Greg McKeown:
Welcome. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, the author of the two New York Times bestsellers, Effortless and Essentialism. And I wrote both of those so that your life and mine could become more limitless. Because most of us feel that we have a greater contribution to make, but we have run out of space to be able to do it. I mean, have you, yourself, not felt that you had untapped potential, but you had no time left to develop it? Maybe you’ve noticed that the busier you get, the less time you have for personal growth. And it’s for exactly that reason that I have invited my friend, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, onto the podcast. I brought him on because he is currently writing a book called 10 X is Easier Than Two X, which is so consistent with the ideas of Effortless and Essentialism. But as you’ll hear in this episode, we didn’t even get to that. We talked instead about where things are for me, where things are for him and what we are learning from that experience, especially the power of developing an inflection point in your life, where you can see a new version of yourself and can step into it so that you can achieve really a tipping point in your life. A point, to use Ben’s phrase, in this conversation of no return, a point of no return. So in this episode, you’re going to hear our conversation, some counterintuitive learnings, and, I would say, some actionable advice. By the end of this episode, you will be better equipped to be able to achieve an inflection point in your life forward by a tipping point so that you can achieve a far higher contribution in your life, but without burning out. Let’s begin.
Remember to teach the ideas in this podcast episode to someone else within the next 24 to 48 hours of listening. Take them with you on this journey.
Greg McKeown:
Do you prefer Ben or Benjamin?
Ben Hardy:
I prefer Ben, but in, like the author world, often people call me Benjamin. So it’s, you know what I mean.
Greg McKeown:
I do know what you mean. Ben, I think at least in my own life, I am in an inflection, and in that inflection, one of the discoveries, and it is so profound to me, I cannot believe it. And that is that all those little glimpses, little visions, but glimpses is easier to accept that we’ve had all through our lives, but what we needed to do. I’m making assumptions in what I’m saying here, but like, they’re all, they all can happen. They all need to happen. They’re all going to happen. Like every achievement you’ve ever made, every time you’ve gone from something you thought wasn’t possible that then you did it. And then it was manifest. If it’s understood correctly, builds faith seriously to go, oh, what if, what if that other impossible thing is actually also just possible?
Ben Hardy:
For me, I look at it in terms of what I call a point of no return, but I feel an inflection point when all of a sudden, some surges start to happen. I start seeing evidences of where I thought, you know, of where things are going, and I start more fully, you know, being at the level, I guess you could say, of where that was going. But I’d be interested in how you would describe that and how, you know, it’s happening. Kind of maybe some of the buildup, or I don’t want to go too deep into it, but I thought it was interesting that you said that and that you knew it was an inflection and all, so you started to feel some of the effects of it and where it was taking you.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. So, I like that. I think that buildup is a good word, right? Where you start to sense something new, you start to sort of birthing process, right? Like you know something’s coming. You know, that you need to, I suppose, you know, you’re not satisfied with how things are. You know that there’s something about that that is no longer sufficient. And so then you’re on the journey to discover it and to figure out what it is. I think that I know I’m at an inflection point where I’m feeling the pull again and again and again to do something different, to make a new contribution. And I think that why I’m saying that I currently am clearly in an inflection point is because it’s gone beyond thinking and beyond taking first actions. And all of these things are starting to come together as a multifaceted strategy.
I mean, just the idea, which I don’t take credit for. I feel like this was detected or even sort of revealed over time. Just even the idea to write a new book and have this podcast be primarily focused on that same subject, and to do a doctorate at Cambridge University on the same subject, with the same book in mind. Like just even that manifestation is what makes it an inflection point rather than just something to think about.
Because now, at this moment, as I’m still very much in the work of those three related projects, I am starting to wonder about what it means beyond doing them. You know, like I’m in Cambridge now, I’ve still got to do the work, but I’ve already begun the work. We’ve started the podcast, you know, this new podcast where I own it and can design it how I want it to be. That’s happening. The new book, I am writing it, working it, reading about it, learning. So these things are now happening. They’re not just ideas. What does it mean?
I can see them coming together. What then is possible? What else is possible if this was possible? Yeah. So it’s sort of two things. One is what happens as a result of completing these, right? That’s an interesting question to reflect on, but then I think actually the bigger inflection point for me now that I’m working through this is if you can do those at the same time, in a way that they plus each other, what else can be done?
