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

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This is the grand finale of our mental-welt series. All month long, we've been talking about how to build a successful business without burning out, numbing out, or losing yourself along the way, and today's episode ties it all together. I'm sitting down with organizational psychologist, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, to talk about how to stop chasing an impossible version of success, and start becoming the person you actually

want to be. If you haven't yet, head to yatmedia.com/mentalwealth to download your free mental wealth playbook. Your final challenge is the IM, I should future self-worksheet, where you'll get clear on who you want to become and start acting like that person today.

Let's close this out strong Yap fam and get right into it. Ben, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. I'm happy to be back. I heard you say on another podcast that when you released that book in 2018 that you came on my podcast to talk about willpower doesn't work.

You actually considered it a failure, because it didn't reach New York Times best-sellers list. And that's like every author's dream, but nonetheless, like when you came on my podcast, I remember thinking it was such a big deal, you were such a big blogger. And we had scored Benjamin Hardy, like episode number seven, and so you were a big deal

to us and to the outside world, but inside you felt like a failure.

“So I want to talk about that, I think it will give us some color on your journey and help”

us understand the gap in the game concept as well. Absolutely. No, I mean, I think it's a beautiful, interesting place to start. So I guess for a very, for a little context, I would say in 2000, ever, so I served at church mission from 2008 to 2010.

And like going on that experience was very transformational for me, I grew up in a really intense environment. We probably even talked about it. So ever since I came home from that experience, in 2010, I wanted to be a professional author.

So like that was a dream of mine, but I didn't know what format would take. And I didn't really start approaching that goal until 2015. So from 2010 to 2015, I went to school, site psychology, got into a PhD program for organizational psychology.

And then once I was in my first year of my program, that's when it really hit me.

And I got really committed, I guess you could say, to my future self of becoming a professional author. So this was early 2015, you know, I was very, already very excited, very motivated. And I had already learned a lot of success principles, I guess you could say. And so I actually grew very fast as a blogger.

“And that's what took me to the medium.com.”

And I grew. And so essentially, over the, from 2015 to 2017, I grew enormously as a blogger and was able to get a book deal and be able to start providing for my family. I mean, that was essentially my dream was to become a professional author and to be able to provide for my family at the time my wife and I had three foster kids.

We've adopted them since and et cetera. But so essentially, I got a multi-six figure book deal to write a book. I'm living my dreams. It all happens way faster than I thought in the early 2018. Honestly, it was March of 2018, the book comes out.

And I did have way in my head, like I'd built everything up in my head that it needed to be a certain level. It needed to be a New York Times without seller. And I admittedly as well through so much money at it.

Like the, early 2018 was the first year I started to make pretty dang good money.

And I threw a lot of it at that book. And I was just throwing everything, kitchen sink at it. And yeah, it just didn't end up launching and exploding the way I thought it would.

in terms of like my writing and my growth, just it was all going very, very well. And so yeah, it didn't hit the goal.

“And for probably four or five months, I was in a very deep depression, very deep slump.”

And kind of back to the idea of the gap in the game. Now, it's kind of funny that I launch a book. I mean, I'm a professional author. I release my first book.

Like I've never written a full book before.

I release this book and to my publisher, they were very happy with it. Results, but for me in my head, I just totally felt like a loser. And I guess I've learned to measure my own self differently. So the gap in the game is something I learned from Dan Sullivan. I read his little book on the subject.

Maybe actually was in 2018. I read his little book and I was still blogging back then. And it was just an idea I loved. And I thought if I ever get a chance to write books with Dan Sullivan, I'm going to make this a major book. And the idea is very simple.

“I mean, it's basically the idea that as a person you're, we all feel happy or sad based on how we measure ourselves and how we measure our experiences.”

The reason I went into a deep depression after I had made a monumental achievement.

I've never done that before.

It was totally new. And yet, I felt like a loser because I was in the gap. I was measuring what was against what I thought it should be, which is an ideal. When you're in the gap, you're measuring yourself against your ideals, which you're always changing always moving. Whereas the game is the opposite.

You measure yourself backward against where you were before. Truth was as I was way further than I'd ever been. And if I was just measuring myself backward against my past self, competing only against my past self, I was radically further than I ever was and I just did something huge. And so I'm learning and I've learned over the years to be more in the game.

And it's a far more enjoyable, far happier experience. Yeah, and I'd love to kind of dig deeper on this if you can help us understand the difference between ideals and goals and why that matters with all of this. So ideals are very, they're very ephemeral. They're not actually tangible. And so how I learned it from Dan is ideals are the horizon and the desert.

You can see him out there, but every time you take a few steps forward, the horizon keeps going.

And in America, we're actually trained to always be pursuing happiness.

That's even in the declaration of independence, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And so we're very big on ideals in America, which is good. Like it's good to have ideals. It's good to be idealistic. There's nothing wrong with ideals.

The problem is is that they're immaterial.

“Like I think a definition of ideal is whatever you believe is perfection.”

So when you're in the gap, you're literally measuring yourself against your view of perfection. But back to the idea of the horizon, that view is never endingly changing. Like, my former self would have felt like it was perfection just to get a book deal. But then once I got there, the ideal changed, the horizon moved. And now, and so if you're always measuring yourself against a moving target and also a moving target

that by definition is unreachable, you can't actually reach an ideal. It's an ideal. But if you're always measuring yourself against it, then you never feel like you've moved anywhere. And that's actually why we wrote the book is because high achievers by nature have huge ideals, but they also usually measure themselves against them.

