230: The Science of Scaling by Dr. Benjamin Hardy & Blake Erickson

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1. 00:00:00 All right, Mike. So we're going to start off with follow up. I'll start off.
2. 00:00:04 I had two items on follow up this time.
3. 00:00:06 If I had one year left in my career in life,
4. 00:00:08 how would I structure this month?
5. 00:00:11 And what I'll tell you is this was not a good experience
6. 00:00:16 because there is a lot that I would change.
7. 00:00:20 There was like a lot I would change.
8. 00:00:22 So I'm not going to get into the like the nitty gritty detail of all of the
9. 00:00:26 things I would change. I think that's a that's a conversation for another time.
10. 00:00:30 But doing it in its own made me really, really think about
11. 00:00:35 what am I doing right now with like day to day, hour to hour, kind of a thing.
12. 00:00:39 And do I need to make some adjustments in life and in
13. 00:00:45 kind of the way I the way I do things, the way I live.
14. 00:00:48 So that was not the most fun experience I've ever had.
15. 00:00:52 I can move forward or you can ask questions if you want to.
16. 00:00:56 I feel like we just got to have big picture.
17. 00:00:58 Why was it so uncomfortable?
18. 00:01:01 Because like I just think I would do things very differently.
19. 00:01:06 I think that I'm not lazy, lazy is not the right word.
20. 00:01:11 Complacent isn't even the right word.
21. 00:01:13 Those are two negative, but I'm comfortable where I am.
22. 00:01:18 And I think that if you gave me that timeline, that one year left in my life,
23. 00:01:24 in my career, I don't think I would want to do the comfortable thing.
24. 00:01:28 For the next year, I think I would want to basically burn the ships as they say.
25. 00:01:33 And I mean, just go out, go out guns of blazing.
26. 00:01:36 And then I think about like, OK, why, like, why am I not doing that right now?
27. 00:01:39 Like what is what's holding me back from that?
28. 00:01:41 And there's reasons, but what's holding me back from doing that right now.
29. 00:01:45 So that's like the highest level I'm willing to give in a public environment.
30. 00:01:50 Wow. OK, is this related to the the secret question you're going to ask me for the
31. 00:01:54 pro show?
32. 00:01:55 No, not really.
33. 00:01:56 No, it really isn't related to the secret question.
34. 00:01:58 It's more just a matter of, you know, just think about, you know, what you're
35. 00:02:03 doing every day and how you're doing it and what you would do different.
36. 00:02:07 So I mean, like one of the things is like I would, I would spend more time on
37. 00:02:12 very tall mountains.
38. 00:02:14 I really like spending time on very tall mountains and I don't do that enough.
39. 00:02:19 So how would I figure out a way to spend more time on very tall mountains?
40. 00:02:22 And then the problem that you have with that is, well, you have to work and you
41. 00:02:26 have to do things.
42. 00:02:27 You can't just spend all your time on very tall mountains.
43. 00:02:30 But I would think about how would I spend more time on really tall mountains?
44. 00:02:35 OK, OK, so my second one, my second one was to research a men's friendship group.
45. 00:02:41 I completely failed at this.
46. 00:02:43 I did not do this.
47. 00:02:44 And it's probably because, as I said, last time my semester is getting ready to start.
48. 00:02:49 And when my semester gets ready to start, you know, it's kind of all hands on deck.
49. 00:02:52 And my life goes from like zero to 150 really, really quickly.
50. 00:03:00 So I didn't research this one because I don't really have time to get involved
51. 00:03:04 in a men's friendship group right now other than the one I'm already involved in,
52. 00:03:07 which we we referenced in the last show.
53. 00:03:11 And that's that's the F3 group, which is like the exercise kind of men's hangout,
54. 00:03:16 hangout group that I'm part of.
55. 00:03:17 So so that one's already kind of checked the box and I didn't research any more.
56. 00:03:22 I can tell you that there aren't a lot from the little bit of research
57. 00:03:25 that I was able to do prior to our show last time.
58. 00:03:29 There wasn't a lot of men's friendship type groups around the Denver area.
59. 00:03:35 So I don't know if that's different in Wisconsin, but that was kind of the most
60. 00:03:38 I was able to get on that.
61. 00:03:40 How about you?
62. 00:03:40 Probably not, but you should totally start one.
63. 00:03:44 That's the problem is if I if I want to do it, I think I'm going to have to start it.
64. 00:03:48 And I don't want to start it unless we go back to my first action item,
65. 00:03:53 which is if I want left, but like, but again, all of those mean I leave my current role.
66. 00:03:59 And, you know, I'm not really that's not really realistic right now.
67. 00:04:03 You could start the fellowship of the really high mountain dwellers.
68. 00:04:07 The fellowship of the 14 years club.
69. 00:04:12 All right, so my action item was to do something to build a friendship.
70. 00:04:20 Proud to say I have completed the easiest action item I've ever given myself.
71. 00:04:26 So basically what this was was really just something to force me to think about
72. 00:04:31 reaching out to somebody who I typically wouldn't have.
73. 00:04:35 I get busy, especially now with soccer on top of everything else.
74. 00:04:40 A couple of our kids got roles in in the fall theater plays.
75. 00:04:44 So our life gets real busy for the next couple of months.
76. 00:04:48 So I had excuses, but I not only did this, but I also mentioned last time that I
77. 00:04:53 wanted to figure out some sort of system in order to do this more regularly.
78. 00:04:58 So I reached out to my friend, Jesse J Anderson.
79. 00:05:02 And I knew he was working on this app, which was going to help people with this
80. 00:05:08 exact thing.
81. 00:05:09 So I'll, I'll share the, the link here in the, uh, the show notes where for
82. 00:05:14 people who want to check this out, it's in beta, but he's given me access to it.
83. 00:05:18 And it's basically like a nice CRM, which kind of, it's, it's not as simple as it
84. 00:05:27 sounds because you could be like, Oh, well, just, you know, set reminders to
85. 00:05:30 check in with someone, but you can actually set like, I want to, I want to
86. 00:05:32 follow up with this person every so often.
87. 00:05:36 Like you can choose the, the frequency and you've got, you know,
88. 00:05:39 tags and things like that that you can, you can use to, to group people together.
89. 00:05:44 And then when you reach out to them, you basically, they call it sending a wave.
90. 00:05:48 Right.
91. 00:05:48 So you, uh, you, you basically like have this system that is built to help you follow
92. 00:05:55 up and be a better friend, uh, sibling, whatever.
93. 00:06:03 Like I'm hoping that you don't need this in order to connect with your spouse.
94. 00:06:06 But the, uh, that you can see that the website is, uh, is pretty well designed.
95. 00:06:13 And there's a lot of little things on here, like no guilt, no pressure.
96. 00:06:16 One of Jesse's other apps that he had worked on.
97. 00:06:18 He's not involved with anymore.
98. 00:06:20 Was this app called polar habits where like when you break the, the streak,
99. 00:06:24 it doesn't just delete everything.
100. 00:06:26 He had this kind of, you know, cool mechanism built in there where it stopped
101. 00:06:30 building, you know, your progress quite as fast, but it didn't like completely
102. 00:06:34 wipe out all your momentum because Jesse is the, he wrote a book on, um, ADHD.
103. 00:06:40 He was diagnosed as an adult.
104. 00:06:41 So he's kind of had to figure some of these things out and, uh, he's, he's built
105. 00:06:45 these, these systems along the way.
106. 00:06:46 So he kind of built this as a tool for himself.
107. 00:06:49 And I think it's pretty cool.
108. 00:06:51 Uh, it is going to be a paid product that it looks like.
109. 00:06:54 And I have no idea what they're actually going to try to charge for it, but I can
110. 00:06:57 tell you from playing with it that it is, it is pretty neat.
111. 00:07:00 And, uh, yeah, I'm going to continue to, to use this, you know, I'm, um, I'm going
112. 00:07:05 to hopefully keep this action item going.
113. 00:07:09 We don't need to follow up on it again, but I'm hoping there's enough momentum
114. 00:07:12 here that this is, uh, this just becomes a habit for me.
115. 00:07:15 Nice.
116. 00:07:16 And you said this is in beta right now.
117. 00:07:17 Yes.
118. 00:07:19 Do they have any, do they have any timeline?
119. 00:07:22 Uh, I don't know, but they have started, you know, I mentioned on the web page,
120. 00:07:27 they have started sending out invites to the people who sign up for the, they
121. 00:07:31 call it a want list instead of a wait list.
122. 00:07:35 So you can sign up for that.
123. 00:07:36 If you, uh, you want to get, get access.
124. 00:07:38 Like I said, the link will be in the show notes.
125. 00:07:40 Jesse is a friend of mine and I like what he makes.
126. 00:07:43 Nice.
127. 00:07:44 Very cool.
128. 00:07:46 Very cool.
129. 00:07:47 All right.
130. 00:07:47 Are we ready to talk about a book?
131. 00:07:50 I think so.
132. 00:07:51 Let's do it.
133. 00:07:53 All right, so today we are talking about the science of scaling and the subtitle
134. 00:07:59 of this is grow your business bigger and faster than you think possible.
135. 00:08:03 It's by Dr Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson.
136. 00:08:06 And what drew me to this book is this idea of growth and this idea of scaling.
137. 00:08:13 I'll, you know, freely admit that one of the big things was we think about the
138. 00:08:19 engineering program at CCU and we think about how do we grow the enrollment in
139. 00:08:22 the engineering program?
140. 00:08:23 And I was like, well, it's probably not business.
141. 00:08:26 Like they're thinking about it like business, but it's definitely something
142. 00:08:30 that needs to scale and I need to think hard about how we, how we help it scale.
143. 00:08:34 And it doesn't need to scale because, you know, pure financial reasons.
144. 00:08:38 It needs to scale because the, the growth of the program is healthy.
145. 00:08:42 So that's what kind of drew me to this.
146. 00:08:44 But then the side thing is something that Mike and I talk about all the time.
147. 00:08:48 It's like Mike and I are involved in these side projects.
148. 00:08:50 We're trying to create different ideas that we can communicate to people
149. 00:08:54 and they can use those ideas and share those ideas.
150. 00:08:58 And how do we, how do we scale those type of things as well?
151. 00:09:00 So I think this might be a little bit more on the nose with Mike and the stuff
152. 00:09:05 he's doing, you know, through practical PKM, but it was definitely applicable to me as well.
153. 00:09:10 So that's kind of what drew me into the book.
154. 00:09:12 The book is three different parts, six total chapters with an introduction and a conclusion.
155. 00:09:18 This might have been one of the fastest books I've ever read in my life.
156. 00:09:24 And I don't know if that's because of the way it was written or the structure.
157. 00:09:29 I mean, it was, it was shorter.
158. 00:09:31 It was a hundred and it was less than 200 pages, if you don't include the appendix.
159. 00:09:35 But at the same time, I just felt like I, I burned through this one and it, and it was a really quick read.
160. 00:09:42 So that's, that's kind of to set your stage.
161. 00:09:45 Mike, what were you thinking coming into to this one?
162. 00:09:49 Well, okay.
163. 00:09:51 So I have read several Dr. Benjamin Hardy books in the past, and I own more than I have read.
164. 00:10:03 I have always thought that the books that I have read, like the gap in the gain, were really good.
165. 00:10:10 And the gap in the gain specifically, that one was co-written with Dan Sullivan.
