Why Thinking Bigger Isn’t Enough w/ Dr. Benjamin Hardy

What if everything you believe about success is actually slowing you down? In this conversation with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, we get real about why most people aren’t achieving at the level they’re capable of—and how to flip that. I told Ben right at the top of the show: our last interview turned heads. The kind of feedback we got—from everyday entrepreneurs all the way up to CEOs of billion-dollar companies—was off the charts. This one picks up where we left off and goes straight into the truth about scaling your business, your mindset, and your life. Dr. Hardy breaks down why the goals you’re setting might be too safe—and how that safety is the very thing killing your growth. We talk about setting what he calls “impossible goals” with unreasonable timeframes, not because they’re flashy, but because they strip away every single thing that’s slowing you down. “False goals create intensity,” he says, and that’s where most people get stuck. The real key? Letting the future—not your past—shape your decisions today. I open up about my own realizations. I thought I was a future thinker. Turns out, I was still leaning on the past more than I realized. And if you're scaling anything beyond just yourself, that mindset's got to shift. We get into what it really takes to lead with conviction, how to simplify your systems, and why being radically honest with yourself is the start of all exponential growth. This episode isn’t just theory—it’s the real talk you need if you're tired of playing small. If you’ve been stuck in complexity, distracted by too many paths, or trying to do five things at once, this one’s going to hit home. Ben says it best: “We’re kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” That’ll preach. Key Takeaways: Why short timeframes eliminate all the false paths The difference between bold goals and truly impossible goals How to stop lying to yourself and simplify your system What it takes to scale beyond yourself—and why most never do How to develop unshakable conviction and operate as a signal in a noisy world Listen now, and get ready to start thinking and executing in a whole new way. — Max Out 👉 SUBSCRIBE TO ED'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW 👈 → → → CONNECT WITH ED MYLETT ON SOCIAL MEDIA: ← ← ← ➡️ INSTAGRAM ➡️FACEBOOK ➡️ LINKEDIN ➡️ X ➡️ WEBSITE Get my exclusive Monday Motivation training in GrowthDay, the world’s #1 app for advanced mindset and personal development. Visit https://growthday.com/ed. This show is sponsored by GrowthDay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Ed Mylett?

  So hey guys, listen, we're all trying to get more productive. And the question is, how do you find a way to get an edge? I'm a big believer that if you're getting mentoring or you're in an environment that causes growth, a growth-based environment, that you're much more likely to grow and you're going to grow faster. And that's why I love Growth Day. Growth Day is an app that my friend Brendan Burchard has created that I'm a big fan of. Write this down, growthday.com/ed. So if you want to be more productive, by the way, he's asked me, I post videos in there every single Monday that gets your day off to the right start. He's got about $5,000, $10,000 worth of courses that are in there that come with the app. Also, some of the top influencers in the world are all posting content in there on a regular basis, like having the Avengers of personal development and business in one app. And I'm honored that he asked me to be a part of it as well and contribute on a weekly basis, and I do.

• 0:45Ed Mylett?

  So go over there and get signed up. You're going to get a free, tuition-free voucher to go to an event with Brendan and myself and a bunch of other influencers as well. So you get a free event out of it also. So go to growthday.com/ed. That's growthday.com/ed. I hear so many small business owners say the exact same thing. They just never have enough time in the day. Well, I measure time differently. I've compressed, condensed, heck, I've bent time. My first day is 6:00 AM to noon. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 PM. And my third day, 6:00 PM to midnight. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, over a year, over five years, and my life's completely different than it would have been otherwise. And if you want to win as an entrepreneur, you have to compress your time too.

• 1:30Ed Mylett?

  And you definitely can't afford to waste it waiting weeks on a big bank for capital. Your best bet's to work with my friends at Cardiff. They know how to compress time for entrepreneurs. They get your business approved in minutes and funded the very same day. They're America's favorite small business lender, and for good reason. Over 20 years in business, over 12 billion deployed to small business across America. Stop letting bank delays slow down your momentum. Head to cardiff.co/ed. That's cardiff.co/ed. Cardiff.co. Real growth, fast funding. Cardiff, borrow better.

• 2:04Ed Mylett?

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com slash superior access to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 2:38Ed Mylett?

  This is the Ed Miliband Show.

• 2:42Ed Mylett?

  Welcome back to the show, everybody. So my guest today, I gotta tell you, I was telling him off camera. When he came on the show, I would say that probably less than 5% of my audience knew who he was. And by the time that interview was over, I was hearing terms like masterclass from people about our first kind of 10x conversation, 100x conversation, actually. And the feedback I got on the first show we did together was shocking about how over the top it was about how deep and helpful the conversation was in your life and in your businesses. And I've told him privately, I'm talking about household name CEOs that run some of the biggest companies in the world have told me personally how much our first conversation

• 3:24Ed Mylett?

  made an impact on them and in their company. Luckily for you guys, he has a new book out and his books are detailed, they're deep, and you need to read them a couple of times because there's so much information. The new one is The Silence of Scaling. It's right in front of him here. We're going to talk about business today, all things scaling with a guy that when he writes a book, he goes to levels most people don't. So Dr. Benjamin Hardy, welcome back to the show.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Ed, it's really fun. Thank you, man. You just got a great energy, man.

• 3:55Ed Mylett?

  Thank you. So do you. By the way, he's an organizational psychologist and he's like business psychology, but we're not going to hold that against him today. We're actually going to let him talk. So let's talk about scaling. Scaling is this fancy word like grow your business, expand it. That's what we're going to talk about today, growing and expanding your business. Scaling is like the nouveau terminology. When we talk about scaling, I always say in life, complexity is the enemy of the execution of executing. You talk about systems and if you're going to scale. The entrepreneur's tendency is to complicate things. What happens when they do that?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  You can't scale a complex system. It just can't happen. So you're going in too many different directions. You've got too many competing goals, often goals you're not even aware of. Right? So I guess to keep it simple, uh, human beings were driven by our future. Like this is one of the big insights in neuroscience, positive psychology is our future shapes our present. And basically as humans, our present is filtered by the future that we have. So our psychology is shaped by our future, but also the systems that we build is shaped by our goals. And so all human systems are driven by goals. And I don't think people appreciate how big that means. Because if you set proper goals, you can create simple systems that scale. I mean, this is what all the, the top thinkers, even yourself just said, Steve Jobs, you have to take something that's complex and make it simple.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  And so the, the real lever is that it comes down to your goals and setting the right scale goal that forces you to simplify.

• 5:20Ed Mylett?

  You have a process in the book. What, what do you call it? The scale old something.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Scaling framework.

• 5:25Ed Mylett?