And in our culture is trained that way. Social media trains us to have ideals and to always be comparing ourselves externally and sometimes ideals are other people. But if you're always measuring yourself against something that's way up ahead and also something that you can never actually reach, then what that does for you internally is it

feels like you've never made any progress at all. And also, it also devalues everything you've done to that point. And so whenever you're in the gap, it does not matter how much you've achieved. It doesn't matter if you're living way, way, way beyond the dreams of anything you ever thought you would do, you actually feel like you've made no progress at all.

And you feel like a loser and you've devalued not only your current self, you've devalued everything that got you here. And so ideals are beautiful. They're just not just useful as a measurement tool. They're useful as a direction tool.

Those are far more concrete, obviously, you can have goals that you set that move you toward your ideals. And so goals are specific, they're concrete, they're their mile markers on a journey. And then the useful thing to do with your goals is to obviously become increasingly intrinsically motivated towards the goals you set and even the standards you set for yourself, that they're

less about what anyone else thinks what anyone else wants. And you actually get better at doing that when you just start measuring your progress backwards. So like all set of goals for myself, I've got huge goals for 2023. But in terms of where I'm measuring myself and in terms of my benchmark, like my benchmark for 2023 is what I accomplish in 2022.

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

do. Yeah. So I hear you saying a couple big ideas here. The first one is ideals are moving target. You're never going to get there.

So you're never going to be happy trying to go toward those ideals, because you're never going to actually achieve that. You can actually achieve your ideal. And it's always moving further and further as you become more successful, right?

Second is comparing yourselves to other people that never helps in terms of our mindset

or happiness. And then I hear you saying that goals can be tangible and you can have mile markers.

“And it's okay to have goals, but you need to make sure that you're judging your progress”

on those goals based on your past, not necessarily how far you are from your ideal place. Right. I know I probably didn't say it as good as you, but that's basically what I'm going to broke it down beautifully. I think that this is one of the main problems with the narratives, like there's a lot of narratives about how you shouldn't have goals.

Obviously, I think it's impossible to not have goals. I think human beings are, we can't not have a goal. That's part of being intentional, but the problem is the measurement. I mean, even if I had hit my goal, I would have gone into the gap. I would have moved the target.

So even if I had hit the New York Times bestseller list, from a gap perspective, I still would have felt terrible about myself because I would have moved the target. The target would have been, well, why wasn't I on it for four weeks? Why wasn't I one, like New York Times, about solar yet? Yeah, or why didn't I hit number one?

So it doesn't even, whether you hit the goal or not, doesn't even matter.

If you're in the gap, it will never have been enough because the target will keep changing

and you're measuring yourself against something that's immeasurable and something that's external and always changing. And so yeah, whether it's other people that you're measuring yourself against or whether it's just, you're inflated ideals, that's the point is is that you won't be happy hitting or not hitting your goals if you stay in the gap and that's just, that's just the key.

Yeah, so then on the flip side, let's talk about gain thinking. What does it look like to have gain thinking or to practice gain thinking? So I look at gain thinking two ways. One is it's a way of measuring your progress and measuring your experiences. So for me, for example, like I've had a number of experiences already today, like even

just to this point and some of them went to plans and some of them didn't go to plans. But if I'm in the gain, I'm measuring what actually did happen and I'm measuring myself backwards.

“I'm only measuring myself against where I was before and the truth is I'm always ahead”

of my past self, even if things go backwards seemingly, like even if I lose my leg in a car accident, like a lot of bad things can seemingly happen, but if you're in the gain, you are finding the gains and you're creating gains from your experiences. And so I consider it your squeezing as much juice out of your experiences as possible.

You're also always choosing to become better as a result.

No matter what happens to you, you're in the gain, so everything ultimately happens for you. So I guess it's really two big ideas. One is it's measuring yourself backward against where you were before and always realizing that you're further than you were before and that the only thing I'm actually measuring

myself against is myself, which is where I was before. So that's number one is just measuring yourself backwards. The second one is literally turning everything that happens to you into something that happens for you. So anything, no matter what it was, you can actually gain and grow from it.

And if you do, then you're always getting better. You're always learning from every experience. Whereas if you're in the gap, then your past becomes a problem. That's from like a psychology standpoint.

“What you need to be happy in the present is you need a happy past and an exciting future.”

And the past is literally a meaning. And so the gain is just a lens of using your, of transforming your past into more gains, more learning. Even from your most extreme traumas, you can learn to turn those into gains so that you're constantly better and even grateful for them, which is what psychologists would call post-traumatic

growth. So it's really just those two things. I'm only measuring myself against myself backward and I'm literally turning every experience into my gain. Hmm.

And we're going to touch on post-traumatic growth later on in this interview. But first, I want to get into your new book, your latest book, be your future self now. I think this is a great tie in. So in your book, you say it's not about becoming our future selves. It's actually about being our future selves.

Now, I think we just got a good foundation of gap-thinking gain thinking. Here you are telling us, basically, let's not compare our progress to our ideals. But you're also not opposed to the fact of thinking in a futuristic way or thinking about

It's not like you're saying, don't think about your future at all.

“It's just that you've got to be your future self.”

It's not about becoming your future self in the gap between where you are and where you want to be. So tell us about how future self is sort of related to this gap and gain thinking. Because I have a feeling that you really got the inspiration from this book, from this other book, after reading both them.

So this is a really interesting concept in psychology. So like when, typically the way we look at time is we look at it as past, present, and future, and we kind of look at it sequentially. And we also look at it chronologically. Like my past is behind me, there's no way I can get back there.

