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📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
Tonight’s Great Book is called The Science of Scaling, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy, and it is easily one of the most transformative business books that I’ve ever read.
It’s also extremely simple to understand and explain.
Dr. Hardy’s book is short, deadly effective, and the “profits per page” that business owners can expect to generate from The Science of Scaling is insane.
After reading it, you'll feel like you’ve scaled yourself up as a person as well.
I spent about 8 hours reading the book, 2 hours processing and transcribing my notes, and then a further 10 hours compiling this full breakdown of all the key ideas, action steps, and more to help you scale your business faster than ever.
It can also be used to achieve astounding results in your personal life too (many of the ideas are easily transferrable), but it’s primarily a business book.
This book breakdown is also completely free, but not all of them will be. For example, I already have many of them that are exclusively for Premium members of The Reading Life.
Upgrade here if you want access to all of them, along with three free (published) books just for signing up, and a lot more.
I also want to wish a Happy Book Launch Day to Ethan Starr, who just published a book I’m looking forward to reading about America’s wealthiest people called Billionaire Trivia (the cover is awesome, by the way).
And also to Eric Jorgenson who just published The Book of Elon, which contains the most useful ideas from Elon Musk on purpose and success. I received an advance copy, and I’m absolutely loving it. Seriously, it’s incredible.
There’s also no politics in it, either. Just ideas, motivation, mental models, and massive rockets. It’s also blowing up right now on Amazon! No pun intended.
Anyway…before our coffees get cold, let’s dive deep into The Science of Scaling!
“There is a wonderful word, ‘why,’ that children use. All children. When they stop using it, the reason, too often, is that no one bothered to answer them, no one tried to keep alive one of the most important attributes a person can have: interest in the world around him. No one fostered and cultivated the child’s innate sense of the adventure of life."
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“Sometimes it just takes one conversation with a rational person to stop yourself from making a horrible, irrational decision.”
Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This month’s book is Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss, a great book about the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires, icons, and world-class performers.
Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!
After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,475 books, including 21 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
This Book is For:
*Ambitious entrepreneurs who are willing to do whatever it takes to scale their companies, regardless of the discomfort, fear of missing out, and hard choices that come from asking the necessary questions.
*People who want to raise their standards, both personally and professionally, and who are willing to commit to following through on the key decisions that elite performers are habitually required to make.
*Anyone who is interested in learning how to use time as a tool for building the future they want for themselves, and for designing the kind of intentional, meaningful life that's always worth living.
Summary:
“Once you raise your floor and eliminate anything and everything that contradicts the level of performance and results you want, your growth will explode.”
The main idea here is that for rapid growth (as in the exponential, “how is this even legal?” kind of growth), almost nothing will work. Almost everything is also a waste of time. For high, hard goals, there are only a very limited number of pathways that will take you there.
One of the biggest mistakes that business owners make is “optimizing something that shouldn’t exist,” or attempting to grow things inside their business that will never take them where they want to go.
For example, if you have multiple offers, lines, or products, and the one that’s the most time-consuming to deliver only brings in 15% of your total profits, you must get rid of it in favor of re-allocating your limited resources toward developing your core offer that is able to scale to multiple seven figures.
The starting point of business strategy is setting the proper goal, and The Science of Scaling will help you set the type of seemingly-impossible goals that force focus, and demand that you become who you have to be in order to make it happen.
In order to do that, you have to raise your floor, or the minimum standards for what you’re willing to accept. In your business, your life…everywhere. In exactly the same way that the majority of things you could do won’t take you to where you want to go, the majority of your thoughts are detrimental to your progress as well.
That’s one of the core realizations I came to myself while reading the book. Raising your floor also means raising the quality of the thoughts you think, which requires you to level-up your social circle, the daily issues and events you care about, the books you read…everything.
Companies that apply Dr. Hardy’s scaling framework routinely grow between 10-100X within just three years, but the majority of business owners aren’t ready to scale; structurally or psychologically. They’re not willing to do what it takes.
Most business owners are simply not ready to make the hard decisions about what kind of business they want to build, what kind of sacrifices they’re prepared to make, what kind of partners they want to surround themselves with, and how fast they’re willing to move.
Perhaps the most powerful idea in the book on an individual level though, (and not purely from a business standpoint) concerns using time as a tool. Your past and future both direct and shape what you do in the present, but the future is much more effective than the past in guiding the decisions that will impact your success, to say nothing of your happiness.
You can learn from the mistakes of your past and commit to never repeating them again (and that’s great), but only a clear and compelling vision of your future can lead to rapid business growth and personal development.