  Framework. We might as well start with gigantic value. One of the things I love about two people I've interviewed today, they give you what's in the book, not being afraid that somehow you won't get the book because you know what's in it because the book's so thick, we can't cover it all in an hour. So what's the framework? Help, help all these entrepreneurs out there or wannabe entrepreneurs.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the framework is it's a psychological model. Actually I call it strategic psychology. But basically it's frame floor focus. So as people are framing, you and I actually talked a lot about frame before. I know you love that concept. The interesting thing about frame is that our frame is fundamentally based on our goals. Of course our past shapes our frame. And so I think a really important thing for people to know is, is that the past and the future are tools for how we operate in the present. And but the future holds 10x, 100x the weight of the past. And so it is our goals that shape our frame. And so basically your frame in the present is finding signal and noise, right? And what is signal is things that are based on your goals. And so everything we do is looking for pathways towards our goals. And so our future shapes our frame and it shapes what we see.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  It shapes what's relevant. It shapes, you know, so anyone listening to this, the only reason they're listening is because this has some relevance to their goal.

• 6:35Ed Mylett?

  Great point.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  But otherwise this would be noise and they wouldn't have, they'd be somewhere else. Right. And so it puts a lot of responsibility on us to know that our future and our goals shape our frame. It shapes everything we do and it also shapes the quality of the pathways that we can find forward. So if we can set better goals and you know, basically in the book, I talk about impossible goals, right?

• 6:54Ed Mylett?

  Correct.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Impossible goals and impossible deadlines. The reason that frame is so powerful is that it forces out all inefficient pathways. So if you have a goal that's 10 or 100x and it's rather than 10 years away, it's two years away. Now most pathways don't work. So now you have to filter for really effective pathways.

• 7:11Ed Mylett?

  Okay. Stay on here. Stay on.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:12Ed Mylett?

  By the way, this is why I love Dr. Hardy's work because it's where psychology meets business and they intersect. Most people don't do both. So let's just slow down a little bit for everybody. The framework again is bang, bang, bang.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Frame, floor, focus. So your frame is your goal.

• 7:29Ed Mylett?

  Yep.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And when you have a better goal, it raises your floor.

• 7:32Ed Mylett?

  Yep.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  So your floor is defined by what you don't do. So Michael Porter, a strategy expert, he said, he said basically strategy is what you don't do.

• 7:40Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  So when you have a better goal, almost everything goes away. So for us, you want to raise your floor so high that almost nothing is relevant.

• 7:48Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  You can only then focus on the most scalable paths.

• 7:51Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  You create scalable paths, a scalable model. And so the point of the super high frame is that it raises your floor so high.

• 7:58Ed Mylett?

  Yep.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  That almost everything becomes noise.

• 8:00Ed Mylett?

  This is exactly why I loved our last conversation. It's correlated to the last one too.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:03Ed Mylett?

  Okay. And so this is really critical. I want all of you that think you've got a big vision for your business or you have some goals to like, now we're going to lean in a little bit. When you say that, I think of Steve Jobs. Okay. So I've got to know Wozniak very well, who was his co-founder with him. And then Tim Cook and I serve on a board together. So the guy that kind of currently runs that company. So I got a lot of insight. I'm sort of fascinated. With jobs.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  He's awesome.

• 8:26Ed Mylett?

  He's awesome. His personality was Henri, didn't always shower all the time. It's just a unique, obsessed, crazy person. Having said all of that, what he certainly had was impossibly thinking. I have a chapter in my book called Be an Impossibility Thinker or Achiever. And impossible deadlines. And so you submit that in the book. You say, there's a big, huge difference between a bold vision and an impossible goal with those deadlines. What is the difference? And how does someone distinguish between the two things?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  So I'll give an example. There was a lady who we were advising and she's in the credit industry. And basically she has a software. She was trying to get it out there. And so she set what she felt was a bold vision. It was a 10x of her current clients. She had 10 clients. She wanted to get 100 clients. The problem with that vision was is that it, it basically enabled her to continue doing everything she was doing before. It was very linear. And so we said, that goal is not impossible enough to shatter your assumptions, to shatter your thinking and to force you to find a new pathway. So she's like, okay, I'll try it. So she basically said, I'm going to go for a thousand clients. She had no clue how to do it in 90 days. And she realized there was no way she knew how to do it. And so that was an impossible goal. It was to basically 100 extra clients in 90 days.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  And so going back to pathways thinking, which is a core, it's a core framework in psychology that everything we're doing is pathways to a goal. So with a thousand clients in 90 days, she was basically just thinking, I have no clue how to do it. And so she sat, journaled, pondered, prayed, and I know you're huge on prayer. And basically a thought came to her that why am I not partnering with software companies who already are serving tens of thousands of these clients? And so basically she reached out to a software company and a day later she went from 10 clients to 8,000 clients.

• 10:06Ed Mylett?

  Hello.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  And so, so it was like a, it was an 800x jump in a week because she went for an impossible goal.

• 10:13Ed Mylett?

  Would you call that like asking a bigger question? Is that part of the training or no?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  No, no, no. The point of the impossible goal is literally again, to force out all bad paths. And so like for her, she was pretty much door to door selling. She was going to every single one of these credit repair companies. There's 50,000 of them and she was knocking them one at a time. And so when you go for the impossible goal, literally you don't know how to solve it. So there's actually a lot of research on this. In psychology, they call them stretch goals. But the actual definition of a stretch goal is it's an organizational goal. With an objective probability that's unknown, but is basically impossible according to your current knowledge. And so you don't know how to do it. And so the whole point of her thinking about, in this case, I want to get a thousand clients in 90 days, is she couldn't get there by knocking on doors. She couldn't cold call her way there. And so it forced her to find better paths.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  And so it forced her to, you know, and it's always going to be through a different who, right? It's always going to be through a different distribution partner, a different strategic partner. And so rather than going directly to, in this case, rather than going directly to the companies, she now went to software companies that serve those companies, but serve tens of thousands of them. And so when you go for the impossible, it forces you to find much more efficient paths that you couldn't be finding otherwise.

• 11:22Ed Mylett?

  Interesting. Again, I reflected jobs. I'm giving a talk right now where I play a clip of him. And it's basically him describing the iPad before it existed.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:33Ed Mylett?