My present is now in the future's up ahead of me.

I can never, I'll never actually be able to go into the future.

All there is is really now from a psychology standpoint. That's not how psychologists view time. Psychologists don't view time sequentially. We actually view it holistically. So what I mean by that is is that the past is currently existing in my life.

Who I'm being right now is a complete amalgamation of my views of my past, my experiences of my past.

“We even today we're talking about us having a conversation four years ago, right?”

And so like my past is, of course, influencing me right now and my narration of the past, my story of the past, the feelings I have toward my past, the anchors I may have in my past that are unresolved call it trauma or whatever, but also my goals are heavily influencing me. I mean, anyone who's listening to this is listening to it for a reason.

They're listening to it because they feel like this is going to help them contribute to their goals or help them move forward in their lives. And so everything about my life right now is a combination of my feelings and my perspectives of my past and also my excitement or my feelings towards the future. And so there's certainly not mutually exclusive in terms of being in the game, but also having

a future oriented mindset. Most people who read the gap in the game are very future oriented people. The game doesn't stop you, I guess, from having a future, actually in my perspective, whenever I'm living in the game, it actually helps me to be more, it helps me to have a future that's more genuinely coming from my own self rather than something that's coming

from the outside. Usually people's goals and they're called their standards or their ideals actually were fed to them by culture, by society, they didn't even, you know, the future that they want actually isn't genuinely intrinsically motivated. And so for me tapping into the game just helps me to stop worrying about the outside world

as much, stop competing with other people. And so in terms of future self, I guess I would say in simple terms, we all have a future self. What the research shows is that most people, especially the older they get, they stop thinking about their future self very much.

Most people probably 30 and above assume that even their future self, 10, 20 or 30 years from now is mostly going to be the same person they are today. So most people don't have huge imagination towards their future self. What the research does show is that that your future self is going to be a wildly different person than you think, even in 5 or 10 years from now, it's going to be hard to fully predict

to your future self will be, but if you start imagining it, start thinking about it and importantly getting really connected to your future self, who you want to be in the future, you can then start using obviously your vision of your future self to guide and direct to who you're going to be today and you can be extremely intentional about it.

“And so from my standpoint, the best, you know, the best thing to do is get really clearing”

and connected to your future self, who you want to be, get very specific about that. And then use that as, I guess you could say the North Star for directing everything you're doing here and now and each and every day as you're moving forward, you're measuring yourself against where you were before.

You're measuring yourself backwards and you're always seeing that by increasingly living

intentionally as your future self, you're always outgrowing your past self. And I do this daily. I mean, if I even look at where I was a week ago, I am not the same person I was last week. I've changed a lot. I've grown a lot. I know a ton of things my past self doesn't didn't know. And so I'm never my past self and I'm always growing into my future self. That's kind of how I see it.

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future self as a completely different person. And I thought that was really eye-opening because for one I feel like you give yourself some more grace when you think of your past and your future self as a different person. It's like you start to feel empathy for yourself and you're not so hard on yourself depending on what outcomes you know end up happening. So I'd love to understand the importance of actually thinking of yourself as different present self, future self even past self.

I've had some of my biggest wins and I've had a awesome some of my biggest mistakes. But I know that I'm not the same person I was again like I said even a few weeks ago and so I don't I'm not mad at my past self though like my past self was coming from a different place.

“I'm not and so I think it's always good to have compassion and empathy towards your former self”

because you now know so many things that they didn't know. You know you're in a different place. You you see things differently. And so one I think it's very beautiful to recognize you're not the same person as you were in the past and to have only empathy towards your past. There's no upsides to having bad or negative emotions towards your past. It does nothing for your future.

It does nothing for your present. And so always transforming your past into gains and greater

perspective learning. That is again back you know back to push them out of growth. It's that you are grateful. Like the idea of trauma is really that something happened to your past and you feel like

in some way because of what happened. Whereas the opposite is that now you're empowered because

of what happened. So I guess that's one. In terms of always seeing your future self as a different

person to me what that does is it propels a growth mindset. Like the definition of a fixed mindset is that you've purely defined who you are based on your past and then you assume that who you are now is who you're always going to be. So you have a fixed mindset. You don't think you're going to change you. You've already kind of painted your future self into a box that your future self is the exact person you are today. And so that that leads you I mean what the research shows is that leads to

kind of having a fragile or a brittle approach to life where you're too afraid to fail because you're trying to prove yourself. Whereas if I know that my future self a week from now is going to be different. They're going to be way more knowledgeable. They're going to be less ignorant. Then that gives me right now a lot of grace. Like you said like I don't have to have all the answers right now. Like one of my favorite kind of models for this it comes from Bernay Brown's book The Atlas of the

Heart where she said you're either trying to be right or you're trying to get it right. And if you're trying to be right that's the that's the definition of a fixed mindset. Like you're trying to prove your current self because your future self isn't going to be any different. Like you've already you're kind of stuck. Whereas if you're just trying to get it right I know I'm going to make a lot of mistakes. I know I don't have all the answers now and I know my future self is going to have

better perspectives. And once I get there they're going to be blown away at how different they are

from who I am today. But also they're always going to be trying to figure it out. Like you're

always trying to get it right and you're always growing and changing. And so it just leads you to not needing to not needing to have it all figured out instead you're just in a state of learning

“which is a growth mindset. Yeah and something that I think is really interesting is that”

it's actually hard to imagine ourselves as a future self. I think some people are better than others but a lot of people have trouble imagining who they are in the future. Can you talk to us about why that is? The main reason that people have a hard time and this is something that Daniel Gilbert said he's a Harvard psychologist who's been studying this concept for 20 years and he actually gave a main stage to talk called the psychology of your future self back in 2014 but he

said that the reason people have a hard time imagining their future self is because they don't do it. Like they literally don't take the time. Like if anyone here was sitting listening I would ask in the last seven days how much time have you spent imagining your future self? How much time have you spent journaling and thinking about it? My guess is is that the average listener and this is a very like and maybe this group would be different because these are young

people who are actually you know have big visions but as a the average person who struggles to think about this it the main reason is just because they're not taking the time to think about it. Imagination is very much a skill. It's a skill that you can get better and better at.

