SPI 431: Is Writing Still a Viable Content Platform? Medium, Copywriting Tips, and More, with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

SPI 428: Is Writing Still a Viable Content Platform, Medium, Copywriting Tips,

Pat Flynn:
With the rise of podcasting and how prolific video has just seemed to be in the last five to eight years, where does blogging, where does writing, where does tapping away on the keyboard fall into this? That’s what that noise was, by the way, tapping on my keyboard. Because blogging, and that’s how I got started back in 2008. After I got let go, I started a blog to help people pass an exam. After I learned how to do that, I started a blog, The Smart Passive Income Blog to teach people how I did that. Now I’m actually blogging less and in podcasting more and I’m shooting video more for YouTube. Is blogging still a thing? Is writing still possible to build an audience with your words? Well, yes, but we are needing to do it in perhaps a different kind of way these days.

Pat:
This means platform perhaps. This means the words that you choose to write, how you write them, how your ideas are presented to others. That’s all much more important today, now more than ever. Today to help us through this conversation, and to help us understand more about how and where writing fits into all this, in addition to learning about a very popular blogging platform called Medium right now, Medium being a place for you to go and write and have those writings distributed elsewhere, not essentially a blogging platform that you own, but a place for you to write, we have today, none other than Dr. Ben Hardy, who I’m very excited to welcome on the show, is actually through a connection from a previous guest who introduced me to Ben, and just how prolific and how successful he’s been writing on Medium about psychology and personalities and that sort of thing.

Pat:
I wanted to bring him on the show to talk about Medium because I’ve had a lot of people ask me about Medium. “Hey Pat, should I be blogging on Medium to drive more traffic to my website? Should I try to build an audience on Medium? Because there’s a lot of people looking for articles and browsing through there nowadays. What should I do?” Well, we’re going to ask Ben those questions. We’re also going to get some copywriting tips and how to make sure that whatever it is that you write and wherever it is that you write it, it stands out, it gets noticed, and can potentially be shared and go viral too. Stick around. We’ve got a great show today. Cue the music.

Announcer:
Welcome to The Smart Passive Income Podcast where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. Now your host, he thinks this SwitchPod business is going to be bigger than anything he’s done before, Pat Flynn.

Pat:
What’s up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to session 428 of The Smart Passive Income Podcast. My name is Pat Flynn here to help you make more money, save more time, and help more people too. I’m really excited for Ben Hardy to come on to tell us more about writing, Medium, copywriting tips, what the titles should be like, how the first paragraph ties into everything. Just all the things related to writing because this is Ben’s super power. It’s what helped build his platform and his business. I’m excited to share his story with you too. He’s also a father, and a family man, and he has a lot of kids in the house. So I ask him questions about how he’s able to manage all that too. Stick around. This is going to be a great one. Here he is, Ben Hardy. Hey Ben, thanks for coming on The Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thanks so much for being here today.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy:
Absolutely Pat, big fan. Excited to be here.

Pat:
Well, I’m stoked too, and I have to give a big public shout out to Richie Norton who’s been on the show before. A lot of you might remember Richie, he came on to talk about his book, The Power of Starting Something Stupid, as well as he as the co-founder of Prouduct, a team that helped me and Caleb create and invent the SwitchPod. Big shout out to Richie for connecting us today. I see that you are known as an organizational psychologist. Can you explain it a little bit about what that means and how does this tie into your story a little bit?

Ben:
Yeah, organizational psychology is a very different form of psychology from let’s just say clinical or counseling. Organizational is very much business psychology. Like studying leadership teams, training, motivation, productivity; I mean it’s very just the business side of psychology, and how to be effective, and how leaders can be effective. I’m not a traditional organizational psychologist at this point. I got the degree, and I enjoyed it, and it influences my thinking, but I’m more a writer and entrepreneur of sorts, but it definitely influences what I write about and what I think about.

Pat:
How does it influence? What of organizational psychology?

Ben:
I think like a psychologist.

Pat:
Yeah. How do you feel that’s helped you in growing this amazing brand and having this giant email list and all these amazing followers on all kinds of places, including Medium, which is what we’re going to get into in just a minute here. But for those of us who aren’t psychologists, you having that super power, how can you help us understand? What is it about being a psychologist that’s helped you gain so much momentum?

Ben:
I think that people can have momentum obviously, without being a psychologist. Whether you’re trying to build passive income, whether you’re trying to build an audience, whether you’re trying to be a good parent, I think psychology is just universally interesting. For me, it’s just a good way from … every psychologist by the way views the world differently. Like, you’re a psychologist, you just don’t have a degree. I think the one thing that’s true about psychologists, yes, they use data to influence their thinking, but also their thinking influences the data that they choose. I have my own biases, and my own perspectives, and the reasons why I look at people and things the way they do. When I started writing on Medium and just other places, I was able to use my background in psychology to further explain things or give credibility to my own thinking.