166. 00:10:16 He didn't really, he mentioned that he worked with Dan Sullivan a while back,
167. 00:10:21 but didn't really explain why he wasn't working with him anymore.
168. 00:10:26 So having that history, that was a question in the back of my mind as we went into the whole book.
169. 00:10:34 And I have, I guess at the beginning here, you know, I was a little bit skeptical.
170. 00:10:42 Anytime you've got a book that has the word science in the title, it feels like this has got to be heavily researched.
171. 00:10:53 There's got to be a whole bunch of case studies and Benjamin Hardy's books generally tend to be short
172. 00:11:01 and don't go into that level of depth.
173. 00:11:05 So yeah, I wasn't really sure what to expect from this.
174. 00:11:10 But I do like his, I've liked the style of the previous books that he's read, the gap in the gain.
175. 00:11:17 I think I recommended that one probably over a hundred times to people.
176. 00:11:22 So I was cautiously optimistic, but slightly hesitant, I'll say.
177. 00:11:32 OK, help me remember.
178. 00:11:35 I don't remember like Blake Erickson being much part of the the authorship of this book.
179. 00:11:42 Is that a memory of mine?
180. 00:11:44 He wasn't. In fact, in the conclusion, he they kind of get into that that story a bit.
181. 00:11:51 But yeah, I had the same same thought the whole time I'm going through this.
182. 00:11:54 I'm like, OK, so there's Dr. Benjamin Hardy, but where's this Blake guy?
183. 00:11:59 Yeah. OK. All right.
184. 00:12:01 So so I didn't I didn't remember that wrong.
185. 00:12:03 I was like, wait, I don't remember him.
186. 00:12:04 I remember feeling like or seeming like a Benjamin Hardy book and then and Blake Erickson at the same time.
187. 00:12:11 They are they are the founders of scaling.com together.
188. 00:12:14 And I think that's what brings Blake Erickson into this is the fact that they've done all this work together.
189. 00:12:19 And it might have been just one of those, hey, we've done so much together that I can't not include him.
190. 00:12:27 You know, in the authorship of this book.
191. 00:12:29 Well, so kind of he makes a very bold offer, which he gets into in the in the conclusion,
192. 00:12:38 which also is is reminiscent of what Dr. Benjamin Hardy did, I feel like with Dan Sullivan back in the day.
193. 00:12:46 So yeah, there's there's definitely some some nuance to that, which we should definitely unpack.
194. 00:12:52 But let's let's save that for the end.
195. 00:12:54 If you're cool with it, my brain totally blanked on that until you just said that.
196. 00:12:58 And I was like, I remember the offer now.
197. 00:13:00 I didn't remember the offer first.
198. 00:13:01 So we'll save that to the end.
199. 00:13:03 OK, so Tony Robbins does the forward of this book.
200. 00:13:07 I didn't think it was anything special.
201. 00:13:10 I thought it was interesting, you know, breakthroughs happen because you need something urgent and it's unreasonable and those kind of things.
202. 00:13:17 But I didn't really get much out of the forward.
203. 00:13:19 I don't know if you did or not now.
204. 00:13:21 So the Tony Robbins thing is interesting because Tony Robbins is like the biggest
205. 00:13:26 name you can possibly get, probably to write a forward for your book, but also like why?
206. 00:13:33 Yeah, what's the connection here?
207. 00:13:36 I mean, obviously he knows Dr. Benjamin Hardy in some way, shape or form.
208. 00:13:41 So I feel like rather than just a generic forward on like, hey, really scaling is important.
209. 00:13:46 This is, you know, I've scaled the biggest self development company in the world.
210. 00:13:50 It would have been cool to hear like a personal story about him and Dr.
211. 00:13:54 Benjamin Hardy and how they go way back and this thing happened.
212. 00:13:57 And that's why I've got to be the one to write this this forward.
213. 00:14:00 It feels like the forward could have been written by just about anyone.
214. 00:14:02 Yeah, I got the I got the same vibe.
215. 00:14:05 It was just it was written by Tony Robbins.
216. 00:14:08 OK, so let's move to the introduction.
217. 00:14:10 Then it's introduction is called the science of scaling.
218. 00:14:13 They he kicks off with a story of the space race and President Kennedy needing to kind of push things and really.
219. 00:14:22 This book reminds me of the thing we've said multiple times is the tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you just told them.
220. 00:14:32 Like, that's basically the nuts, the nuts and bolts of this book.
221. 00:14:36 But if you're going to do that on a topic called the science of scaling, shouldn't it be longer than two other pages?
222. 00:14:43 OK, OK, but it wasn't.
223. 00:14:45 So my point in saying it was this whole first chapter is here's what I'm going to tell you.
224. 00:14:51 And I'm going to use some examples and I'm going to give you that and I'll give you the highlight of it.
225. 00:14:55 There's a frame, there's a floor and there's a focus.
226. 00:14:58 Now, these are the three sections of the book.
227. 00:15:01 I told you it was a three part book.
228. 00:15:02 Well, there's a there's a part that's the frame.
229. 00:15:04 There's a part about the floor and there's a part about the focus.
230. 00:15:06 Each of those has two chapters in them.
231. 00:15:08 The frame is what you see.
232. 00:15:10 It's based on your goals.
233. 00:15:12 The floor is what you filter out.
234. 00:15:13 It's defining what you don't do and the focus is what you filter for.
235. 00:15:19 And that's the path and the partners and kind of the system that you develop in order in order to do things.
236. 00:15:25 Basically, that's the gist of the introduction is outlining those things and saying here's what I'm going to talk about.
237. 00:15:32 He makes the statement that the promise of this book is if you and this is I think this is a bold promise, a very bold promise.
238. 00:15:40 I'm going to read it verbatim apply the scaling framework and you'll scale your company bigger and faster than you think possible.
239. 00:15:48 OK, I mean, like that's a bold get out there and get it kind of claim at the very beginning.
240. 00:15:55 That said, they've got scaling.com and they've got a bunch of experience doing this.
241. 00:16:00 So they obviously have made it work or you wouldn't make that claim or he's just kind of, you know, blown smoke.
242. 00:16:07 So we'll see what we'll see what happens.
243. 00:16:09 But what do you think of it?
244. 00:16:10 What do you think of the introduction man?
245. 00:16:12 I don't know what to make of this introduction.
246. 00:16:14 I can tell you, I was not a big fan of the story, the president, John F. Kennedy setting the impossible goal getting to the moon first forcing that direct path.
247. 00:16:28 I feel like I've heard that story before and I mean, I guess it makes sense here, but it also when an author uses a story.
248. 00:16:42 Well, I feel like you kind of don't know where it's going and then they set it up and then they make their important point and it kind of like causes something to go on inside of you.
249. 00:16:54 This one was kind of like they could have used it.
250. 00:16:56 They could have not used it.
251. 00:16:57 It's almost like that's the science part there.
252. 00:16:59 This is a historical event that happened.
253. 00:17:03 So you can trust me.
254. 00:17:05 He also mentions a quote from Elon Musk, which he comes back to at the end.
255. 00:17:11 I don't remember if that was a conclusion or maybe that was just part three.
256. 00:17:16 The most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist.
257. 00:17:20 And I agree with that quote, the story that he tells later on in the book about how he took over Twitter and all of the changes he made, you know, letting all the the staff go, he uses it to support the point that like he got to focus on the real essential stuff.
258. 00:17:39 But I wouldn't exactly say that Twitter has scaled since he took it over.
259. 00:17:43 So I don't know.
260. 00:17:45 It just feels even from the very beginning here with this President John F Kennedy story that these data points or, you know, supporting arguments, they don't really click for me.
261. 00:17:57 Maybe part of that is because he's going to go hard on goals and the importance of goals.
262. 00:18:02 Your entire reality is filtered by your goals and I'm on record as having issues with goals.
263. 00:18:09 I think he uses them and defines them and talks about them effectively in this book.
264. 00:18:14 And I think, you know, there is good that comes from having those sorts of things and the idea of like setting these goals that are impossible to achieve.
265. 00:18:24 So it forces you to do something different.
266. 00:18:27 You know, that is, I think, a powerful idea.
267. 00:18:30 It's also not original. It comes from another book that he wrote called 10 X is easier than 2 X with Dan Sullivan.
268. 00:18:41 Where the whole idea is like, if you're going to do 2 X, you can just get more efficient and optimize what you're currently doing.
269. 00:18:48 If you're going to do 10 X, you got to completely change the way that you think about things.
270. 00:18:52 And that's really the point that he's driving at and kind of the crux that he gets to whenever he shares stories of interactions he has with people.
271. 00:18:59 So I don't know what to think at this point to tell you the truth.
272. 00:19:03 I think I like the scaling framework, the frame, floor and focus.
273. 00:19:07 I think those three things are are pretty good.
274. 00:19:09 But other than that, a lot of fluff in this introduction for me.
275. 00:19:14 All right, so you you brought it up.
276. 00:19:15 I wasn't going to do it, but you brought it up.
277. 00:19:17 The whole, the most common mistake, the must quote of a smart engineer is optimized.
278. 00:19:22 I think it should not exist.
279. 00:19:23 I have a fundamental problem with that having worked as an engineer before, because I would at times be asked to optimize things.
280. 00:19:31 And nobody cared whether I thought they should exist or not.
281. 00:19:35 Like that is for that's for the CEO.
282. 00:19:38 That's for the chief product officer.
283. 00:19:40 That's for like these people who are in much higher positions.
284. 00:19:43 They would then just tell me like, Hey, make this the best thing that it can be.
285. 00:19:46 And I and like when I came back to them or if I would ever come back to them and be like, Hey, this is a bad idea.
286. 00:19:51 Like we just shouldn't do this. They would be like, we don't care.
287. 00:19:54 This is what we're doing because I'm the chief, whatever, whatever.
288. 00:19:59 So I have like, I had a fundamental problem with that, that quote.
289. 00:20:02 I agree that in like an ideal world, you wouldn't do the things that don't matter.
290. 00:20:07 I agree with that.
291. 00:20:08 Like that premise makes total sense, but just that rubbed me the wrong way.
292. 00:20:13 So all right, we're belittling that we should move on.
293. 00:20:16 Yeah, let's go to go to part one.
294. 00:20:18 So actually, I guess we should talk about the format of the book or this.
295. 00:20:21 There's, let's see, three different parts and introduction and conclusion.
296. 00:20:25 Each part only has two chapters to chat.
297. 00:20:27 So it's almost like why even have the parts, but well, it does.
298. 00:20:32 I've heard you talk about this before where, you know, your standard business books have three parts and multiple chapters within each.
299. 00:20:39 And it's all symmetrical. So I mean, he was fitting that mold.
300. 00:20:42 Yeah, I guess I do think that the chapters and the like the order that they go in, they do build on each other pretty well.
301. 00:20:51 But yeah, the different parts maybe aren't three different parts in a less than 200 page book just feels weird.
302. 00:21:00 All right, so part one is change your frame.
303. 00:21:02 Chapter one was set a goal so big, you think it's impossible.
304. 00:21:06 The intention of this entire chapter is to push you to think beyond the status quo, to think bigger than what you normally normally think.
305. 00:21:21 Mike, we get into goals.
306. 00:21:23 So I was curious as I was reading, I was like, OK, I don't know how Mike's going to handle this.
307. 00:21:29 Like, I don't know what he's going to do because I do understand or I've heard you discuss your idea with goals, but many, many times.