“Psychologists there's kind of levels to seeing your future self. The first one is honestly just”

connecting with your future self and having empathy for them just like you would want to have

empathy for your past self. A crucial first step to connecting to your future self is having

is having empathy that your future self is a real person. They're coming from a certain place and they're being impacted by what you do. And so like if just like I would have empathy for another person if I was more emotionally intelligent I would realize that they're coming from a different place than me. They've got different perspectives, different values, different goals. They're in a different situation. I would want to start by understanding. But then you go from

connecting to getting really vivid where it's like you now start to kind of see the context of your future self. And obviously you get to create that. Like your future self is going to be different from mine. And I get to choose in large part what I want my future self to look like. And so I think you just take the time to think who do I want my future self to be in five or

“10 years? What do I want that to look like? What's going to be really important to my future self?”

What's going to be really important to them that I should be paying attention to now? I mean see I think it's just taking the time to really think about it and putting yourself in the situation like just as one simple example. Like let me just put myself into my future self shoes. Call it in 2030. So 2030 is eight years away. One way of putting myself into that person's shoes is literally just thinking things through. So I know that it's a little crazy for a lot of people but

I have six kids. And the oldest one is 15. The youngest one is two. So like I know that my 15-year-old in eight years from now is going to be 23. Like so that's one thing is like okay I'm going to have a 23-year-old son. My youngest is going to be 10. And so I'm just starting to like actually start to think about that. I'll be 10 years older. What do I want that to look like? Where do I want to be? What do I want to be focused on? What's going to be really important to me then? Like

literally starting to put yourself in the shoes and start to think about it. And then starting to think what are the most important things that I could do now that would set that future self up. I know that and you can do it in shorter time frames, but it's literally just actually putting

Yeah. So related to this and your book you say that your identity is what your most committed to.

“And it's your identity that actually drives your behaviors or your future identity.”

Can you talk to us about that? Yeah. So identity is such an interesting concept. And I really do think it's kind of the driver of everything. But then the question is well, what drives identity? And identity is really actually driven by what your goals are, what you're most committed to. And when I say it's what you're most committed to, it's really two things. It's the story that you're most

committed to in terms of your past, present, and future. Like we all have a story about our past and who we were and what led us to this point. We have a story about who we are now and we also have a story for our future. And so that's one commitment. Is the story or the narrative you

have, the second one is actually your standards. So your standards as a person or what you're

committed to. Like we all have standards. Like I'll give an example. Like I was recently back home visiting home. And I have a cousin who's been living at my dad's house for call it five years. He's a cousin that lives at my dad's house now. And he's one of those people who plays world of workcraft, literally like all day unless he's at work or sleeping. And actually honestly,

“that's how I used to be. Like I used to be that way where I played video games like 16 hours a day.”

But it was interesting because I was talking to him. And I was just catching up with him. And I was just asking him what was going on in the game because that's kind of the main thing he does. And he said, well, I recently left my group, my guild. It's a guild in this online game. And I said, well, why did you leave the guild? And he said, because they're just not up to my standard. Like I have, I have bigger goals that I want to achieve in the game. And there's

there's things I want to do and I just can't do in this group. And he's one of those people who's like at the top of the top of the top of the top in this game. And I said that was interesting that his standard for himself is really high in the game. Like I have zero standards for myself in that game because it's not, it's not, it's not valuable to me. Like it's not what I value. So I have no standards there. But the question is, what where are my standards? Where do I actually

care and how high are my standards in those areas? And your standard does reflect what you're committed to. So like he showed that he was committed to something more, which is why he left that group because his standards were higher. So as you elevate your standards and your story, you change your identity. And so your standards are just whatever you hold yourself to. That could be in your finances. It could be in your health. And when you raise the standards in it's a true commitment,

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

would be unfathomable to me now. Like it just doesn't fit with with what's acceptable or even with what's relevant to me anymore because it no longer fits the standard. Yeah. So basically it's having this very clear vivid picture of your future self. And then whenever you have decisions

in terms of how you act or the things that you do, you're always being true to your future self.

And it helps you basically be able to say no more often and make the decisions that will be good to your future self or what is the line to your future self. Yeah. I mean, when you start to make your future self the standard, then it becomes a mass of filtering tool where it's like, what would my future self do? Or if I was

“my future self now, how would they approach this? And how would my future self want me to do this?”

