for authority in that regard, but if I want to go in on my 10x future, I got to quit my job. I got to lose my income to bet on this thing because I need the time of my day to make it happen.
That's probably a pretty scary thing for almost everyone to do or process. There's two things here. The difference between wanting something and needing it, no one needs a 10x future, but the goal is that you start doing things that you want, not things that you think you need. And what I'm saying is that something is in the 80% because you think you need it. Even an addiction is something that someone's doing, not because they want to anymore, because they literally think that they need it.
That could be literally a straight up addiction or it could be a job. You're only doing it because you think you need it, not because you want it. A lot of times people only do things because they have to. Once you get to a certain place in your life where you actually have your needs met, people stop having goals because they honestly can't think of anything more that they need.
Call it what Maslow would call self-actualization is you actually do things out of want and of intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic motivation. You go from freedom from to freedom to. So freedom from means you're freeing yourself from poverty, from ignorance, from whatever it may be. And that's often all we're thinking about is escaping from things we don't want.
I don't want to have to do X, Y, Z. But the only purpose of doing all that is to get to the point eventually where you have the freedom to do something because you actually want to do it. But to the practical point, if someone's listening in there saying, okay, if I actually was to entertain what I want because I stopped doing that a long time ago, and instead of letting my past my present dictate my future, one of the core stories that we told in this book is a story
about Michael Angelo. Michael Angelo being the sculptor in Italy who sculpted the beautiful David, the Pope asked how the heck did you do it? And he said, I just took away everything that's not David. And so if you could think about it this way, you're stripping away more and more of the layers of the ways in which you're not being honest to yourself. There's a lot of different things coming at us. Yeah, I got to pay the bills.
Whatever maybe the distractions of the world, there's a lot of things that block you from being able to actually consider, let alone think about what you truly want to do, and then to begin actually thinking about how to go about doing it. But I just like the idea of the layers that you want to strip away, which is the things that you don't actually want, but you're only doing because you think you need them. So it takes time.
The thing that I will say is you don't have to strip away the 80% all at once. That's actually something I would advise against doing. I actually don't think possible. You get rid of them over time by actually getting rid of them though. What I mean is you're uncommitting to them because everything in your life right now is in your life because you're still committed to it. All the clothes in your closet are there because you're committed to it.
If you threw some of them away, now they're no longer a part of your commitment. Everything in your life right now is there because you're still committed to it. That's the idea of death and standards. That's the idea of identity. Can you uncommit to something without getting rid of it? Could you say I've decided I'm no longer committed to this job. I'm going to pursue a 10X life. I'm no longer going to be a dentist. I'm going to own a winery.
You can say I'm now committed to that, but I don't have to shut down my dental practice tomorrow to not commit to it. That's part of the process. If that person who's a dentist or has a job and it doesn't have to be work related by the way, but it can be. Certainly, and we can use that as an example. But let's just say we start to explore our future self and even a 10X future self that seems impossible to us, but that would be incredible.
If we are honest with ourselves and with other people, which we're scared to do, by the way, a really great quote from alcoholics and onumuses, all progress starts by telling the truth. So if I may have started to actually think about this and entertain it and be open to it and imagine it and get excited about it. And by the way, there are three levels. First you go from seeing or thinking to feeling and then you eventually get to the place of knowing.
Those are all three levels of getting connected to your future self. But a lot of people have heard the quote, never let the urgent get in the way of the important. What I'm saying is that 10X future self or your future self is what's important. It's not urgent. So if you just even start placing a little bit more of the important before the urgent, it doesn't have to mean you have to get rid of the job all at once. So let's start exploring it.
What if we could engineer in just three to five hours a week where you're actually starting to explore that. Think about it. Invest in it. Ask questions about it. You're still keeping that job. But maybe we know that in three to six months, you're going to replace yourself or you're going to start hiring on someone else and you're going to spend half of your time in the 20% right now. You got all your time in the 80% and you're stripping more and more away.