Ben:
I think that it allowed me to speak … One of the things that honestly, I think helped my blogs for so long go viral, was that I would write things in a very emotional tone, which is obviously good for connecting with the reader, but I was able to layer in research, which then didn’t make it feel like it was just my opinion even though a lot of the times it was.

Pat:
Right. It definitely adds little bit more credibility, which is awesome. You do a lot of writing. Your main medium is writing, and speaking of Medium, I’d love to talk about that because you are known as somebody who’s built this amazing following on the platform, and it’s something that we’ve talked about a little bit. A lot of people ask me, Pat, where should I start writing? Should I start writing on Medium or should I start my own blog? What should I do? For somebody who doesn’t even know what Medium is, how would you explain what Medium is and how powerful of a platform it can be for somebody trying to grow a brand and a following?

Ben:
Yeah. Medium was created by Ev Williams and others. Ev Williams is the guy who created Twitter. It’s made by people who really understand platforms. It’s a certain type of platform. It’s a blogging platform, it’s a communication platform. A lot of people go on there to … there’s already an embedded audience. It has over a hundred million viewers a month, and so it’s one of the top 300 websites in the world. There’s all sorts of different genres. Obama sometimes puts messages on … It’s interesting because sometimes people put very controversial or very like timely pieces on that platform and it has a big shot of going viral, just because of the nature of the platform and how things can spread. I started writing on Medium in 2015. That’s actually when I started blogging and writing in general.

Ben:
That was during the first year of my PhD program. I didn’t really know that much about it, to be honest with you. I just heard about it from a friend. I would put blog posts on my own website and I’d also copy paste them into Medium. It probably took about fifteen or twenty articles before one of them really took off and actually got like several million views, which was interesting. I ended up writing on Medium very aggressively from 2015 to 2018. Still put stuff on there last year, and even started posting stuff on there now. I will say it’s a great place for people to write if they’re wanting to get eyeballs. There is a problem with it, and that’s the problem with any big platform, is that the more and more the people that get on there, the harder and harder it is to get discovered.

Ben:
It is very saturated at this point, and it’s very different from what it was even two or three years ago. It really depends on the person’s goals. It’s very different from like say a LinkedIn. LinkedIn is so focused on business. I actually think that LinkedIn, for most people actually in the business realm or stuff like you do, I think LinkedIn is actually much better now than Medium is, but Medium still has its place. Medium has great audiences in the entrepreneurial world. Finance, like self-improvement, politics. There are so many people that read Medium that it’s possible that your stuff can get viewed. The reason I don’t really use it anymore, or at least it’s not necessarily something I care to too much about anymore:

Ben:
For a long time, what I would do, is I would write an article, and at the bottom of my article, I’d have a call to action. Very simple call to action. We ended up getting very good at polishing them over time and driving people to a landing page. Ultimately, for probably over two years, I was getting over 20,000 emails a month without any paid ads. I was getting 20 to 30,000 emails, just from about a million views a month on Medium, and it just lasted for like two or three years. I had one landing page that got over 800,000 opt-ins, but it was all just Medium. It was just a beautiful audience. There’s a great audience there. Why it has changed, is they don’t allow any of that anymore. They don’t allow any internal marketing. They don’t allow you to do calls to action.

Ben:
If you don’t have those, the chances of people going from your article to your website or to your landing page are so small. What they do now is they pay writers per clicks. If you write for their platform, you can get money per click. For a lot of writers that’s exciting because they can get page views, which is great. Sometimes, there’s a lot of big audiences that will syndicate work. When I was publishing there a lot, I’d often get Business Insider or like Forbes or Fortune. I’d have people from all over the place asking, can we syndicate your work? I’ve had dozens of articles on CNBC and stuff because when articles are going popular on Medium, a lot of editors from big platforms will come and syndicate it.

Ben:
That’s, I think still a potential benefit of the platform. But if you’re someone who wants to build an email list and if you’re someone who wants to turn your writing into money, unless you want to get a small five figure income, Medium won’t help you too much with building an email list.

Pat:
Got it. Do you still feel there’s a place for writing today? Because I remember when I first started, there were a lot of platforms like that to write on to, be able to grow an audience from. It seems like just it’s getting harder and harder to do that. With a lot of people now focusing on YouTube and podcasting, it seems like blogging and just writing the way it used to be is, a lot of people say it’s dying, but then, I see people like yourself and so many others who are just incredible with it. Paul Jarvis is another person who’s mostly just writing versus a lot of these other platforms, and you’re crushing it. How would you consider the place of writing today? Is it still important, and if it is, what tips do you have for those who would rather write and not podcast or do YouTube but want to make an impact and grow an audience?

