Dr. Benjamin Hardy: The Mindset Shift That Stops You From Feeling Like a Failure | Mental Wealth Series | E4

When Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s mental health took a serious hit after publishing his first book, it made no sense on paper. He had achieved a lifelong dream by landing a multi-six-figure deal, yet still felt like a failure because he did not make the New York Times bestseller list. That moment revealed how dangerous it is to measure success against a moving target. In this episode of the Mental Wealth Series, Dr. Benjamin shares how the “Gap” and “Gain” framework and future-self thinking can help entrepreneurs measure progress in a healthier, more fulfilling way. In this episode, Hala and Dr. Benjamin will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:00) Dr. Benjamin’s Low Point After a Major Milestone (07:04) The Difference Between Ideals and Goals (12:25) How to Practice Gain Thinking Daily (14:34) Becoming Your Future Self Now (26:23) How Future Identity Drives Behavior (35:34) MrBeast’s Future Self Video Strategy (43:18) Setting Timelines for Future Goals (47:08) Approaching Goals With Purpose (52:07) Viktor Frankl Story: Why Hope Fuels Survival Dr. Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist, keynote speaker, and bestselling author known for his work on the psychology of exponential growth, personal transformation, and future-self science. His book The Gap and the Gain teaches high achievers how to build happiness and a healthier mindset by measuring success based on how far they have come, not how far they still have to go. Sponsored By: Huel - Get over $50 in savings with the Discovery Bundle from Huel. Use my exclusive code YAP15 for 15% off at huel.com/yap15. Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Quo - Run your business communications the smart way. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting Fabric - Protect your family with term life insurance from Fabric by Gerber Life. Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric.com/profiting ZocDoc - Stop putting off those doctors’ appointments. Find and instantly book a doctor you love today at Zocdoc.com/PROFITING Blinkist - Turn the world’s best nonfiction books into quick 15-minute reads or listens. Grab your free trial plus an exclusive 30% discount at blinkist.com/profiting Remitly - Transfer money internationally across 100+ currencies with no hidden fees. Download the Remitly app or visit remitly.com to get started. Use code BUSINESS to get a $100 bonus after you send $300 or more. New customers only. Prolon - Reset and rejuvenate your body with Prolon’s five-day plant-based fasting mimicking program. Go to ProlonLife.com/PROFITING for 15% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program. Resources Mentioned: Dr. Benjamin Hardy's Website: benjaminhardy.com Dr. Benjamin's Book, Be Your Future Self Now: bit.ly/BH-FutureSelf Dr. Benjamin's Book, The Gap and the Gain: bit.ly/TheGapandtheGain Dr. Benjamin's Book, Willpower Doesn't Work: bit.ly/BH-Willpower Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: bit.ly/S4Meaning Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown: bit.ly/BB-AOTH Mental Wealth Series E1: youngandprofiting.co/MWS-E1 Mental Wealth Series E2: youngandprofiting.co/MWS-E2 Mental Wealth Series E3: youngandprofiting.co/MWS-E3 Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Biohacking, Motivation, Manifestation, Productivity, Brain Health, Life Balance, Self-Healing, Positivity, Happiness, Sleep, Diet

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hala Taha?

  Today's episode is sponsored in part by Northwest Registered Agent, Whatnot, Mod, and AG1. Northwest Registered Agent gives you the tools and guidance to build a complete business identity. Start using free resources at northwestregisteredagent.com/yanpfree. Whatnot helps sellers grow through live shopping, community, and real-time connections with buyers. Search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, in the App Store, download, and you can start selling right away. Mod connects qualifying patients with licensed medical providers for modafinil to support sustained energy, focus, and alertness throughout the day. Visit mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order plus free shipping

• 0:43Hala Taha?

  with promo code PROFITING. See their website for important safety information. AG1 Next Gen supports your nutritional foundation with vitamins, minerals, pre- and probiotics, and superfoods. Go to drinkag1.com/profitting and get a free immune support bundle with your first subscription order. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at youngandprofiting.com/deals. Yap Gang, we made it. This is the grand finale of our Mental Wealth Series. All month long, we've been talking about how to build a successful business without burning out, numbing out, or losing yourself along the way. And today's episode ties it all together.

• 1:24Hala Taha?

  I'm sitting down with organizational psychologist Dr. Benjamin Hardy to talk about how to stop chasing an impossible version of success and start becoming the person you actually want to be. If you haven't yet, head to yapmedia.com/mentalwealth to download your free Mental Wealth Playbook. Your final challenge is the I Am, I Should, Future Self worksheet, where you'll get clear on who you want to become and start acting like that person today. Let's close this out strong, Yap fam, and get right into it.

• 1:56Hala Taha?

  Ben, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I'm happy to be back.

• 1:59Hala Taha?

  I heard you say on another podcast that when you released that book in 2018, that you came on my podcast to talk about willpower doesn't work. You actually considered it a failure because it didn't reach New York Times Bestsellers list. And that's like every author's dream, but nonetheless, like when you came on my podcast, I remember thinking it was such a big deal. You were such a big blogger and we had scored Benjamin Hardy, like episode number seven. And so you were a big deal to us and to the outside world, but inside you felt like a failure. So I want to talk about that. I think it will give us some color on your, you know, your journey and help us understand the gap and the gain concept as well.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. No, I mean, I think it's a beautiful, interesting place to start. So I guess for a very, for a little context, I would say in 2000, ever, so I served a church mission from 2008 to 2010. And like going on that, that experience was very transformational for me. I grew up in a really intense environment. We probably even talked about it, but ever since I came home from that experience in 2010, I wanted to be a professional author. So like, that was a dream of mine, but I didn't know what form it would take. And I didn't really start approaching that goal until 2015. So from 2010 to 2015, I went to school, studied psychology, got into a PhD program for organizational psychology.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  And then once I was in my first year of my program, that's when it really hit me and I got really committed, I guess you could say to my future self of becoming a professional author. So this was early 2015. You know, I was very, already very excited, very motivated. And I had already learned a lot of success principles, I guess you could say. And so I actually grew very fast as a blogger and that's what took me to themedium.com and I grew and. And so essentially, over the, from 2015 to 2017, I grew enormously as a blogger and was able to get a book deal and be able to start providing for my family. I mean, that was essentially my dream was to become a professional author and to be able to provide for my family. At

• 4:03Speaker 01

  the time, my wife and I had three foster kids. We've adopted them since and etc. But so essentially, I got a multi-six-figure book deal to write a book. I'm living my dreams. It all happens way faster than I thought into early 2018. Honestly, it was March of 2018, the book comes out. And I did have way in my head, like I'd built everything up in my head that it needed to be a certain level. It needed to be a New York Times bestseller. And I admittedly as well, threw so much money at it. Like, early 2018 was the first year I started to make, like, pretty dang good money. And I threw a lot of it at that book. And I was just throwing everything, kitchen sink at it. And, yeah, it just didn't end up launching and exploding the way I thought it would. Like, I had just expected it would go a certain