If we're just talking about the average American spends five, eight hours on their phone a day. And so there's a lot of stuff in the 80% that can be stripped away. That's honestly just bad habits, right? It doesn't all have to be work related. You could strip away five hours a week on stuff that you already know is a distraction and just invest that in the 20%. And over time, the goal is to build your life in that way. So you said it's not all work.
What are some examples you've seen of kind of 10X for future selves on the personal side? One of the things that I think is really important here, I don't view 10X purely quantitatively. Even though it's a number and we're saying 10X, often what happens is people only start to think about things like money. It's quantitative, it's easy. I really look at 10X as a qualitative. What I mean by that is it's a change in quality.
So as an example, a child going from crawling to walking, I consider that a 10X. The things you can do as someone who can walk are fundamentally different than things you can do as a crawler. But also a transformation has occurred. And you now have new capability, new potential as a walker versus a crawler and you fail a thousand times to get there, right? Bigger picture standpoint. Like going from horse and buggy to a car, I consider that a 10X.
We're talking about transportation, horse and buggy. But now with a car, we and I plan the same game. You could think about your future self in similar ways. What's the version of you that's doing something different that is more in alignment with what you really want to be doing? Even though it's not quantitatively 810X, qualitatively it may be like the quality of who you are and the way you're doing how you're doing it may be different. I could think about it in terms of me with my kids.
I don't have to literally go 10X in numbers. But I can see myself having a much different connection with my kids, especially the three we adopted and like the teenagers where it's like we're really engaged on a different level. It just takes time to like actually clarify what does that look like at a totally different quality of life, quality relationship. It could be you living in a different place, right? I try to think about it in terms of quality more than quantity.
I remember I had an interview with someone. I can't remember when during the week, but there's like a four hour period during the week where the whole family just hangs out in like this room of the house they call the library. There's got to all hang out and someone might say like, I don't ever have time for that. That is the 10X version of myself, especially if you think long term and ripple effects that could have a 10X impact.
It could be a 10X for me to do a date night with my wife once a week. That might have ripple effects that over time change everything. So yeah, I like to think about it in those terms. When it comes to building wealth, taxes are such a big part of the strategy and even if you've already filed being proactive right now to lower your future liability is so important.
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And if you learn to master it and use your present as a way to shape your past and use your future as a way to shape your present, you can kind of change your mindset. You can set really ambitious goals for yourself, for your work. Think about what world would look like in a 10X world for you, not just a 2X world. And then start to cut away at all the stuff that is getting in the way. I'll go a few different places.
The first one is actually that people often have a very unhealthy relationship with their past. And it's because of how they approach their future. So as an example, even you, right, someone who has a very successful podcast and stuff like that married has a great life.
And me and Dan actually wrote a different book on this topic and we wrote it on purpose before we wrote 10X because if you're going for 10X, obviously the future keeps getting bigger and bigger, thus the goal post keeps getting moved. And often what happens is no matter how much you achieve and accomplish an experience, if you're always measuring yourself against the future, then this creates what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill.
It does not matter how much you've got compared to your past self, right? By all intents and purposes, you might be living the dreams and way beyond of your past self. And so as we so quickly adapt in the present and because we're always going for something bigger and bigger in the future, if you're always measuring yourself against that future, then you're always going to feel like a loser in the present, no matter where your life is. You might be competing with other people.
Now you're in a higher socioeconomic status. And so now you're comparing yourself with people with ferraris and stuff like that. And you're always feeling like a loser does not matter, right? All that stuff is relative. And so the first key is actually this. And this goes to the idea of mastery of your past. It does not matter what I accomplished in the next 90 days. I'm the one who determines what it means, right? I control my past. You absolutely, your opinion has nothing to do with my past.
The only person who's opinion that matters about my past is me. And so I get to then look at my past and look at all the ways in which I've grown, accomplished. I get to frame it in a positive or I can frame it in a negative, but that's not going to help me. I think just a super important point for everyone to always understand in my opinion, it's always you in the present. You're always measuring yourself backwards. That's what we kind of call it in the book.