Ben:
Yeah, I do think that writing does have a place. I think it’ll always have a place. I think that there are still blogs, etc, that can go viral. I don’t know the rules, for example, for … I’ve watched plenty of YouTube videos, and I can see some of the patterns. I haven’t studied it from the perspective of a student as far as how to create a viral video. I’m more steady blogging from that perspective. The rules are probably similar, but different, as far as how to create a blog or a podcast. But there are different rules. The thing that really helped me was I did have a very tangible goal. I was very committed to becoming a professional writer, which when I first started, I learned that I needed to get a hundred thousand emails to get a six figure book deal.

Ben:
I wrote from that perspective. I took an online course from a guy named John Morrow, and that course taught me how to write viral headlines and how to pitch myself. I was not just writing for the sake of writing, although I love it, but I was very much like, I’m going to learn how to write viral stuff, I’m going to learn how to position my work so that it spreads so that I can get these hundred thousand emails or more so that I can become a professional writer. I was very much, from a deliberate practice, is something that is like … It’s kind of the psychology of high-performance. It’s something that Malcolm Gladwell popularized as the 10,000-hour rule. But basically what it means is, it’s not really 10,000 hours. It’s learning for a purpose.

Ben:
Basically what they say is you can’t engage in deliberate practice without a very specific future self in mind. The only reason I bring all that up is I think that blogging, there’s huge room for it. I’m sure there’s a blog post literally going off on the internet right now that’s getting millions of views, maybe even tens of millions. So there’s space for it. I would just always start with the future self in mind, and it’s like, why are you doing this? If it’s just to write and you hope to get eyeballs, you probably won’t, but it’s like, if you’re really committed to some specific end, whether it’s making money, building an audience, eventually becoming an author, then you’re going to have to really learn the other sides of it, which is like how to get emails and how to get your stuff viewed by millions.

Ben:
Those are skills to be learned. They’re totally learnable skills. I would say yes. I would say, anyone listening to this could be someone that could manufacture an article that could get millions of views. I think that it’s worth trying if that’s what you want, and if you’re just writing for the sake of writing, you could do that too, but the chances of eyeballs, I think, as you said, are becoming more and more difficult.

Pat:
You had mentioned something that was very important. No matter if you’re a blogger or a podcaster or a YouTuber, and you had mentioned the importance of writing headlines. I think that this is like one of those things, I call it the first moment of distraction. It’s like, you could write the best article in the world, if the headline’s not great, well, you’ve missed the opportunity. Can you, through John’s work as well, from who you learned from, John, I know John, he’s awesome, what’s one or two things that we could all do to just write better headlines? Because I think it’s so absolutely important no matter what we’re doing.

Ben:
It is, honestly, a keystone skill. If you want to make money on the internet, this is a skill that must be learned and something that you have to come around to. I will say just really quickly that one of the things that I did for so long on Medium was that I would … I probably wrote 100 articles, but there came a point where I was literally just recycling them, where every six months I would republish the articles. I’d go through the whole list over and over and over again. I did learn the importance of headlines, even there because like, there would be an article and maybe the first time around, I’d get maybe 20,000 views, and I’d tweak the headline, and it’d go from 20 to 200,000. Literally, the headline made the big difference.

Ben:
But as far as thoughtful strategies, people still love lists articles. List articles just do well, and they’re a great way to organize an article. My first major popular article was eight things every person should do before 8:00 a.m. Obviously, a popular topic, but 8 before 8:00. It’s just like, your mind can capture it. Rather than saying, for example, a strategy to maybe make passive income, you would want to talk specifically. Rather than saying like, a strategy to make passive income, you’d say this strategy will help you make … You want to use the word this or these or here. You wanna use words … So it’s specific.

Ben:
It’s like, this morning routine will help you make $50 million. It’s not a morning routine, it’s this one, or it’s like this checklist. Using stuff like that, and people like numbers. If you put a certain amount of numbers, it’s not like how to make six figures, but how to make $100,343 a month. Numbers catch people’s eyes and just making it hyper-focused. Those are some of the things that really have helped me. One of the things that I learned from Ryan Holiday early on is that your headline, you really want … I think that your confidence needs to come through on the headline. Ryan, I think somewhere said, you essentially want to dare people to click. Obviously, if you’re someone who loves what you’re doing, as far as the content and you love your audience, you’re not going to just try to throw out garbage media with good headlines.