• 4:48Speaker 01

  way because most everything to that point, in terms of like my writing and my growth, just, it was all going very, very well. And so, yeah, it didn't hit the goal. And for probably four or five months, I was in a very deep depression, very deep slump. And kind of back to the idea of The Gap and the Gain now, it's kind of funny that I launch a book, I am a, I mean, I'm a professional author. I released my first book. Like, I've never written a full book before. I release this book and to my publisher, they were very happy with the results. But for me, in my head, I just totally felt like a loser. And I guess I've learned to measure my own self differently. So The Gap and the Gain is something

• 5:32Speaker 01

  I learned from Dan Sullivan. I read his little book on the subject, maybe, actually, it was in 2018. I read his little book and I was still blogging back then. And it was just an idea I loved. And I thought, if I ever get a chance to write books with Dan Sullivan, I'm going to make this a major book. And the idea is very simple. I mean, it's, it's basically the idea that as a person, you're, you're, we all feel happy or sad based on how we measure ourselves and how we measure our experiences. The reason I went into a deep depression after I had made a monumental achievement, I mean, I'd never done that before. It was totally new and yet I felt like a loser because I was in the gap. I was measuring what was against what I thought it should be, which isn't ideal. When you're in the gap, you're measuring yourself against your ideals, which are always changing, always moving.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Whereas the gain is the opposite. You measure yourself backward against where you were before. Truth was, is I was way further than I'd ever been. And if I was just measuring myself backward against my past self, competing only against my past self. I was radically further than I ever was and I just did something huge. And so I'm, I'm learning and I've learned over the years to be more in the gain. And it, it's a far more enjoyable, far happier experience.

• 6:44Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I'd love to kind of dig deeper on this. If you can help us understand the difference between ideals and goals and why that matters with all this.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  So ideals are very, they're very ephemeral, like they're not actually tangible. Like, and so like how, how I learned it from Dan is ideals are like the horizon in the desert. Like you can see them out there and like, but every time you take a few steps forward, the horizon keeps going. And in America, we're actually trained to always be pursuing happiness. That's even in the Declaration of Independence, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." And so we're very big on ideals in America, which is good. Like it's good to have ideals, it's good to be idealistic. There's nothing wrong with ideals. The problem is, is that they're immaterial. Like I think a definition of ideal is whatever you, whatever you believe is perfection. So when you're in the gap, you're literally measuring yourself against your view of perfection.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  But back to the idea of the horizon, that view is never endingly changing. Like my former self would have felt like it was perfection just to get a book deal. But then, once I got there, the ideal changed, the horizon moved. And now, and so if you're always measuring yourself against a moving target. And also a moving target that by definition is unreachable. You can't actually reach an ideal. It's an ideal, but if you're always measuring yourself against it, then you never feel like you've moved anywhere. And that's, that's, that's actually why we wrote the book is because high achievers by nature have huge ideals, but they also usually measure themselves against them. And our culture is trained that way. Social media trains us to have ideals and to always be comparing ourselves externally. And sometimes ideals are other people.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  But if you're always measuring yourself against something that's way up ahead and also something that you can never actually reach, then what that does for you internally is it feels like you've never made any progress at all. It also devalues everything you've done to that point. And so whenever you're in the gap, it does not matter how much you've achieved. It doesn't matter if you're living way, way, way beyond the dreams of anything you ever thought you would do, you actually feel like you've made no progress at all. And you feel like a loser and you've devalued not only your current self, you've devalued everything that got you here. And so ideals are beautiful. They're just not useful as a measurement tool. They're useful as a direction tool. Goals are far more concrete.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Obviously, you can have goals that you set that move you toward your ideals. And so goals are specific. They're concrete. They're mile markers on a journey. And then the useful thing to do with your goals is to obviously become increasingly intrinsically motivated towards the goals you set and even the standards you set for yourself, that they're less about what anyone else thinks, what anyone else wants. And you actually get better at doing that when you just start measuring your progress backwards. So like I'll set a goal for myself. I've got huge goals for 2023. But in terms of where I'm measuring myself and in terms of my benchmark, like my benchmark for 2023 is what I accomplished in 2022.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Like I accomplished some cool things, but I'm using that since it's tangible. Ideals are not tangible. Like I have concrete evidence of what I did in 2022 and I can use that not only to propel me forward, but I can also use that to say, what do I want to do that's even going to be bigger and more exciting? So you can just measure yourself backwards and use that as the baseline for what you can do.

• 10:07Hala Taha?

  Yeah, so I hear you saying a couple big ideas here. The first one is ideals are a moving target. You're never gonna get there, so you're never gonna be happy trying to go towards those ideals, because you're never gonna actually achieve that. You can't actually achieve your ideal, and it's always moving further and further as you become more successful, right? Second is comparing yourselves to other people. That never helps in terms of our mindset or happiness. And then I hear you saying that goals can be tangible, and you can have mile markers, and it's okay to have goals, but you need to make sure that you're judging your progress on those goals based on your past, not necessarily how far you are from your

• 10:49Hala Taha?

  ideal place, right? I know I probably didn't say it as good as you, but that's basically

• 10:54Speaker 01

  what I'm gathered from. You actually, no, you broke it down beautifully. I think that this is one of the main problems with the narratives. Like, you know, there's a lot of narratives about how you shouldn't have goals. Obviously, I think it's impossible to not have goals. I think human beings are, we can't not have a goal. That's part of being intentional. But the problem is the measurement. I mean, even if I had hit my goal, I would have gone into the gap. I would have moved the target. So even if I had hit the New York Times Bestseller list from a gap perspective, I still would have felt terrible about myself, because I would have moved the target. The target would have been, well, why wasn't I on it for four weeks?

• 11:33Hala Taha?

  Why wasn't I number one New York Times Bestseller? Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, or why didn't I hit number one? So it doesn't even, whether you hit the goal or not, doesn't even matter. If you're in the gap, it will never have been enough, because the target will keep changing, and you're measuring yourself against something that's immeasurable, and something that's external and always changing. And so, yeah, whether it's other people that you're measuring yourself against, or whether it's just your inflated ideals, that's the point, is that you won't be happy hitting or not hitting your goals if you stay in the gap. And that's just, that's just the key.

• 12:06Hala Taha?