The book is called the gap in the game, rather than measuring yourself in the gap of where you want to be, which is kind of like a horizon. It does not matter how many steps you take forward. You're never going to reach the horizon, right? That's your future self. That's your ideals. But what happens to people, and especially high achievers, they're always measuring themselves against that horizon. And as a result, they now feel like they're actually not doing that great in the present.
So it actually diminishes your present and largely diminishes your past because you're not where you could be or should be or you're not as good as that person. The whole purpose of what we're talking about here is using the past in the future to increase the present. I just think it's really important to accurately measure your progress. You as an example, you talked about how this year you've accomplished things that your past self would have thought were impossible. That's beautiful.
Don't forget that. I'm always reminding myself, not just reminding, but I'm actually documenting. This is part of creating the past and mastering the past is actually like becoming aware of all the ways in which I've actually like accomplished things even in the last week. And I would forget about those things and even downplay them if I'm always only wishing I was at my future. Again, we're using the future as the filter and the decision making factor in the present.
But we're not living in that future. We're bringing that future to the present just on a really simple terms on a weekly basis. Look back and write down all the wins, write down all the ways in which you've made progress. Do that on a monthly basis. Go back to the beginning of the year. Go back three years to COVID. Write down the things that you now know that you probably know back then. That's the whole idea of like keeping proper perspective.
And if you can do that, then playing the game of going for massive futures is awesome because I don't need that future. Remember, I want it. And also, I'm extremely blown away by even where I'm at. That's a crucial first step is staying in that what we call a gain mindset rather than a gap mindset. That's like a fundamental foundation of a healthy psychology.
Okay. So I think that's a really helpful because what I wanted to try to get at is what are the things that people trying to push forward that create this 10x mindset, kind of push their life forward to a place they want to be? Where are they going to get stuck? So it's out like one place they'll get stuck is this. It's not necessarily framing everything in the right way. And so not looking at their past in the right way, where would you get stuck? I have a few. So one is prioritization, right?
If you have, you know, you envision this 10x version of yourself, there's probably more than one vector in which you're changing. So I'm not just changing, you know, what I do professionally or who I hang out with or what I say no to. It's all of those things and more. So figuring out where to start and what to focus on first, I think is one figuring out next steps in really ambitious things, you know, probably is another big one because you don't know that next step because it's not obvious.
I love it. Those are great spots. So one of them that I think is really helpful, there's a classic book, Good to Great from Jim Collins. Very few companies go on to become excellent, even very few companies go on to keep existing. What's the difference between the two? That's what that whole book's about. Just remember that. Well, only the great can even have a shot at succeeding let alone and continuing to exist. I'm just talking business, but this also fits with life.
The companies that become great let go of everything that is merely good. And so they are hyper focused, you know, one of the things you even told me at the beginning of this conversation is you like having deep conversations, right? The only way to get really good at something is to actually be focused, use the word prioritization. And so one of the things that he says in that book that if you have more than three priorities, you have zero.
And so when you're thinking about your quote unquote 10x feature self, I think it's useful to think in terms of three priorities. What are the three core areas of life that I want to 10x, right? One could be professional right. One could be personal, one could be spiritual, could be your family. There are three key areas that you're going to like massively 10x. Then those priorities actually determine strategy. They determine focus. They determine the pathways. They determine the decisions.
And so you don't need to think about your future self in like 50 different factors. You've got two or three areas of life that you're massively going to focus on, invest in and honestly quote unquote take 10x. There's a great quote that says it's better to be a meaningful specific than a wandering generality. So like when it comes to your future self, be specific highly specific and it can't be specific in 50 ways, maybe specific in three. So I think that's one.
When it comes to then the practical pursuing short term goals, right? I love again, like I said 90 day time frames. I don't have to accomplish my future self in 90 days, but I can tell you that if I'm actually using my future self as the decision making factor. And if I'm stripping away some of the 80% that I admit is holding me back.