308. 00:21:36 I like the premise of this though, and the reason why I like the premise of this is because I think it's so easy as I was describing before to get comfortable and your goal that you set is like a it's a marginal goal.
309. 00:21:51 You know, oh, what are we going to do? We're going to small growth, small growth, small growth, or I'm going to try to do this thing. That's just a little bit.
310. 00:21:59 And I think what he's trying to do is he's trying to shock the system and he's trying to say, hey, you got to think much, much bigger.
311. 00:22:06 This is why I didn't, I saw the connection to the president Kennedy and space race thing is because we were trying to do something that had never really been done before, put a person on the moon.
312. 00:22:20 OK, yeah, like that's that seems like an impossible goal.
313. 00:22:22 So I got the connection that was was trying to be made there, getting back to the kind of the structure and what was covered in the chapter.
314. 00:22:30 So he establishes what impossible goals are. He then talks about what kind of the mistakes people make as they try to set goals and he outlines four of them avoid explicit goal setting altogether set low and achievable goals because of fear and failure.
315. 00:22:49 Avoid the reality of trade offs and opportunity costs with conflicting goals and then pursue and even can succeed in the wrong goals.
316. 00:22:56 So wrong goals, trade offs with conflicting goals, low and achievable goals and then explicit goals.
317. 00:23:03 Now, at this point, I'm going to turn it over to you and I'm going to say, Mike, what is your thought on the first chapter and impossible goals?
318. 00:23:11 Well, I actually don't have as much of an issue with this as maybe you think I do because he makes an important point here where he says it's impossible not to have goals.
319. 00:23:22 So what he's talking about with goals is different than the traditional smart goals, although the way he describes them and the four mistakes that he shares, I feel like you can kind of fill in the blanks and see that he leans that way.
320. 00:23:37 And that I think I probably would disagree a little bit with, but I think I generally agree with his premise, you know, an impossible goal is when you don't know how to reach one that requires radically new approach and paths to realize.
321. 00:23:51 So if you don't get clear on what you're trying to do, you're not going to create a new way of working that's going to help you get there.
322. 00:24:00 Like, you have to have some sort of clarity and vision for that.
323. 00:24:05 And I do want to say I really like and agree with the general premise set a goal so big.
324. 00:24:12 You think it's impossible that is part of the life theme process that I walk people through in the life theme cohort that's in the library.
325. 00:24:19 There's an entire step there, step two devoted to, okay, now, whatever you were thinking about dream bigger, what would you do if you couldn't fail?
326. 00:24:28 And having that permission to think big usually is scary for some people because they've not done it before.
327. 00:24:37 And once people do it, it tends to be exciting because you give yourself permission to think about a better future.
328. 00:24:45 Maybe it's the first time you really thought about it, the clearer that picture becomes, the more exciting it becomes, the more it draws you.
329. 00:24:51 So that's a great way to start this book, to be honest.
330. 00:24:55 But yeah, I rankle with the term goals, but not the concepts that he's talking about here.
331. 00:25:04 You know, when he talks about goals, he says the purpose is to filter decisions, remove that end distraction,
332. 00:25:09 and enable you to find the most powerful paths you otherwise couldn't feel like it's hard to disagree with that statement.
333. 00:25:16 Yeah, I think he talks about the fact that human behavior is driven by goals, and I think that's very, very accurate.
334. 00:25:25 But I think I would, how do I say, soften it maybe, or I would change it up to a little bit to say human motivation is driven by goals.
335. 00:25:34 I think we can go human behavior is driven by goals and habits.
336. 00:25:40 And like, I think if we did that, that would make a lot more sense.
337. 00:25:42 But he's going to tie that in later on to the systems that you develop as well.
338. 00:25:47 So I think there's more connection there than he explicitly writes about, but that's like kind of where my change of thinking comes in.
339. 00:25:57 But I do agree, like, if I think about the things I want to do, I usually write them first as some sort of a goal that I'm trying to achieve.
340. 00:26:04 And then I think about like, how do I achieve that in the every day, smaller, smaller bits.
341. 00:26:09 One of the questions I have for you, you know, you said about the science thing.
342. 00:26:14 He describes a key point, which I completely agree with, choose the right metric to optimize for.
343. 00:26:19 It will, you know, it's costly if you don't kind of a thing, so you measure what matters.
344. 00:26:24 He says that the research on impossible goals is clear, that if we're an impossible goal to be effective, it must be outcome or performance based.
345. 00:26:33 What do you think about that?
346. 00:26:35 I'm not sure.
347. 00:26:38 I think if you're trying to scale a business, you could be right.
348. 00:26:46 I don't necessarily think that that is the most important thing to be optimizing for necessarily.
349. 00:26:55 So maybe it's not always true.
350. 00:27:00 But yeah, I don't know. I don't like thinking about the outcome as much because you can't control it.
351. 00:27:10 And if you are focused on the outcome, what happens when you when it takes longer than you think it will is you you get discouraged and you feel like you just want to give up.
352. 00:27:22 I have been there multiple times in my brief stint as a independent creator.
353. 00:27:29 And each time it's like, you got to figure out, well, what are we actually what do we actually believe here? Where are we actually going?
354. 00:27:36 You know, I think that's really what he's talking about there is, you know, have a clear idea of where you're going.
355. 00:27:41 And I don't think you need to have a specific outcome in mind that you just got to know these are the levers that I want to pull.
356. 00:27:47 He talks in the first chapter here about you can't scale a complex system.
357. 00:27:51 You do have to get clear on what are the things that are important.
358. 00:27:54 And I can tell you just as an as an example, you know, as an independent creator, you hear people doing TikTok, you're people doing LinkedIn and you're like, oh, I should totally be on that platform.
359. 00:28:05 You know, but I I really believe I've heard this advice from a couple different people, one platform, one customer, one product, until you reach a million dollars in revenue.
360. 00:28:17 Like you don't need to be everywhere, you need to really do a good job where you decide to be. If you spread yourself too thin, you know, you're not going to scale to borrow his term.
361. 00:28:28 So what I've done is I've decided YouTube's my platform doesn't mean I'm not going to show up on those other platforms, but they are secondary.
362. 00:28:35 They're nice to have if I have time, I'll I'll devil with LinkedIn because I see potential there, but my core growth engine is YouTube.
363. 00:28:43 That's where people find me. And then from there, I I offer the free obsidian's practical PPM starter vault.
364. 00:28:51 So they download the starter vault, they get on the email list.
365. 00:28:54 And that's the thing that drives the sales of the products, like that is the simple version of this YouTube email product.
366. 00:29:01 And I can tell you that just in like the last several weeks, I've been publishing a short every day throughout the month of August.
367. 00:29:09 And I have almost doubled my my views.
368. 00:29:15 The watch time is is up quite a bit. The email list growth is up quite a bit.
369. 00:29:21 And I attribute that to just getting laser focused on, you know, forget all the tech space stuff, videos, my thing, YouTube is my place.
370. 00:29:28 What's the best thing I can do here and having that focus?
371. 00:29:31 But the goal is not, you know, to get the silver play button when I hit a hundred thousand subscribers.
372. 00:29:37 I would love to do that. I think I will do that at some point.
373. 00:29:39 But thinking about that actually is discouraging.
374. 00:29:42 There's not something I can do that's going to allow me to grow a 10 times faster YouTube.
375. 00:29:48 I have to make good stuff. That's literally it, you know, make a hundred videos.
376. 00:29:53 That's what what people tell you.
377. 00:29:55 And then you'll you'll have an idea of what you actually want to make.
378. 00:29:59 So that's what we're doing. We're just focusing on that.
379. 00:30:01 And then the if I focus on what I can control, the lead measures, the leg measures are going to take care of themselves.
380. 00:30:08 Yes, see, and the reason why I asked the question is because I think this contradicts some of the stuff that I I do in my engineering world and in my systems engineering world, where your goal is continuous improvement.
381. 00:30:21 Your goal is something like Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, something like that.
382. 00:30:25 So it is learning and it is process based like that is what you're trying to do.
383. 00:30:31 You can't lose the outcome, you know, so I can't lose my quality metric.
384. 00:30:37 But if I'm not paying attention to my learning metric or my process based metric, it's hard to hit that quality that outcome metric.
385. 00:30:44 So I guess I'm torn.
386. 00:30:46 I think my thing here is I'm torn.
387. 00:30:48 I don't think what he's saying is wrong.
388. 00:30:51 I just think there's more nuance and this is where we get back to the idea of could have could this have been a longer than 200 page book.
389. 00:31:00 And I think it could have because he could have unpacked some of those.
390. 00:31:04 So there's nuance ideas.
391. 00:31:05 Well, I mean, yeah, it definitely could have.
392. 00:31:08 And there's a whole bunch of just natural counter arguments to the things that he's sharing here, which I don't necessarily think.
393. 00:31:17 I keep saying he I should say they because there is a co-author here.
394. 00:31:22 They they like they address every single one of them.
395. 00:31:28 I don't think the I wouldn't want to read the book that talks about.
396. 00:31:33 Well, you know, counter argument to this would be agile methodology and scrum.
397. 00:31:37 And this is better because X and so what that does is it leaves the question for someone who actually is a fan of of scrum.
398. 00:31:45 Like, well, you know, I don't quite see how this thing fits with that thing.
399. 00:31:51 And it can, you know, he doesn't explicitly address it.
400. 00:31:55 But I think in general, you know, if you're asking me, which as someone who's just starting off with something, you know, assuming that you don't have any sort of background or context, like, I just want to become successful as quickly as possible.
401. 00:32:10 What's the shortest path to do that?
402. 00:32:11 I would say I would say follow scrum, to be honest, you know, set your your sprint window.
403. 00:32:16 Maybe it's two weeks.
404. 00:32:18 Pick the things you're going to work on, focus on those ship them, right? Figure out your baseline in terms of what you are actually able to do and then try to ratchet that up just a little bit every single time.
405. 00:32:29 And if you do that, I think the score takes care of itself.
406. 00:32:33 And that's not what he would say, which is, which is really, really interesting or not what they would say.
407. 00:32:38 All right.
408. 00:32:38 We got to move to chapter two, chapter two, set a timeline to so short, you think it's impossible.
409. 00:32:45 All right. So now not only are we setting an impossible goal, but now we're going to set a very, very tight timeline.
410. 00:32:53 And what's interesting about this is there is no, not surprisingly, there is no, like, it should be a week.
411. 00:32:59 It should be two weeks.
412. 00:33:00 It should be whatever, you know, whatever it is, because it depends on what your impossible goal is, but the key is, is it short?
413. 00:33:07 And he says in this chapter, your future is a power tool to improve your present.
414. 00:33:12 So you're thinking about where you want to be in the future, which means you're going to adjust your daily activities today.
415. 00:33:19 And if you tighten that timeline down, OK, this is good.
416. 00:33:24 I get the idea, but man, when the rubber meets the road on this one, I, I just like this one's really, really hard.
417. 00:33:32 There's there's so much out of my control unless I am a solo entrepreneur.
418. 00:33:38 Like, I can set a two week timeline for something that relies on somebody that's going to take four weeks.
419. 00:33:45 Yeah, you know, when I get feedback, you're in an interesting situation.
420. 00:33:49 Like, I don't think he anticipated a whole lot of college professors are going to pick up this book as valid.
421. 00:33:57 So I think his, his audience is the, the entrepreneur.