  Yeah, so then on the flip side, let's talk about gain thinking. What does it look like to have gain thinking, or to practice gain thinking?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  So I look at gain thinking two ways. One is, is it's a way of measuring your progress and measuring your experiences. So for me, for example, like I've had a number of experiences already today. Like even just to this point, and some of them went to plans and some of them didn't go to plans. But if I'm in the gain, I'm measuring what actually did happen and I'm measuring myself backwards. I'm only measuring myself against where I was before. And the truth is, is I'm always ahead of my past self. Even if things go backwards seemingly, like even if I lose my leg in a car accident, right? Like a lot of bad things can seemingly happen, but if you're in the gain, you're finding the gains and you're creating gains from your experiences.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  And so you're, I consider it, you're squeezing as much juice out of your experiences as possible. You're also always choosing to become better as a result. No matter what happens to you, you're in the gain. So everything ultimately happens for you. So I guess it's really two big ideas. One is, is it's measuring yourself backward against where you were before and always realizing that you're further than you were before. And that the only thing I'm actually measuring myself against is myself, which is where I was before. So that's number one is just measuring yourself backwards. The second one is literally turning everything that happens to you into something that happens for you. So anything, no matter what it was, you can actually gain and grow from it. And if you do, then you're always getting better. You're always learning from every experience.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Whereas if you're in the gap, then your past becomes a problem. Like that's from like a psychology standpoint, what you need to be happy in the present is you need a happy past and an exciting future. And the past is literally a meaning. And so the gain is just a lens of using your, or of transforming your past into more gains, more learning, even from your most extreme traumas. You can learn to turn those into gains so that you're constantly better and even grateful for them, which is what psychologists would call post-traumatic growth. So it's really just those two things. I'm only measuring myself against myself backward and I'm literally turning every experience into my gain.

• 14:15Hala Taha?

  And we're going to touch on post-traumatic growth later on in this interview. But first, I want to get into your new book, your latest book, Be Your Future Self Now. I think this is a great tie-in. So in your book, you say it's not about becoming our future selves. It's actually about being our future selves. Now, I think we just got a good foundation of gap thinking, gain thinking. Here you are telling us, basically, let's not compare our progress to our ideals. But you're also, you know, not opposed to the fact of thinking in a futuristic way or thinking about our future. It's not like you're saying, don't think about your future at all. It's just that you've got to be your future self. It's not about becoming your future self in the gap between where you are and, you know, and where you want to be.

• 14:59Hala Taha?

  So tell us about how future self is sort of related to this gap and gain thinking. Because I have a feeling that you really got the inspiration from this book, from this other book, after reading both of them.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  So this is a really interesting concept in psychology. So like when typically, the way we look at time is we look at it as past, present, and future, and we kind of look at it sequentially. So and we also look at it chronologically, like my past is behind me. There's, there's no way I can get back there. My present is now and the future's up ahead of me. I can never, I'll never actually be able to go into the future. All there is is really now. From a psychology standpoint, that's not how psychologists view time. Psychologists don't view time sequentially. We actually view it holistically. So what I mean by that is, is that the past is currently existing in my life. Like how, who I'm being right now is a complete amalgamation of, of my views of my past, my experiences of my past.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  We even today, we're talking about us having a conversation four years ago, right? And so like, my past is of course influencing me right now and my narration of the past, my story of the past, the feelings I have toward my past, the anchors I may have in my past that are unresolved, call it trauma or whatever. But also my goals are heavily influencing me. I mean, anyone who's listening to this is listening to it for a reason. They're listening to it because they feel like this is going to help them contribute to their goals or help them move forward in their lives. And so everything about my life right now is a combination of my feelings and my perspectives of my past and also my excitements or my feelings towards the future. And so They're certainly not mutually exclusive in terms of being in the gain,

• 16:40Speaker 01

  but also having a future-oriented mindset. Most people who read The Gap and The Gain are very future-oriented people. The gain doesn't stop you, I guess, from having a future. Actually, in my perspective, whenever I'm living in the gain, it actually helps me to be more... It helps me to have a future that's more genuinely coming from my own self, rather than something that's coming from the outside. Usually, people's goals and their... Called their standards or their ideals actually were fed to them by culture, by society. They don't even... You know, the future that they want actually isn't genuinely, intrinsically motivated. And so, for me, tapping into the gain just helps me to stop worrying about the outside world as much, stop competing with other people.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  And so, in terms of future self, I guess I would say, in simple terms, we all have a future self. What the research shows is that most people, especially the older they get, they stop thinking about their future self very much. Most people, probably 30 and above, assume that even their future self, 10, 20, or 30 years from now, is mostly going to be the same person they are today. So, most people don't have huge imagination towards their future self. What the research does show is that your future self is going to be a wildly different person than you think. Even in five or 10 years from now, it's going to be hard to fully predict who your future self will be. But if you start imagining it, start thinking about it, and importantly, getting really connected to your future self,

• 18:09Speaker 01

  who you want to be in the future, you can then start using, obviously, your vision of your future self to guide and direct who you're going to be today, and you can be extremely intentional about it. And so, from my standpoint, the best thing to do is get really clear and connected to your future self, who you want to be, get very specific about that, and then use that as, I guess you could say, the North Star for directing everything you're doing here and now. And each and every day, as you're moving forward, you're measuring yourself against where you were before. You're measuring yourself backwards, and you're always seeing that by increasingly living intentionally as your future self, you're always outgrowing your past self. And I do this daily. I mean, if I even look at where I was...

• 18:52Speaker 01

  A week ago, I am not the same person I was last week. I've changed a lot. I've grown a lot. I know a ton of things my past self doesn't, didn't know. And so I'm never my past self and I'm always growing into my future self. And that's kind of how I see it.

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• 20:19Hala Taha?

  What's up Yap gang? I recently had Gary Vee on the podcast and he told me something that really stuck with me. If you've got sales DNA, you've got to be paying attention to live selling, because it's one of the biggest opportunities right now online. And that really got me curious, so I checked out an app that he told me about called Whatnot. I jumped into a live show and I instantly got it. The seller was showing products in real time, answering questions in the chat, and building a real relationship with the buyers. It didn't feel like boring shopping. It felt like a community. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country. And for entrepreneurs, the results are really hard to ignore. Sellers on Whatnot can sell up to 10 times more than traditional marketplaces. And the number of sellers making over a million dollars a year on the platform has doubled.

• 21:03Hala Taha?

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• 21:18Hala Taha?

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• 22:02Hala Taha?

  Go to GetMark'sBook.com/Yap, buy one copy for $32 and get a second copy free, so you can keep one for yourself and give the second to a friend, future co-founder, or someone who needs a little push. Something that I thought was really interesting when I was reading your work is this concept of you actually thinking of your future self as a completely different person. And I thought that was really eye-opening, because for one, I feel like you give yourself some more grace when you think of your past and your future self as a different person. It's like you start to feel empathy for yourself and you're not so hard on yourself, depending on what outcomes end up happening. So I'd love to understand the importance of actually thinking of yourself as different

• 22:45Hala Taha?