  And it's him saying, here's what we got right here. We got this thing. It's going to be a book. You're going to be able to open it and it's going to be this and it's going to cost us $10,000 and it's going to cost us $3,000. And our competition's doing something like it right now, but they suck at it. We're going to do it right. But it's this whole thing of him laying out this impossible vision and then compressing the timeframe. That's the big thing. There's these hilarious clips on social media of me, we've been laughing about them, where I misspeak in an interview and I say, you know, you're manipulating time. And, and, you know, cavemen lived 300 years ago. I just conflated a sentence on an eighth interview of a day. But the point I'm making in that is condensing timeframes and shrinking your time horizon. It's why I own an island. It's why I'm wealthy. It's why you're sitting oceanfront here today is my proclivity

• 12:16Ed Mylett?

  to look in shorter timeframes, what people would call unreasonable windows of time. So what's new to me about what you're talking about is not just this bigger idea, but then also the unreasonable timeframe as well, or impossible timeframe, right? So talk about that. Why is that a critical part of it? It's not just the big 100x goal. It's now attaching to it an impossible theoretically timeframe.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Is very critical. So Elon Musk said, if a timeline is long, it's wrong. I don't know if you've ever heard of his five step algorithm. Basically, his algorithm is you always want to question requirements because most people have very false requirements to a goal. So if like, for example, someone was thinking about how, how do I get an island, right? They might think there's 50,000 steps to get there. You might say, well, if you actually just went for the island, there's probably three. So like, let me give an example. There was a 22 year old guy who I was talking to. And I said, what's your biggest dream? And he said, I want to own a European soccer team. Right? And I said, well, when are you going to do it? He said, age 55. Okay, I said, cool, you got 33 years to do it. I said, what would happen if you went for it by age 30? So now you got eight years. And he said, well, and they started getting nervous. He's like, well, I feel like I gotta do this, this and this to get there. I want to get a PhD. I want to run a firm first.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  And he starts laying out all these false requirements, right? And I said, well, if you just went for it at age 30, how much of that stays relevant? And he's like, I don't know. Right? And so what the, what the compressed timeline does? And by the way, again, back to the idea that the future is only a psychological tool to shape the present. Like, basically, the old linear model of time puts the past and future outside of yourself. Right? But like psychology, neuroscience shows, these things are just in your head. They shape your frame. And so the future is in your head and it's a psychological tool for stripping out the nonsense. And so for him, age 30 is really arbitrary. Like, it's just that, but if he moves the goal forward, now all of these false steps that he really didn't need go away. And so he's forced to find just a direct pathway to his goal.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  And so what we all do is we end up having a lot of false requirements to our goal. And so that makes a complex system. Now we have five goals that we have to achieve in order to get here. Whereas the point is to strip all those out. And so the short timeline literally forces out all false paths.

• 14:21Ed Mylett?

  Oh, my gosh. And it forces out complexity.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  That's the point.

• 14:26Ed Mylett?

  So that's the, because by the way, it sounds really-

• 14:28Speaker 01

  And complexity comes from false goals.

• 14:30Ed Mylett?

  Oh, my gosh. Because that, that idea of making things less complex is so difficult for most leaders. Because the longer you do something, the more you know, the more you want to add to your presentation. One more thing, and here's another thing, and here's another step, and another step. So that's how you actually force out complexity.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Extreme frame. So the extreme, the extreme frame of him going for that impossible goal. He's going to own a European soccer team, but in an extremely unreasonable timeline forces out complexity. Because now all of the false requirements, the false steps, the means goals. So like, one of my favorite quotes, and I think I even possibly shared it with you last time, is we're kept from our goal, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. So for him, a PhD is a lesser goal. For him, running a firm is a lesser goal. He really wants the one goal. But he's laid out all these requirements of lesser goals, which- You know, this is why people have complex systems is because they have too many goals. And, and they're, and a lot of their goals are hidden to them. Like as an example, we were, I was recently talking to a guy running a great firm, you know, 31 million in revenue, but he realized that he had a hidden goal to himself and it was an avoidance based goal.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  He realized that his goal was to avoid what had happened to his father. His father had a big firm and it sank because he had made some bad decisions. And so he realized in thinking about that his past was shaping his goal, which you don't want. You don't want your past to shape your goal.

• 15:45Ed Mylett?

  Hmm.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Um, you always, and I think we talked about this, but you always want your present to reshape and reshape your past.

• 15:50Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  But the future is really the tool you want and you always want to be approach based. You always want to be on offense. But for him, he realized, I have this hidden goal that I didn't realize, which was avoidance based. I was trying to avoid what had happened to my dad. And so he had one goal over here, which is his company goal. And then he had this hidden goal of avoiding what had happened to his dad. That's complexity. So anytime you have multiple goals, the point of a goal is to simplify a system.

• 16:11Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  So you want one goal that essentially derails all your other goals. So you can actually focus.

• 16:16Ed Mylett?

  That's brilliant. The fact that you take this off ramp because of the clearer path to the easier goal. It's brilliant. I was thinking of, uh, I'm just thinking of, you know, people have been blessed to be on that same board I'm on with Cookie is also Jerry Jones is on that board.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:28Ed Mylett?

  And he's such a great example of what you're describing. He's a younger guy, doesn't really have the wealth and there becomes this opportunity, this crazy goal in his mind. I'm going to buy the Dallas Cowboys. Right? He doesn't have the money. He doesn't have anywhere near the money to buy the team at the time. But what ended up happening was he could have bought a, an arena league team. He could have bought a Canadian football league team. He could have just supported Arkansas where he went to college and been a big donor there like a lot of guys do. But he had that one clear goal and when it happened, he found a way to borrow this, put that together.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Pathways thinking.

• 16:59Ed Mylett?

  Pathways, right? And then it ends up being that, I mean, I'm, I'm probably off, but I think he paid a hundred million for the team and it's now probably valued at eight or 10 billion dollars. But that's the framework in the book is how the Musks, the Joneses, the Jobses, the people that end up ruling the world and changing their bloodline forever and becoming the one in their family. This is how they actually think. How did, speaking of iconic people, this is in my notes to ask you, so I'm going to ask you.

• 17:30Ed Mylett?

  So hey guys, I want to jump in here for a second and talk about change and growth. And you know, by the way, it's no secret how people get ahead in life or how they grow. And also taking a look at the future. If you want to change your future, you got to change the things you're doing. If you continue to do the same things, you're probably going to produce the same results. But if you get into a new environment where you're learning new things and you're around other people that are growth oriented, you're much more likely to do that yourself. And that's why I love Growth Day. Write this down for a second, growthday.com/ed. My friend Brendon Burchard has created the most incredible personal development and business app that I've ever seen in my life. Everything from goal setting software to personal accountability, journaling, courses, thousands of dollars worth of courses in there as well. I create content in there on Mondays

• 18:12Ed Mylett?

  where I contribute, as do a whole bunch of other influencers, like the Avengers of influencers and business minds in there. It's the Netflix for high achievers or people that want to be high achievers. So go check it out. My friend Brendon's made it very affordable, very easy to get involved. Go to growthday.com/ed. That's growthday.com/ed. This episode is sponsored by Ro. A lot of people assume GLP-1's cost a fortune and that assumption keeps them from even looking into treatment. Ro helps people find a more affordable path to FDA-approved GLP-1 treatment. Ro wants to help people lose weight. That's why they have more affordable GLP-1 options, whether you're paying with insurance or cash. Ro's free insurance checker makes it easy to see if you're covered for GLP-1 injections. Just submit your insurance card and Ro handles the rest.

• 18:57Ed Mylett?

  No paperwork, no waiting on hold, no confusing phone calls. And if insurance doesn't cover treatment, there are still options. Ro offers the lowest cost cash pay FDA-approved GLP-1s, such as daily pills and multi-dose pens. I use products by Ro and you should too. Go to ro.co/milet to see if you qualify. That's R-O dot C-O slash Mylett to get started on Ro. For side effects of GLP-1 medications, including boxed warning, go to ro.co/safety, ro.co/safety. So when I ended up buying the island, we had to do all of our outdoor decorating and I spent a fortune in the first half of the place and I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore, but I want the best stuff. And that's

• 19:39Ed Mylett?