And if I'm actually starting to advance on some of those things that I don't know how to do yet, I'm maybe starting to learn about some of the pathways or I'm starting to make some of the decisions that I wouldn't make three weeks ago, but I'm now starting to make now over a 90 day time period. You can actually do a lot, especially if you're operating from the future.
And then at the end of those 90 days, look back as said, frame it in the positive, learn from it and be willing to go for goals you probably won't achieve. The purpose of those goals is so you can properly filter the 80 from the 20 and then just like go as much as you can and make as much progress in the 20s you can each 90 days. And you'll be shocked at how much your life can change on 90 day time frames.
Whereas in six, 12 months from now, you look back and you're like, oh, yeah, so many things that I didn't even think were possible now are normal. Maybe in those time frames, you did let go of something big, like a job or something. Me as an example, that thing that I told you guys, I'm letting go of, it took a year for me to come to that conclusion because I'm letting go of honestly something massive.
It's not like I just jumped on it, like, but now I'm getting more and more committed to that 20% and to the peak of the next future self. And so some things you can let go of fast. Some things in my take a year of preparation to let it go. You mentioned closet and clothes at one point and I'm thinking, okay, in my closet, I bet there's at least half of the stuff in there that I don't need. Is it that you don't need or that you don't want? Probably both.
I have dress shirts that I'm probably never going to wear again. And I'm like, I don't even like them. It's like, well, maybe one day I'll need this thing. A lot of that stuff's in the 80%. Yes, totally agree. But it doesn't really take up space. I also think we just cleaned out the kitchen. And I was like, we have a lot of outdoor plastic glasses. Like if we wanted to have people over for whatever reason, we have like outdoor champagne glasses and outdoor wine glasses.
And I'm like, gosh, this is just stuff. I feel like we never use this. And my wife's like, we should get rid of it. And I'm like, yeah, but we don't really need the space for something else. But you talk a little bit about why getting rid of it would add value, even if you have the space. So this is what I was talking about before with raising the floor and using a new floor. You think that you're not committed to those things because they're just there.
What I'm saying to you is this, the fact that they're in your house says a lot about you. And so the fact you are still holding onto those things, even in your orbit, says a lot about your current floor. But when you raise the floor to a certain point where now no longer would it ever make sense to wear that shirt, it's not even a part of your identity. And to the idea of your floor is your identity.
What happens that when you actually now get rid of it, you're now proving through your actions that you're a different person than you were in the past. That no longer resonates with what you consider valuable or useful. You know, I know you're talking about physical items in the house, but that same thing fits with anything that you're allowing to have any bandwidth on your attention. You can know a lot about who a person is by what they're saying yes to.
And what they're saying yes to is how they spend their time. What's in their environment? Who's in their environment? Right? And so when you raise the floor and now you start stripping out things that no longer fit the new floor, fit the new filter, I'll give an example. A lot of people think about their potential. A professional athlete will never see its peak or even create new peaks if it doesn't also raise their floor. The floor could be their habits. Who they say yes to.
Most people because their floor is so low, they'll never even get anywhere close to where they really want to go because they're so hung up in so many different ways by what they're saying yes to. It could be bad habits, X, Y, and Z. The main thing I want to get here enough probably over over the point. You saying yes to it proves that that's who you are. If you said no to it, you'd prove that's who you are.
And it's a big thing to watch yourself start saying no to things for a higher reason and to start filtering things. Whether it's a job, whether it's saying yes to certain things on your calendar, whether it's saying yes to things in your environment, watching yourself say no for a really clear reason shows that you're no longer the same person. Yeah. So what I wanted to do was I want to be a person that is only wearing clothes I love. Is there probably a time where I might need this thing?
Well, if I don't love this thing, I'm a person that's only going to be wearing things that I love. So, yeah, I don't need it. It's like connecting the dots between who you want to be to whether you need a thing. That seems to be for me at least what clicks. And when I just think it's really important for everyone to realize that if something is in your life, you're still committed to it because if you weren't committed to it, it would not be in your life. Truly.