  present self, future self, even past self.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  I've had some of my biggest wins and I've had also some of my biggest mistakes. But I know that I'm not the same person I was, again, like I said, even a few weeks ago. And so I'm not mad at my past self, though. Like, my past self was coming from a different place. I'm not... And so I think it's always good to have compassion and empathy towards your former self, because you now know so many things that they didn't know. You know, you're in a different place. You see things differently. And so, one, I think it's very beautiful to recognize you're not the same person as you were in the past, and to have only empathy towards your past. There's no upsides to having bad or negative emotions towards your It does nothing for your future. It does nothing for your present.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  And so always transforming your past into gains and greater perspective, learning. That is, again, back to post-traumatic growth. It's that you are grateful. Like, the idea of trauma is really that something happened to your past and you feel like you're now in some way inferior. You've gone backwards. You're also crippled in some way because of what happened. Whereas the opposite is that now you're empowered because of what happened. So I guess that's one. In terms of always seeing your future self as a different person, to me, what that does is it propels a growth mindset. Like, the definition of a fixed mindset is that you've purely defined who you are based on your past.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  And then you assume that who you are now is who you're always going to be. So you have a fixed mindset. You don't think you're going to change. You've already kind of painted your future self into a box. That your future self is the exact person you are today. And so that leads you... I mean, what the research shows is that leads to kind of having a fragile or a brittle approach to life, where you're too afraid to fail because you're trying to prove yourself. Whereas if I know that my future self a week from now is going to be different, they're going to be way more knowledgeable, they're going to be less ignorant, then that gives me right now a lot of grace. Like you said, like, I don't have to have all the answers right now. Like, one of my favorite kind of models for this, it comes from Brene Brown's book, The Atlas of the Heart, where she said, "You're either trying to be right, or you're trying to get it right."

• 24:59Speaker 01

  And if you're trying to be right, that's the definition of a fixed mindset. Like, you're trying to prove your current self because your future self isn't going to be any different. Like, you've already... You're kind of stuck. Whereas if you're just trying to get it right, I know I'm going to make a lot of mistakes. I know I don't have all the answers now, and I know my future self's going to have better perspectives. And once I get there, they're going to be blown away at how different they are from who I am today. But also, they're always going to be trying to figure it out. Like, you're always trying to get it right, and you're always growing and changing. And so it just leads you to not needing to have it all figured out. Instead, you're just in a state of learning, which is a growth mindset.

• 25:32Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And something that I think is really interesting is that it's actually hard to imagine ourselves as a future self. I think some people are better than others, but a lot of people have trouble imagining who they are in the future. Can you talk to us about why that is?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  The main reason that people have a hard time, and this is something that Daniel Gilbert said, he's a Harvard psychologist who's been studying this concept for 20 years. And he actually gave a main stage TED Talk called "The Psychology of Your Future Self" back in 2014. But he said that the reason people have a hard time imagining their future self is because they don't do it. Like, they literally don't take the time. Like, if anyone here was sitting, listening, I would ask, "In the last seven days, how much time have you spent imagining your future self? How much time have you spent journaling and thinking about it?" My guess is that the average listener, and this is a very like, and maybe this group would be different,

• 26:30Speaker 01

  because these are young people who are actually, you know, have big visions. But I'd say the average person who struggles to think about this, the main reason is just because they're not taking the time to think about it. Imagination is very much a skill. It's a skill that you can get better and better at. Psychologists, there's kind of levels to seeing your future self. The first one is honestly just connecting with your future self and having empathy for them. Just like you would want to have empathy for your past self, a crucial first step to connecting to your future self is having empathy that your future self is a real person. They're coming from a certain place and they're being impacted by what you do. And so like, if, just like I would have empathy for another person, if I was more emotionally intelligent, I would realize that they're coming from a different place than me.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  They've got different perspectives, different values, different goals. They're in a different situation. I would want to start by understanding. But then you go from connecting to getting really vivid, where it's like, you now start to kind of see the context of your future self. And obviously, you get to create that. Like, your future self is going to be different from mine, and I get to choose, in large part, what I want my future self to look like. And so I think you just take the time to think, "Who do I want my future self to be in five or 10 years? What do I want that to look like? What's going to be really important to my future self? What's going to be really important to them that I should be paying attention to now?" I mean, so I think it's just taking the time to really think about it and putting yourself in the situation, like, just as one simple example.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Like, let me just put myself into my future self's shoes. Call it in 2030. So 2030 is eight years away. One way of putting myself into that person's shoes is literally just thinking things through. So I know that it's a little crazy for a lot of people, but I have six kids. And the oldest one is 15, the youngest one is two. So like, I know that my 15-year-old in eight years from now is gonna be 23. Like, so that's one thing is like, okay, I'm gonna have a 23-year-old son. My youngest is gonna be 10. And so I'm just starting to like, actually start to think about that. I'll be 10 years older. What do I want that to look like? Where do I wanna be? What do I wanna be focused on? What's gonna be really important to me then? Like, literally starting to put yourself in the shoes and start to think about it. And then starting to think, what are the most important things that I could do now?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  That would set that future self up? I know that, and you can do it in shorter timeframes. But it's literally just actually putting concrete around it. And context to really start thinking about it.

• 28:53Hala Taha?

  Yeah. So, related to this, in your book, you say that your identity is what you're most committed to. And it's your identity that actually drives your behaviors or your future identity. Can you talk to us about that?

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so identity is such an interesting concept. And I really do think it's, it's kind of the driver of everything. But then the question is, well, what drives identity? And, identity is really actually driven by what your goals are, what you're most committed to. And when I say it's what you're most committed to, it's really two things. It's the story that you're most committed to, in terms of your past, present, and future. Like, we all have a story about our past, and who we were, and what led us to this point. We have a story about who we are now, and we also have a story for our future. And so that's one commitment, is the story or the narrative you have. The second one is actually your standards. So your standards as a person are what you're committed to. Like, we all have standards.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Like, I'll give an example. Like, I was recently back home visiting home. And I have a cousin who's been living at my dad's house for, call it, five years. He's just, he's a cousin that lives at my dad's house now. And he's one of those people who plays World of Warcraft, literally, like, all day unless he's at work or sleeping. And actually, honestly, that's how I used to be. Like, I used to be that way, where I played video games like 16 hours a day. But it was interesting because I was talking to him and I was just catching up with him. And I was just asking him what was going on in the game because that's kind of the main thing he does. And he said, "Well, I recently left my group, my guild. It's a guild in this online game." And I said, "Well, why did you leave the guild?" And he said, "Because they're just not up to my standard." Like, "I have bigger goals that I want to achieve in the game and there's

• 30:35Speaker 01

  there's things I want to do and I just can't do it in this group." And he's one of those people who's like at the top of the top of the top in this game. And I thought that was interesting that his standard for himself is really high in the game. Like, I have zero standards for myself in that game because it's not valuable to me. Like, it's not what I value, so I have no standards there. But the question is, well, where are my standards? Where do I actually care and how high are my standards in those areas? And your standard does reflect what you're committed to. So like, he showed that he was committed to something more, which is why he left that group because his standards were higher. So as you elevate your standards and your story, you change your identity. And so your standards are just whatever you hold yourself to. That could be in your finances, it could be in your health.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  And when you raise the standards and it's a true commitment, you don't go back below those standards. You start saying no to everything that's below those and it stops resonating with your identity. Like, because your standards and your identity are pretty much the same thing. So as you elevate your standards, basically, you no longer can go back to doing what you were doing before because it just doesn't resonate with your identity anymore. Like, there's things that I was even saying yes to, call it a few months ago, which would be unfathomable to me now. Like, it just doesn't fit with what's acceptable or even with what's relevant to me anymore because it no longer fits the standard.