  Wayfair came in. My wife wanted to get this new garden bed and Wayfair was the place that offered the perfect solution. Wayfair also helps you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value and trusted reviews. Wayfair verified products are hand vetted by product specialists. They use a 10-point quality inspection system. Here's all I can tell you. The stuff has lasted over time. It looks great and I get compliments on it. Shop thousands of products across every style and budget, whether you're trying to refresh your space for fall or transform your space for Halloween. Use filters, custom photos and reviews to find the right fit for your home. More than 20 million verified five-star reviews, 20 million. So transform your space with the pieces that hold up to real life. Join Wayfair Rewards today and get 5% back

• 20:20Ed Mylett?

  on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com or shop the Wayfair app for all things home. That's W A Y F A I R dot com.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Wayfair, every style, every home.

• 20:34Ed Mylett?

  How did JFK's moonshot affect your thinking for this or sculpted at least?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  So I was, admittedly, I started the book with Musk. Everything that was going on with Musk, he obviously has an impossible goal, go to Mars. And if you think about pathways and partners, like he did not want to get involved in politics. And I think the further, the further along in the story he gets, the more we realize like, you know, it was very costly for Musk to get involved with Trump and obviously, you know what I mean? And so I started the book with that story and talking about how like in order to get to an impossible, you've got to go very unlikely paths and you've got to have very unlikely partners. And that, that ended up just being pretty crazy with where things were at. And so I was thinking about, about the like the moon mission. And that's obviously like a really clear cut example of a seemingly impossible goal, a really seemingly

• 21:23Speaker 01

  impossible deadline, which was seven years. But the funny part was like, that was a very linear process. Like basically what I lay out in the book is, is that Kennedy probably could have done it in three. Like if he had actually used the shorter timeline, they would have stripped away probably half of the nonsense that they did during those seven years. Well, think about it like they, they set a goal to just achieve it by the end of the decade, which is a very lazy.

• 21:44Ed Mylett?

  It sounds good, but it's lazy.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's lazy. So like that's, that's what often happens when someone has a 10-year goal. It's just lazy. And so if you just take the 10-year goal and move it to two or three, now you strip out most of the false steps. So like with the NASA missions and I spoke with a NASA engineer while writing the book. NASA is very specifically like a linear process. They're very focused on safety and things like that. And so they're not, they're not like Musk. They're not breaking systems. They're not fast going. So it was a very linear process. And my argument was if they had just gone for it in three, they would have found a much better path. They would have found a much better, like probably, I mean, there's research that shows that 10% of what a company does is effective. If you look into what NASA did, and yes, they changed the world, like they did phenomenal things. I'm not, I'm not throwing shade at NASA.

• 22:27Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, sure.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  But, but it's just a really good example of an impossible goal that changed the world. But, and he used time as a tool. Like he's like, we're going to do it in seven years. He, seven years is also just still pretty far away. And it, and so if you, if he had gone for it in half the time, he probably would have found a much more effective path.

• 22:44Ed Mylett?

  The thing he said in the book, I was like, man, I think I'm not honest with myself about this stuff. And so you actually state that in the book, like literally, I wanted to make sure I read it right. So why I have it right here in front of me. Part two is when you're talking about raising the floor, because he breaks it into these different parts of the book. Be more honest with yourself and quit the wrong stuff faster. I was just talking to John Maxwell, not too long ago, we were on a flight together, his plane, fortunately for me. And I said, what's the biggest thing that you've shifted your mindset on leadership on over the last years? He goes, well, it's actually that. I like changing my mind now. I used to think that if I changed my mind as a leader, it made me look like an inconsistent thinker. And now I realize that

• 23:26Ed Mylett?

  it makes me honest, that when I've changed my mind, I've got more information, I need to be honest with myself, and I should be open to changing my mind. So what do you mean in the book when you say, be more honest with yourself and quit the wrong stuff sooner? What do you mean by that?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  So anytime you're below your floor, you're saying yes to things that are essentially limiting your ability to scale, right? You may be scaling a fairly complex system, even 10x, you may be, you know, there's a lot of successful people that listen to this. The point is, is that when you're below the floor, you're saying yes to things you should be saying no to. And you're lying to yourself about it. And so anytime you're below the floor, that just means that you're actively, you're actively lying to yourself, whether you're justifying it. So for example, there's a, there's a lot of people who, who I've interviewed who are doing Fifty things and they they believe that they're all synergistic, right? Even I myself, like I got called out very hard by by a mentor of mine. He's like, Ben, you're doing fifty things like be honest with yourself. Like you, if you just focused on writing books like, but he's like, you're doing this, you're doing this, you're doing this. I was like, and I I thought I was focused, right?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  And so I was doing things below my own floor and I was saying yes to things that, you know, you could justify, but they're extremely costly. And I think like one of the things that I've learned is is that the further, you know, the further you go in in your learning, the more you realize just how costly a yes is. So it's like, yeah, this thing might make you a lot of money or maybe a good opportunity, but the cost is is insane when you think about what you could be doing. And if you think about sports, like it's the errors, right? It's it's it's the mistakes that lose championships and that error came from a lack of preparation. So it's really, it's really the errors that that really can sink companies that mess you up. And so that's when you're lying to yourself is when you when you don't admit that you're saying yes to the things that you shouldn't be saying yes to, and that you're really not focused.

• 25:10Ed Mylett?

  You said something a minute ago about linear thinking and I I've read this, so I know what it means. But I think I glossed over that where people listening, I've made an assumption that people know what that means in the context that you use it in. And you don't like linear thinking, I think is fair to say, right? So what exactly is it? And how does one become disruptive with that? What's the antithesis of linear thinking?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  So linear.

• 25:34Ed Mylett?

  Example two.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so linear thinking comes from linear time. And so linear time is where the the past shapes the present and the present shapes the future. So an example of that in business would be I did five million last year. So let's use that as the baseline for what we're going to do next year. We'll go for six million, seven million, right? So that's where companies are doing twenty percent a year, thirty percent a year.

• 25:52Ed Mylett?

  Gosh, this is good.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Right? And so if you use the past as the basis for your future, that means you're using the past as the basis for your goals. And why it's linear is is that if you're using the past as the basis for your future, then you're going to continue doing what you're already doing. And so you're not disrupting, right? And so even Peter Drucker said, most firms are essentially perpetuating today. They're just doing what they're doing yesterday, right? But he said that the future is meant to disrupt the present. The future is meant to be the enemy of today. In other words, if you have a new model, right? The whole purpose of a new future or a bigger future is that it simplifies and it disrupts what you're doing in the present.

• 26:24Ed Mylett?

