YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

*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.

This is easily one of the most transformative business books that I’ve ever read, and it’s also extremely simple to understand and explain.

It’s 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. 

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Your reticular activation system is the tool your brain uses to filter your reality.

What you look for determines what you see, and once your "tell" your RAS to start looking for ways to achieve a particular goal, your brain goes to work delivering that reality to you by bringing you opportunities and uncovering pathways to make it happen. It's not magic, it's not mysticism, it's just a function of how the human mind works. Which is actually pretty magical when you think about it!

In actual practice, this means that once you've consciously decided that something is important to you, it'll start appearing more often in your field of awareness. The most common example most people cite is when you're looking at buying a new car, you start seeing that specific type of car everywhere.

The reality is that it was always there, but until your brain was tuned to look for Porsche Boxsters or Ford Mustangs, they got filtered out because you weren't paying attention. The same goes for literally any other goal you could select.

In the context of business, when you start thinking in terms of seemingly-impossible goals and exponential growth, you'll start seeing new opportunities everywhere you look. They were always there, mind you, but you didn't see them because you weren't "ready" for them.

Small goals keep you fixated on all the minor things you could do to make an extra $100 here or there, or increase profits by 15%, etc. But when you select massive goals, you signal to your brain that it's time to look for ways to make them happen.

Simple scales, complexity fails. Businesses that have too many different moving parts and things to keep track of can quickly spiral out of control and become a nightmare to manage, much less grow.

If you have fifty different things that you're tracking, working on, etc., and there are dozens of ways they could each go wrong, that's going to be a much more difficult business to grow than one where you have, say, three revenue streams, three growth channels, and one ideal customer profile.

An even simpler business would be one where you publish YouTube videos (growth channel), for HR managers who want to achieve a better work/life balance (customer profile), with a link in your video descriptions where they can book a call with you and potentially hire you as a coach (revenue stream).

That's sooo much simpler (yet potentially much more profitable, all things considered) than posting on five different platforms, trying to reach people who want to be healthier (such a broad category that it becomes meaningless), selling everything from courses to coffee mugs.

The first person is going to find it much easier to enroll five people in their coaching program for $1,000 each, than if they were to dilute their message in a vain attempt to reach "everybody," confusing them with all these different offers and products that try to address a barely-defined need.

This is especially important when/if you reach a stage where you want to hire additional employees. Instead of trying to manage three sales teams, seven video editors, two social media managers, etc., you have just a few moving parts to explain to others, and a very small number of defined pathways to success.

Personal standards are everything in life. They affect your success in so many ways, and this is no less true in the field of business.

Raising your floor, or your minimum standards for what you're willing to accept and do, enables an entire world of possibilities that are simply unavailable to people who are willing to settle for less.

Remember: almost nothing will work. If your goal is to raise $50M in venture capital funding, starting a Patreon probably isn't going to be the best decision. Likewise, if your seemingly-impossible goal is to make it to the Olympics, you shouldn't attempt to become a world-class violinist at the same time.

That's to say nothing of the more mundane choices we make every single day. When you have a seemingly-impossible goal, you can't go out drinking five nights a week, hang out with toxic people all day, catch every episode of "that new show," whatever it is. Those activities are all beneath your floor, and you have to eliminate them if you're truly serious about success.

There's a mental component at work here too, where the thoughts you think are either above or below your floor as well. That was one of my biggest realizations while reading The Science of Scaling. Perhaps 90% of the thoughts you think aren't conducive to getting where you want to go in life. Thoughts of regret, revenge, petty annoyances, the various injustices (real or perceived) we each experience throughout the day - none of these things are above your new floor. Drop them.

This is a mental exercise worth doing (and recommended in the Action Steps section below), and it involves mentally walking down several different potential pathways that get you to your goal, and then selecting the best one.

For a business owner who wants to reach $10,000 in monthly revenue, there are multiple ways to get there, not all of which are created equal. Some will take too long, some will be too uncertain, some will be unethical or immoral...there are many "wrong" paths where a person could get lost on their way to $10K/month.

It's a worthwhile exercise, however, because it expands your mind, opens up your options, and makes it more likely that you discover a pathway to your goal that will work. What Dr. Hardy's saying above is that the bigger your goal, the fewer available pathways there will be to reach it. The goal determines the path.

Taking what we said about the RAS even further, the quality and clarity of your goal matters as well, along with the strength of your commitment. Selecting a good goal in the first place is the first step, but seeing its every contour and detail, visualizing it intensely, is the next step after that. Thirdly, you have to keep advancing confidently towards it, no matter what, for however long it takes.

We've already spoken at length about selecting high-quality goals (and there's more to come below), but the clarity with which you can observe that successful realization of that goal in your mind is consistently underrated as well.

Think about every single Olympic athlete you've ever seen or heard about. The fighter pilots, the ultra-successful entrepreneurs - they all saw their idealized, desired future in their minds, almost exactly as if it were a present reality. That's the kind of detail you need to develop and return to in your mind.

Then, you have to commit. But not in the "well, I'll give it my best shot" kind of way, but as though your life depends on it. At the very least, your future depends on it, which is your life. Or at least your potential life if you select the proper goal, see it as though it were already achieved, and never let it go.

Most people are lying to themselves, pretty much every single minute of every single day. The Reality Principle, as Robert Ringer calls it, is a tough one to consistently apply, as it's so much easier and more comfortable to live in a state of blissful self-delusion...until the future actually gets here, and you realize that you could have had everything you've ever wanted, had you not been so unserious.

Cultivating ruthless self-honesty is about building an accurate map of reality, and basing your decisions on how the world actually is, instead of how you would like the world to be. What's true won't always feel good, but if you actually care about scaling, it won't matter. You're in this no matter what, remember?

A maniacal sense of urgency, and a disposition towards radical action are two characteristics that consistently lead to success. You have to want it, you have to get serious about it, and you have move move move. Now. All the time. At least if you're serious about making massive changes.

Most people simply aren't ready to scale - in business or otherwise - and you know what? That's totally fine. You don't have to want what everyone else wants, and you likely won't, if you're being honest with yourself. Again, the important thing is simply never to lie to yourself.

What helps to develop a maniacal sense of urgency is a heightened awareness of the consequences of not changing, of not doing something different, of not moving fast. Again, if you can mentally scale up the pathways and try to catch a glimpse of your future if nothing changes, you can become inspired to make radical changes in the here and now.

When it comes to scaling a company, you'll want to set aggressive deadlines, and you'll want to make clear the consequences for not hitting them. When you know that something terrible is going to happen if you don't hit these deadlines (even if it's "only" public embarrassment), it really gets you moving!

Your past is a tool to improve your present, but your future is a power tool to improve your present. Both can help you make better decisions in the here and now, but looking ahead to the future will give you better direction and more useful information than staying stuck in the past.

Learning from the mistakes and negative experiences of your past can tell you what not to do in the future, but they can't really help you set a new direction. Sure, you can kinda sorta figure out what you want to get away from, but it's only by looking ahead to the future that can you set a course to an exciting, meaningful, and profitable new reality.

Using time as a tool means using your future, desired reality as a filter for what you do in the here and now. Knowing where you want to end up in the future determines the moves and actions you take in the present, and this kind of clarity can help you make more correct decisions, because you'll know exactly where you're headed. As they say, if you don't know where you're going any road will take you there.

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