422. 00:34:01 If you're not at the top level of your organization, you maybe want the organization to grow, but
423. 00:34:09 you don't really care if it scales and you certainly don't care how quickly it scales.
424. 00:34:13 The people who care how much something scales are the people who have, well, I guess, if you're like in a startup and you're trying to, you know, get an exit and everybody's got equity in the company.
425. 00:34:22 Maybe you, you have that, that sort of scenario, but it's the people who are going to make the most money when the company is sold.
426. 00:34:28 They're the ones who really care.
427. 00:34:30 And so there's a whole different, you know, set of questions to be asked there.
428. 00:34:34 Do you want to have a big company?
429. 00:34:36 Do you want to have a lifestyle business?
430. 00:34:38 I probably lean more towards the lifestyle business than build a big, you know, big, whatever.
431. 00:34:44 However, I will say that this chapter, I think provoked me to think about things differently than most out of any of the chapters in the book.
432. 00:34:53 So I actually like this one a lot.
433. 00:34:55 Now, I don't have a timeline for my goal that is impossible to achieve.
434. 00:35:00 I don't have something specific.
435. 00:35:01 Like I'm going to hit, you know, 10,000 email subscribers in the next 30 days.
436. 00:35:06 Because again, you know, that thought exercise, I went through it and I just feel like that's not really that helpful for me.
437. 00:35:13 I see you waving your, I'm doing it.
438. 00:35:15 I'm calling a timeout.
439. 00:35:16 I need you to talk about here because I was going to ask you this at the end of part one, but I'll ask you now because you started to bring it up.
440. 00:35:22 You just throughout the 10,000 email subscribers in 30 days.
441. 00:35:26 Do you believe that 10,000 email subscribers is an impossible goal?
442. 00:35:30 And do you believe that 30 days is an impossible timeline?
443. 00:35:34 Um, yes, currently, it's not, um, it's, it's not a truly impossible goal, which I think is kind of his point.
444. 00:35:48 Like you take this impossible goal and then you figure out how can we make it possible.
445. 00:35:52 But that's also not the one that inspires me to take action either.
446. 00:35:59 So I got a couple of, uh, nice notes from people after I, I shared some of the, the struggles that I was, I was going through in the last episode.
447. 00:36:08 So just as a follow up to that, I guess, my, like, impossible goal would be something like all of the debt is paid off by the end of the year.
448. 00:36:19 And, um,
449. 00:36:21 And is that, is that an impossible timeline too?
450. 00:36:23 By the end of the year, uh, if you look at the graphs, yeah.
451. 00:36:28 But here's, here's why I'm asking the question is because I went through this thought exercise in my mind.
452. 00:36:34 And I actually kind of had a hard time thinking of a goal that was impossible and thinking of a timeline that was impossible and being like, okay with that or being comfortable with that.
453. 00:36:45 I didn't want to set it as an action item, but like, I'm, I'm trying to get feedback from you as I think through.
454. 00:36:49 Yeah, is it, is it like a hundred students by the fall of 26?
455. 00:36:53 You know, like, what is my impossible, my impossible timeline?
456. 00:36:55 So that's where this is all coming from.
457. 00:36:57 Like, I just want to get to it.
458. 00:36:59 So I can just kind of walk through this, I guess, and, and you can poke at it and maybe figure out a way to apply this to your, your situation, I guess.
459. 00:37:11 But when I think about, you know, all that, that, that is paid off by the end of the year, the company is completely profitable from that point forward.
460. 00:37:22 I know that growing the email list is the biggest lever towards sustainable creator business that I can, I can pull.
461. 00:37:32 If I just continue to do what I can to grow the email list, that's, you know, if I had to pick one thing to focus on, that would be the thing.
462. 00:37:42 However, there are other, other things that other possibilities that get opened when you choose a goal, like a revenue goal, as opposed to the number of email subscribers, which is actually more helpful in my situation because that's really what I'm after.
463. 00:38:01 So what could I do to make more money?
464. 00:38:06 I could launch more products, I could do a whole bunch of things, which technically, you know, without getting into the specifics would actually look like distractions, right?
465. 00:38:17 If I just, you know, focused on life HQ, that would be the thing.
466. 00:38:20 That's my biggest product, my signature product.
467. 00:38:23 But I'm thinking about this revenue goal, it's like, well, if I just continue to sell life HQ, that's not going to get me there quick enough, right?
468. 00:38:31 So what are the other things that I could do for the person who life HQ is, you know, the ideal customer for life HQ?
469. 00:38:38 Why are they buying it?
470. 00:38:39 They want to use their PKM system to do what?
471. 00:38:43 And I have actually the last couple of, of newsletters.
472. 00:38:49 I have teased a creator business accelerator, and I have a bunch of people who have clicked to join that, that wait list, basically, I'm sort of feeling it out to see if there's enough.
473. 00:39:01 Interest, but early indications are, yes, there is.
474. 00:39:06 So what could I offer at a high ticket, you know, for, for somebody that would, that would be valuable, not just something I can charge a lot of money for, but obviously would, would contribute a bunch of value.
475. 00:39:16 So I'll, I'll just, I don't want to spoil your, your secret question at the end.
476. 00:39:22 I'm trying to figure out what exactly that is.
477. 00:39:24 Maybe this is related.
478. 00:39:25 So you can tell me to, to put a pin in this, but this business accelerator idea, you know, this would be a.
479. 00:39:32 Thousand, two thousand dollar, you know, program, because it would help people walk through all of the different parts of the process, pick a platform, pick a niche, show up, build an audience, build trust, sell a digital product, and ultimately, I would love to have some sort of guarantee.
480. 00:39:50 I'm really like hesitant on this part, but I would love to be able to say, okay, this thing is going to be two thousand dollars.
481. 00:39:56 I'm going to work with you for a quarter and you're going to make at least two thousand dollars by the end of the quarter.
482. 00:40:02 If you do everything, otherwise, you know, I'm going to continue to work, work with you until you, the program is paid for itself.
483. 00:40:08 You know, that would be pretty cool.
484. 00:40:10 Right.
485. 00:40:10 Yeah, it would be cool.
486. 00:40:12 And so like, that's the sort of thing that I feel like I wouldn't have considered if I wasn't thinking about the impossible goal with the impossible timeline.
487. 00:40:23 But I think there's a lot of nuance here in choosing the right goal and choosing the right timeline.
488. 00:40:30 Like I said, the email subscribers, that technically is a goal, but that one, it's hard to even describe how non-motivating that is.
489. 00:40:38 Yeah.
490. 00:40:40 And ultimately, and usually I would tell people don't pick a revenue goal because you really can't control that leg measure.
491. 00:40:48 So I kind of don't even know how to describe to the people listening how you would do this effectively other than you kind of got to try some different things out.
492. 00:40:58 And then you'll find one, I think that that clicks or resonates, but.
493. 00:41:03 OK, that makes sense.
494. 00:41:04 So yeah, we're going to get into more of this later, but not not fully, but we'll get into more of this later.
495. 00:41:11 OK, I do have to point out chapter two, though, on page 68.
496. 00:41:16 Do you have your do you have a physical book with you this time?
497. 00:41:18 No, Mike, I don't read physical books.
498. 00:41:20 You did last time I saw it.
499. 00:41:21 I know, I know, but I don't read them often, but I can get to the physical copy of it.
500. 00:41:26 No, that's that's OK.
501. 00:41:28 By the way, side note, Corey texted me after he was here and we recorded in person last time.
502. 00:41:33 And he said, my book, my library book fell out of my bag at the airport.
503. 00:41:38 I almost lost it.
504. 00:41:39 Another another vote for digital books, and I told him that he's just not used to having a physical book as part of his everyday.
505. 00:41:47 Kerry, he really should.
506. 00:41:51 But on page 68, there is a pretty big typo in the physical version that I have.
507. 00:41:58 They they it must have been like Grammarly or something because I've seen this happen to me when I edit stuff online.
508. 00:42:06 There was a word journaling which got broken apart and they so it's like J.O.U.R.
509. 00:42:12 and then the word than and then couple of spaces in.
510. 00:42:17 And I have no idea how a typo like that ships in a book like this.
511. 00:42:24 I didn't notice that.
512. 00:42:25 Yeah, I mean, I I don't know.
513. 00:42:30 I I want to write a book.
514. 00:42:31 I know nothing about the, you know, the publishing process, though.
515. 00:42:36 But like that sort of thing, it's it's not even just a, you know, I spelled a word wrong.
516. 00:42:42 It's I used an AI tool to fix things and it messed it up worse.
517. 00:42:48 Yeah.
518. 00:42:48 How does that get through?
519. 00:42:51 Yeah, I mean, like, so I think people are relying on things a little too much in terms of like automated systems now and they're not going back and doing that extra check.
520. 00:43:00 And I wouldn't even put this on the authors.
521. 00:43:01 I'd put this on the publisher.
522. 00:43:03 Yes, they're not going back to to do this.
523. 00:43:06 There's extra checks and it's probably it's because they're resource strapped.
524. 00:43:09 But OK, so the net result for a book called the science of scaling is her ability has now dipped.
525. 00:43:16 Yeah, I agree.
526. 00:43:17 I agree.
527. 00:43:18 So the last item I'll add in chapter two is basically the purpose of the impossible goal,
528. 00:43:23 the purpose of the impossible deadline is that it encourages you.
529. 00:43:27 I'll say it that way.
530. 00:43:28 It encourages you to filter out anything that's not going to let you hit that
531. 00:43:33 goal at that deadline.
532. 00:43:35 The reason why I brought that up was because that's the perfect transition into the second part of the book, which is basically raise your floor.
533. 00:43:42 So part two is raise your floor.
534. 00:43:44 There's there's two chapters in it as well.
535. 00:43:46 Chapter three is be more honest with yourself and quit the wrong stuff faster.
536. 00:43:50 So it's this idea of filtering.
537. 00:43:52 So we roll right into OK, you've got this impossible goal.
538. 00:43:56 You've now got this impossible deadline.
539. 00:44:00 Essentially get rid of everything else that doesn't allow you to hit that goal on that deadline.
540. 00:44:08 He asked questions that I think are really, really good that like I turn into action items.
541. 00:44:12 So here's my first action item out of this book.
542. 00:44:14 What are you still saying?
543. 00:44:15 Yes, too, that you know is below the floor and that is costing you far more than you're willing to admit, right?
544. 00:44:21 So OK, like we got to think about that.
545. 00:44:23 I'll give my first I don't know if this is my first major criticism, but I think it's my first major criticism of the book.
546. 00:44:29 I don't like the idea of the floor at all.
547. 00:44:32 Yeah, he talks about raise your floor.
548. 00:44:35 I understand what he's saying conceptually.
549. 00:44:37 I get it right like raise your floor, but man, I just don't like it.
550. 00:44:41 Like I think it's clunky.
551. 00:44:43 I think it reads funny.
552. 00:44:45 I think it talks funny even in that question that is below your floor.
553. 00:44:49 Like I just think it's a it's a strange phrasing that I'm not I'm not a big fan of anyhow.
554. 00:44:56 So we'll move on from that.
555. 00:44:57 But basically, you know, he then goes into once you raise your floor, it allows you to increase transparency and accountability, then you can't keep holding on to these other things and that this is the essential thing that you need in order to scale.
556. 00:45:11 So basically, if you're going to scale, I would say chapter three hits the hardest, you know, point or not the hardest point, but his most important point is if you're going to scale anything, you've got to get rid of all the cruft.