Ben Hardy:
I like it. Here’s kind of how I interpret what you’re describing. One is, this is just my bias, but I believe that the goal ultimately informs the process. I’m not sure what your vision is that ultimately led you to the development of this three or four-pronged strategy that you put together. There is some driver that ultimately led you to developing this. The development of it was an inspired creation. You didn’t know it was going to come out this way. And I think how I think about it is it was an incredible feat just to put this process together, and then the inflection point is the confidence and excitement that I believe you have, that if you go through with this process, it’s going to transform you into what you were building it into for the first place.
Like you’ve now built kind of a runway. You’re excited about it. You’re like, holy cow, look at this thing that just came together. And at least from my standpoint, my belief is, is now going through it, going through this Ph.D., writing this book, learning what you’re going to learn that you now don’t know, developing it, and then putting it out there and the way you want to. This process that you’re going to go through, you do believe is going to take your life and your work to a place that’s kind of beyond what your former self could have imagined, but it’s also going to take you to a place where you can’t even fully grasp all the potentials it, what you’re describing. And so that’s kind of how I see it is.
And interestingly, in psychology, there’s a lot of research on what’s called pathways thinking. Pathways is a huge aspect of hope, and high hope people and the psychologists have split it up.
You can look at research on high hope people versus low hope people, but a big aspect of high hope people is what they call like high pathways thinking or high strategy thinking, where you’re always trying to find or generate new and more interesting pathways to getting to where you’re wanting to go. And if one path isn’t working, a low-hope person will keep doing it over and over and over again. That’s kind of the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Whereas a high hope person takes all experiences as feedback to adjust and transform the path or the strategy forward.
And so, as I’m listening, I’m hearing this development of really interesting strategies and pathways towards where you’re going, and then the excitement of what the path is going to do to you. It’s going to transform you, your work, and probably a lot of other things in your life.
Greg McKeown:
You’ve introduced two things there now, and at least in my mind, there’s two subjects to explore the one that I wanted to go to before you got to the high hope person, low hope person was just something you’d said sounded so true to me, named something in me. And what’s exciting is like the movie Limitless. You seen that movie?
Ben Hardy:
Yes
Greg McKeown:
The core idea of it, I mean, that’s the only drug that I’ve ever seen demonstrated in a movie context or a real, you know, or in real life that’s ever had any appeal to me, right? The idea that this person can take this pill and suddenly be able to do anything, that he’s limitless in his intelligence, in his ability to learn, that he can learn a new language in a day or two days. I mean, the idea of being limitless, not just for the sake of it, but to be able to make a higher contribution, to be able to be more useful, more valuable to people, is so attractive to me. The idea of limitless growth.
I got a text this morning from somebody. Okay. So, this is someone I’ve had on the podcast before. This is Rob Dyrdek. Who’s like a fascinating individual. Do you know, Rob?
Ben Hardy:
I know him in the context of skateboarding because I grew up as a skateboarder and a snowboarder in Salt Lake. And I remember if I’m thinking of the right Rob Dyrdek.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. That’s the same one.
Ben Hardy:
I know that he’s more now in kind of the metaphysical, like the like law of attraction, think and grow rich world, which is really interesting, but I know of him primarily as a skateboarder because that was the world I was in, in high school, but that’s a really interesting nonlinear transformation right there as well.
Greg McKeown:
Well, exactly. And he’s turned from being a skateboarder and being very successful in that and brands associated with that into a business leader, MTV star, and so on. But he’s like the, I think the second best-paid skateboarder in the world, but that’s not even the thing is that when I talk to Rob, whenever I have talked to him, I’m just like, oh, my brain just explodes. It really is like talking to someone who has figured out the next level. And I don’t mean I want to be him or even like him, you know, he’s just him. I’m not trying to be Rob. But I see in his description of how he’s approaching his life, like a whole system, he’s basically taken these ideas from Essentialism and Effortless. And, and I don’t mean limited to that, but, he has, he read both of them and he like said, oh yeah, I’m just incorporating them.
And he just did it so fast in building these systems that produce results for him that I’m like, yeah, that’s what it looks like. That’s what, you know, he’s achieving what he wants to achieve using these principles and these systems to get there.
Anyway, he just texted me today who, talking here about limitless. He just says, “Perpetually evolving towards your limitless potential in life and in business is the goal.”.