Ben:
You want to blow people’s mind once they get in, but at the same time, you do need to be bold with the headline. Because of the nature of just the millions of headlines that people are exposed to, you need to capture that attention and then bring them in.

Pat:
Then as far as once they get in there, how do you keep people in there? Because I think, the headlines leads to the first paragraph or the first sentence.

Ben:
Yep.

Pat:
Then from there, it’s a whole train of just this journey. It just seems kind of impossible for people who are just doing this for the first time. There are so many things I need to get right before we get into what’s in the article itself, whether Medium or elsewhere.

Ben:
You can get better though, man. You can get better. One of my favorite quotes is, “a painting is never finished. It simply ends in interesting places.” For example, one of the reasons I didn’t write for so long is because I was worried about it being right. It’s like the pottery example, if you make fifty pots, you’re going to eventually make a few good ones, and you never know which ones are going to be good, and so I think it’s okay. Deliberate practice is called practice. I think it’s okay, if you wrote fifty blog posts, some of them would be good, but you’re right. Basically when someone opens the blog post, usually, either they read the first paragraph or they scan it for the structure.

Ben:
This is why structure matters so much. If it’s like a list article, before they even read it, they’re probably going to just scan through and read the bullets. It’s like, what are the five ways to make income? They’re going to read the subheads before they even discern if they’re going to take the time. How you structure the article is actually the second most important part. The headline is the most important part. The second thing is structuring it in a way so it feels easy, so giving away the beautiful answers at the front, and then they’ll decide if they want to read it or not. I think, subheadings are essentially headlines in and of themselves. They’ve got to be interesting topics, obviously useful topics, strategic topics, in the case of self-help literature.

Ben:
Whether that’s mindset stuff or whether that’s income stuff, but organizing it around subsections, whether that’s three, five, ten, and there’s obviously different strategies for different lengths of articles, but people want to look at the article first, even see if it’s worth investing, and if you can make it interesting and compelling, and if it looks good. Making it look good, in a lot of ways is, how you write the sentences, not having too blocky of paragraphs, short sentences, short paragraphs, lots of white spaces really. That’s one of the reasons why Medium is so aesthetic, is because it doesn’t feel overwhelming when you’re reading. Just taking people so that it’s an easy flow down to the bottom.

Pat:
How do you get into flow when writing? This is often another struggle that, I, myself have in a lot of people listening right now have. When you sit down to write and just nothing’s coming out. What are some strategies that you’ve learned over the years to get your head in a good place to begin writing great stuff?

Ben:
Lots of journaling. Journaling is a really great place just to practice as far as just dumping thoughts and not necessarily worrying about what’s being said. Also, I also write generally in the morning. It’s a lot easier for me to write in the morning before the busyness of the day, if I’ve had like a meeting, for example, or if … it’s hard for me to write in between things. If I’m on your podcast, for example, I’m probably not going to write afterward because I’m already kind of tired. I try to write before the busy-ness of the day. I find, if you have a structure, that it’s a lot easier to write around. For me, most of the work is about getting the structure right. The structure, it doesn’t have to be that difficult. It’s just about, what are the four ideas or the five ideas that I’m trying to talk about here that connect together?

Ben:
I think, if you can think in terms of, what’s a really exciting idea, or just something that you would like to talk about, and what are like the one or three subsection ideas below that—if you can get that, and then you can start to, in a kind of sloppy bulleted form, just like, what are the chapters, but just like what are the three or four things that you’re trying to say? Then, if you can maybe find a quote or a story and you just … then all of a sudden, you can just dump, so you got to have kind of the structure first. If you’re just facing an empty canvas, yeah, that’s great way to hit writer’s block, but if you give yourself the time to think, all right, what am I trying to say here?

Ben:
I usually think that, with headlines, especially, good headlines are usually very explanatory. When someone asks, how do you write a good headline? I’m like, well, what is the purpose of the article? If the purpose of the article is to teach someone how to do X, then the headline needs to say, three ways to do X. If you then have that, then it’s like, well, what are the three ways to do that. If you then have the structure, then it becomes easier to just dump it out. Once that’s there, I think it’s easy to get into flow. But it’s hard to be in flow if you don’t have that structure.

Pat:
One thing that helps me with flow also is just having some time to think what I’m going to write before I’m supposed to write it.

Ben:
Definitely.

Pat:
In terms of like having a content calendar and stuff, can you tell us a little bit about your writing process in terms of planning. What we don’t want, what I’m sure you don’t do, is you publish an article and you’re like, okay, now I’ve got to write another one. What’s that going to be about? I would imagine you have some sort of plan. Can you uncover what that planning process is like?