557. 00:45:25 You've got to get rid of everything that doesn't that's going to get in the way of your impossible goal in your in your timeline.
558. 00:45:31 That's kind of my gist for chapter three.
559. 00:45:34 Yeah, so I have experienced both as director of operations for the family business.
560. 00:45:43 And then I was an integrator at a digital marketing agency.
561. 00:45:47 So I have maybe a little bit of different context for the floor.
562. 00:45:53 I understand what he's saying when he says that.
563. 00:45:58 And I agree with the general argument that you got to get rid of this stuff that's not contributing.
564. 00:46:06 I mean, when I was working with the digital marketing agency, that was basically the big project that I got tasked with kind of unexpectedly at the beginning was, okay, we got to figure this stuff out.
565. 00:46:19 And so, okay, who are they actually profitable clients? Who are the ones that are unprofitable? Why are they unprofitable? Oh, it's this type of work. We shouldn't be doing that.
566. 00:46:29 You know, that's exactly what he's talking about. So I get where he's coming from here.
567. 00:46:34 I also don't really like it. I think it's a little bit too aggressive. There are certain situations when, yeah, like you got to cut all the cruft.
568. 00:46:41 And if you really want to scale, maybe you do have to have that approach all the time.
569. 00:46:46 However, if I'm going to follow the advice in this chapter, I am going to instantly delete every single product from my portfolio except Life HQ, and that's not happening because it's part of a bigger vision.
570. 00:47:00 So again, there's another model that comes in here, which seems contradictory to what he's talking about. It's not necessarily, but the way he describes it, it is.
571. 00:47:10 I've got a couple different products and I'll again, just talk about my stuff as an example. So my whole business model basically is YouTube, email list, the way they get on the email list is the starter vault.
572. 00:47:21 And then when you're on the email list, the first like real product I'm trying to sell is Life HQ.
573. 00:47:27 That's a one time purchase. And then the thing above that is really the library at this point. So the membership, the cohorts and things are part of that.
574. 00:47:37 The accelerator program would be something separate, but they're all going up in terms of price and hopefully value for the right person. They're not for everybody, but they are providing something for my ideal customer that can meet a need that they have at the next level of their journey.
575. 00:47:57 So it's not, you know, they're spread out wide and they aren't focused and they're serving different groups, different people. And I got to figure out, you know, where's the product market fit?
576. 00:48:11 The product market fit is evidenced by Life HQ.
577. 00:48:15 If I were to take this advice, though, from a operational standpoint, I would immediately shut down the library because it's really not profitable yet. However, it's gaining traction and it's a long term play.
578. 00:48:29 I have a vision for what this thing is going to be. And it's part of what Nathan Barry would call a skyscraper. He had a, I think a blog post, maybe a podcast episode, I'll try and dig it up for the show notes, but I have no idea where I first came across this idea.
579. 00:48:45 I know he's the one that said it though, where if you're trying to build a digital business, a lot of people will build strip malls. So they're very wide. They're not very tall and people can just buy, you know, whatever the heck they, they want from that, that a lot of different offerings.
580. 00:49:03 And he was advocating for a skyscraper where you are serving one specific person, but you are always providing them another level. And so that's really what I'm trying to do for people who want to use PKM to be creative.
581. 00:49:16 And I would argue the more I get into this creator world, the more I like it, the more I see that it actually aligns with my personal story where I didn't think I was creative and now I do it for a living.
582. 00:49:29 Like I want to help people do that sort of thing. I struggle a little bit with the imposter syndrome, because as I mentioned, you know, I'm still working through some stuff, but I have, on the other hand, like I've done the thing and I have the, the, and when I actually make a list of, you know, what have I actually accomplished?
583. 00:49:47 There are things I could put on that sales page that are pretty compelling. I just have trouble focusing and saying that because I'm in the middle of it right now.
584. 00:49:56 So that's my, my thought about this is like, I think it's generally maybe good advice, but it's specifically for me, not the right advice for me.
585. 00:50:06 Okay, all right. So this is good. This, I'm going to give a counter to this that is very different than the context you're in.
586. 00:50:15 I am thinking about scaling from a increase the enrollment in the engineering program perspective, right? How do we scale that? And this stuff starts to immediately break down, right? Like get rid of everything. I can't get rid of everything else.
587. 00:50:29 Yeah, I literally cannot get rid of everything else. And then if I did get rid of everything else, now the only thing I'm focused on is scaling, scaling the engineering program and I'm going to tell you that's kind of boring.
588. 00:50:42 Like, that's not the most exciting thing I've ever thought of in my life. Would, would that be the best thing for the CCU engineering program? Yes, it would, right? Like that would, it would be great. I shouldn't say the best because, you know, I need to definitely do my teaching, you know, because that's, you know, serving the students that are there.
589. 00:51:00 But do you know what I mean? Like, this is where this starts to break down for me. And you had said it before. I don't think I'm the target audience for this, but it's important for different audiences and getting perspective on, on different audiences as you.
590. 00:51:12 As you think through these different things. So I just have a, I like the idea. If you could just get rid of everything else, except be laser focused on the possible goal and the timeline. Yeah, I like that idea.
591. 00:51:25 I just don't know if it's that realistic for people that aren't in the C suite of some small to medium sized organization.
592. 00:51:37 Yeah, and that's the challenge with this book is that it is hard to generalize, I think, but it's in the subtitle.
593. 00:51:44 So it's not, you know, deceptive, grow your business bigger and faster than you think possible.
594. 00:51:50 That's valid.
595. 00:51:51 And that is not to say that the, the concepts cannot be translated, but yeah, you're going to have to figure out how to apply it in your situation.
596. 00:51:59 And I think the general advice is probably more directly addressed by people like Cal Newport, maybe where he talks about deep focus and slow productivity.
597. 00:52:13 And like the biggest argument or comment that he gets on his, his podcast is, well, that sounds great, but I don't have control my day.
598. 00:52:23 I'm not the decision maker. So how do I apply this? And he basically says, start where you are with what you have and carve out little, little places where you can apply the principles.
599. 00:52:35 As you start to gain some momentum, you do the quality work, you'll get more leverage because people won't want to lose you, you know, what you're doing is working.
600. 00:52:44 And I think there is a path for that sort of thing here. So if you were going to own like one small piece of the engineering project portfolio and just control that, that would be the place where I would say, okay, let's get laser focused on this is the one thing.
601. 00:53:02 Because you can always break it down and you can always roll it back up. Really, what you want to do is distill it down into the simplest thing to focus on and then just really do whatever you can to move the ball forward in that specific area.
602. 00:53:16 And then once you get some results, you can figure out how to maybe apply that a little bit more more broadly, but it's frustrating when you're feeling resistance on every side. I get that.
603. 00:53:28 Well, and he, and he's not the only one talking about this. So I have a social media post from Seheel Bloom, who we've read the five types of wealth before and he talks about basically go dark for a month, you know, get rid of everything else, disappear, think deeply, eat simply, don't explain yourself, turn off on notifications, focus on one meaningful pursuit for an entire month and you'll gain.
604. 00:53:52 So Benjamin Hardy is not the only person talking about this. You know, Blake Erickson aren't the only people talking about this. It's just a matter of it gets very contextual, I think, very, very fast. So it's not kind of a one-size-fits-all approach.
605. 00:54:08 Yeah, all right. Ready for chapter four? Let's do it.
606. 00:54:11 Okay, so we're still in part two. We're in chapter four. Now he starts talking about systems. So Mike, I'm reading this book thinking, man, we're talking about goals. We're talking about systems like Mike's probably in hog heaven.
607. 00:54:22 Like, he's just loving every second of this book. So he talks about the fact that scaling requires you to focus. It requires you to simplify your system and that basically, like, he makes the strong statement of complex systems can't scale.
608. 00:54:38 So, I mean, he's just outright like, if it's a complex system, get it out of there because it's not going to scale. You need to simplify, simplify, simplify.
609. 00:54:46 He talks about pivoting as a form of simplification. And I thought that was a really, really cool way to do it. He has a Warren Buffett quote in here, which I thought, which I thought was great, but the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
610. 00:55:01 And I was like, oh, man, like, that's a, that's a really interesting, interesting quote, but I would also say that they're also probably really successful in like that one tiny thing because they said no to everything else. So you got to define what success means for you.
611. 00:55:16 What else? I think that's my, those are my major highlights here. He gets into more of like talking about raising the floor.
612. 00:55:24 So how do we raise that floor? And he outlines three different things to ask yourself. What are you optimizing for? What are you currently saying yes to? And then what pathways are you still investing yourself in that are ultimately dead ends?
613. 00:55:37 And I think those are three good questions. Like when I think about, you know, a retreat or when I think about a, you know, a focus session that I'm where I'm trying to re-up and figure out what to prioritize.
614. 00:55:51 That's a pretty, there's three pretty good questions for me to, for me to consider. And I think honest answers to those would, would push me forward and allow me to, to kind of reorganize my, my thinking.
615. 00:56:02 Yeah, the action that I've added down was, what am I optimizing for? Which is a question, to be honest, I have heard before and I have asked before. I'm not sure I ever actually heard that directly from another source, but I have definitely used that many, many, many times.
616. 00:56:26 I love that framing, because it's not, you know, what are the things that we should be doing? Because then you can make a list that's 500 things long.
617. 00:56:36 But you can only optimize for one thing. So what am I optimizing for? That's a clarifying question. And then everything else is kind of like I said earlier, nice to have.
618. 00:56:47 You know, if I have extra resources, I can throw it at these things as though maybe he would say no, just put everything you have, put all the wood behind that one arrow and just focus on that.
619. 00:56:59 But I do like those, those questions. So I think the way he's thinking about these things in this chapter, I really, really like.
620. 00:57:07 I actually like the idea that systems are designed to defend the system.
621. 00:57:15 I thought that was good too. It kind of communicates the fact that the system is, well, he also says that all systems actually become more complex.
622. 00:57:24 So you sort of have to fight against this. It's not, you know, well, there we simplified it. Now we just have to maintain the status quo.
623. 00:57:31 Like you always have to be thinking about these things, which I think is important.
624. 00:57:35 I do agree a lot with the idea that a system has to be simple before you can scale it.
625. 00:57:40 I love the definition of simple and complex that he shares here. So I actually preached a message at my church with this as the crux of it.
626. 00:57:49 So I thought these were great. Simple comes from the Latin simplex, one fold or unentangled, and complex comes from the Latin complex, which means braided or twisted together.
627. 00:58:01 So when you have something that is simple, there's nothing else that's layered into it. It is, you know, the core essence of the thing.
628. 00:58:11 And the more you try to layer on top of that, the more complex something becomes. And really it was, it was just, the message was just keep it simple.
629. 00:58:21 And I think that applies in every area of your life. So I like that emphasis on like keeping things simple.
630. 00:58:29 And just as an example, I guess of like the struggle of this for me.
631. 00:58:35 I go through these these phases where, okay, this is what I do. This is the process.
632. 00:58:42 And was I go through my week, you know, I got to make sure that I'm recording the YouTube video on Tuesday, so I give it to Max on Wednesday.
633. 00:58:51 So he can get me a first cut by Friday. So we can go back and forth on frame on Monday and Tuesday. I can get back the final one, edit it all on Wednesday, publish it on Thursday.
634. 00:59:02 Like that's generally the timeline. That has to exist alongside of the record bookworm every two weeks. And there's a process for that.