  Shoot.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  That's what you're supposed to do, but then you have to be honest with yourself. Right. So that's the whole transformation is if you have the massive goal and you say, and then you look at your current life from the goal, from the future, if you let the future shape the present, then you're basically, you have to say, is this, is the juice still worth a squeeze on these things? And all of it starts to fall below the floor because there's only a few pathways up to that impossible goal.

• 26:44Ed Mylett?

  God, you're really making me think. I use a term called legacy thinking when I interact and consult with companies that just frustrate the heck out of it. We've always done it that way. And I'm like, I'm not a legacy thinker. I'm a future thinker.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 26:58Ed Mylett?

  But maybe I'm not. Based on your definition, there's, I do do a lot of that. Well, last year we did eight million, so we could do 12 million. And so that's a

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Linear thinking.

• 27:07Ed Mylett?

  And that, and it's also a form of legacy thinking. We did it before, so we can do a little bit more now. In other words, I'm using my past.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  To shape your future.

• 27:13Ed Mylett?

  Correct. Exactly what you just said. So the whole time you've been saying that, because a lot of people listen to podcasts and they don't, they don't do the hard work of listening to how's this apply to me? They discard the things they think that don't apply to them. And oftentimes it's the very thing that does. And it would be very easy for me to go, I'm a future thinker. I'm a visionary. No, not so much based on your definition. I use the past to shape my thinking way too often. And I do it regularly. And then you don't know what you don't know when you're using the past. You don't even know what you're missing. And so I'll give you like, I'll give you one of my rubs and you talk about it in the book. I'd love you to help everybody with this. Not everybody gets to this stage, but they should be at this stage, I think from day one, if they're really thinking big and is an impossibility thinker.

• 27:56Ed Mylett?

  I think about the businesses I'm involved with. Let's just use this podcast, for example. I want to scale it beyond me. And actually beyond my ability to influence it, like I do, my, my lifetime. And I thought for a long time, well, you can't, it's you, you're the host. That's all you can do. But the truth is, there's a lot of directions I could go, just as I'm talking with you right now. This thing's going off in my mind. I've been using the past as a reference. There's all kinds of things I could be doing. How does one begin to think about scaling beyond themselves? And what are some of the key components in doing that?

• 28:27Speaker 01

  I think it's beautiful. So.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  This is the thing that actually disappointed me the most. As someone who got to be around a lot of people who were heroes of mine, I began to realize they couldn't scale beyond themselves. And so they were, they were basically like the king or queen of what they were doing. So in Jim Collins' language, that's level four leadership. So that's the genius with a thousand helpers. They have to be the centerpiece. And so you really have to have a goal that's so big, so straight up for this podcast, right? Have a goal that's so big and so urgent that it might force you out of your role to some degree, right? And it forces, it forces different thinking. This is what a lot of people won't do. So there's a lot of research that I lay out in the book about basically people who are super effective.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  So basically, I mean, even Bill Gates said that the average code writer is worth one, one ten thousandth of a good one. So like a good code writer is worth 10,000, right? And so, and there's research to back that up. And so you won't get those super who's, those super talent, if you're building it around yourself, right? And so you, to scale at unbelievable levels, it has to be beyond you. But I have found that most entrepreneurs of various, various different types of companies, they want to be the centerpiece. They want to be the primary decision maker. And so they're, for me, what that means is that their vision is too small. And, and they can't actually attract those super talents that are what makes scaling possible, like extreme scaling possible.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  And so just as an example, there was a guy who I advised, he's an incredible CEO. He took a company from like four million to a hundred million in about three or four years. He was awesome, young guy, you know? He took, but then I asked him, what would it take to get to a billion? And he said, I might not be able to be the CEO. Dude, that was awesome. Like he showed he learned it. He didn't need to be the guy. Like, you know, like a lot of people would be like, I have to be the guy, but he's like, You know, if we could get to a billion in two or three years, I don't need to be the CEO. I could take a different role, but I think a lot of people aren't willing to do that.

• 30:26Ed Mylett?

  I do too. I keep going back to Jobs. And as I understand the story, Apple's kind of ticking along and he figures out this vision so big, I can't do this. I'm not the guy.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  I mean, that's when you know.

• 30:36Ed Mylett?

  That's when you know, right?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  That's when you know your vision's right.

• 30:38Ed Mylett?

  As I understand the story, he starts pursuing this guy Scully, who's running Pepsi at the time.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:42Ed Mylett?

  Right? And he can't get Scully even to call him back. He can't get Scully to get interested. And he finally uses the vision to get Scully. As I hear the story, Jobs picks the phone up. It was in the answering machine days and leaves Scully this voicemail, this answering machine and says, hey, dude, I'm tired of effing calling you. When you're tired of selling sugar water to kids and you finally want to go change the world, give me an effing call back.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:05Ed Mylett?

  And Scully kind of rolls his eyes. His wife hears the, the voicemail, the answering machine and goes, well, you kind of do sell sugar water to kids. Why don't you go do something to change the world? And he brings Scully over because he knew what he, now, as it turns out, they brought Jobs back because Scully ran it into the ground at one point or the group did. But the point is, is that even Jobs is a young man who I admire as a business guy, had exactly what you just described. It's got to scale beyond me. It ended up bringing him back in later, but the point is at that time, it's exactly what you just described. The other thing I think of when I think of him, and I'll stop talking about him is,

• 31:37Speaker 01

  He's awesome.

• 31:37Ed Mylett?

  Well, he was convicted. I think of the great entrepreneurs that I know, that many of you don't know, they're just people you wouldn't know that have held on to their company and never exited, or they've exited and they're just private people.

• 31:51Ed Mylett?

  So you know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing like on repeat all the time? That sweater that kind of just goes with everything or these perfect pair of pants? Those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy and that's what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high quality wardrobe staples with premium materials like a hundred percent Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton. The styles are timeless, versatile and designed to become the dependable pieces you reach for every day. It's what I'm wearing right now. They give you the softness and quality you'd expect from a luxury brand without the price tag. Quince also makes premium pants, fitted tees and polos and breathable activewear. Quality basics designed to work with your wardrobe and hold up to everyday wear. I love their cotton tees. I'm wearing one now and I get a ton of compliments when I wear them on the podcast and when I speak.

• 32:34Ed Mylett?

  So find your next fall favorites at Quince, download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to quince.com/ed for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q U I N C E dot com slash ed. So you know, I've been trying to take my health and my morning routine to the next level. And I used to do a whole bunch of different stuff, tons of different supplements. And then I found all in one in a drink with IM8. IM8 is the way to simplify your supplement routine, finally, once and for all. 16 supplements replaced 90 ingredients across nine major organ systems in one drink. You can have all these supplements for $2.61 a day. I've changed my mornings, the whole IM8 routine has changed my mornings.

• 33:19Ed Mylett?