• 31:59Hala Taha?

  Yeah, so basically, it's having this very clear, vivid picture of your future self. And then whenever you have decisions in terms of how you act or the things that you do, you're always being true to your future self. And it helps you basically be able to say no more often and make the decisions that will be good to your future self or what is aligned to your future self.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, when you start to make your future self the standard...

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Then it becomes a massive filtering tool where it's like, what would my future self do? Or if I was my future self now, how would they approach this? And how would my future self want me to do this? We were talking about Viktor Frankl, you know, earlier in this call. And that's literally what Viktor Frankl invited people to do. He said, "I want you to imagine this moment that you're sitting in right now, and imagine that you had already lived it." So whatever you're doing, you know, let's just call it you're on your way home from work and you're about to go home from work. So let's just imagine that this moment right now has already passed and you acted poorly, like you, you did, you acted the way you're, you're about to act. Now I want you to, and you're, and you're having to deal with the consequences of whatever it is you're gonna do. But now you get to come back and relive it again.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  And you get to actually do it differently and better. Like that, that's something that, like, and so that's just using your future self as the standard. Like, I know that my future self wants the best for me and also wants me to be my best. And so if I start to make my future self the standard, then all of a sudden, I, I'm gonna start making a lot better decisions in the present. Because not only am I, am I, am I thinking about what's best for me in my future, but I'm now using that as the tool for making the best decisions now. Whether that's, call it I'm at home. And, you know, I could be engaging with my kids on a really high level, which is what my future self would probably want me to do. But instead, I'm just kind of spacing out, like, sitting on my phone. Like, if I'm using my future self as the standard

• 33:58Speaker 01

  and my future self being what might, would, would be ultimately best for me and what I value most, it becomes a lot easier to make the decision here and now to do what's best for the present and the future.

• 34:11Hala Taha?

  And I could imagine that if you don't have a clear goal or vision of your future, your life is just willy-nilly, right? You're just doing things to do them. You don't have a clear goal. It's chaotic. So what's the downside of not even having a future self vision?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you don't know who your future self is in any degree, or if you're absolutely not connected to your future self at all, like the extreme end of that, and like you can see this, the extreme end of being disconnected to your future self is someone who has zero perspective of consequences. And like, they're like, almost so, they're so out of touch. Like, and I've seen this even with my kids where it's like, they're acting so poorly, like right before bed, sometimes as a family. Like, if they do certain things like our night routine really well, sometimes we'll like, watch like, half a movie or something like that before bed. And like, we will tell them sometimes, like, if you go through these,

• 35:12Speaker 01

  if you do the routine really well, we'll, we'll like have ice cream and watch a movie, like, you know, for like 40 minutes. If they're not connected to that future self, even 45 minutes into the future, like, they will do absolute terrible things that then lead us to saying, nope, can't do it. And then they throw a fit. They're like, they can't even believe that they lost what they did, but they were so disconnected to what they were doing and the consequences. And like, this is what happens for extreme addicts, where like, you do something and you're so disconnected from the consequences that you're shocked when you, when all of a sudden, like, everything's falling apart. And so, like, one degree of looking at this is, is like,

• 35:55Speaker 01

  if you are so disconnected from your behavior and, and reality being consequences, which is what my kids were, like, they're acting so opposite to the results that they want or think that they want, but they don't even know it. It's like, are you aware that what you're doing right now is literally sabotaging you in 10 minutes from now? And you're about to throw a fit? And they don't see it. Like, that is utter blindness. But the other angle, which is kind of more the direction you were going was, it's kind of like the Alice in Wonderland thing, where, you know, Alice meets the cat and the cat says, You know, Alice says, "Which way should I go?" Because there's two different paths.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  And the cat says, "Well, that depends on where you want to go." And she says, "Well, I don't know where I'm going." And so he says, "Then you can literally go any direction you want." Because if you don't know where you want to go, if you don't have a destination in mind, then it literally doesn't matter what you do today. And that's, that's part of, I guess, what you would say is being connected to your future self is once you get specific about where you want to go, about what you want, then you can start to formulate pathways of getting there. But if you have absolutely no direction, no destination, then it does not matter what you do here and now. You're essentially rudderless. I mean, your future self becomes the anchor and it becomes the compass to like the decisions you make here and now. And that's, that's actually literally what all the research shows now. And, and by the way, the Psychology Today magazine that just came out

• 37:24Speaker 01

  in September and October was all about future self and about the person you're going to be in the future. Because this topic is becoming so, so big in, in psychology and even in therapy, like therapists are finding that there's really no way we can help someone change long-term without getting them connected to their future self. Because if they're not, if they're not thinking about who they want to be, it's very hard to change without a goal or without a why. Like, that then just becomes behavior change, which is kind of willpower focused. And you can't really sustain that without a direction. And so, yeah, it's, I would say it's very difficult to, to be intentional if you don't have a future self you're working towards.

• 38:04Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And, you know, I interview really successful people all the time, like yourself. I had Alex from OZI on the show, who's like everybody's new favorite sales and marketing entrepreneur and guru. And we were talking about focus. And this idea of focus is becoming such a big theme lately. I've been doing podcasting for almost five years now. And more and more, it just sounds like people saying, "You need to get focused. If you're unfocused, if you're unprioritized, you're not going to really achieve extraordinary success." Like, you can be successful, of course, but to really, you know, become that 1%, Scott Galloway was on and said the same thing. And so what you're saying is aligned to that. You know, understanding your future self is having this extreme focus of who you want to be, right?

• 38:49Hala Taha?

  And the steps you're going to take to get there because you understand who you want to be. And that target's always moving, but you're always taking the actions that's going to help your future self.

• 39:02Hala Taha?

  What's up, Yap gang? I recently had Gary Vee on the podcast and he told me something that really stuck with me. If you've got sales DNA, you've got to be paying attention to live selling, because it's one of the biggest opportunities right now online. And that really got me curious, so I checked out an app that he told me about called Whatnot. I jumped into a live show and I instantly got it. The seller was showing products in real time, answering questions in the chat, and building a real relationship with the buyers. It didn't feel like boring shopping. It felt like a community. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country. And for entrepreneurs, the results are really hard to ignore. Sellers on Whatnot can sell up to 10 times more than traditional marketplaces. And the number of sellers making over a million dollars a year on the platform has doubled.

• 39:46Hala Taha?

  So if you've got products to sell and you're looking for a new way to reach customers, search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, in the App Store. Download it and you can start selling right away. That's Whatnot in the App Store.

• 40:01Hala Taha?

  What's up, Yap fam? You guys know we love reading on this show, so I'm always excited when I find a book I genuinely think is worth sharing. "Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love" by Mark Pincus is one of those books. Mark is a legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, and this fast-paced 170-page book is his playbook for testing ideas quickly, navigating uncertainty, and figuring out what's actually worth pursuing. One of my favorite concepts is what he calls "the abyss", those moments when you feel stuck or unsure of what's next. Instead of fearing uncertainty, he shows you how to use it as a tool for discovery. Right now, Mark is doing a buy-one-get-one offer for Yap listeners.