635. 00:59:10 We record focus every two weeks. There's a process for that. Send out the newsletter every week. There's a process for that.
636. 00:59:16 So those processes, you know, you can get get it down. It's like, okay, so, you know, this is kind of what this requires now.
637. 00:59:24 We figured this out. I know what this is. But then there's always the tendency when the results will come fast enough to, well, I should add one more thing.
638. 00:59:32 I should add one more thing. Someone did this and they mentioned that, you know, it 10x their email growth. So I should totally just do this thing.
639. 00:59:39 And you really got to fight back against that. Now, I don't think you should just not try new things either. So that's the thing I, the issue I have with this, I think, is there should be an element of experimentation.
640. 00:59:52 That's why my personal retreat process. I pick something to stop doing every single time that I do it. So I have the margin to try new things.
641. 01:00:00 If you aren't ever trying new things, you're going to find yourself in an innovator's dilemma type situation where eventually you go the way of the dodo just because you're trying to hold on to something that doesn't work anymore.
642. 01:00:12 You know, I had a real example of that with the family business because it was installable software, CD-ROMs, and then the internet came around.
643. 01:00:20 It's like, we got to do this. And I remember having conversations with my dad and he's like, well, you know, it's totally different pricing model.
644. 01:00:26 We do these site licenses with the internet. We got to do like these single use things and it's going to eat up all of our revenue.
645. 01:00:34 And he was right. It is going to cannibalize the revenue, but you got to be the one to come up with the new thing.
646. 01:00:40 You can't be Kodak and give the digital camera to somebody else because you don't want to monopoly.
647. 01:00:45 You don't want it to take away your film business.
648. 01:00:49 So, yeah, I think the ideal version of this is you're constantly trying experiments, right, tiny experiments.
649. 01:00:57 You're looking at the results and you're figuring out which of those things you want to work into the world.
650. 01:01:01 When you got to be realistic, you can't do more than you've got capacity for.
651. 01:01:06 And you also have to know, you know, if everything, if it hits the fan, what's the one thing that I'm going to do at the expense of everything else?
652. 01:01:16 All right, so we roll into the third part of the book. The third part of the book is accelerate your focus.
653. 01:01:22 Chapter five is do the work to engineer a focused path and scalable model.
654. 01:01:27 He brings up the idea of signal to signal to noise that we need to be focusing more on signal unless on noise.
655. 01:01:33 He actually talks about something that you just kind of mentioned there where, you know, if you're the sinking ship.
656. 01:01:39 All undisciplined systems are going to do is help the ship sink faster.
657. 01:01:44 I don't have a ton of notes on this, this chapter. I didn't.
658. 01:01:49 There wasn't a large volume of thing, but what I will tell you is that I think it's because it was so clear what the point of this chapter was.
659. 01:02:00 The point of this chapter was one product, one metric, simplify, you know, like in another way, I would say it would he would say strong concept, simplify scale.
660. 01:02:13 Like that is in in essence what he's doing. So you've already talked about how this applies to your creator business and this other things where you're saying, I'm thinking about more about a skyscraper to where I have one essentially overall product customer, if you will.
661. 01:02:30 I guess I have one customer, but I have products for them to tear up tear up with me.
662. 01:02:35 I think this gets to a depends on your type of business kind of a thing.
663. 01:02:41 Because I think about like, okay, you know, Apple wants to scale to everybody, but one product doesn't scale except for the fact that like the iPhone kind of does drive like 90 something percent of their business.
664. 01:02:57 So, are they doing this strong concept iPhone, simplify, it's, you know, you get it and it's simple to use and here it is. And then they scale that. So like, I'm really, again, I'm really torn. Like, I kind of love some of this stuff, but then I kind of like my brain starts to break because
665. 01:03:16 I think of the university model and I say, okay, well, I, we can't just do one major. Like, you know, like, we're going to oversimplify that, but we are, you know, we are degrees.
666. 01:03:29 So what is our one product? Our one product as you come out and you get a degree. And, but is that our product or is our product that four years of learning experience?
667. 01:03:37 And like my brain starts to get real jumbled. I would break it down a little bit further than that, I think. And I'm glad you brought up Apple because in my opinion, no one has done a better job from an operational perspective than Tim Cook has.
668. 01:03:55 The iPhone was invented under Steve Jobs, who there's a lot of stuff that he's famous for, you know, we're only going to have four products and focus is saying no a thousand times.
669. 01:04:07 But I think the thing that Tim Cook has has done, and you can see it if you listen to all the Apple podcasts like you and I do, there are people who get upset at him because, oh, he doesn't care about the Mac, or he doesn't care about this.
670. 01:04:26 And there'll be years that go by where we still got these stupid butterfly keyboards like, when are they ever going to fix this? But one by one, those things have been addressed.
671. 01:04:39 And those arguments go away at least for a period. Because in my opinion, Tim's thing is he's got to figure out how to manage all this stuff. And yeah, if you had, if you had to pick just one product, it's the iPhone.
672. 01:04:52 But the iPad has a successful business. The Mac is a successful business.
673. 01:04:56 And he's prioritized the resources of the company for the iPhone, but also all the other products, which are really like their own separate business units.
674. 01:05:07 Like they have their own one thing, I would argue.
675. 01:05:11 And then they just do, in my opinion, a very masterful job of doing that one thing, and then the next one thing, and the end result is that the hardware is in an incredible place.
676. 01:05:22 They're making their own chips.
677. 01:05:25 That wasn't even a thing several years ago, and they're the best chips in the industry.
678. 01:05:30 By far, how do you do that? It requires that laser focus.
679. 01:05:35 So I think it's possible to do this in a broader context. You don't just have to have a single product. You don't just have to have a single offering.
680. 01:05:44 But the key here is that every person in the organization does need to have a single metric.
681. 01:05:52 There does need to be a single measurement. So as an independent creator, I need to have a single measurement that is more important than everything else.
682. 01:06:00 But I've been in those larger companies where, okay, this is the manager of the growth marketers.
683. 01:06:06 This is the manager of the paid ads specialist.
684. 01:06:09 And this is the number that the paid ads person needs to have so they know whether they are winning or losing.
685. 01:06:19 They don't have to have the follow up conversation with their boss as well.
686. 01:06:22 We're generally pretty happy with your performance, but we really need to step it up a little bit.
687. 01:06:26 And they're just like, stuff it up how? I don't even know. You got to give me some clarity.
688. 01:06:30 What can I do better? I'm willing to do better. If you have a players in your organization, they want to crush it.
689. 01:06:36 They want to know that they're doing an incredible job.
690. 01:06:38 But a lot of times they just don't get the direction that they need in order to feel like, okay, I can focus on this thing because it's the most important.
691. 01:06:45 And it's the CEO or the person at the top stop to make sure that this number and this number and this number,
692. 01:06:49 when everybody does those things that they align for the organization and the bottom line is, you know, whatever, the one metric for Apple, you know, revenue.
693. 01:06:59 They're the most profitable company in the history of the world. So, yes, Tim Cook has won.
694. 01:07:04 Well, and I don't know if you meant to do this or not, but you hit it on the nail in the head is like, Mike, I can't tell you what my one metric is.
695. 01:07:12 Like, I have no idea what my one metric is there are so many places that you can't do that.
696. 01:07:17 You know, that's the biggest thing whenever I'd work with a company or organization that, okay, let's build a scorecard like this, this organization over here, this subdivision over here.
697. 01:07:24 Like, what are they working on? What's the most important thing for them?
698. 01:07:27 Well, you know, what's the one number that represents whether they're making progress and that nobody knows.
699. 01:07:31 And just creating that scoreboard and assigning everybody a metric.
700. 01:07:36 I can't tell you how much that helps.
701. 01:07:38 Well, it would clarify so much stuff because I don't know if I'm going to prioritize my time.
702. 01:07:45 I don't exactly know how to do that right now, but that one metric allows me to prioritize my time.
703. 01:07:49 I'm not saying the whole university needs one metric. I don't think they do. I think each division like you described needs a metric.
704. 01:07:56 And this is so this is a fun conversation because it gets into the things that I think the extension of this book, which I don't think Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson were trying to write.
705. 01:08:07 But I think the extension of this book is what does this look like for not just solo entrepreneurs or small business entrepreneur type people.
706. 01:08:19 And I really think they're trying to hit the small business entrepreneur type people.
707. 01:08:23 Maybe, although an argument could be made that maybe they're not even going after the small businesses.
708. 01:08:28 Maybe they're going after the big businesses, but that is a much smaller argument or audience.
709. 01:08:32 So the majority of the businesses in the world are small businesses. You're probably right in that.
710. 01:08:38 Okay, let's go to chapter six. Build something that can scale beyond yourself.
711. 01:08:43 So now we're talking about this idea of, okay, you are a bottleneck in this system. How do we overcome the fact that you are a bottleneck?
712. 01:08:53 Who talks about this idea of super who's and they're these people who can do a thing. And when we find them and their experts at this thing, we need to grab them and attach ourselves to them and just help let them help us scale what we're doing.
713. 01:09:12 And in air, he talks about the fact that we basically need to incentivize these people that like, if you, yes, they're more expensive than everybody else, but you'll get more out of them.
714. 01:09:25 So don't take the hit. Don't go, Oh, I'm going to hire four less expensive people. I'm going to hire that one a player that's super who, and it's going to be worth it. It's going to pay off for you in the long run.
715. 01:09:37 I just feel like what he's doing in this situation is he's trying to give leaders permission to overpay, because like the culture of businesses don't like the culture of businesses like fire the old experts and hire in a bunch of new young people who are
716. 01:09:55 significantly cheaper. And I feel like he's almost trying to be like, no, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Don't do that.
717. 01:10:02 He talks about the bet, the idea that you need slack in here. I get, I got frustrated immediately because he talks about slack and then he basically talks about financial resources resources are your biggest way to get slack.
718. 01:10:15 And I was like, well, yeah, but that doesn't, like that's, that's easy. If you have money, right? Like, you know, making money with money is easy when you don't have it and you're just getting started.
719. 01:10:24 So it's interesting to me how the audience of this book got muddled in my head as I read this. I didn't have a clear target audience.
720. 01:10:34 Yeah, so I want to address one thing you mentioned there about how a lot of organizations out with old and with the new.
721. 01:10:43 And that is because most organizations don't hire rock stars or a players. I am having trouble placing the business book I read that talked about a players.
722. 01:10:59 But I remember seeing this grid and I remember going through this with everybody in the organization and you can get mad about these arbitrary numbers but whatever, you know, if you're a leader in an organization.
723. 01:11:12 You got a, you got to know your people.
724. 01:11:15 So you rate them on a scale from one to 10 in terms of like their ability to to really understand and do the work.
725. 01:11:28 And then you rate them on a scale of one to 10 and it's kind of like an access on essentially like how easy they are to work with.
726. 01:11:37 And so in the upper right quadrant if they've scored above an eight or I think it was above an eight.
727. 01:11:43 In each of those is a tiny little box in the upper right corner. Those are your eight players.
728. 01:11:48 Right, and everybody else falls into these quadrants that I think we talked about in radical candor. Maybe that was the book.
729. 01:11:55 I know Kim Scott talks about this.
730. 01:11:57 There's like the really abrasive people who are really good at their job and you just have to kind of endure them, they're people who are really trying and they just aren't that skilled.
731. 01:12:08 And the larger point is that eight players want to work with other players.