Ben:
Yeah, I’m always listening to books, reading, learning, and just taking notes. I do have a whiteboard filled with ideas, as far as possible ideas. This is for me, but when I’m journaling in the morning, I usually sketch out multiple different potential ideas. If I’m listening to an audio book or podcast, just things that are interesting to me or things that I’m thinking about. Just writing about things that you have energy behind. Good writing is energetic. When you’re reading it, if it sucks you in because you get caught into the emotion of it. When you’re starting to feel emotions towards something, like when I’m starting to feel emotions towards something, whether it’s anger or excitement or frustration, usually I’m like, okay, this is something I probably should write about.

Ben:
So, I start to just try to conceptualize it into a concept. For example, this morning I was listening to just, honestly, a spiritual talk, but it was talking about how, and this is just an example, but it was talking … This is a little bit more spiritual, but it was talking about how often kids leave their church, or kids are going to church, but going through the motions, and so they ended up stop believing in religion when they grow up. It made me think about the whole concept of deliberate practice, and just about, if you don’t have a purpose or a goal behind something, then you are essentially going through the motions. Then it just made me think like, if you don’t have a goal then you’re going through the motions.

Ben:
Some then just literally turning this into an idea, but I’m also like getting upset about it. Not necessarily angry upset, but just like I have an opinion on it. Because I have an opinion on it, I have something to say about it. I think it’s just like what are the things that you have an opinion on that you want to say that have a perspective on, and then it’s just framing … These are ways that I get into flow, but these are also ways that I just start sketching ideas out. I think doing it in a journal is nice because, as you said, preparing before you write, because then you can start to think about different angles or different ways you want to talk about it.

Pat:
I love that. What kind of journal do you write in?

Ben:
Flat. Just paper.

Pat:
Just paper? Nothing super special?

Ben:
Lined paper. Yeah, I’ve never ascribed to the overly structured journals. I’ve always just gone through just paper and just lines.

Pat:
Are you one of those who has like a fancy pen that you have to use the same pen all the time kind of thing?

Ben:
No, I use just the cheap pens, but I am a little picky about pens, but I don’t have any fancy pens. My journals are literally like pen and pad, very basic. I go through a ton of them, but nothing fancy.

Pat:
That’s cool. I love it. I was on your About page, and I see you have this beautiful family. Five kids, is it?

Ben:
Yep.

Pat:
Five kids.

Ben:
Five kids, I think one on the way too, my friend. It’s a little crazy.

Pat:
Wow. You’re incredible, and your wife is incredible. That’s awesome. How do you write and get your work done with such a large family and all these kids in the house?

Ben:
I don’t write in my house. I did for a long time. I have a separate office. The early blogs and stuff, I would leave. I’d wake up super early. I went to Clemson University for my PhD. I would usually wake up super early and go write in some computer lab, to be honest with you. I would actually, honestly, prefer writing in my car with a hotspot. I prefer to wake up early before the craziness if I’m going to be home, even if it’s just like an hour early, you know. I think fast timelines are good. I call timelines forcing functions because they force you to focus. That’s Parkinson’s Law, I think.

Ben:
I think that getting out of your environment is key. Obviously, if you don’t have a car, that’s a big challenge. But for me, I would rather, if I didn’t have this office, which I do have now, I would rather go out to my car with my laptop with a hotspot, and write in there than try to write in my house, because there’s just too many other triggers in the house. There’s too many other distractions. Some people may have an office space for that, and so if that’s the case, then that environment is suited for their work, but I didn’t actually have that. For many, many years, I never had an actual place that I could write.

Ben:
So I had to just find places. That that is a constraint, but you can get around it. For me, at least in the journal, organizing thoughts, studying it, if you’ve got a reason to write, you can get into some momentum, where you get used to just throwing out imperfect work. If you only have an hour, use that hour to push out something that’s not perfect versus not having done that, that’s a confidence.

Pat:
That’s fantastic. Thank you for some insights on your writing and your habits and whatnot. I think that’s extremely valuable. I’d love to shift the conversation to Personality Isn’t Permanent. This is your new book that, by the time this episode comes out, it will have just come out. About yesterday actually, at the time of this recording going live, so congratulations on the new book published by Penguin. Tell us about the book. Who’s it for?

Ben:
Personality Isn’t Permanent. This book is for people who want to understand more about why they are the way they are. Basically, I destroy common perspectives of what personality is. Pop culture views of personality are very different from the research over the last fifty years. This book shreds tests like Myers and Briggs, and just explains why those lead to a fixed mindset. Really, this is a book about people who want to live, want to become who they want to be. There’s a lot of really cool research on future self and about how to become that. I just wanted to provide a more useful perspective of personality since it’s such a broad, popular topic, and just show from a science perspective, but also, I think more from a common-sense perspective why some of the more traditional views can be limiting.