  I feel great and I bring energy to the entire day. Go to im8health.com/ed10 right now, or click the link in the description and use code ED10 for a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets plus 10% off your order. That's code ED10 at im8health.com/ed10. Code ED10 at im8health.com/ed10. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. You say conviction is the currency of scaling. What does that mean and how does somebody develop it?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  So when you go for a true scale goal, which most companies don't, I mean, most, most companies aren't going for a true scale. Once you actually go for it, so as an example, there's a guy who is a friend of mine named Mark. He has an advertising agency and they're doing 20 million. It took him 30 years to get there. Then he like learned some of these scaling principles. He's like, okay, I gotta go for a hundred million in three years. Again, it took him 30 years to get to 20, but once he set the true scale goal, he realized back to the point he had been lying to himself. Their, their agency.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  They are the best in the world at one thing, but they had become overly complex. They'd been saying yes to things that were below their floor and ultimately they weren't scaling. So he was lying to himself. And so, once he actually set a true scale goal, and there's a lot of research on this. It says impossible goals, they redefine who you are, but they also force you to define yourself. And I think a lot of people are unwilling to define themselves. Like, "We do this, right? This is what we do. We don't do other things. We don't do these five other things. We do this." And so, once he set that scale goal, he realized he had been lying to himself and he'd been lying to his clients. And so, that's where he built extreme conviction is because he could clearly define himself, right? He stopped being noise in the marketplace. He became signal. He's like, "This is what I'm about." And so, he went to all of his clients, right?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  What had happened was is their firm was so good at scaling companies in like mass media. They diluted themselves into like Amazon and social media and stuff. And so, he went to all of his clients and said, "I want to apologize to you." He said, "We have not been serving you the way you should be served. You wanted lesser services and we gave them to you. And we are setting your business up for failure." And so, he said, "We're giving you these small packages and your company is going to fail." He said, "The only way that you can succeed is if you bring your product into mass market." And he's like, "You're gonna have to bring me three, 500 grand right now." And a lot of them moved over because he had such conviction. He had such clarity and definition of who he was. But in order to do that, they actually had to raise the floor and stop doing all of their other nonsense.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  And so, his big future, his big impossible goal forced him to define himself. It forced him to say, "This is who I am. This is what I do. I don't do those 50 other things. I'm gonna stop lying to myself. I'm gonna stop lying to my clients. I'm gonna stop lying to the world and trying to be five things. And instead, I'm gonna say, 'This is who I am. This is what I stand for. This is what I do.'" And when you speak with that level of honesty, that level of conviction, that level of clarity, now all of a sudden, you're a rare signal in the environment. Whereas everyone else is trying to be five things. It's like, "No, this is what we are. This is what we do. We're the best in the world at it." And then you can tell people when they're making bad decisions.

• 36:26Ed Mylett?

  Really good. You've used this term a few times. I want to unpack it a little bit more. Noise and signal.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:32Ed Mylett?

  Right? And it's a terminology that you're familiar with, and I now am because of your work. But unpack that a little bit. How does one know if they're a signal or a noise?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So signal means.

• 36:44Ed Mylett?

  Or participating in it.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So signal means something is relevant. It stands out. It's clear. It's understandable. Think about it as light, right? It's clear. It's comprehensible. And signal is always based on your goal, right? And so if you have a goal, then some things are signal, meaning they're relevant to where you're going. And then everything else gets blocked out as noise. And so in psychology, we call that selective attention, right? We're always filtering for relevant signal to get us to where we're trying to go. And so the problem when you're diluted, when you're unfocused, when you're distracted, is that if you're doing multiple things, right? And you're making multiple different offers, right? Out into the marketplace, there's no clarity. And so there's no clear signal in what you're saying. So that makes you noise in the marketplace where it's hard for people to understand what you're saying. And so when you can come out with

• 37:29Speaker 01

  just absolute clarity, this is, you know, actually speaking truth. And people can hear it and they can, they can hear it in the sea of noise. It stands out.

• 37:37Ed Mylett?

  Someone listening to this would say, well, wait a minute, there's still verticals. I mean, when I go into a Starbucks, their signal is coffee.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 37:44Ed Mylett?

  But you can get a breakfast sandwich too. That's not what you're saying, that there can't be a vertical or an attached business.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  No, there can be those.

• 37:50Ed Mylett?

  Yeah. But the main signal, when people think Starbucks, they don't go yogurt.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  They're not there for that.

• 37:56Ed Mylett?

  Right. There it's coffee, right? So but is that, I just want to make sure everyone that doesn't drown that out. You're not suggesting that there can't be a, another sell when someone's marketing a product.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  No, you can do that. It's just what are you? I think Starbucks can clearly define who they are and what they do, which is why they scale.

• 38:11Ed Mylett?

  They're the perfect example of scaling because they're, they're in the business of coffee distribution.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  And it'd be interesting how much they've truly optimized for those other things, right? Like, how much is the sale of those other things versus the coffee? It's probably 95% five or less.

• 38:23Ed Mylett?

  Great point, by the way. I would love to know that data. I guarantee you, most of it's probably coffee, right? I would think it is.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 38:30Ed Mylett?

  The CEO who says, I'm sorry, I apologize. To me, that's accountability, right? It's a, it's a huge thing. In my estimation, as I travel and speak and work with different people or if I'm coaching somebody. There is a dramatic lack of accountability in the companies that I see that are average. And there is hyper accountability, hyper accountability in the companies that I consider to be elite. And you talk about that in the book. So go ahead, talk about that.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So a system's ability to scale comes down to the accountability of the leader owning the frame and owning the floor. The floor again is what you say no to. And so one of the people I interviewed for this book is a guy who creates economic systems for countries. So he goes into first world countries, helps them design the economic systems, goes into third world countries, helps them, you know, and again, these are, these are systems, right? And so I asked him, what's the, what's the difference between a first world country and a third world country? And he said, one word accountability. And so it's accountability in the system, right? And if you look at any true leader, a true leader actually holds a system accountable so that it can, so that it can scale. And if you don't have accountability, then there's a lack of focus, there's a lack of clarity, there's a lack of truth.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  And so accountability is just your, it's essentially your accountability to your goal, right? And if you're not being accountable to the goal, that means you're being accountable to your past, you're being accountable to other people. That's what creates complexity is you're saying yes to other things versus just saying this is what we're accountable to. And so therefore we're saying no to everything else.

• 39:55Ed Mylett?

  You're, we just go with him. You guys notice this? Like just go. If I could bring in five entrepreneurs in here that are running something, they got a three person dry cleaners, an eight person mortgage company, a nine person daycare, whatever they have. They want to scale and there's, they're in the noise sense. Even getting clear on what you want, do you have any tactics or strategies or thoughts about how do I get my mind out of the noise? Like it's just very easy to be, someone walks in your office with a problem and you got to pay a bill over here. And then someone's behind on their payment there and you got a client issue there. And all of a sudden you've gone through your day or your week or your month or your year, and you just dealt with noise and fires all day long, right?

• 40:38Ed Mylett?