732. 01:12:14 They get frustrated if they're being held back by the rest of the team.
733. 01:12:21 So I think there's there's truth in in the message that he's sharing here. However, it's one chapter at the end of a lesson 200 page book.
734. 01:12:29 And I think radical candor by Kim Scott speaks to this in much greater detail and much more effectively.
735. 01:12:36 And I would argue has some things that are a little bit contrary to the way that he describes things here.
736. 01:12:42 So if you really want to like dig into this go read that book. It's much much better.
737. 01:12:46 I know you didn't like it, Corey, but it's like it's the best resource for this kind of stuff from a business perspective, I'll say.
738. 01:12:54 And I think that it's important to recognize that you really can't undervalue hiring good people.
739. 01:13:03 Working with the family business, my dad had some products that he built on emotional intelligence.
740. 01:13:08 And one of the things that came out of the research that he had done for those because we sold it to corporations at one point.
741. 01:13:18 And it was involved in the hiring process, but there was this graphic which showed what he called the turnover process.
742. 01:13:24 And it showed that basically companies would hire for there were two columns, reasons one and two.
743. 01:13:30 And they were titles and certifications, superficial reasons. I like the person. They did well on the interview.
744. 01:13:38 But the reason that people would leave an organization was reason three.
745. 01:13:42 That was all like the emotional intelligence stuff, the soft skills stuff, the things that are almost impossible to screen for at the beginning.
746. 01:13:50 And which is why I think AI in the hiring process is so popular right now.
747. 01:13:54 People recognize the need for figuring this stuff out. They don't understand it. It's a big black box. Oh, AI can figure this out for me.
748. 01:14:00 And it can't. But yeah, you know, you're going to hire somebody. Just think about it, though.
749. 01:14:05 If you hire somebody because they ace the interview or they got the right degree, they went to the right school.
750. 01:14:12 Okay, they have all the hard skills. That's great. They have the potential to do the job that you have hired them for.
751. 01:14:17 But then they get into a situation where they don't really know what to do.
752. 01:14:20 There were people I'd never really worked with before. They have to be able to navigate that from a social perspective,
753. 01:14:26 from an emotional intelligence perspective. You have to have empathy. You have to be a go-getter.
754. 01:14:31 You've got to have your own, you know, achievement drive was one of the scales in the assessment that we had.
755. 01:14:39 Leadership skills, you know, you can actually assess that type of stuff. You got to ask the right questions and you got to do it the right way.
756. 01:14:45 But those are the things where if you plug somebody in and they can't hack it in the organization,
757. 01:14:52 they don't really fit with the culture, assuming you're building a good culture, you know, then they end up leaving three to six months later.
758. 01:15:03 And now you've got to start the process all over again. So you thought you closed the loop. You thought you took care of the problem.
759. 01:15:11 And now you got to start all over. So the cost of a wrong hire is insanely expensive. You cannot afford to do that.
760. 01:15:21 So I think essentially what he's saying is find somebody who's really good, throw a bunch of money at him because he's going to save you money in the long run.
761. 01:15:28 And generally I agree with that. But just throwing money at somebody who was really skilled isn't necessarily good advice.
762. 01:15:35 I think the other thing that gets me about chapter six is chapter six actually includes the conclusion because the conclusion of the book is actually just about scaling.com and the extension of this.
763. 01:15:52 Yeah, and the way that they got connected. So what I don't know, we're already at, if we finish all of the content by page 185 or whatever it is.
764. 01:16:04 And then we go to the conclusion, which is basically like, "Hey, let me tell you my story and our story for this and then invite you to come and partner with us."
765. 01:16:13 In my mind, his one thing is the scaling.com company. That's his one thing. And this was, I get the impression that this was the leader to get people to go to that.
766. 01:16:29 This was the driver to push people into that. And he's written a bunch of books already. So he's got a name and people will read this and they'll go to his thing.
767. 01:16:38 So I don't know if you want to talk about the conclusion or not. I don't really need to talk about the conclusion. It wasn't, I have zero notes from the conclusion.
768. 01:16:47 So let's talk about the conclusion. But one more thing on chapter six, which I did not like and I need to call out. He says less than 1% of people who ever lived have made 99% of the impact on the world's direction.
769. 01:16:58 And on the one hand, if you're speaking to business owners, maybe it's easy to think of yourself as in that 1%. But I think that's generally pretty discouraging.
770. 01:17:06 Like why even try?
771. 01:17:10 I hadn't thought about that, but you're absolutely right. It's like, wow, I'm not going to impact the world. Doesn't really.
772. 01:17:15 Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so now we can go to the conclusion. And I do want to talk about this because this is where the story comes in from the beginning.
773. 01:17:25 And I think I have a little bit different context with this because I've been watching from afar his relationship with Dan Sullivan for many years. So Dr. Benjamin Hardy, before he was doctor, I think, wrote some books which I own, but have not read.
774. 01:17:44 And then when he joined up with Dan Sullivan, Dan Sullivan, I was familiar with Dan Sullivan has a company called Strategic Coach that the visionary, actually a CEO of the digital marketing agency that I worked at.
775. 01:18:00 They're the ones who introduced me to this concept. And he was a part of the mastermind, Newgoda, Toronto, every quarter to meet with other big business owners. He would always come back, really excited, a whole bunch of clarity, and talk through things.
776. 01:18:14 I'm like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it definitely saw the value. Dan seemed like a really, really smart guy. He's a little bit weird.
777. 01:18:20 He thinks he's going to live to be 150 or something like that. I remember hearing him say at one point. And on the one hand, set an impossible goal.
778. 01:18:29 And again, I hit it. I'm sure that that net result is you live longer than you would have any ways and have a higher quality of physical, physical health than you would have any ways.
779. 01:18:38 But so I just showed up, you know, take it with a grain of salt, but the whole idea of the gap in the game, that comes from Dan Sullivan and it's a really powerful idea. He's been teaching for years.
780. 01:18:48 So Dr. Benjamin Hardy comes around, comes along, gets connected with Dan. It's kind of like, how did you get connected with Dan?
781. 01:18:55 Why are you working with Dan? Dan doesn't really need you, but you've now co-authored a book called The Gap in the Game, which is totally Dan's idea, but your name is on the cover.
782. 01:19:05 And I always kind of the back of my mind was like, how did he swing that deal? You know, and he admits in that book, not admits, but like he mentions in that book, like this is Dan's, you know, idea.
783. 01:19:16 I'm just the one who helped him turn it into a book project. But the bottom line is that if Dr. Benjamin Hardy had not been there, I'm sure Dan Sullivan had the resources.
784. 01:19:24 To find somebody else to help him really publish the book, if that was really something he wanted to do.
785. 01:19:30 But he didn't. He worked with Dr. Benjamin Hardy and put his name on the cover. So Dr. Benjamin Hardy now gets approached by this other guy, Blake Erickson, and essentially does the same thing.
786. 01:19:49 That's what the conclusion is about. Dr. Benjamin Hardy mentions. It's written from his perspective. He's like, Blake comes up to me and he's like, so I think we could, you know, make this company and work with these different companies and help them scale, stuff like that.
787. 01:20:05 But in order for that company to be a thing, you know, I got to be on the cover as a co-author. Dr. Benjamin Hardy is like, but it's my book.
788. 01:20:15 I wrote it all. Like I could publish it without you. And then he's like, oh, I see what you're doing there. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, you know, and then basically just like pays it forward to this guy.
789. 01:20:24 So I like that element of this, this whole bigger picture. I think that's actually pretty cool that Dr. Benjamin Hardy is really willing to stake his reputation on partnering with this, this new person that haven't heard of before.
790. 01:20:42 And I think if their goal was to continue to write books, you know, Blake Erickson would be the one that in 10 years is the one that's writing these books. That's, that's the pay it forward pattern that I see here. However, I don't think that's their, their goal.
791. 01:20:56 Looking at scaling.com. It looks like they want to be business consultants for businesses that want to scale. So that makes this book then a business card.
792. 01:21:10 And it completely changes how you think about the content in the book. It's kind of like, if you go into it thinking about that. Oh, now I get why you did that, right?
793. 01:21:22 And everything that you've kind of read up until the point, if you don't know what scaling.com is, it's kind of like, well, it seems like good information, but kind of weird that they package it that way or kind of weird that they're approaching it from this direction.
794. 01:21:36 So I don't know if this is positive or negative to tell you the truth. I think on the one hand, you really shouldn't discredit the ideas. The ideas in here should be able to stand on their own merit regardless.
795. 01:21:51 But it does kind of leave a weird taste in your mind when you recognize that scaling.com. What is that? It's not resources to help you scale. It's a landing page.
796. 01:22:00 You put in your email and they may work with you if you give them enough money. Like, that feels weird. And that's the part that I struggle with a little bit because as much as like Dan Sullivan has these really high level paid coaching programs,
797. 01:22:17 he's got a website with a whole bunch of free stuff that he has had forever. Like, I remember one of the things that you could download was this impact filter.
798. 01:22:25 It's basically a PDF where you're trying to make this decision. You're not sure what to do. So you kind of work through it, gives you clarity and it's like, okay, yeah, from a business perspective, this is the thing that we should do.
799. 01:22:37 Right. So maybe it's just new, you know, they don't have it up there. I know the book is new, but yeah, maybe it's because I'm not in a position to actually work with them.
800. 01:22:51 You know, maybe if I had the resources, yeah, yeah, your message is right. I just need somebody to help me do this. I'm gonna throw a bunch of money at this problem.
801. 01:22:57 You guys helped me help me do it. Maybe, maybe I would. I would think a little bit differently about it, but very weird conclusion to me.
802. 01:23:06 I agree completely. It almost feels like the rug was pulled out from under you. And the thing I struggled with is I actually enjoyed the book.
803. 01:23:18 I told you, like it might be one of the fastest books I've read in a really, really long time. It's not because there's pictures everywhere, people.
804. 01:23:24 It was just like, I was like powering through it. I was kind of jiving with what we were doing. I was trying to apply to my life and think about it and I was trying to apply to Mike's life as I'm thinking about it, you know, because that's what we're going to talk about.
805. 01:23:35 And then, and then, well, and then you kind of, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. I meant, that's what we're going to talk about on the main show. But then, and then you get into this and it's like, well, hold on, this was really just like a 185 page, one pager for all of the businesses
806. 01:23:51 who you want to work with. And like, they're going to read it because, you know, your names on it, and then they're going to hopefully click through and they're going to.
807. 01:23:59 And it just, I don't know, like I just have a strange feeling about it, but it doesn't, like you said, it doesn't necessarily discount what was said in the book or this framework.
808. 01:24:09 It just feels funny. It just, it just kind of felt weird.
809. 01:24:12 Yeah. So how would you feel about this book if it was not called the science of scaling and instead something like is on their landing page, the proven scaling framework to 10x your business in three years or less?
810. 01:24:27 Yes, that would be better. I feel like I agree. I agree. Yeah, more upfront. It would, it would come across as the precursor to working with you.
811. 01:24:38 Like, I need to read this book before I to figure out whether or not I want to work, I want to work with you. And that seems like legit, like that seems, you know, like an okay thing to do.
812. 01:24:48 And even that though, like the reason that people don't use titles like that for books, I think is it feels the word would be clickbait, I guess, but it's only clickbait if you don't follow through on the promise that you're making in the title.
813. 01:25:03 And they definitely believe in that promise. So I feel like that would be actually from a bookworm perspective, a better title in terms of actually selling more books. Maybe it's not.