First of all, who talks like that? And then secondly, like, that to me is what’s attractive. I have; you have everyone listening has such limited time. It is pathetically short and then such limited effort and energy.
In my experience, I would say I have a higher level of energy and willingness to put effort in than maybe even the average person. I think that’s true. I’m up this morning, 5:30 in the morning. I am just, I cannot think of a time, honestly, in I would say 25 years that I haven’t woken up just full of energy, ready to go, you know, wanting to go and make a difference.
So like, it’s not like, I don’t think that matters, but that’s insufficient because there’s only so much of that to go around. And so, anyway, I wanted to riff for a second there on this idea of the attraction of limitlessness. It’s that you, and I don’t mean you don’t make trade-offs. It’s that you make trade-offs in order to be able to achieve a higher level. And then, once you have achieved that high level of contribution, what’s the higher level after that? And you have to keep learning and transforming and keep going through inflection points in order to not just keep doing more of what you were doing before.
If I was still doing more of what I’d done before, I’d literally still be washing cars as I was as a 10-year-old in Leeds, England. Like, you have to keep evolving your way of thinking so that you can operate at a higher level, but still without burning out and still without damaging your relationships. In fact, making your relationships better over time, if you want to make a higher contribution and you don’t want to do it at the cost of relationships or your personal health, you know, are these things that often get put to the side and therefore cost us highly. You have to keep evolving your way of thinking about the systems in life that you’re using. And so what’s the tangible thing somebody can do to create a kind of inflection point that we are describing? Like, what’s something actionable that someone could do in, let’s say, a sort of 10-minute exercise to start them on that journey?
Ben Hardy:
You kind of brought it up. That there’s a shift that occurs. It even reminds me a lot of my research that I did in my Ph.D. I studied the difference between wannabe entrepreneurs and real entrepreneurs. And that was my master’s thesis. And then my doctorate was on transformational leadership theory, but anyone can find that thesis it’s called The Courage to Start a Business by Benjamin Hardy. But I was very interested in that inflection point. I called it the point of no return. And so I was, I was asking, you know, it was mostly a qualitative study, but I was, I interviewed dozens and dozens of what we called nascent entrepreneurs. These are people who aren’t yet entrepreneurs, but the reason we interviewed them is because they said that they would rather be an entrepreneur than an employee. Even though they weren’t yet an entrepreneur, they wanted to be. That’s what kind of qualified me to interview them.
Greg McKeown:
That’s really interesting.
Ben Hardy:
And then the actual entrepreneurs were people who are truly running a business full time.
Greg McKeown:
I love the framing of this. And I think that that’s exciting for anyone who’s thinking about getting more education in their lives, you know. Take it from me. It’s not too late, you know. You think it is, but it doesn’t have to be. So, but when I hear that title and that theme, I think, well, suddenly people who assume if you’re doing a masters, it has to be in some, I, I don’t know, an esoteric subject that is, is out there. No, you can study something that’s fascinating to you, whatever that thing is. So I love that. That’s my little, you know, break in the subject to emphasize that. Now carry on with what you learned about these two types of entrepreneurs.
Ben Hardy:
One thing that, you know, just because I know you’re going into a Ph.D. or you’re already in it now at this point, but, you know, when you go into a Ph.D., at least from my standpoint, you’re studying a subject matter. I was studying organizational psychology, which was intriguing to me, but also I was drilling into a particular line of research, at least for the first two years, which was psychological courage. And the person I was working with was one of the top researchers who had been studying courage for 25 years. And so pointed me to dozens of studies, et cetera, that gave me so much understanding of courage, but then I just applied it specifically to entrepreneurship. And so, like, I took her base research, and I was like, well, I want to understand psychological courage in the context of becoming an entrepreneur.
And she’s like, oh wow, never even thought about that. Okay. Go for it. But it’s interesting in thinking about that and also thinking about your inflection point. I was not yet an entrepreneur when I first started my Ph.D. program. I went, mine was from 2014 to 2019, but I was thinking about it. And I was trending in that direction. And so the reason I was studying that in a lot of ways was for my own, my own self, my own learning, but also for my future self, my future goals. And then, obviously, through the course of my Ph.D., I literally became a professional writer and an entrepreneur. And even before I was done writing it, I started writing those books with Dan. So it’s kind of interesting, but I guess kind of pulling some of these ideas together and then hearing your thoughts or reactions.