  Is there a structure, a framework, a thought, a strategy on that?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  I mean, the easiest place to start is always the future. And, and that is, it's a recognition that your future is shaping everything here. And the problem with that person is that their past is shaping their future. So like. They're just doing, they're in a sea of noise. They have a complex system. They can't get above it. And so the easiest thing to do is actually to set a goal that disrupts all that. That makes all that irrelevant and helps you actually start to find a simple path forward. And so if you have a really high goal, so like as an example, if that person was, it's really easy to just start using numbers. So I would ask that person, like literally, how much revenue are you doing? We're doing two million, right? This is crazy. All right. So let's just go up to 20 million. If you were going to do 20 million in three years, how much of this stuff can even stay?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Almost none of it. How much of the team can stay? I don't know. Depends on if they're committed, like maybe half of them, right? But it's going to be a different business model to 20. It's going to be a different path. You're going to have a different team. And so you start thinking from there. And again, back to Drucker, the future is there to simplify the present.

• 41:42Ed Mylett?

  It's so good. I love that quote.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  That's really, that's the whole, the whole purpose. I mean, it's a technology.

• 41:46Ed Mylett?

  Well, you're, bro, you're reading my mind. I'm going to ask you a curve ball that's not in the book and it

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Do it, toss it.

• 41:51Ed Mylett?

  It plays right off of where you just went. The future and technology. To me, when I think of even my own usage of AI recently.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 42:00Ed Mylett?

  Okay, it ought to be changing what I believe is impossible in the future. Right? And so I'm wondering your thoughts about technology. And how we all should be looking at this as, I'll just call it stretching our vision of what's possible because the future is actually here now.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  It is.

• 42:16Ed Mylett?

  And I just want to know your thoughts about that because it's not in the book, but it's like, I got you here. I got this guy that understands business and psychology better than anyone. And thinking the impossible, and now we're in the midst of this AI revolution. What are your thoughts about that?

• 42:28Speaker 01

  I, I love the tools. I mean, they, they definitely make what used to be impossible, possible.

• 42:33Ed Mylett?

  Right.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  And so I, I think that use the tools, you know, I mean, that's, that's what they're there for. So I think that increasingly we're going to be able to do things we, we couldn't do before. But I mean, even, even without the technology, the technology is just a propellant. But a lot of people, they won't, they can't use it effectively because they don't have a future that gives them a reason to. Right? And so if you have a massive future, you don't need the best tools. The best tools only accelerate your progress. But the reason that people can't use the tools is because they don't have a reason to.

• 43:03Ed Mylett?

  Okay. You guys, it's so good, right? So you say something in the book and I've been debating it and disputing it in my mind.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Let's hear it.

• 43:12Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 43:45Ed Mylett?

  You say a goal properly set is halfway reached.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:49Ed Mylett?

  And for me, I'm such a worker type of a dude. I, I, I want to know what you mean. How do you know you have a goal properly set? And why do you think that means you're halfway there? Does that mean 99.9% of the people are not setting goals properly?

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:03Ed Mylett?

  Okay, so give it to us.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and, and John Doerr actually was that one who originated that one.

• 44:09Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  But, um, so a goal, a goal properly says halfway reached because a goal properly set almost removes every other option, right? And so there's.

• 44:16Ed Mylett?

  Love this thinking.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like if you, and so again, John Doerr said that, but the goal properly set is halfway reached because if you set the right goal, almost all the dead end paths that you would have taken and wasted decades on now become irrelevant. They become noise because those have zero efficacy for the goal, right? The goal shapes the relevant pathways. And so if you set the right goal, and, and the right doesn't mean it's like a perfect goal, it just means if you set an effective goal.

• 44:39Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Then what that goal does is it gets rid of a lot of what you're doing. It gets rid of also a lot of the options that you would have taken and wasted a lot of time on.

• 44:48Ed Mylett?

  Hmm.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  And so that's the point. I would say that there's, there's like, there's like three or four false models of goals. So you hear a lot of people that say, don't set any goals, just focus on the process. That doesn't actually work because all human beings are driven by goals.

• 45:00Ed Mylett?

  Of course.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  The second one is a small goal, right? That's a linear goal that's just going to create complexity, right? So if you're going for small goals, that means you're just trying to avoid failure, but that doesn't enable you to filter the best paths forward.

• 45:11Ed Mylett?

  Hmm.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Um, also just the competing goals. A lot of people have like, you know, 50 goals, right? So that's going to create a complex system that can't scale. You're going in 20 different directions. You haven't defined yourself. And then, um, there's just the final one is actually setting a bad goal, right? So a great example of that's just Steve Ballmer, right? He set a goal to increase shareholder value, right? But he was with the company for 14 years and their value. Went down a lot and because he wasn't focused on growth. And so you can scale the wrong thing. You can, you can actually set a goal and hit it. And, and honestly, cost yourself huge in the future. So it's about, obviously you want to think about growth and it's about setting a goal. That simplifies what you're doing and forces out all the bad paths, all the dead ends.

• 45:53Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  And you just be honest, again, be honest with yourself. There's a lot of people who won't let go of the dead end paths. Like as an example, I taught this to a guy. He's in real estate and he said, okay, I'm going to try it. I'm going to set an impossible goal. He said, I'm going to go for 10,000 units in three years. I said, awesome. I said, how much growth does that look like on your current path? He said, that's 20 years of growth, Ben. I said, perfect, perfect impossible goal. And then he said, but I really want to have a podcast. And I said, okay, tell me why. And then he started to lie to himself. He started to say that podcast is going to help me hit my goal. And I said, tell me why. I said, tell me how that podcast is going to help you hit the goal. And he started, that's where he started to try to justify two competing goals, which would make a, a complex system. I'm not saying you can't have two goals, by the way. I'm just saying, pick one, like, because you're not going to have both.

• 46:38Ed Mylett?

  By the way, you're competing against killers who are laser obsessed, focused on the one thing they're doing. You divert your energy, your focus and your attention to two or three places. It's just going to be really hard. At the top, at the top, at the top, you're playing against the best. There are levels to this thing.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  There are.

• 46:53Ed Mylett?

  There are levels to life and I promise you, when you walk into a room of the best of the best, they are killers. And they are not diverting their focus. They are thinking very, very big and they are lasered in on that thing. I'll give you an example. This is a silly one, but it's out of my own life. The theory of when you set an impossible goal with an impossible timeframe, it eliminates all the crappy options is really true. I, I've just had a lot of health stuff this year. You know, I'm talking about it off camera. Before I say this, I don't want any messages from people telling me this was unhealthy and all that other stuff. Okay. I set a goal last month to lose 20 pounds in a month. Which I know, I get all that. Okay. I know. I don't care. I'm gonna lose 20 pounds in a month. Right. So I set that goal to lose the 20 pounds in a month and I'm actually gonna lose 30 pounds in 60 days is the entire goal.

• 47:37Ed Mylett?