• 40:45Hala Taha?

  Go to GetMark'sBook.com/Yap, buy one copy for $32 and get a second copy free, so you can keep one for yourself and give the second to a friend, future co-founder, or someone who needs a little push. What's up, Yap fam? If you're building a personal brand, you already know how hard it is to stay consistent with content when you're also trying to actually run your business. I love creating content, but realistically, I'm not trying to sit in front of the camera. Every single day, I need time to work on my business. But the problem is consistency matters. The more people see your face and hear your voice, the more familiar you become. That's why HeyGen has been such a great tool for me. You can record just 15 seconds of footage, create an AI avatar of yourself and use it to make videos on demand.

• 41:31Hala Taha?

  So instead of constantly filming from scratch, you can create more content, stay visible and keep showing up without making your entire life be about generating content. And you guys know I'm always looking for tools that give entrepreneurs more leverage. HeyGen is definitely one of those tools. Thirty million people already use it, from solo founders to 85% of the Fortune 100. Your first three videos are free at heygen.com/profitting. That's H E Y G E N dot com slash P R O F I T I N G. Heygen.com/profitting. You talk about Mr. Beast in your book, I believe. And so I'd love to understand how Mr. Beast used this concept

• 42:14Hala Taha?

  to be a 17-year-old kid, no money, no skills, to one of the most famous people in the world.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  So this was really interesting to me. I was shocked when it happened. Because I was writing Be Your Future Self now. It was kind of, so I wrote a book called Personality Isn't Permanent. And I did not know about the future self research, even though like I had already done a PhD. It was still kind of a growing, they call it like a branch or a vein of research. Like it was a topic I'd never really heard of and it was kind of small, but it was burgeoning, meaning it was growing. And anyways, while I was writing that book, call it end of 2019, early 2020, I fell upon the research on future self. And I was like, oh my goodness, why have I never heard of this before? Like, why have I never even seen this?

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Why have I never heard people talking about this, whether it's in psychology or in self-development or anything? Like, why is this a new idea? It seems like this is like the grounding of All self-development ideas and also like psychology. Like I'm, but anyways, I knew I wanted to write a book on it. And so I was doing all sorts of research on it while writing other books. And then all of a sudden in 2020, and I had known who Mr. Beast was just because I mean, I like YouTube. I was watching it. You know, he's the, he's this interesting figure, right? Doing these huge outlandish videos and I was mostly watching them with my kids and just blown away by what he was doing. And then all of a sudden in October, so it's in October of 2020. A video comes up and it's called, "Hi, me in five years."

• 43:43Speaker 01

  And it's got a picture of like a younger version of Mr. Beast, Jimmy Donaldson, right? And it's, it's sketchy. Like I turn, I clicked the video and it's, it's him talking as a 17-year-old kid in 2015. So it's, it's filmed in 2015 and he's saying, "Hi, you know, whenever you see this video, I just want to let you know like it's 2015. I'm filming this video from my room. I should be studying for my history test, but I just wanted to take this minute and have a conversation with myself in five years from now." And he basically just starts talking to his future self. It's like two minutes long. It's, it's really rough, filmed from a really bad camera. He shows where he's at with his YouTube channel. I think he's got like 8,000 subscribers. And basically he just talks about his future self. He's like, you know, where do I want to be in five years?

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Like who do I think I'm going to be in five years? And he's just kind of having this intimate, personal conversation with his future self in public. So basically what happened, and you know, as you scroll way back in time through his channel, you actually see that he did this multiple times, but he did it all the same night. So it was in October, it was well, you know, if you use the exact date, it was October 4th of 2015. And he was 17 years old and he, what he ended up doing, I don't know where he got the idea, but he filmed four different future self videos. Each of them were like two minutes long. So the first one was, "Where do I want to be in?" He said, "Hi, me in six months," or something like that.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  And so he was talking to his future self, six months into the future and just saying where, mostly because his obsession, which as you can see, whatever you focus on expands, he got very good at YouTube. But most of his future self was related to like himself as a YouTuber. You know, he wanted to be a famous YouTuber. He wanted to be, be the biggest YouTuber in the world. And so like, as he's talking to his future self, six months into the future, he's like, you know, If I have 20,000 subscribers, it's gonna be absolutely amazing and stuff like that. If I don't, it's gonna be embarrassing. So he did one for six months out, one for a year out. I think he did one for five years out and then he did a 10 year all that night. Basically, all of those videos were only two minutes long. And what he did is he filmed them all in one place, one time. He probably took 10 or 15 minutes to film the four videos.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  And then he put them, you know, he set them to go publish on his YouTube channel, but he set them to go into their corresponding times. And so he set the six month one to go live, six months into the future, the one year one to go live, a year into the future, the five year one. And so on October 4th of 2020, when the video just automatically went live because he had set it to go live five years into the future, he actually had forgotten that he had made that video. Like it was a shock to him. But in that video, he said he wanted to have a million YouTube subscribers and he wouldn't have even been able to fathom what it would have been like to have a million subscribers. Well, when the video actually went live in 2020, his channel had like 45 million subscribers. By that point, he was incomparably a different person.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  He had a huge business. He was like, had a big team. He was, all of his videos were getting like tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of views. And even since then, now, you know, he's got multiple channels and he's doing so many things, it's even ridiculous. But I mean, he's just an interesting example of someone who was very public about his future self, not afraid of admitting his future self. And you can actually see when you watch his old videos before that day, October 4th of 2015, you can see that obviously he got really clear and committed to his future self because the videos started changing after that time. And his growth started to like really like accelerate. And so he's just someone who is obviously connected to, committed to his future self. He used his future self as the basis for what he did. He was talking to his future self in public.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  And that was obviously his identity that drove him forward. And he continued to raise his standard for who he became and what he did. So he's just a brilliant example of it.

• 47:31Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and what a great idea in terms of like shooting videos, basically speaking to your future self.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  With no apology, like no embarrassment, like he doesn't care. And I think that's a huge thing is to not be ashamed of your future self. So many people are afraid to admit what they want.

• 47:48Hala Taha?

  Yeah. How about in terms of like the timeline of your future self? Is there a certain, should we think about ourselves five years from now? 10 years from now? Do we want to think of like a range? Like what's your suggestion there?