814. 01:25:18 Maybe the science of scaling is better. And again, I don't know if they're worried about selling books either. I think they're worried about getting scaling.com clients.
815. 01:25:28 Yeah, hopefully folks, hopefully folks listening don't aren't reading this as incredibly negative. Like, I don't know. I don't know if I think that that's incredibly negative. I think it felt like the rug was pulled out from under you at the end of the book.
816. 01:25:43 That's what I'm saying is as the reader felt like the rug was pulled out. And the reason you feel that way is because that wasn't implicit in the beginning. It does talk about businesses, right?
817. 01:25:54 But you probably went into it thinking that science is scaling. I can apply parts of this to my engineering program. But if you read the sales page, most founders, this is all the text on the sales page.
818. 01:26:03 Most founders don't scale because they're growing complexity faster than revenue. Learn the exact framework. Top 1% founders used to simplify their business model, eliminate bottlenecks and create exponential growth that compounds without burnout or bloated teams.
819. 01:26:16 If you read that at the beginning, you're like, I'm out.
820. 01:26:19 It's not for me, right? Like, I'm not top 1% founders, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's just not me. And I'm not as interested in that book.
821. 01:26:29 Yep, be clear, not clever.
822. 01:26:32 Yeah. All right. I'm just doing due diligence. Did I miss that when I...
823. 01:26:40 I mean, it probably is somewhere in the Amazon description. I don't blame you for missing that, to be honest. And again, the science of scaling.
824. 01:26:48 It implies that there are inherent natural laws to scaling something that he's going to apply to business, but you could apply other places.
825. 01:26:58 So I will tell you, it's not in the Amazon description. I just read the Amazon description, and it's much more general in the...
826. 01:27:07 Now, granted, the company thing. But that's just on me. I know company versus academic, like I get that. Okay. We've got to move on. Action items.
827. 01:27:14 So I'll start... There is a... It's not in the conclusion. It's in chapter six. And it starts now at the end of the science of scaling, and it lists all the questions to ask yourself.
828. 01:27:26 What is your own impossible goal? How will you utilize time as a tool? What is your impossible goal and timeline due to your floor?
829. 01:27:32 Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's, I don't know, eight or nine questions here. I want to work through those questions.
830. 01:27:37 Because despite what we just said, I think those are good and interesting questions that if I ask those questions, they will help me think through the things that I'm doing and they'll help me get better.
831. 01:27:51 So my action item out of this is I want to take a period of time and reflect on those things and figure out, you know, what that does.
832. 01:28:00 I don't have a goal. There's no like actual thing that I want to do out of this. It's just, I want to take the time to reflect on those things and see what it does.
833. 01:28:09 How about you, Mike? All right. Well, I also have a single action item, and it's one question specifically that I want to just kind of noodle on for a little bit, and that is, what am I optimizing for?
834. 01:28:22 Again, credit not to this book because it's not what I heard it initially, but when they mentioned it, I'm like, oh, yeah, I should be asking that question again.
835. 01:28:31 Okay, good. So now we'll get to style and rating. My book, I start.
836. 01:28:38 Did you hear the big sigh, because I just made a big sigh. So we heard the big sigh.
837. 01:28:43 I want to rate this book of five. I really want to rate this book of five. I think when I like originally was like working through it and, you know, I was three quarters of the way through it.
838. 01:28:56 I was like, yeah, five star book, baby, like, here we go.
839. 01:29:00 I think the more I've processed this book and the more I've looked into it, I think the rating just has to drop.
840. 01:29:06 I don't think it drops down to like a two. I think it was more valuable than that, and I think you can get a lot out of it, but I think you have to work a little too hard to get the good stuff out of it.
841. 01:29:16 The other one is I think it's very contextualized, and I think that lowers my rating for it.
842. 01:29:24 So if somebody's coming up to me and they're in, you know, they're talking about scaling something, I don't care whether it's a nonprofit or a business or a university or a church or whatever it might be.
843. 01:29:35 They're thinking about like growing a thing, scaling, whatever you want to talk about.
844. 01:29:39 I still think this is a valuable book to read, and it's because I think those questions at the end make you think differently about the way you're doing things.
845. 01:29:48 They help you prioritize. They're going to help you move forward in the areas that you want to move forward in.
846. 01:29:55 The challenge I have is that the recommendation now comes with a, but you're going to have to like contextualize it into your world.
847. 01:30:05 Like you have to know that this is written for the CEO of something, the founder of something, you know, the early stage, whatever it is, and that changes some of the things that you can work with, and that changes some of the ways you have to work through through some of the ideas.
848. 01:30:20 And any time I have to give a recommendation where I say, but you have to like, you know, and I have to give that caveat, that rating is going to drop lower.
849. 01:30:29 So what I'm trying to debate here, Mike, is I'm between a three and a four, and I don't like to give half ratings.
850. 01:30:37 So I'm trying to think about it from purely a recommendation standpoint, from purely a like who would I tell?
851. 01:30:44 I think before our conversation, and hopefully you don't take this the wrong way. I think before our conversation, I would have given this a four.
852. 01:30:51 I think after our conversation, which I think was a very healthy and good conversation, I think it drops to a three. I think this book is a three star book for me.
853. 01:30:58 So I'm going to rate it a three star book that again, that doesn't mean there isn't valuable things in here. I just think the valuable things are.
854. 01:31:06 You have to work hard to pull them out and you have to work hard to apply them to your life and that drops it down to a three for me.
855. 01:31:14 That's fair. All right. I'm going to join you at the three.
856. 01:31:19 I am so close to being the perfect person for this book, and I'm very surprised how much I feel like this is not for me.
857. 01:31:28 Yeah. I mean, the whole business perspective here, like that's my jam.
858. 01:31:39 It sounds weird, but whenever people ask me why I don't like reading fiction, it's simply because I want to learn more about business.
859. 01:31:50 And I'm like, oh, this business book looks fascinating. And other people are like, that looks boring, like pull my teeth out instead.
860. 01:32:01 So I'm wired different, but even so, I didn't think this book was great.
861. 01:32:07 I think there's some really powerful ideas in here. And I have no doubt that if I met Dr. Benjamin Hardy, I would like him a lot.
862. 01:32:16 I think some of the stories that he shares about the way that they raise their family, they adopted three kids, like, we're cut from the same cloth, I feel.
863. 01:32:27 And I just kind of more I know about him. I like him as a person.
864. 01:32:33 I've always felt a little bit, I don't know, strange, I guess, like, why don't I just completely resonate with this person's writing, reading his other books, and this one, I have that feeling more than any of the others.
865. 01:32:45 And again, like, this is the one on the surface that should have been like, yeah, let's go. This one's for me.
866. 01:32:54 Yeah, I think it's okay. I think it's decent and I would generally recommend it for people who are interested in the topic.
867. 01:33:06 I'm not sure I would recommend this book over other books. You know, if I had a business owner who really wanted to get clarity on their business systems, I would not recommend this one, even though their goal may be to scale their business.
868. 01:33:25 I wouldn't recommend this one. I would probably recommend something like Pinnacle. I forget the author of that one, but it's like a conglomeration of a couple different, you know, business operating systems and they share different pieces of different things like scaling up and, I don't know, EOS, all those types of things.
869. 01:33:45 It's kind of like a good approachable mix of all that stuff, and then you can kind of pick and choose which ones you want to go deeper with.
870. 01:33:51 So that was a really good book that was recommended to me by a business guide at one point, and I feel like that would be way more helpful for the person that this book is really intended to serve.
871. 01:34:03 However, you know, I get where they're coming from when they create this, and I think if they're trying to get people to work with them, you know, they share just enough information here for people to feel like they understand the process.
872. 01:34:16 It probably significantly decreases the length of the sales process for them when they actually talk to these people.
873. 01:34:23 So I can't fault them for the approach that they took, and I do think that they probably do understand this stuff pretty well, and if you worked with them, you probably are able to get some pretty decent results.
874. 01:34:35 If you're a person who wants to figure this stuff out on your own and do your own digging and research and things like that, which is probably a vast majority of the bookworm audience, you know, we're not providing quick life hacks here.
875. 01:34:50 So people who want that sort of stuff are kind of naturally weeded out just by like the vibe of the show, I guess.
876. 01:35:00 So it's decent. It's not great. It's definitely a little bit of a disappointment, I would say, was expecting a lot more meat in this one, especially with Tony Robbins forward, but it was all right.
877. 01:35:15 All right, good. Let's put the science of scaling on the shelf. What's next, Mike?
878. 01:35:20 Next is Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy, the fourth edition specifically. So pick that one up if you're reading along with us. Eat That Frog was the first book I read when I started getting into productivity.
879. 01:35:35 The whole idea behind Eat That Frog is a Mark Twain quote, where if you got to do something unpleasant, basically you should do it first thing, because nothing else worse is going to happen to you the rest of the day. So kind of an anti procrastination thing.
880. 01:35:50 But yeah, I think this is an interesting concept and I'm kind of curious if it holds up for me or if I've come so far in my productivity journey that I just absolutely hate this when I read it again.
881. 01:36:03 Sounds good. After that, I will be picking published the proven path from blank page to 10,000 copies sold by Chandler Bolt because I'm interested in learning what it's like to write a book and given this perspective on writing a book.
882. 01:36:21 So that's the, that's the one after that. Mike, do you have any gap books?
883. 01:36:26 I actually do have one I'm going to try to read. I have no idea if I'm going to be able to finish it. But there was a book recommended to me a while back by Jake Knapp and John Zyrowski, the authors of Make Time, which I absolutely loved, called Sprint, how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days.
884. 01:36:45 Feels like a natural follow up to the one that we just read. And I am thinking about what am I optimizing for with my creator business. And I think that if I want to try some new things that this book will maybe help me test and iterate faster than I would have otherwise.
885. 01:37:06 Awesome. I do have a gap book this time. This one's called The Call to Climb, a story to find your path, conquer your fears and fulfill your destiny. It is by one of my good friends who is part of my, you know, we talked about it with strength to strength, my male friendship group.
886. 01:37:22 It's his name is James Robbins, and I'm checking that one out. I'm about three quarters away through it. So I'm going to finish that one up between now and the next time. Awesome. Well, thank you everybody for listening. If you want to support the show, you can do so by going to patreon.com/bookworm FM.
887. 01:37:42 When you join the Bookworm Pro membership for $7 a month, you get longer ad-free episodes with an extra segment. Honestly, I have no idea what this one's going to be because getting it at the end is set at the beginning and Corey has a secret question to ask me.
888. 01:37:57 So if you want to find out what that's all about, you can sign up for the pro show. You also get a bootleg feed, so we record these via Zoom, and I upload the Zoom recording right after we get done recording the episode itself.
889. 01:38:12 So it generally goes out about two weeks early. We've also got a live stream, which when we don't have scheduling snafus, that's up on the calendar, so you know when they're coming and you can join the live stream. There's also a Bookworm 4K wallpaper, and like I said, $7 a month helps us keep the lights on.
890. 01:38:28 So thank you so much to our pro members, and if you want to become one of those awesome people, go to patreon.com/bookworm FM.
891. 01:38:37 For those of you who have a book that you'd like us to think about reading, we will have a link to the recommendation form in the show notes.
892. 01:38:47 Feel free to hop in there and add your book to that. We'll consider it, and thank you all for listening again. Let's move on to the pro show.