We were talking about Victor Frankel, you know, earlier in this call and that's literally what Victor Frankel invited people to do. He said, I want you to imagine this moment that you're sitting in right now and imagine that you had already lived it. So whatever you're doing, you know, let's just call it you're on your way home from work and you're about to go home from work. So let's just imagine that this moment right now has already passed and you acted poorly. Like you acted the way

you're you're you're about to act. Now I want you to and you're in your having to deal with the consequences of whatever it is you're going to do. But now you get to come back and relive it again. And you get to actually do it differently and better. Like that that's something that like and so that's just using your future self as the standard. Like I know that my future self wants the best for me and also wants me to be my best. And so if I start to make my future self

the standard, then all of a sudden I'm going to start making a lot better decisions in the present because not only am I am I am I thinking about what's best for me in my future. But I'm now using that as the tool for making the best decisions now. Whether that's call it I'm at home and you know, I could be engaging with my kids on a really high level which is what my future self would probably

my future self as the standard and my future self being what might would would be ultimately best

for me and what I value most. It becomes a lot easier to make the decision here and now to do what's best for the present and the future. And I can imagine that if you don't have a clear goal or vision

“of your future, your life is just willy-nilly, right? You're just doing things to do them. You”

don't have a clear goal. It's chaotic. So what's the downside of not even having a future self vision? Yeah, so if you don't know who your future self is in any degree or if you're absolutely not connected to your future self at all. Like the extreme end of that and like you can see this, the extreme end of being disconnected to your future self is someone who has zero perspective of consequences and like they're almost so they're so out of touch. Like and I've seen this

even with my kids where it's like they're acting so poorly. Like right before bed, sometimes

is a family. Like if they do certain things like our night routine really well, sometimes will like watch like have a movie or something like that before bed and like we will tell them sometimes if you go through these, if you do the routine really well, will like have ice cream and

“watch a movie, like you know for like 40 minutes, if they're not connected to that future”

self even 45 minutes into the future, like they will do absolute terrible things that then lead us to saying nope can't do it and then they throw a fit. They can't even believe that they lost what they did but they were so disconnected to what they were doing in the consequences and like this is what happens for extreme addicts where like you do something and you're so disconnected from the consequences that you're shocked when you when all of a sudden like

everything's falling apart and so like one degree of looking at this is like if you are so disconnected from your behavior and and reality being consequences which is what my kids were like there acting so opposite to the results that they want or think that they want but they don't even know it it's like are you aware that what you're doing right now is literally sabotaging you in 10 minutes from now and you're about to throw a fit and they don't see it like that is utter blindness

but the other angle which is kind of more the direction you were going was it's kind of like the Alice and Wonderland thing where you know Alice meets the cat and the cat says you know well Alice says which way should I go because there's two different paths and the cat says well that depends on where you want to go and she says why don't know where I'm going and so he says then you can literally go any direction you want because if you don't know where you want to go if you

don't have a destination in mind then it literally doesn't matter what you do today and that's that's part of I guess what you would say is being connected to your future self is once you get specific about where you want to go about what you want then you can start to formulate pathways of getting there but if you have absolutely no direction no destination then it does not matter what you do here and now you're essentially rudderless I mean your future self becomes the anchor

and it becomes the compass to like the decisions you make here and now and that's that's actually literally what all the research shows now and and by the way the psychology today magazine that just came out in September and October was all about um future self and about the person you're going to be in the future because this topic is becoming so so big in in psychology and even in therapy like therapists are finding that there's really no way we can help someone change long term

without getting them connected to their future self because if they're not if they're not thinking about who they want to be it's very hard to change without a goal or without a why like that then just becomes behavior change which is kind of will power focused and you can't really sustain that without a direction and so yeah it's I would say it's very difficult to to be intentional if you don't have a future self you're working towards yeah and you know I interview

really successful people all the time like yourself I had Alex from Ozzy on the show who's like everybody's new favorite sales and marketing entrepreneur and guru and we were talking about focus and this idea of focus is becoming such a big theme lately I've been doing podcasting for almost

“five years now and more and more it just sounds like people saying you need to get focused if you're”

unfocused if you're unprioritized you're not going to really achieve extraordinary success like you can be successful of course but to really you know become that one percent Scott Galloway was on and said the same thing and so what you're saying is aligned to that you know understanding your future self is having a extreme focus of who you want to be right and the steps you're

going to take to get there because you understand who you want to be and that target's always moving

you know starting a business sounds exciting until you realize it suddenly you're the marketer

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with Shopify today sign up for a $1 per month trial today at shopfly.com/puffeting go to shopfly.com/puffeting yeah fam raise your hand if you've been putting off a doctor's appointment yeah same and for me

it's even worse because I'm always traveling bouncing around cities and so I don't really plan

my health care weeks or months in advance most of the time I wake up and think I better go to the dentist and if I don't go right then and there in the next day or two it can easily turn into months

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“talk for supporting this message you talk about Mr. Beast in your book I believe and so I'd love”

to understand how Mr. Beast used this concept to be a 17 year old kid no money no skills to one of the most famous people in the world so this was really interesting to me I was shocked when it happened because I was writing be your future self now it was kind of so I wrote a book called Personality isn't permanent and I did not know about the future self research even though like I had already done a PhD it was still kind of a growing they call it like a branch or a vein

of research like it was a topic I'd never really heard of and it was kind of small but it was

burgeoning meaning it was growing and anyways while I was writing that book call it end of 2019 or early 2020 I fell upon the research on future self and I was like oh my goodness why have I never heard of this before like why have I never even seen this why have I never heard people talking about this whether it's in psychology or in self development or anything like why is this a new idea uh it seems like this is like the grounding of all self development ideas and also like psychology

like I'm but anyways I knew I wanted to write a book on it um and so I was doing all sorts of research on it while writing other books and then all of a sudden in 2020 and I had known who Mr. Beast was just because I mean I like YouTube I was watching it you know he's the he's this interesting figure right doing these huge outlandish videos and I was mostly watching them with my kids and just blown away by what he was doing and then all of a sudden in October so it's an October of 2020