In fact, this principle in investing in personal finance a lot, you know, you're holding on to a stock. And I always tell people like, if you're not selling it, you're effectively making the decision every day to buy it. Like, it's not quite the same. It's very close to the same. There's capital gains context here, but if you own a bunch of stock in a company and you're saying, well, I don't really want it, but it's at the wrong price.
Well, you're kind of also saying, if you sold it today, you would buy it at today's price. You're actually hitting a lot of the deep psychology behind why we hold on to the 80% and this is what you're talking about right now is sunk cost bias, which is that the reason you're keeping it is because you're already invested in it. Even though you know that if you didn't own it, you wouldn't invest in it now. If you didn't already have those dishes in your closet, you probably buy them today.
And you're like, well, yeah, but I don't need to buy them. They're free. Okay. Well, obviously, then you're valuing them above what they're worth to you. That's also called the endowment effect, which is over valuing something because you have it. So a lot of these what they call cognitive biases for the reasons we hold on to the 80% one of them truly is what you're describing, which is why people hold on to a stock that they would not buy today. They overvalued because they own it.
That's the endowment effect. The sunk cost bias is that because they're so invested in it, this is where things go a bad direction because you're already so invested in it. So it's a relationship, right? Or it's or your job or something like that. Everything in your 80% by the way, you're very invested in. You're past self invested a lot into it, but now using the new future, it's inviting you to let it go. But often we keep investing in something because we've invested so much in it.
And so now we're actually forcing it to be a part of our future self's lives, even though it makes no logical sense. The other principle that I just want to share here is what psychologists call the consistency principle. This one really, really holds people hostage in their 80%, which is that as people, we really love to be viewed as consistent to other people.
I might keep doing things that I deep down don't want to keep doing, but I keep doing them because I want to be viewed by the outside world as consistent. What that does is it leads people to being consistent with their past self. But what happens in what I'm inviting you to do, which is a really high bar of psychology, again, I use the term psychological flexibility.
If you have a huge future and you're letting that be the determining factor for who you are in the present, you're going to be very different in the present than who you were even yesterday. Not like I'm not saying you're going to go and like buzz your head and do something crazy. I'm just saying, you're letting your future determine who you are in the present. By virtue, that future is very different from your present.
Of course, you're going to start doing things that look different from what you were doing yesterday. You have to be comfortable with the fact that a lot of people are not going to get it. They might even disagree with it. One other really important point is most people really don't care. You're not the center of everyone else's world. You're the center of your own world. Definitely don't make other people that are deciding factor.
Certainly, the people who matter, the people who fit with your future self, your spouse, those are the people that obviously it matters. Most of the people in the outside world that we're trying to hold up a reputation to, they shouldn't be the determining factor on why you make certain choices. If we just double click for a second more on the endowment and sunk cost, what advice do you have people who are still struggling to get through those? I'll give some hard examples.
Relationships in general, right? It could be your friends. In my case, I'm just saying this directly. There are three team members that at the end of the year, I know I'm going to have to let go of. Because, again, I told you this thing that was a big part of my business. I'm effectively letting it go so that I can prove to myself how committed I am to my 20%. Now, there's a lot more skin on the game, literally a lot of money for myself.
That I'm letting go of in the short run to actually go deep on the few things that I think are going to be massive for my future self. Honestly, a big part of why I was afraid to let that go is because that means letting go of three of the team members, one of them has been on my team for five years, who I freaking love. There's just not going to be a role for her now with the direction I'm going. That is devastating to me.
In a lot of ways, because I've been so invested in that relationship and because we've done so much great stuff together, kind of like the clothes and the closet, I could hold on to that part of my business. This then becomes something very different than your clothes. This ends up being something that I now have to put dozens or even hundreds of hours of my 2024 into. I'm holding on to it because I'm afraid of essentially letting go of this relationship or changing it.