Certainly, you have to have a goal; you have to see yourself somewhere in the future. Right? And I think, you know, so the nascent entrepreneurs, they indeed wanted to be entrepreneurs, but admittedly were not yet committed to do so. If they had reached a point of commitment, which is what I believe in large part is that inflection point and point of no return, they would be entrepreneurs. The psychological definition of identity is; actually, it’s, there’s a few fold aspects of identity, but essentially it’s how you see yourself, and it’s the values and goals to which you’re most committed. So like, as people, we’re all committed to various things, and whatever we’re most committed to is our identity. And when you change what you’re committed to, your identity, you know, changes as well. So I do think that the inflection point is a moment of full commitment to move forward.
And then it kind of becomes who you are. You start to shed away the old version of yourself. You know, we were talking about Rob; there was a point when he stopped being the skater. I don’t know, maybe he still does skate. But he’s probably left many elements of his former self behind in order to go through his next jump. And one of my favorite quotes is from Robert Brault, “We’re kept from our goal, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to lesser goals.” Very in line with Essentialism, you know, that there’s all these lesser goals.
You start to see the inflection point, generate massive momentum where it starts to really pull you forward. You use the word pull, which is really interesting because psychologists also break motivation into two categories, push or pull, and push motivation is more willpower. Like you’ve got to force yourself to do it. It actually costs a lot of energy. Whereas pull means that you are literally being pulled forward by the thing that you want. And it actually generates energy. Like it’s pulling you forward. I kind of think about it almost like, you know, you’re being pulled forward, like into like warp speed, you know? And, like, that’s kind of a big part of the inflection point. You can feel it pulling you forward. And I think that a lot of it has to do with reaching that place of commitment and then beginning to strip away everything that’s in conflict with that commitment. That’s actually what commitment is. It means you’re literally letting go of the things that are in conflict with that commitment, those lesser goals, or those things that got you there. So those are some of the ways I think about this.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I really like it. I think that it is all about getting to a point where you are willing to let go of the past strategy, the past version of you, you know, that’s when it becomes real. Of course, that’s true because until you let go of something until you eliminate the non-essential until you shed some version of yourself, there’s no space for you to actually invest in the future version of you. Right? I said there’s a natural limit of time and effort, as I was mentioning before now.
Ben Hardy:
And an identity, seriously, you’re operating from an identity.
Greg McKeown:
I like that. I like the idea that there’s. So to me, I think, you know, the whole idea of an inflection point, or we could use a different term, right? A tipping point. I would say an inflection point maybe is right before a tipping point, something like that. And this tipping point, you have to keep investing in, you know, a vision of your future self, what you want even more than what you have. What do I want so much, I’d be willing to give up what I have right now for it? And then I think you have to do a lot of the brainstorming of optionality, like just of ideas of how to get there. Anna said to me, my wife, Anna said to me years ago, it was really helpful feedback for me. She’s like, Greg, you’re like a professional brainstormer, and I didn’t take it, especially like that was a compliment. Because I hadn’t thought about brainstorming as that feels like, instead of doing, you brainstorm.
Ben Hardy:
Instead of doing, you probably like it if she said strategist, because what’s the difference?
Greg McKeown:
Right? Fair enough. But I’ve come to really value that perspective because if I ask somebody to achieve a goal, like a task, a project, something, and they’re like, well, you know, I tried. You know, I did X, and, you know, it can’t be done. Or, I’ve sometimes worked with people like this. And I’m like, do you think you’ve tried all the options? There are, like, I can think literally of 10 to 20 ways to achieve the thing that we are talking about right now. I don’t know if any of them will work. I don’t know which one of them will work, but there’s so many ways to attack a problem.
You know, one of the things for me that’s always been interesting to me is meeting people who I admire, who I’m fascinated by and fascinated with and want to learn from like, I’ve always wanted that on the basis that if you can spend your time with people who know more than you, who have achieved more than you, if you can just be in the presence of those people, some of it rubs off on you. Some of it changes your own thought patterns. And, so, I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to develop ways to meet people and just to get to know them.
So if I say, hey, listen, I want to have, I want to meet so and so, and I have someone on my team who’s saying, yeah, well, you know, I mean, you know, I emailed their website. It’s like, yeah. Okay, well, good. That’s number one. There’s like 25 other things we could try to do now to reach this.
