Benjamin P. Hardy Quotes

Rather than ask, “How can I make $100,000 this year?” ask, “How can I make $10,000,000 this year?” Different questions spark innovative thinking and new angles. Psychologist and spiritual teacher Dr. Wayne Dyer said, “When you change the way you see things, the things you see change.”45 When you change what you’re looking for, you change what you see.

Decisions and actions are best when reverse-engineered from a desired outcome. Start with what you want and work backward. Think and act from your goal, rather than toward your goal.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith explained in his book Triggers, “If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.

Longitudinal research highlights that a person’s personality can often be explained by the social roles they espoused and relinquished throughout their life stages. Thus, social role is an oft-studied and tangible predictor of personality.

The more you put your Future Self in debt in terms of health, learning, finances, and time, the more painful and costly will be the eventual toll. There will be a lot of interest to pay if you continually accrue debt. Everything you do can be categorized as either a cost to or an investment in your Future Self. Costing your Future Self means you’re more focused on present or short-term rewards over long-term consequences. Costing your Future Self means you’re consuming far more than you’re creating. Every little action adds up. A cost makes you less healthy in some way, whether mentally, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, or physically. If repeated, costs make you fatter, lazier, hazier, and less connected. A cost is something that comes to control you, rather than you controlling it.

To quote Adam Grant in Think Again: To unlock the joy of being wrong, we need to detach. I’ve learned that two kinds of detachment are especially useful: detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your identity . . . My past self was Mr. Facts — I was too fixated on knowing. Now I’m more interested in finding out what I don’t know. As Bridgewater founder, Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the past year.”36

Step #5 to being your Future Self is automating and systemizing your Future Self. How can you better systemize your desired Future Self? What could you simplify and eliminate from your life, to free yourself from decision fatigue and lesser goals? What barriers and filters could you create to protect your time and attention? What could you automate, such as a weekly investing strategy? Where could you find a who to handle some of the hows that are outside your zone of genius?22

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

Rather than putting your Future Self in deeper debt, make your Future Self wealthier. Continually position your Future Self for freedom of time, money, relationships, and overall sense of purpose.

Your actions come from your identity. When your identity is rooted in current commitments, rather than your Future Self, your actions are weak and unaligned with your goal. The only way to realize your Future Self is to be your Future Self now.