Pat:
Well, I’m a big fan of actually, and I’ve used quite a bit, the Enneagram, which I know you also mentioned there too, which is another one of those pop culture tests that one could take to understand more about themselves. I think you’re right. It does definitely, I’m a three in Enneagram, and that’s what I associate with, but I’ve never questioned, well, could I be another number or could I be something else? How do you, using science, allow us and give us the freedom to potentially get rid of these self-limiting beliefs perhaps or getting out of who we think we are based on a lot of these popularized tests.

Ben:
Well, I guess I’ll just ask you, do you think that you’re the exact same person you were five years ago?

Pat:
No, I think I had parts of who I am now in there and I’ve just sort of leaned into more of who I think I know I am.

Ben:
You think you’re pretty similar, pretty much the same guy?

Pat:
Pretty similar, but definitely, I don’t know if you want to call it more mature, grown up or more confident, but if you were to ask me about who I was ten years ago before I got laid off and before I had this opportunity to create all my businesses, yeah, you’re actually right. I would have been somebody who I would thought was completely different, not confident, not seeking recognition and feeling worthiness from serving others. That’s not who I was before, or at least, I don’t think I was.

Ben:
Yeah. For example, if I didn’t know who Pat Flynn was, and if I met the version of you ten years ago, had a conversation with you, and let’s just say you guys didn’t look the same, and then I met you and had a conversation with current Pat Flynn, would I think that they’re the exact same person? Probably not. Maybe not.

Pat:
Probably not. No. This makes me think of friends who used to be friends who aren’t friends because something in their life has changed them. They weren’t who they were before, why I was attracted to them.

Ben:
It’s interesting. There’s a lot of really cool research from a guy named Daniel Gilbert. Daniel Gilbert, he actually gave a TED Talk called The Psychology of Your Future Self. He’s been studying personality development over time. Basically, what he does is he asks people to basically see if they’re the exact same person, same preferences, same interests, same situation, same habits, same views as who they were ten years ago. Say, no, not really. Are you going to be the same person in ten years as you are today? Even for people who have undergone big change, the general consensus is that the change in the future is going to be less than the change has been in the past.

Ben:
That’s actually a psychological phenomenon called the “end of history illusion.” Basically, how Dr. Gilbert explains it is that human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. We have a tendency as people to think that the current version of ourselves is pretty much the version of us that we’re always going to be. We undervalue change that’s going to happen in the future. Basically, the truth is, is that your future self will be different than your current self. If you’re not trying to change, it’s going to be less different, but if you’re seeking growth, seeking change, seeking new experiences, being intentional, your future self will, as you’ve said, be more mature.

Ben:
They’ll have probably better priorities, better perspectives. They’ll make different decisions. They’ll weigh things differently. They’ll also be in a different context. I think one beautiful aspect of this is to know that, if you’re overly owning your current identity and if you’re cementing it in by, for example, saying I’m a three, what that does is it creates tunnel vision that ultimately, usually when people overly assume a label, which from a psychological perspective makes you mindless. There’s a lot of research from Ellen Langer who’s at Harvard, and she studied mindfulness for about forty years.

Ben:
Her book Mindfulness and her book Counterclockwise, I could not recommend them more, but basically, what labeling does is it leads you to being mindless. It leads you to not noticing all the times when the label isn’t true. My guess is if I were to follow you around for a day, I’d probably see a lot of that three, from the Enneagram perspective, but I’d also see a lot of other things, but you might not see those other things because of your identification as a three. When you buy a car, you start to see the car everywhere. In psychology, we call that selective attention, but you don’t see the 500 other cars because you’re not paying attention to those.

Ben:
These tests make you think you’re one way when really you’re actually not as consistent to the label as you think you are, but because you think the label is true, and maybe because you identify with it so well, maybe you love the label, you then set goals to confirm the label, which stops you from maybe being flexible or imaginative about what you could be. Ultimately, overly labeling yourself creates a fixed mindset about your identity, stops you from potentially seeing yourself in different ways or pursuing things that may be different than what you currently are right now. Your identity is really just a view. We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.

Pat:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I think that also, in addition to that, I look for ways to prove I am a three right? Confirmation bias takes a role here, I would assume.