a video comes up and it's called High Me in Five Years and it's got a picture of like a younger version of Mr. Beast Jamie Donaldson right and it's sketchy like I turned I clicked the video and it's it's Tim talking as a 17-year-old kid in 2015 so it's it's filmed in 2015 and he's saying hi you know whenever you see this video I just want to let you know like it's 2015 I'm filming this video from my room I should be uh studying for my history test but I just wanted to take this

minute and have a conversation with myself in five years from now and he basically just starts talking to his future self it's like two minutes long it's it's really rough filmed from a really bad camera he shows where he's at with his YouTube channel I think he's got like eight thousand subscribers and basically he just talks about his future self he's like you know where do I want to be in five years like who do I think I'm gonna be in five years um and he's just kind of having this

as you scroll way back in time through his channel you actually see that he did this multiple times but he did it all the same night so it was an October it was well you know if you use the exact date it was October fourth of 2015 and he was 17 years old and he what he ended up doing I don't know where he got the idea but he filmed four different future self videos each of them were like two minutes long so the first one was where do I want to be and he said hi me in six months

or something like that and so he was talking to his future self six months into the future and just saying where mostly because his obsession which as you can see whatever you focus on expands he got very good at YouTube but most of his future self was related to like himself as a YouTuber you know you want to be a famous youtuber you want to be the biggest youtuber in the world and so like as he's talking to his future self six months into the future he's like you know

if I have twenty thousand subscribers it's gonna be absolutely amazing and stuff like that if I

“don't it's gonna be embarrassing so he did one for six months out one for a year out I think he”

did one one for five years out and then he did a ten year all that night basically all of those videos were only two minutes long and what he did is he filmed them all in one one place one time he probably took ten or fifteen minutes to film the four videos and then he put them you know he set them to go publish on his YouTube channel but he set them to go into their corresponding times and so he set the six month one to go live six months into the future the one one

one year one to go live a year into the future the five year one and so on October 4th of 2020 when the video just automatically went live because he had set it to go live five years into the future he actually had forgotten that he had made that video like it was a shock to him

but in that video he said he wanted to have a million YouTube subscribers and he wouldn't have

even been able to fathom what it would have been like to have a million subscribers well when the video actually went live in 2020 his channel had like forty five million subscribers by that point he was incomparably a different person he had a huge business he was like had a big team he was all of his videos were getting like tens of millions sometimes hundreds of millions of views and even since then now you know he's got multiple channels and he's doing

so many things it's even ridiculous but I mean he's just an interesting example of someone who is very public about his future self not afraid of admitting his future self and you can actually see when you watch his old videos before that day October 4th of 2015 you can see that obviously he got really clear and committed to his future self because the videos started changing after that time and his growth started to like really like accelerate and so he's just someone

who is obviously connected to commit to his future self he used his future self as the basis for what he did he was talking to his future self in public and that was obviously his identity that drove him forward and he continued to race his standard for who he became what he did so he's just a brilliant example of it yeah and what a great idea in terms of like shooting videos

basically speaking to your future self with no apologies like no embarrassment like he doesn't care

“and I think that's a huge thing is to not be ashamed of your future self so many people are afraid”

to admit what they want yeah how well in terms of like the timeline of your future self is there a certain should we think about ourselves five years from now ten years from now do we want to think of like a range like what's your suggestion there so this is the beautiful part about time psychologically is that you can use it however you want one of the areas and we don't have to go too deep into this in the book but like obviously a lot of people believe in God right

and so a lot of people believe in their future self after this life and like and so like obviously a lot of people are thinking about the after life and they're using their views of that to dictate their decisions now so like you can go as far into the future as you want you can go beyond this life if you want you can think about your future self there and learn about that which a lot of people do and that influence is a lot of their decisions in the meaning in their life you can think you know

Stephen Kovey had the old concept of imagining your 80th birthday party and like what you want your life to be like on your 80th birthday party who do you want to be there what do you want people do talk about your life about so like you can think way ahead and then think you know big picture you know and expand that out and really start to think like what will really have

“mattered at the end of my life like what matters and ideally you spend most of your time on the”

things which matter not on the things which don't but in terms of hyper practicality I think it's good to build your future self around various timelines like various important anchor moments and like I gave you 20 30 on purpose that wasn't an accident the reason I gave you 20 30 is because in eight years from now the youngest one that we adopted so we adopted three kids and then we had three of our own and the youngest one that we adopted is currently 11 years old in 2030 he will turn

18 okay and so the older two will be gone he will be leaving in 2030 and that is going to be a

like when he moves we live in Florida we might not you know our future selves might have different plans but that's kind of a huge anchor moment for my future self for my family's future self is like our older three kids are going to leave our younger ones are much younger than the ones we adopted so like me and my wife have spent some time thinking about like what's going to happen when Logan leaves like we're going to go become nomadic and like travel the world live in different countries like and so

like we're starting to think about our future self on that timeline because there's a key moment there like there's a key anchor to that and so like it's good to think about your future self in terms of key anchoring times because then you can really start to map out like what do I want to see happen in the next eight years and like where would I like to be when Logan leaves like I can really think big on an eight year scale like I can do a lot of things between now in 2030