In my own business, I’ve used the ideas from Benjamin Hardy’s book to radically simplify everything that I’m doing. I’m now more focused and in control than ever before, and the goals that I’ve set are now powerful filters for deciding what I should and shouldn’t be spending my extremely valuable time on.
After reading The Science of Scaling, my business makes more sense (and more money) than ever before. Not only that, but I’m now absolutely convinced that when you raise your floor, your minimum standards, there’s no success ceiling that will ever permanently limit your life.
Key Ideas:
#1: The Case for Seemingly-Impossible Goals
“When you have a goal that’s so big it seems impossible, and a deadline so short it seems absurd, you are forced to:
1) More accurately and honestly filter everything you’re currently doing, being left to acknowledge that the majority is a distraction based on sunk cost bias or lack of accountability, and…
2) More powerfully filter for the most innovative and teleporting pathways (and partners) you otherwise couldn’t see or find.
When you commit yourself to a seemingly impossible goal - in both scale and timeline - you quickly see that almost everything in your current business (and possibly your life) is ‘optimizing things that should not exist.’”
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said that shooting for the smaller goal automatically puts the larger goal out of reach. People fail at achieving large goals all the time, but not reaching for them in the first place guarantees your mediocrity.
What happens when you set a seemingly-impossible goal with a seemingly-absurd deadline is that you automatically increase the expected value of your success.
Put simply, aiming for a 100X increase in revenue over the next three years means that even if you "only" achieve a 50X increase in five years, you're way ahead of where you would have been, had your initial goal been something boring (and relatively easy) like a 25% increase in that same timeframe.
What's more, you'll also start to see that virtually everything you're now doing is a waste of time. I'll have more to say about this later on, but setting seemingly-impossible goals is also an exercise in extreme simplicity.
Your task list will shrink by an order of magnitude, you'll question your default assumptions and uncover new opportunities for rapid growth, and you'll start seeing pathways to victory that were literally invisible to you before you set that massive goal.
This is nothing less than a total revolution in your thinking and your way of operating. You'll be on track to achieve exponential growth, while your competitors are still mired in complexity and corporate bureaucracy, and even your "failure" will be more profitable to you than their highest conception of success.
#2: Almost Nothing Will Work
“From the reference frame of an almost impossible goal, almost nothing will work. Therefore, such a goal serves as a razor-sharp filter for your current situation and decisions.”
One major factor in your success is the vehicle you use to get there. To take an extreme example, to become a billionaire in the next ten years, there's almost nothing you can do to make that happen. Almost nothing.
Putting aside the fact that becoming a billionaire may not even be a worthwhile goal for you (very possible), if that were your goal, that automatically limits the available pathways to getting there.
Day trading isn't going to do it, becoming a tax accountant won't get you there, and starting a hot dog stand in NYC gives you an approximately 0% chance of making it.
No, to become a billionaire, just take a look at how most billionaires made their money: founding and scaling a company, investing and asset management, inheritance (that's a big one!), and things like that. For that seemingly-impossible goal (and others), almost nothing will work.
For myself, I have much more "modest" goals for my business. I just want to get to $50,000 per month in revenue. A lifestyle business. That's it. It's not "nothing," and it's certainly a lot more money than most people make, but it's also a lot smaller than the goals of many readers of Dr. Hardy's book. And that's okay.
I once added up virtually everything I could possibly want out of life, and what it would cost me per month to make it all happen, and I came up with about $30,000 per month. Increasing it to $50,000 takes care of taxes, additional investments, a cash buffer, etc. I'm also already happy now, but that's a discussion for another time.
What I'll say now though, is that with respect to the revenue streams I have operating in my business, only a few of them could take me to $50,000 per month.
Running ads in my newsletter, landing sponsors for my YouTube channel, and attracting members to my Skool community could make up a large chunk of that (or even the whole thing eventually), with the other revenue streams basically on the back burner.
For example, I sell my book notes from the 1,000+ books that I've read on my Patreon for $1/month, but I'd need 50,000 people to join if that was my only revenue stream! Whereas, with sponsorships, just four sponsors at $5,000 each adds up to $20,000 per month right there. If my math serves me correctly!
All of this is to say that it's incredibly freeing to realize that you don't have to do so many things at the same time! You don't have to start six companies, or try and do drop-shipping, and a YouTube channel, and drive for Uber, and and and...
In fact, trying to run some Frankenstein business like that is only going to hold you back! You can't just keep adding things all the time. No, you need to subtract, and you have to take an honest look at all the things that won't take you where you want to go. Then, you need to be emotionless about eliminating them.
