Dr Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist and bestselling author of Willpower Doesn’t Work. Benjamin’s blog is read by millions of people monthly and featured on Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, Cheddar, Big Think, and many others. He is a regular contributor to Inc. and Psychology Today and one of the most popular writers on Medium. He speaks and trains at a wide range of events. He is also currently training for his first Ironman. Benjamin and his wife Lauren adopted three children through the foster system in February 2018 and, one month later, Lauren became pregnant with twins, who were born in December of 2018. They live in Orlando, USA.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
When business started difficulties overcame:
“I think the difficulties I was facing was just the sheer amount of learning that I had to go through and also I was going through graduate school, I was a foster parent of three kids. It was kind of the complexity of figuring out how to make money… I think that the thing was just difficult was just not knowing how to sell… and also I think I had to learn how to be okay selling things because for me it was the sharing of ideas”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs Book by Joshua Wolf ShenkFavourite Quote:
“A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.”
Recommended Online Resources:
- Medium – where words matter. Medium delivers the best stories and ideas on the topics you care about most straight to your homepage, app, or inbox.
- Audible – Explore the world’s largest selection of audiobook titles by best selling authors
- Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems Zoom Rooms is the original software based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done Zoom is a private company headquartered in San Jose, CA
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“really take the time to clarify your future self, who you genuinely plan to Be… People on their deathbed say they lacked the courage to be who they really wanted to be and instead they lived up to the expectations they thought other people had of them. Even if you are a successful entrepreneur it can be easy to get caught up into the persona or to the status that you’ve lived.. It takes giving yourself space and reflection to genuinely say is this what I really want? Even though this is great or this has been successful, is this what I truly want? I think giving yourself the honesty to clarify who you plan to be that allows you to clarify who you currently are. Because if you don’t know who you plan to be you can’t have any sense of who you are today. And then begin to tell everyone about that self, about the pivot that you’re making just the future you are striving to create, the person you are striving to become ”…[Listen for More]
More About Benjamin Hardy:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“The future belongs to the competent. Get good, get better, be the best!” Brian Tracy
Other Quotes From the Chat with Benjamin Hardy:
- “personality isn’t permanent because even now who you are today… the research shows that the future self will be different than your current self. So even now your current self can’t anticipate all of the things that you are going to learn on the way. So you are going to be able to look back on even your current situation, on your current decisions from a different perspective. And you are going to have a different perspective on you going to have a different approach, you are going to make better and hopefully different decisions then you could make right now. And you don’t need to overly judge or criticise your former self, you can just recognise that the context and the situation and the views and now you see and do things differently”
- “continuing to focus on a few key relationships as far as mentors and collaborators really clarifying and simplifying roles of employees and even my own role. I think it’s better to have three or four people doing very simple focused tasks than having one person… I would rather have for part-time people that are really focused and maybe one or two full-time people who can cover it all. I find that role simplicity is really key for momentum”
- “giving yourself time every day to what’s called psychologically detach from work, giving yourself time every day to let go so that you can step away from it, recover and rest. And I think you have got to have other key areas of your life outside of your work… Research shows that only 16% of creative ideas happen while you are at work. Usually they happen when you are resting, travelling, commuting… You need space for your creative ideas to really gel and for them to be useful.”
- “I love change. I think change is something we should seek, it’s not to be avoided. I think that change always has the opportunity for growth”
- “if nothing is certain then everything is possible”
- “in order to make choices you must embrace uncertainty. If you need everything to be certain then you have no choice”
- “who you are right now is not a finished product, and how you see the world now is different to how you saw it five years ago, and how you are going to see in five years from now is going to be different from how you see it now. So you don’t need to hold to tightly to your creative process, you don’t need to hold to create tightly to what you create, you don’t need to hold to tightly even to your own identity. That’s not to say you don’t have a purpose or a foundation but it allows you to move forward and not get so rigid and black-and-white in your thinking”
- “the concept of who not how really does matter”
- “in psychology there is a concept called decision fatigue. And decision fatigue basically just means that the more decisions you have to make as a person the less quality decisions become. And so as you grow as a business or as an entity it becomes important to not make as many decisions because the complexity will kill your mindset and your motivation. You have got to get who’s or you have got to get other people to do that for you”
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