“when he leaves in terms of super practicality I think three years in terms of tangible goals”

in terms of like if I want to accelerate toward a big progress three years is a really good timeline for really achieving big specific things like you know you and I over the last three years you know it's been a little over three years now but like in terms of you three years ago if you're thinking about like how big do you want to see your podcast go like over three years you can grow enormously toward a very specific goal and so thinking in terms of like if I want to

grow really big in a very specific direction call it me as an author you as a podcast someone in their finances someone towards skills three years you can you can get really specific and you can still grow like quant like 10x 100x 1000x big in a certain direction so I think three years or less in terms of really big sprints towards big goals. I love that I think that's super super helpful. Okay so I want to go I want to move into purpose and understanding how purpose is related to all

“of this and so I think a good place to start would be understanding the levels of every behavior”

you say it's the what the why and the how can you talk to us about how your why really drives the what and the how. Yeah so the why is the reason for doing it right so this is where you start to become intentional so as an example if someone's listening to this podcast my question will be

well why are you listening to it and the why would then highlight what you're ultimately trying to

do and what you ultimately value like everyone's going to have a different why for why we're doing this you have a different why for interviewing me as I have for being interviewed right and so it's important to clarify and understand what what what the why is that's driving everything you're doing and I'm of the belief that you do choose the why like you do choose it you clarify it but you you can scrape away levels of understanding but the why is just the purpose

“the purpose is the goal like what is the ultimate reason you're doing this um Aristotle would”

call that final cause which is basically the end so as an example like if if I'm hungry you know like if I get up and go to the kitchen and start eating well why did I get up and go to the kitchen it might have been because I'm hungry but it also might have been because I was triggered and I'm just trying to avoid like I'm just like trying to avoid working like and so it's just understanding the why and the purpose starts to help you realize what's driving your behavior is it is it something

you really want you know like when you're a teenager maybe your why was which again the why is the goal and this is why the goal drives everything you do including your identity um you know when you're younger the why might have been just to impress your friends right and and so there's

always a why behind every action and how psychologists frame it is is every goal is either an

approach oriented goal where you're trying to approach what you want or you're trying to avoid what you don't want and so the why is always going to either be approaching something you want or avoiding something you don't want you know and so it's it's it's helpful when the why is more approach oriented sure you want to avoid bad things from happening but if if everything you're doing is just to avoid negative things from happening um that kind of probably shows it there's a lot of

trauma that's unresolved in the past and so you're trying to avoid a lot of pain yeah so I'd love if we could like just dig on this a little bit so we're talking about the difference between

approach motivations and avoid motivations when we approach motivation we're basically creating

our future rather avoid motivation is just avoiding a future we don't want and it's better to proactively create one is what you're saying I just want to understand what you're trying to say well

call it bad decisions avoiding bad people but if you're always just avoiding then then then

basically every action you're taking is a reaction against something else like I'm trying to not but even avoiding things is based on the future like I'm you know so I'm like I'm trying to avoid being out of shape right like that could be I don't want to like be obese in the future so I'm going to avoid that like that's one way of approaching your future but it's far more powerful and more proactive to say well what is what is it I truly want to approach like what is it

I want to like direct my attention towards and focus on and create and yeah I can avoid land falls along the way and I can learn from experiences and avoid those kind of people or I can avoid those kind of dumb mistakes like certainly you can avoid things but it is very powerful to be proactive and kind of consciously creating like this is what I want and then to watch yourself go and get it and and so both are useful both are incredibly useful both are motivations

“and I think it's helpful when you're trying to observe yourself like why am I doing this it's”

either going to be to approach something you want or to avoid something you don't and that can start to highlight kind of the why and I guess one reason why avoid motivations can have downsides

is because if you're always just trying to avoid something then that means that one of the things

you're avoiding is fear like you're avoiding going through the going through the emotions of getting what you want like if you're always avoiding then you're also avoiding the hard truths you're avoiding the fear you're you're avoiding hard conversations if you're always avoiding then that what what that means is that you're not passing through the emotions and the fear that are going to get you where you want to go when you're when you're operating with commitment

and courage you're not avoiding you're going right through it and you're transforming through it. I love that this has been an awesome man so just to round this out I thought a good story that kind of ties into a lot that we were talking about and I know these big inspiration for you is Victor Frankles life so can you tell us a story about Victor Frankle and how he used his purpose of protecting his book to survive while he was in the concentration camps in the Holocaust and

what you learned from his story about hope and purpose and then we'll close out the conversation.

“So the reason Franco is so important is that Franco highlights a lot of what Mr. Beast”

understood but Franco makes it even more dramatic basically what Franco shows and again

man search for meaning one of the most important books in the world he was a Jewish person who

in 1942 was taken into the Holocaust right when it like the German Nazi concentration camps and what he found with people who are living in such dire situations we really I mean unless you actually study the Holocaust you you don't even understand what I'm saying it's gibberish right now it was almost unfathomable how bad it was like everyone was the people were starved they were thrown in gas chambers people were shot in the head right next to you like you're sitting doing

grunt work for months months months years and years and years everything's been taken from you even the clothes off your back you're standing there naked deprived of everything deprived of your dreams deprived of everything and what Franco noticed when he was in those situations because he was a psychologist and so like he was paying attention to this stuff he was very in tune with what was going on in people's heads and like whether why are some people could be resilient and even be

happy in these crazy conditions and why some people would get desperate lose their minds and he started to draw an interesting correlation which was in those dire situations when you're kind of deprived of everything and you're also starved physically I mean they were only given like a small piece of bread every day is he saw an immediate correlation that like when someone lost hope toward their future within days they died in those situations like their body didn't have enough

to sustain them if you and I lost hope in our future we'd start to fall apart physically like we'd probably lose our health you know and hope from a psychology standpoint is like air to your physical body like food and air like you need hope psychologically because you're who you are right now is largely dictated by your views of the future so basically what Franco found was is that unless you had a specific goal which is a huge aspect of hope without a specific goal

that gave your life meaning in substance you couldn't handle the present especially when it was