• 48:01Speaker 01

  So this is the beautiful part about time psychologically is that you can use it however you want. One of the areas, and we don't have to go too deep into this in the book, but like, obviously, a lot of people believe in God, right? And so a lot of people believe in their future self after this life. And like, and so like, obviously, a lot of people are thinking about the afterlife and they're using their views of that to dictate their decisions now. So like, you can go as far into the future as you want. You can go beyond this life if you want, and you can think about your future self there and learn about that, um, which a lot of people do. And that influences a lot of their decisions and the meaning in their life. You can think, you know, Stephen Covey had the old, uh, concept of imagining your 80th birthday party and like, what you want your life to be like on your 80th birthday party. Who do you want to be there? What do they, what do you want

• 48:45Speaker 01

  people to talk about your life about? So like, you can think way ahead and think, you know, big picture, um, you know, and expand that out and really start to think like, what will really have mattered at the end of my life? Like, what matters? And ideally, you spend most of your time on the things which matter, not on the things which don't. Um, but in terms of hyper practicality, I think it's good to build your future self around various timelines, um, like various important anchor moments. And so like, I gave you 2030 on purpose. That wasn't an accident. Um, the reason I gave you 2030 is because in eight years from now, the youngest one that we adopted, so we adopted three kids and then we had three of our own. And the youngest one that we adopted is currently 11 years

• 49:30Speaker 01

  old. In 2030, he will turn 18. And so the older two will be gone. He will be leaving in 2030. And that is going to be a big moment for me, my wife, and our younger three kids, because chances are, we're going to move from Florida, like when he moved. We live in Florida. We might not, you know, our future selves might have, might have different plans. But that's kind of a huge anchor moment for my future self, for my family's future self is like, our older three kids are going to leave. Our younger ones are much younger than the ones we adopted. So like, me and my wife have spent some time thinking about like, what's going to happen when Logan leaves? Like, Where are we gonna go become nomadic and like travel the world, live in different countries? Like, and so like, we're starting to think about our future self on that timeline because

• 50:12Speaker 01

  there's a key moment there, like, there's a key anchor to that. And so like, it's good to think about your future self in terms of key anchoring times, because then you can really start to map out, like, what do I want to see happen in the next eight years? And like, where would I like to be when Logan leaves? Like, I can really think big on an eight-year scale. Like, I can do a lot of things between now and 2030, when he leaves. In terms of super practicality, I think three years, in terms of tangible goals, in terms of like, if I want to accelerate toward a big progress, three years is a really good timeline for really achieving big, specific things. Like, you know, you and I, over the

• 50:54Speaker 01

  last three years, you know, it's been a little over three years now, but like, in terms of you, three years ago, if you're thinking about, like, how big do you want to see your podcast go? Like, over three years, you can grow enormously toward a very specific goal. And so, thinking in terms of like, if I want to grow really big in a very specific direction, call it me as an author, you as a podcast, someone in their finances, someone towards skills, three years, you can, you can get really specific, and you can still grow, like, quant, like, 10x, 100x, 1,000x big in a certain direction. So I think, three years or less, in terms of really big sprints towards big goals.

• 51:36Hala Taha?

  Mm-hmm. I love that. I think that's super, super helpful. Okay, so, I want to go, I want to move into purpose, and understanding how purpose is related to all of this. And so I think a good place to start would be understanding the levels of every behavior. You say it's the what, the why, and the how. Can you talk to us about how your why really drives the what and the how?

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the why is the reason for doing it, right? So, this is where you start to become intentional. So as an example, if someone's listening to this podcast...

• 52:12Speaker 01

  My question would be, well, why are you listening to it? And the why would then highlight what you're ultimately trying to do and what you ultimately value. Like, everyone's gonna have a different why for why we're doing this. You have a different why for interviewing me as I have for being interviewed, right? And so it's important to clarify and understand what the why is that's driving everything you're doing. And I'm of the belief that you do choose the why. Like, you do choose it, you clarify it, but you can scrape away levels of understanding it. But the why is just the purpose. The purpose is the goal. Like, what is the ultimate reason you're doing this? Aristotle would call that final cause, which is basically the end.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  So, as an example, like, if I'm hungry, you know, like, if I get up and go to the kitchen and start eating, well, it's like, well, why did I get up and go to the kitchen? It might have been because I'm hungry, but it also might have been because I was triggered and I'm just trying to avoid, like, I'm just, like, trying to avoid working. And so it's just, understanding the why and the purpose starts to help you realize what's driving your behavior. Is it something you really want? You know, like, when you're a teenager, maybe your why was, which, again, the why is the goal. And this is why the goal drives everything you do, including your identity. You know, when you're younger, the why might have been just to impress your friends, right?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  And so there's always a why behind every action. And how psychologists frame it is, is every goal is either an approach-oriented goal, where you're trying to approach what you want, or you're trying to avoid what you don't want. And so the why is always gonna either be approaching something you want or avoiding something you don't want, you know? And so it's... It's helpful when the why is more approach oriented. Sure, you want to avoid bad things from happening, but if everything you're doing is just to avoid negative things from happening, that kind of probably shows that there's a lot of trauma that's unresolved in the past, and so you're trying to avoid a lot of pain.

• 54:19Hala Taha?

  Yeah, so I'd love if we could like just dig on this a little bit. So we're talking about the difference between approach motivations and avoid motivations. When we approach motivation, we're basically creating our future. Rather, avoid motivation is just avoiding a future we don't want, and it's better to proactively create one, is what you're saying? I just want to understand what you're trying to say.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's good to avoid things you don't want. Like, it's good to be strategic about avoiding, call it, bad decisions, avoiding bad people. But if you're always just avoiding, then basically every action you're taking is a reaction against something else. Like, I'm trying to not... But even avoiding things is based on the future. Like, I'm, you know, so I'm like, I'm trying to avoid being out of shape, right? Like, that could be, I don't want to, like, be obese in the future, so I'm going to avoid that. Like, that's one way of approaching your future. But it's far more powerful and more proactive to say, well, what is it I truly want to approach? Like, what is it I want to, like, direct my attention towards and focus on and create?

• 55:22Speaker 01

  And yeah, I can avoid landfalls along the way, and I can learn from experiences and avoid those kind of people, or I can avoid those kind of dumb mistakes. Like, certainly, you can avoid things, but it is very powerful to be proactive and kind of consciously creating, like, this is what I want, and then to watch yourself go and get it. And so, both are useful. Both are incredibly useful. Both are motivations, and I think it's helpful when you're trying to observe yourself, like, why am I doing this? It's either going to be to approach something you want or to avoid something you don't. And that can start to highlight kind of the why. And... I guess one reason why avoid motivations can have downsides is because if you're always just trying to avoid something, then that means that one of the things you're avoiding

• 56:06Speaker 01

  is fear. Like you're avoiding going through the going through the emotions of getting what you want. Like if you're always avoiding, then you're also avoiding the hard truths. You're avoiding the fear. You're avoiding hard conversations. If you're always avoiding, then that what that means is that you're not passing through the emotions and the fear that are going to get you where you want to go. When you're when you're operating with commitment and courage, you're not avoiding. You're going right through it and you're transforming through it.

• 56:33Hala Taha?