Ben:
That’s a big part of labeling. Yeah. If you’ve overly assumed a label, then that’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to confirm the bias and you’re going to set goals to confirm the bias. So your goals become a product of your current view of your personality, rather than your personality being the product of the goals you genuinely want to pursue. Your life becomes to confirm the persona that you’ve really bought into. From an identity perspective, there’s actually, and I don’t know if you know who Paul Graham is, but he gave a great lecture. The whole idea of keep your identity small, but it’s really about if you … Labels kind of make you dumb in the sense that they make you defensive about how you view yourself, but from an identity perspective as well, if your future self is going to be different, and hopefully they’re going to be better, basically the idea is, is two things:

Ben:
One is, your future self can be intentionally designed, and in fact, if you don’t then you can’t make adequate decisions here and now. If you don’t know who you’re going to be or who you want to be, then it doesn’t really matter what you do today because none of the decisions you make here, none matters. Hal Hershfield, he’s at UCLA, he studied basically the relationship between having an imagined future self and how that influences your decision making here now, and viewing your future self as a different version of you, a different person, not you, but they’re a different person who would do things differently. Making decisions based on that, allows you to make better decisions here now, but also in the realm of high performance or just learning, you can’t actually engage in what’s called deliberate practice without having a future self in mind.

Ben:
Deliberate practice is essentially meaningful learning. It’s not the same as going to the gym every day and doing the same workout. Actually, a lot of people on Medium, I saw this over and over and over. There’s a lot of people who are “obsessed with the process.” They’re so obsessed with just doing the thing. I actually think that that’s a persona as well, I think it’s based on ego. There are so many writers who are still writing on Medium, and they’ve written thousands of blog posts, but their blog posts aren’t getting any better, and they haven’t translated anything. It’s not because they didn’t have the skill. I think it’s because it’s that 10,000-hour rule thing.

Ben:
It’s not 10,000 hours. That’s not what makes you good. It’s going through a specific type of training for the specific purpose of becoming something. If you have a specific goal and you’re going through specific types of training, then writing a blog post could lead to growth because then you look at the blog post from the perspective of your future self, and you’re like, this isn’t going to get me there. I need to get better. I need coaching, or I need to like learn how to do these headlines better. Then the process can become practiced, which leads to growth.

Pat:
Wow. I love that. What else can we expect in the book? What’s the ultimate outcome that you prefer for us after reading through?

Ben:
I think intentionality. What they say is, is that the number one deathbed regret is this: that people didn’t … they didn’t become who they genuinely wanted to be. They lacked the courage to be who they really wanted to be, and instead they lived up to the expectations that they thought other people had of them. Even people who are very successful develop a status and a persona. You, yourself, you have a persona online that we all know you as. It can be very easy to get trapped into a status or a persona, and that can then be the thing that drives your decision making versus what you truly want, which may require a pivot.

Ben:
I think that being honest about who you really want to be and what you really want to do and then ultimately, turning that into your identity narrative. It’s easy to go into autopilot. But really, the book is ultimately about why personality is something, and there’s such good research on this now, but why personality is something that can and should be shaped. That’s not to say it’s easy. It’s always a learning process. You’re going to have to get rid of, for example, views of your past. You have to update your view of how you see the world from the past perspective. Your relationship with your former self, how you view the past, can and should have changed from a memory perspective, and how you explain the past.

Ben:
But also, really being open and honest with yourself and other people about who you want to be in the future. Then obviously, reshaping how you explain yourself, your identity narrative, changing your environment, updating your subconscious. All of these things are ways that you can become who you want to be. I think that living intentionally obviously requires a lot of courage. I think that’s probably how you’ve got to where you’re at. You’ve done a lot of things intentionally and that there’s ways to do that. If you’re living intentionally, by definition, you’re not living subconsciously, and you’re not living reactively on autopilot, but you’re actually, on a daily basis, thinking, who do I want to become? How do I move in that direction?

Ben:
Sometimes it takes courage, but that’s a more true way of living and it’s also a more honest way of living. It is how you can make big change where when you’re looking at yourself, maybe a year or two years ago, you realize, wow, I am quite different.

Pat:
Yeah, I think everybody’s thinking about that right now, actually. The final question I have for you, and again, thank you for spending time with us here today. I definitely recommend everybody check out the book, Personality Isn’t Permanent. Really quick, where might people go to check that out? Or where would you like them to go

Ben:
Anywhere. They can get it anywhere, wherever they prefer to buy books. I’m really grateful just to be on your show. I did not expect this really humbled and grateful for Richie Norton to just like … Let me give this opportunity. I’m very humbled, and hopefully, people got value out of the Medium conversation. But yeah, you can get the book anywhere. My website’s BenjaminHardy.com, and obviously we give away free giveaways for people who pre-order by the book. But yeah, just wherever you prefer to buy the book.