“that bad and so that's why he always quoted Nietzsche which is when you have a why to live for”

you can bear almost anyhow and so everything he did and he literally he layers it and I share the best quotes of it and future stuff but he says you know when you lose when you lose hope in your future you know you're doomed but he also said that everything we did in the concentration camps to give people hope or to even help them to be able to manage their mind or manage their

himself you know he literally stated the goal that gave him purpose and gave him meaning

“and allowed him to endure the trials and for him it was he wanted to be reconnected with his”

wife Tilly who was taken to another camp he didn't know that she'd already been killed who and she was pregnant with their baby but he didn't know that he wanted to be reconnected with her but also he wanted to rewrite his book which was almost done being written when they got basically taken by the Nazis and they took the manuscript and tore it apart and so he really wanted he literally states this in the message for meaning he said my deep desire to rewrite that

book a new and publish it allowed me to overcome the rigors and the pain of the camps so when you have a why to live for you can bear almost any how if you don't have a why to live for if you don't have hope and commitment in your future then you're not going to be very productive I mean little things in your day can throw you away off right but for him in those situations

“it was life or death it's literally life or death yeah so so fascinating I think this is”

a great way to close out the interview so I always end the interview with a couple last questions

and then we do something fun at the end of the year and recap them so the first one is what is one actionable thing are young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow doesn't have to be money related yeah yeah yeah I mean here's what I'm gonna say it goes back to the Alex Hermosie comment for me right now which is I love the quote it's better to be a meaningful specific than a wandering generality and so the more clear you get on your future

self and the more specific that obviously takes you down a specific direction you're not trying to be everything for everyone like some of the recent decisions I've made in my career and in the books I'm writing have to do with like becoming even more focused even more specific in a narrow range

it's kind of like the 80-20 principle like 80 percent of what you're doing is kind of a distraction

whereas it's just the core 20 that makes sense and so you want to go deeper and deeper into that like let go of everything else like actually commit and go deep and get 10 times better in something specific like if you get really really good in something specific it kind of reminds me of that quote becomes so good you can't be ignored like it but it's really about qualitative not quantitative it's not about the quantity of what you do it's about the quality of how you do it

and that requires focus commitment and purpose and so just commit to something and commit to getting really really good and unique in that thing that's actually what mastery is it's not about doing something well it's about doing something uniquely well and comparably well and that takes commitment and depth not broadness love that mic drop all right and what is your secret to profiting in life defining what profit means to me not everything is profitable not everything is

“worth my time not everything is useful and so defining what I value what I care about what matters”

most and then going all in on those few things and letting go of everything else and Ben where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do Benjamin Hardy dot com and future self dot com awesome and we're going to stick all of your links in the show notes Ben thank you again for coming back on to young and profiting podcast I'm happy to be with you you your future self who you are today is a is unimaginable to who you were four years ago it's so cool thank you so much

what a powerful way to close out our mental wealth series I have to say this episode is one that I

always think about and if there's one thing I hope you take away from this conversation it's this

you are not behind you are not your past and you are not limited to the version of yourself that you are today Benjamin reminds us that hi achievers often get trapped in the gap we measure ourselves against the ideal the dream the bigger goal the thing we still have not reached yet and when we do that even our wins can feel like failures but when we measure backwards when we look at who we were a year ago five years ago or even just a few months ago we start to see the game we start to see

the growth and that gives us the confidence clarity and energy to keep going from a way healthier place so here's your final challenge yap gang go to yapmedia.com/mentalwealth again that's yapmedia.com/mentalwealth and open the future self worksheet and the I am column I want you to write down who you want to become in five years from now and try to make it bigger than just work for example it could be I am a present parent or I am a great leader or I am a healthy creative joyful person whatever it is

and then in the I should column write the small actions you're going to take right now to become that person eventually because your future self is not built someday it's built in the small

your mind is your greatest business asset not your sales funnel not your calendar not your strategy

“your beautiful mind so protect it train it listen to it and build a life in business that your”

future self will thank you for thank you so much for joining me on this mental wealth series this is

the final episode of our program and I hope you enjoyed it keep doing the work keep choosing growth

and keep becoming the person you were meant to be this is your host Hala Tahan signing off

“hey Afam we're about to launch something that might be my favorite thing we've ever done on the podcast”

a brand new series called How We Profit now I've been doing young and profiting podcasts for eight years and my listeners are successful we are real entrepreneurs with real businesses and a lot of you guys are crushing it behind the scenes you may not be super famous you may not be a billionaire yet but you've got a business that you've learned how to scale and we want to hear from you one of the best ways to learn as an entrepreneur is from your peers and I found it super helpful

to be in these peer entrepreneurship groups and learn from other entrepreneurs who are at my level

“but just in a different industry so that's what I want to bring to this podcast I want this to be”

our own peer group but on the podcast and so I'm gonna be interviewing people who are making

anywhere from 500,000 to 10 million dollars a year they're not super famous they're not the

typical billionaires that are on my show these are real entrepreneurs who are crushing it behind the scenes and we're gonna uncover what they do to sell how they get their customers with their profit margin looks like how they market and so much more if this sounds like you and you want to be featured on young and profiting podcasts for our how we profit series just how to young and profiting dot com slash apply and share your story let me know why you think you

should be featured on the show again that's young and profiting dot com slash apply and who knows maybe you'll be our next guest on young and profiting podcast