  I love that. This has been awesome, Ben. So just to round this out, I thought a good story that kind of ties into a lot that we were talking about, and I know that he's a big inspiration for you, is Viktor Frankl's life. So can you tell us a story about Viktor Frankl and how he used his purpose of protecting his book to survive while he was in the concentration camps in the Holocaust and what you learned from his story about hope and purpose? And then we'll we'll close out the conversation.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  So the reason Frankl is so important is that Frankl highlights

• 57:11Speaker 01

  a lot of what Mr. Beast understood, but Frankl makes it even more dramatic. Basically, what Frankl shows, and again, Man's Search for Meaning, one of the most important books in the world, he was a Jewish person who in 1942 was taken into the Holocaust, right? One of like the German Nazi concentration camps. And what he found with people who were living in such dire situations, we really, I mean, unless you actually study the Holocaust, you don't even understand what I'm saying. It's gibberish right now. It was almost unfathomable how bad it was. Like, everyone was, the people were starved, they were thrown in gas chambers, people were shot in the head right next to you. Like, you're sitting doing grunt work

• 57:53Speaker 01

  for months, months, months, years and years and years. Everything's been taken from you, even the clothes off your back. You're standing there naked, deprived of everything, deprived of your dreams, deprived of everything. And what Frankl noticed when he was in those situations, because he was a psychologist, and so like, he was paying attention to this stuff, he was very in tune with what was going on in people's heads and like, whether why some people could be resilient and even be happy in these crazy conditions and why some people would get desperate, lose their minds and He started to draw an interesting correlation, which was in those dire situations when you're kind of deprived of everything and you're also starved physically. I mean, they were only given like a small piece of bread every day.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Is he saw an immediate correlation that like when someone lost hope toward their future, within days they died in those situations. Like their body didn't have enough to sustain them. If you and I lost hope in our future, we'd start to fall apart physically. Like we'd probably lose our health. You know, and hope from a psychology standpoint is like air to your physical body, like food and air, like you need hope psychologically. Because you're who you are right now is largely dictated by your views of the future. So basically what Frankl found was is that unless you had a specific goal, which is a huge aspect of hope, without a specific goal that gave your life meaning

• 59:16Speaker 01

  and substance, you couldn't handle the present, especially when it was that bad. And so that's why he always quoted Nietzsche, which is when you have a why to live for, you can bear almost anyhow. And so everything he did, and he literally, he layers it. And I share the best quotes of it in Future Self. But he says, you know, when you lose, when you lose hope in your future, you know, you're doomed. But he also said that everything we did in the concentration camps to give people hope, or to even help them to be able to manage their mind or manage their emotions, was we had to give to them a goal in their future, which they could work towards. And he himself, you know, he literally stated the goal that gave him purpose and gave him meaning and allowed him to endure the trials.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  And for him, it was he wanted to be reconnected with his wife, Tilly, who was taken to another camp. He didn't know that she'd already been killed and she was pregnant with their baby. But he didn't know that. He wanted to be reconnected with her. But also he wanted to rewrite his book, which was almost done being written when they got basically taken by the Nazis and they took the manuscript and tore it apart. And so he really wanted, he literally states this in Man's Search for Meaning. He said, "My deep desire to rewrite that book anew and publish it allowed me to overcome the rigors and the pain of the camps." So when you have a why to live for, you can bear almost anyhow. If you don't have a why to live for, if you don't have hope and commitment in your future, then you're not going to be very productive. I mean, little things in your day can throw you way off, right? But for him in those situations, it was life or death.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  It's literally life or death.

• 1:00:47Hala Taha?

  Yeah, so, so fascinating. I think this is a great way to close out the interview. So I always end the interview with a couple last questions and then we do something fun at the end of the year and recap them. So the first one is, what is one actionable thing our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 1:01:07Hala Taha?

  Doesn't have to be money related.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, here's what I'm gonna say. It goes back to the Alex Hermosy comment for me right now, which is, I love the quote, "It's better to be a meaningful, specific than a wandering generality." And so, the more clear you get on your future self and the more specific, that obviously takes you down a specific direction. You're not trying to be everything for everyone. Like, some of the recent decisions I've made in my career and in the books I'm writing have to do with, like, becoming even more focused, even more specific in a narrow range. It's kind of like the 80/20 principle, like 80% of what you're doing is kind of a distraction, whereas it's just the core 20 that makes sense. And so you want to go deeper and deeper into that, like let go of everything else,

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  like actually commit and go deep and get 10 times better in something specific. Like, if you get really, really good in something specific, it kind of reminds me of that quote, "Become so good you can't be ignored." Like, but it's really about qualitative, not quantitative. It's not about the quantity of what you do, it's about the quality of how you do it. And that requires focus, commitment, and purpose. And so, just commit to something and commit to getting really, really good and unique in that thing. That's actually what mastery is. It's not about doing something well, it's about doing something uniquely well, incomparably well. And that takes commitment and depth, not broadness.

• 1:02:32Hala Taha?

  Love that. Mic drop. All right, and what is your secret to profiting in life?

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Um, defining what profit means to me. Not everything is profitable, not everything is worth my time, not everything is useful. And so defining what I value, what I care about, what matters most, and then going all in on those few things and letting go of everything else.

• 1:02:54Hala Taha?

  And Ben, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  BenjaminHardy.com and Futureself.com.

• 1:03:01Hala Taha?

  Awesome. And we're going to stick all of your links in the show notes. Ben, thank you again for coming back on to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  I'm happy to be with you. You, your future self, who you are today is unimaginable to who you were four years ago. It's so cool.

• 1:03:16Hala Taha?

  Thank you so much. What a powerful way to close out our mental wealth series. I have to say this episode is one that I always think about. And if there's one thing I hope you take away from this conversation, it's this: You are not behind, you are not your past, and you are not limited to the version of yourself that you are today. Benjamin reminds us that high achievers often get trapped in the gap. We measure ourselves against the ideal, the dream, the bigger goal, the thing we still have not reached yet. And when we do that, even our wins can feel like failures. But when we measure backwards, when we look at who we were a year ago, five years ago, or even just a few months ago, we start to see

• 1:04:00Hala Taha?

  the gain. We start to see the growth, and that gives us the confidence, clarity, and energy to keep going from a way healthier place. So here's your final challenge, Yap gang. Go to yapmedia.com/mentalwealth. Again, that's yapmedia.com/mentalwealth, and open the Future Self worksheet. In the I AM column, I want you to write down who you want to become in five years from now. And try to make it bigger than just work. For example, it could be, I am a present parent, or I'm a great leader, or I am a healthy, creative, joyful person, whatever it is. And then in the I SHOULD column, write the small actions you're going to take right now to become that person eventually.

• 1:04:45Hala Taha?

  Because your future self is not built someday. It's built in these small choices that you make right now, today. And as we wrap up this series, I want you to remember this. Your mind is your greatest business asset, not your sales funnel, not your calendar, not your strategy, your beautiful mind. So protect it, train it, listen to it, and build a life and business that your future self will thank you for. Thank you so much for joining me on this mental wealth series. This is the final episode of our program, and I hope you enjoyed it. Keep doing the work, keep choosing growth, and keep becoming the person you were meant to be. This is your host, Halataha, signing off.