Pat:
Cool. Thank you for that. The final question is, it goes actually back to your kids, and this idea of psychology and identity. Kids, they’re young, they’re growing up, they don’t even know who they are yet. They’re discovering themselves, they’re being shaped. How do you take this information that we’re learning here in this book and through this conversation today about self and who we are and intentionality? How are you instilling that into your kids and helping them prepare for the future and becoming the best version of themselves?

Ben:
Yeah, three thoughts come to my mind. One is myself. For example, it’s really easy to view yourself from a tunnel vision perspective where you stop being mindless about yourself and you become rigid and essentially try to confirm your own identity. It’s also very easy to do that with kids. We adopted our older three kids, and so our oldest one is twelve. Let’s just say he’s got some tendencies or he’s had tendencies to try to get himself out of situations. Like, when we’re trying to get him to do homework, he’ll do anything and everything to get out of that. I can easily be in tunnel vision mode where I think that’s always the case. By the way, again, it’s like seeing the car that you always see. There are certain things that you attend to or focus on and you ignore the times when that’s not true.

Ben:
We all have triggers or things that we focus on about our kids or about other people just as we do for ourselves. It’s easy to be mindless or to lack attention towards things that just, we don’t see it as that relevant or that don’t trigger us. Just as an example, recently, I got mad at my son or something like that because he was just trying to dodge a situation, and I’m like, why are you always trying to get out of stuff? I was really grateful because my wife stopped me. I think it’s good to have an environment where you sometimes you can get pulled out of your mindlessness. My wife’s really, really good at that. 100 percent, she’s the soldier, she’s the one who stabilizes everything, and we wouldn’t be able to do anything without her.

Ben:
She just was like, “Ben, stop it. You’re you’re being ridiculous. You’re putting him into a box. He’s not always trying to get out of things.” Then she would remind me like, look at what he did this morning. He was being very amazing at doing his homework, and he rocked all this morning, and I was like, you know what? You’re 100 percent right, and I apologized to my son. I think one thing is just realizing that it’s easy to be mindless towards other people. It’s easy to miss their growth. It’s easy to see them from one perspective. I think it’s good to, sometimes, just as you question the perspective you have of yourself or don’t hold it so tight that you can’t change, same is true of your kids.

Ben:
It just humbles me actually to watch how much our kids have actually changed because we got them as foster kids five years ago and we went through a crazy court battle for three years to get them. I like the concept of Dan Sullivan who says measure the gain, not the gap. It’s actually insane, and I think it’s a good practice, to spend some time to look at what’s changed in your life or in your kid’s life or how they’ve changed over the last year, two years, three years. Dan Sullivan actually recommends doing it every nine months. You can really train yourself to notice change, be mindful of growth and development. If I think about who my kids are now versus the kids that they were when we got them five years ago, it’s shocking.

Ben:
The types of behavioral issues we were dealing with when we first got them. I think when you notice change and when you’re paying attention to that, it’s that whole idea, what you focus on expands. When you’re noticing change and you’re looking for that, you can get out of tunnel vision mode. To me, I think that that’s one. I think I went long enough there that I won’t go to the other ones.

Pat:
No, that was fantastic. Thank you for that insight. I think you’re right. Just being conscious is the key here because we often, especially being busy and being online, we do get a little mindless sometimes, so thank you for bringing us some consciousness and some willpower too. Appreciate you for that. Again, BenjaminHardy.com. Check out the book when, whenever you can, Personality Isn’t Permanent. Thanks for taking the time today, Ben. Appreciate you.

Ben:
Yeah. No, I’m grateful to be on here.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Ben Hardy. You can check us out at benjaminhardy.com. Make sure it’s BenjaminHardy.com, not benhardy.com. That’ll take you to a very interesting website, but go to both because yeah, it’s worth going to. But secondly, make sure to check out the book, Personality Isn’t Permanent. A very interesting discussion about that because I’ve gotten really into, like you heard in the episode, the Enneagram, and this counters the idea that you just are a certain way, but I love the way he challenged me there. It was great and definitely a well worthwhile to at least explore this a little bit more.

Pat:
Thank you, Ben. I appreciate you for coming on. Thank you for listening all the way through, and I’m excited to share more with you coming up in the upcoming weeks here. Next week, we got another great episode coming your way, so make sure you hit that subscribe button so you make sure you don’t miss that. If you want to check out the links and all the things mentioned here in this episode, head on over to the show notes page at smartpassiveincome.com/session428. Cheers. Thanks so much. I appreciate you, and as always, #TeamFlynnforthewin. Peace.

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