  But for what I want to do is shrink the timeframe. It's an impossible goal, but here's what it did. It eliminated every part of BS thinking I could possibly come up with, should I go keto? Should I do this? It like, hey dude, your caloric restriction needs to be crazy. You need to be in the gym doing cardio a couple of times. You know, all the things, it's calories in, calories out, what's my protein? And it eliminated all these silly paths. And it was like, hey, right to the point, you got this crazy goal. This is what you gotta do. It eliminated all these other options. Should I eat kiwi or fruit or it doesn't matter? Like I gotta do it, right? And so although it wasn't business or life, it was an impossible goal, impossible timeframe. I lost 22. Right. And by the way, feel great doing it and I'm gonna crush the 30 thing. The point is, is that maybe it is unhealthy. Maybe it's not even healthy to be a crazy entrepreneur all of your life.

• 48:22Ed Mylett?

  But if you're gonna be one, you might as well be crazy while you're doing it. Right. And so this stuff is true. The number one thing that crazy goal with the crazy timeframe did impossible. Eliminated all the options.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  It eliminated the weird options.

• 48:34Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  And you said it simplified your thinking.

• 48:36Ed Mylett?

  It focused me in on exactly what I needed to do. As opposed to going, and I know everyone's going, eh, that's so danger. Look, okay. All right. But listen, I didn't want to lose it over nine months when I could lose it in a month. Well, all you did was lose water. No, I didn't. I drank a ton of water. Trust me. I was so overweight. My body's like, please drop this weight. But the point being is that that impossible goal, impossible timeframe was actually easier, I think, than losing six pounds last month to your former theory or the current theory. I really believe me losing six pounds in a month would have been harder for me than just, I'm obsessed. And to the point is, I didn't do this casually.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:15Ed Mylett?

  Every second of the day, I'm thinking about babe, what's the, what's the caloric intake if I eat six green beans? Right. I'm literally, right. I'm, you know, 30 minutes of cardio. What's my heart rate need to be like? It's precise, right? But simple so that I could scale that thing in my life. All right. Last thing, I want to go back to some original work we do. This has been flipping awesome as usual. By the way, he's a founder of scaling.com too. And we're going to promote the book in a second and a minute. At the end of the book, you do this thing on holistic time and linear time. I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna throw two things at you.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 49:48Ed Mylett?

  What the heck is holistic time? Number one. And also, how does one know what frame they're operating on? So it's two totally disconnected questions, but I'm gonna let you run with it. In other words, if an entrepreneur is in here thinking, I don't, am I, what frame am I in? Am I in the past frame?

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:02Ed Mylett?

  Am I in the current frame or am I in the future frame? How do I know? And then just what the holistic time thing is, because I think it's a cool concept.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so holistic time, just to answer that, and then I'll tell you how you can know if you're operating from your past frame or your future frame. Holistic time is the psychological appreciation that the past, present, and future are all happening right now. So like psychologically, your past is shaping your present and your future is shaping your present. But what the research basically shows is that the future weighs 10 to 100x the past. Of course, the past impacts us, but we have the power to shape and reshape it continuously. And so rather than separating these things, like the past is way over here, it's outside of me and it's driving me, right? And the future's out there, I don't know it, it's just a recognition, all these things are happening now. And as I shape one, I reshape the other, right? And so that's holistic time.

• 50:45Ed Mylett?

  Got it.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  And the main insight, by the way of that, is that the future shapes the present and the present shapes the past. And that's a really important point.

• 50:52Ed Mylett?

  I remember this last time, it took me a little bit to process that, but he can prove it to you. It actually is true.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the future, and we've talked about this a lot, the future is the primary thing shaping everything about who you are and what you're doing, what, you know, what pathways you're taking in the present. If you move the goal much higher, most of what you'd be doing right now would be irrelevant, right? It'd be those wacky pathways you gotta get rid of. But also just the beauty of that it's always you in the present that shapes the meaning of your past. No matter what it was, it's all, and it is your responsibility in the present to reshape and redefine what it means. And it doesn't own you, you own it.

• 51:20Ed Mylett?

  I love it.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  And so that's holistic time.

• 51:22Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  And so you can know if you're operating linearly, again, or you're operating from your past, if you're pretty much just doing the same thing you were doing yesterday. And if you're not scaling, truly, if you're growing slow and if you have, if you have a lot of complexity, that story you gave of the person with the washing machines, that's a person stuck in their past. They're not moving quickly, they're not making big decisions. If you're operating from your future. There's a lot of courage. There's a lot of letting things go. There's a lot of disappointing people. There's a lot of simplifying systems and getting rid of stuff that is the legacy, which was awesome, but it's no longer relevant to the new future. So if you're in, if you're operating from the future, you're having to be a lot more truthful. You're having to make a lot of decisions in the present that are gonna,

• 52:03Speaker 01

  that are gonna disappoint the people that were from your past. But you're then gonna make better decisions. And if you do it in an honest and a respectful way, they'll get it because people appreciate honesty and they appreciate you just telling them the truth. And so, yeah, if you're operating from the future, every day looks and feels really different. Every day looks and feels really powerful and you start to see pathways to things that you thought were impossible. And you start to get there. You start, you start to have those regular experiences every day. You start to normalize it and you start to, you start to scale. Really, that's what you start to do is you start to just, your growth starts to get crazy.

• 52:37Ed Mylett?

  This is how you scale, it's how you scale your life. Every time I talk to you, I,

• 52:42Ed Mylett?

  I wanna run with you. Like, I wanna mentally run with you. I wanna get inside your brain. I wanna, you're, I wouldn't call you a contrarian thinker because that would make, it almost seems odd. It's not that. It's a,

• 52:55Ed Mylett?

  it's a big thinker. It's a future thinker. It's a creator type thinker, not a replicator type thinker. And I love that you back everything up with science and neuroscience. I love all of, everything you do. And I already know, I'm gonna get messages from my most successful business friends, listen to, it's gonna go, okay, this dude blew my mind again. That's what you do. You make, here's what you do. You make me think about how I think. And that's, that's very, very unusual, that someone can compel you to really think through, when you think you're not a limited thinker, maybe you are. When you think you're a great leader, maybe not so much. When you think you have a big vision, maybe you don't. And you make me challenge all of the,

• 53:40Ed Mylett?

  Things that are acceptable in my life that don't need to be that really are unacceptable. So, thank you. You're awesome.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Ed, speaking honestly, you are one of the funnest people to talk to. You serve it up so fun and so we just easily and you just, you just, you have powerful energy. So just thanks.

• 53:56Ed Mylett?

  Thank you. Well, bro, I love your work. Like I love your work. It's why you're back here again. By the way, guys, you gotta get the book. It's called The Science of Scaling. Dr. Benjamin Hardy. His books are great, you guys. Like it's not an, just an everyday read. I'm so sick of reading the same book over and over again with a different author and a different title. And when the reason I like Benjamin's stuff so much is like, it's not the same book. It's a different book than you've ever read before. So, go grab it, you guys. All right. God bless you. Max out your life. Share this episode.

• 54:29Ed Mylett?

  This is the Ed Miliband Show.