So I think there’s something about that. All of those kinds of things get you to a point where you start to believe in the possibility of this new version of you. And that, I think, is the inflection point right before the tipping point because you say, oh, I can risk letting go of the old now because this new one is becoming real enough that I can step into it. I don’t think it happens in a single instant; even if the decision itself is a single instant, I think you have to build up to it, build up your sense of it and the possibility of it before you can, before you can, it gets, it gets real. And then something you commit to, and that you reach the point you are saying of the point of no return. Give me your final thoughts on this.
Ben Hardy:
Yeah. My final thought is that the inflection point, listening to your inflection point, is when you start to believe in it enough that you’re investing more and more into it. The tipping point is where you shift from belief to knowing because you’ve now reached, you’ve now generated either a path, strategy, et cetera. And there’s so much evidence that this is the direction you’re going, and it’s now pulling you forward. And you’re already stripping so much of the old self away that, like the point of no returns already happened. And, like, this is now just the path you’re on. The evidence is so strong. You’re now in a position you see where it’s going. And so, like, that’s the tipping point slash point of no return. The inflection point led up to it because that’s where you now, like, start to believe in it enough to start putting more and more into it, really start digging into it. But yeah, once you hit that threshold, now you’ve shifted from belief to knowing. And there’s just too much evidence, too much momentum where it’s just now the direction.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I really like that is the order inflection point, point of no return, and tipping point.
Ben Hardy:
I’m calling the tipping point and the point of no return, the same thing. It’s the same thing.
Greg McKeown:
Inflection point is built up, and then you have this tipping point, this tipping point, that’s the point of no return.
Ben Hardy:
That’s the core inflection point like that’s, yeah.
Greg McKeown:
You let go. Now you’re actually letting go of the past self, and there’s no, you’re not going back. You can’t put yourself back into the original packaging. You can’t, you can’t go back into the version of yourself before you started this journey. At that point, it wouldn’t be you anymore.
Ben Hardy:
Yeah.
At that point, it’d be new wine in an old bottle. It would be pretty uncomfortable for you and everyone else. Like you could potentially do it, but like you would be inauthentic at that point. And you’d probably drive yourself crazy and probably start developing addictions and whatnot.
Greg McKeown:
My goodness, Benjamin Hardy, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, we were supposed to talk about one thing, but we really enjoyed it. I’ve really enjoyed talking about something completely different. I’m going to reach out and get Rob Dyrdek on here, and we’ll get him on so you can sort of see a version of what this looks like when somebody is willing to repeatedly uproot their previous version of themselves, find new ways to evolve at a whole other level of contribution, create systems to do it. You know, what that sounds like, what that looks like. And just one example. He’s just one case study. He’s just one person. But we’ll do that, and then we’ll come back to Benjamin Hardy. Ben, thank you for being on the podcast today.
Ben Hardy:
Happy to be with you.
Greg McKeown:
I hope you have enjoyed that conversation with Benjamin Hardy. It’s an unusual conversation. It’s led us forward. The next podcast is going to be with Rob Dyrdek, as long as I can get him to say yes. And the episode after that will be again with Benjamin Hardy, talking about what I had originally wanted him to talk about, which is the book he’s researching and writing called 10 X Is Easier Than Two X. So we will still get to that content. But I hope that this has been interesting. If you have found value in this episode, please write a review on Apple Podcasts. The first five people who do it will get access to the Essentialism Academy. That’s like a $300 value for anyone any day, but for you, you’ll get it for free. Just send a photo of your review to info@gregmckeown.com.
I want to make a plug here for you that if you want to make your life more limitless, you have to make your life more effortless. You have to make the things that you’re already working on as effortless as possible so that you can free up space to be able to invest. You’ve got to shift between being a linear to a residualist. And that’s what I write about in Effortless. So if you haven’t yet, please buy Effortless, read it, teach it, and share it with people on your team with people around you. If you haven’t signed up for the 1-minute Wednesday newsletter, that’s a free resource to you, helps reinforce the ideas that we’re talking about in these episodes. So that’s all for me today. Take one idea that you’ve heard, teach it to somebody else, and share it with somebody else so that you can increase your influence and deepen your learning at the same time. I’ll talk to you next time.