I could see myself doing that. I guess a main point here is this. I know that's on the relational side and we can do that with friends. When you're going to a new place, a lot of the friends that got you here, it's not like they're no longer your friends, but your relationship will change. You can't hang out with them every day. That's just going to be the case when you're making changes. You can either learn to embrace that or you can let it be a really painful experience.
I think that one of the ways of embracing it is just to appreciate what it was. It's almost like what Marie Kondo literally talks about. It's not that simple of being grateful for the shirt that you're getting rid of. That's part of I think what I'm calling the gain mindset. I am so freaking amazed by those five years with that person. I'm celebrating that. I'm not going to downplay that because now it's over.
I think you can just get to the point where you don't have to overly pomemone the loss. You can really be grateful for it. That's part of owning the past. I think you can be emotionally intelligent about it though. I have a few jumpity for those three people, but I don't have to take responsibility for them. I'm making choices for my future self. I can let them have responsibility for their own future self as well.
Well, you were talking about things like people that you're going to be reminded of when you see them and how it's different. Made me realize that, well, now that I've had this conversation, there actually is a drag of seeing a shirt in my closet that I know I should get rid of but haven't. In some ways, it's motivating me more to go do it. Just this year talking about it and understanding and thinking about who it would make me is making me want to make that change sooner.
One thing I will just say is in psychology, we would say time is holistic rather than sequential. Sequential would be that the past is behind this present. I'm saying it's holistic. The past present and future are all happening right now, but it's really powerful to use the future as a filter. Yes, no. So when you have a 10x future, the reason it's so powerful, it is a powerful filter for what you say yes and no to. So it can be an orientation towards life, not just something you do.
It's a filtering system. It's an example. I've had a messy car for a while. Just this morning I cleaned it up because I just said that's not my future self. The stuff in my car, that's the 80%. I went just through it away. Even stuff that I could have gone and hung back in my closet. No, one of the shirts I just threw away. Not my future self. It just becomes an orientation and it allows you to really do make big leaps. I'm saying this on the personal side.
First off, I invite anyone listening to think about the times you've done this. Chances are all of us have done this at different stages where you actually got committed to something in the future and over time you went all in on that. If it was going to college or whatever it may have been, and over time you had to let go of aspects of what were big parts of your life back then. Me as an example, a lot of big parts of my life go into high school, right? It became part of my 80%.
But even the friend group, me, I was huge on snowboarding and playing video games. I played World of Warcraft 15 hours a day. Snowboard all the time. Then I had the bigger future that invited me to let that stuff go. I had to let go of the stuff that was important in that chapter in my life. And by hat too, I said I chose to. I could have held on to that and like some of my friends still been playing 15 years later because they just couldn't let that go.
And by the way, I think a really huge book on this topic. Have you ever read Man's Search for Meaning? No. It's written by a guy named Victor Frankel. It's all about his experiences in the concentration camps. This book was written in the 50s, right? So he was a Jewish psychiatrist who lived through the Holocaust. And his whole book is about the psychology of the Holocaust. What happens when you get everything, literally everything taken from you.
He literally just walks you through the psychology of all of it. And in that book, he talks about the fundamental importance of having a future to hope for, to strive for, to live for. Because if you lose that future, then in the present, especially if you're in a horrible situation like a concentration camp, then there's really no purpose.
One of his quotes in that book is he says what people need is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and the struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. Not that you have to be gunning all the time for your future self. Certainly there's plenty of time for enjoyment.
But to have a future that is stretching you and inviting you to make some big decisions and elective stuff that no longer is who you are, I think it's really important to realize that you're not your past self, not to overly identify with your past self. Right? That's part of having a growth mindset. One thing that's really interesting as well though is not to overly identify with your current self. Even Daniel Gilbert, he's the Harvard psychologist.