#3: Massive Goals Are Decision-Filters
“Goals enable you to filter your experience in the present and make decisions. Consequently, the goals you set have enormous implications not only in how you operate in the present, but also in the direction and results you create.
If you set the wrong goal, you’ll be unable to filter the signal from the noise. Your life and business will either stagnate and stall due to complexity or you’ll scale in entirely the wrong direction.
For attainable goals, the perceptual filter is too dull to separate the signal from the noise. With such goals, you can’t filter and find the most powerful pathways forward among the near-countless options you could pursue.
Frankly, attainable and linear goals justify you in maintaining not only your existing system and process, but also your existing assumptions and beliefs.”
Goals and time are both incredible decision filters. Meaning, you can use them to evaluate the choices and pathways you have in front of you, helping you to make the best decision going forward. Time I'll talk about later, but let's start with goals.
People with no goals struggle to make decisions, because they have no idea what's even important or what's worth focusing on. And people with small goals often make decisions that limit their possibilities for success in the future.
Setting the right goal literally determines your potential, and it also changes what you see. Not only that, but is also shows you what you can safely ignore.
If your goal is to 100X your revenue in the next three years, you're probably going to want to (politely) reject the offer from your friend from high school asking you to help him manage his corner coffee shop.
Unless it's going to be the next Starbucks, managing that shop is likely going to be nothing more than a distraction. It might even be a somewhat profitable distraction! But it's all time that could have been spent closing deals and expanding your main business.
When you really think about it, all success really comes down to is a series of decisions. You're here, right now, and at the end of 10,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 decisions is the massive success you're looking for.
The problem is that there are only so many decisions you can make, and every time you choose to make a decision that takes you closer to achieving some smaller, relatively unimportant goal is a decision that could have been taking you to that outrageous success that you really want.
Instead of taking five steps in a hundred different directions, commit to taking five hundred steps in one direction and see how far you get.
Book Notes:
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”
“The goal determines the process - what is signal and what is noise. The more effective you are at framing your future, the more powerful your process will be in the present.”
“When it comes to running a company, if you give yourself too much time to do something, you can’t filter the present hard enough. The purpose of the impossible goal and deadline is that the filter becomes extremely intense! If you only have 18 months to do what you thought you had 10 to 15 years to accomplish, you can’t waste your time on nonsense.”
“If you want to be exceptional, you can’t engage in average anything.”
“Raising the floor is the crux of scaling. It’s the hardest part, and until you do it, you’re fooling yourself. But once you do it, your growth literally explodes.”
Action Steps:
#1: Set a Seemingly-Impossible Goal
Whatever you're thinking, double it. Or triple it. Hell, 100X it for all I care. Just think bigger. The goal you select should challenge you (obviously), and it shouldn't be immediately obvious whether or not you can pull it off.
As you gain more experience in goal-setting, you'll learn your true limits, but you'll also stretch those limits by consistently setting larger goals than you think you can handle.
Don't invest money you can't afford to lose, but also don't set some boring target of attracting 10 customers in the next 150 days. Try 150 customers in 10 days. That's more like it!
#2: Set a Seemingly-Impossible Time Limit
The other part of the equation involves dramatically shortening your time horizon. If adding $100,000 in profits to your company is something you feel like you can achieve in the next year, try to do it in 30 days. It's a qualitatively different goal, and the person you'll become by trying to reach it is not the same person you'd become if you had settled for $100K over the next year.
#3: Mentally Scale Up Each Pathway
When you've selected your seemingly-impossible goal, and zeroed in on a seemingly-impossible time limit, evaluate your options for how you'll get there.
If your company sells a $50 product, a $500 product, and a $10,000 product, and your goal is a $100,000 increase in revenue, visualize what it would take to get there if you could only do it by focusing on one product.
For example, maybe you could partner with 100 influencers to help you sell the $50 product, at a commission rate of 50%.
With those terms, you'd need to sell 4,000 of them to reach $100,000 in revenue (I'm simplifying a ton, obviously), or 40 per influencer, on average. What about partnering with a larger influencer and giving them a higher or lower percentage? Or a flat fee? Or what about running Facebook ads instead?
There are sooo many ways to sell a $50 product online - or offline! Consider offline, too!
For the $10,000 product, how many sales calls would it take (assuming you know your numbers here, which you should!) to close 10 extra deals? Who do you know that can introduce you to more prospects? Do you even need sales calls?
Think through each path and select the best one, according to your preferences, likelihood of success, and other factors.
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 200,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:
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