He said that the person you are right now is as fleeting as the present moment. And so I don't need to over-identify with the things that I want now. My future self is going to want different things. It doesn't mean I don't have any core foundations as a person. It's just recognition. I don't have to overly cling to things. There's certain things that my past self was really attached to. One of them being world of work craft.
Me and my current self right now, you couldn't pay me to play that game. Even stuff three months ago that I was paid for. You couldn't pay me to do now because I'm not my past self and because my floor keeps going up. That's part of psychological flexibility is the ability to let things go as well. What would you say to someone who's at this point? They're like, I'm all in. I want to do this. But I don't actually know what that future self looks like.
Are there some exercises or some practices to figure that out? Albert Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. Imagination is a skill. It's something you get better and better at every week, every month. There's a lot said about journaling. Journaling is really powerful. And I think even if you gave yourself ten minutes a week to just journal and think about the things that you want, think about your future self, think about what things could be like in three years from now.
Also think about how different they are from three years ago. I think just giving yourself the space to think about it. I mean, for me, I journal about 15 minutes every morning. I think about the things I have accomplished. I also think about the things I'm dealing with now, but I also think about my future self. Just giving yourself the time. And I also think giving yourself not only the time but the space. What I mean by space is put yourself in different environments.
It could be that you, you know, once a quarter, take a day off, go do something that's fun. Give yourself a little space to think. But on like a daily or weekly basis, it doesn't need to be that much time. But actually give yourself the space to think about it, to write about it. And maybe over time you'll start to talk about it with certain people. Practice the joy of giving yourself the space to think, to imagine, and then maybe even a little bit to strategize. How did I go about that?
I honestly just think it's a continuous process, but think about it. Think about your future self. Think about what you would want. Think about what would be amazing. Think about what you would most value. Just give yourself the time to think about it. But it sounds like there shouldn't be expectation that you need to figure this out in a day or two. It might take you weeks, months to figure out what that is. Well, one thing I just want to say is that everyone already has a future self.
There's already so many things that you're now doing because of your future self. As an example, you're probably going to work. If you weren't thinking about your future self two weeks from now, paying the bills, you probably wouldn't be going or thinking about your long-term future self and wanting retirement. You just have to acknowledge that almost everything you're already doing is because of some view of your future self. In psychology, they often call it the default future.
It's the future that they've already pre-committed to, even if it's not the one that they would want. I'm in a retired age 65. It's the default future that now is largely shaping so much of what we're already doing. Stepping back a little bit and looking at your life and being like, okay, I am going to work 40, 60 hours a week. There are reasons why. And then starting to actually give yourself permission to the idea of want and think about what would I want in the beginning in that direction.
And what your view of your future self already is and what you've already pre-committed to in your mind. This is super helpful. I feel like I'm ready to go do these exercises. I think people need to be keeping in mind that we haven't talked about before we wrap up. I mean, obviously, I wrote a book, Be Your Future Self Now, right? 10x is easier than 2x. These are books you can have deeper dives into. But it really is a constant process.
As an example, the future self that I'm imagining is quite different than the future self I was imagining even at the beginning of this year or even three months ago. And so it's a non-stop process. That's why the past and the future are simply tools. They're not things that are fixed in place. They're things that are constantly evolving and changing. I look at it like the draft of a book. My future self is not a finished draft. Yes, it can get more and more crystal or vivid.
It can get more specific and I can really start to developing credible plans, which I am doing. But at the same time, in a month from now, I'm going to probably know a lot of things I don't know. And maybe those are going to tilt my plans, shift them. And so I just think that's part of just viewing it as a continuous process. I love it. I hope it's really helpful. You've got these two books. Obviously, anyone listening that wants to go deeper, they can find them both wherever books are sold.
Anywhere else people can stay on top of everything you're working on. YouTube, Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Those are all turned into podcasts. My website is BenjaminHurry.com. If you go to futureself.com, you can actually download the Freak Kindle, be your future self now. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for asking cool questions. Okay, we covered a lot today, but I hope you all are as excited as I am to start becoming your 10X self.
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