From Impossible to Inevitable: Keith Ellis on 10X Goals, Magic Questions, and the $10,000 Mindset

[00:00:03] Welcome to the Business Chop Podcast, where our guests speak on meeting the challenges of entrepreneurship, as well as offer tips and advice on business, marketing, technology, and more. Whether you are a newbie or seasoned professional, this episode is for you. I am your host, Audrey Wiggins.

[00:00:24] Let's chop it up.

[00:00:28] Hello, Chop Squad and friends. It's great to be with you and welcome to my new listeners. I hope that you will subscribe and become a member of the Chop Squad.

[00:00:39] My guest today is Keith Ellis. He's the bestselling author and the number one superpower coach in the world. He helps successful entrepreneurs achieve impossible goals.

[00:00:51] He reinvented the art of setting goals in his classic book, The Magic Lamp, Goal Setting for People Who Hate Setting Goals, which has helped more than 100,000 readers around the globe.

[00:01:04] Now, we're going to learn more about Keith and get into some questions on the other side of this message.

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[00:01:39] We're back now with Keith. And Keith, welcome.

[00:01:44] Thank you so much, Audrey. I am delighted to be here.

[00:01:46] Yes, we're delighted to have you. Now, a little bit more about you, Keith.

[00:01:50] Soon after, he was only the sixth employee hired by a tiny internet startup named Web Methods as their first vice president of sales.

[00:02:02] Three years later, they went public in one of the largest software IPOs in history.

[00:02:09] Then he wrote the book that changed everything, Magic Questions 2.0.

[00:02:15] How to transform your life at the speed of thought.

[00:02:19] We're going to get into that a little bit more in our episode today.

[00:02:23] Now, Keith just published the first $10,000 book in history, 10 times superpower.

[00:02:30] I'm glad he's on my show. We're going to be good friends. I'm going to rub some elbows here with him.

[00:02:37] How to make the impossible easy. So let's get the whole title in there.

[00:02:41] 10 times superpower. How to make the impossible easy, which reveals the secret to how he helps entrepreneurs achieve the impossible goals.

[00:02:51] And he's here with us on The Business Shop to share this $10,000 secret with you for free.

[00:02:59] Listen up, folks. Welcome again, Keith.

[00:03:02] Well, thank you so much. Wait a minute. Did I say for free?

[00:03:05] Okay, let's...

[00:03:07] We need to start again, okay?

[00:03:08] Okay, and he's here on The Business Shop.

[00:03:12] No, I am delighted to be here. Thank you so much.

[00:03:15] Oh, yes, definitely. You are welcome.

[00:03:17] So let's just dive in here and let's see. What am I going to ask you first?

[00:03:23] How about this? What makes your book worth $10,000?

[00:03:29] So, you know, we've all read books that are worth $10,000.

[00:03:33] Okay.

[00:03:34] But we didn't pay that for them. We got them from a friend or we checked them out from a library.

[00:03:39] But they changed our lives. They were really powerful influences in our lives.

[00:03:43] So we've all had that experience.

[00:03:46] When I was writing this book, I was putting together several things that I'd been working on for years and teaching for years

[00:03:55] and had been having tremendous results in my own life from these things.

[00:03:59] And I was putting it together in this new book and it was taking me to a place that really was hard for me even to imagine.

[00:04:05] It was taking me to a place that was essentially impossible, except I was getting there.

[00:04:10] And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this book is something different.

[00:04:15] It's really spectacular.

[00:04:16] Now, that's not to say there aren't other spectacular books.

[00:04:20] But I said, you know, this book is worth so much, I ought to charge $10,000 for it.

[00:04:24] And then I started thinking about it and I said, why not?

[00:04:30] Why not put the value up front?

[00:04:32] Let people know I'm absolutely dead serious when I say this book is worth as much.

[00:04:37] In fact, I put a guarantee on it.

[00:04:38] It says it's worth – to you, it's going to be worth at least 10 times as much as you pay for it or I'll give you the money back.

[00:04:46] Okay.

[00:04:47] And this is where it got interesting.

[00:04:50] I also have this coaching program.

[00:04:51] And in the business world, the world I work in, the business coaching program, and my focus is on successful entrepreneurs.

[00:05:00] I help successful entrepreneurs achieve impossible goals.

[00:05:04] And in that focus, I have this coaching program.

[00:05:08] Most people in coaching programs will give you content like a book for free and then try to sell you an expensive back-end program.

[00:05:18] Right.

[00:05:18] I said – and that's great.

[00:05:20] It's a great business model.

[00:05:21] A lot of people make it work.

[00:05:22] That's wonderful.

[00:05:23] I said, you know, why not just be up front?

[00:05:25] Just say, this book is worth 10 grand.

[00:05:27] Go for it.

[00:05:28] If you want the goodness in this book, pay $10,000.

[00:05:32] And oh, by the way, I'm going to give you my coaching program for free.

[00:05:36] So it's essentially turning the whole model on its head.

[00:05:41] And you don't have to take advantage of the coaching program.

[00:05:43] That's up to you.

[00:05:45] But what I've found, and I'm sure you've had this experience too, we've all had these great moments where we've learned something really valuable from a book.

[00:05:53] And then we put the book in the shelf.

[00:05:55] And then we read the next book.

[00:05:56] And that's very valuable.

[00:05:58] We put that in the shelf.

[00:05:59] And we get little bits and pieces from them.

[00:06:01] But we don't make the wisdom in those books come alive.

[00:06:05] And my coaching program, I call it Superpower Coaching.

[00:06:09] It helps people take what's in the book and bring it alive in their lives so they can literally create impossible goals and then achieve them.

[00:06:20] And when I say impossible, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

[00:06:22] Things that they think are impossible, I can help them achieve.

[00:06:26] So they don't have to wait for the other shoe to drop.

[00:06:29] I'm not trying to sell them something on the back end.

[00:06:32] There's no hidden charges.

[00:06:33] I'm saying, here's a book.

[00:06:35] It's $10,000.

[00:06:36] Get used to it, right?

[00:06:38] Right?

[00:06:39] And then, by the way, here's a spectacular coaching program that you get for free to help the book come alive in your life.

[00:06:47] And that makes sense, though, because depending on the type of learner you are, you can take the book and get the $10,000 out of it.

[00:06:57] Absolutely.

[00:06:58] Because you're a good reader.

[00:06:59] You absorb.

[00:07:00] You're taking notes.

[00:07:01] Okay, if I do this or that.

[00:07:03] And you go right away and you start implementing.

[00:07:05] And then, so maybe you just need a coach a couple of times or you never get the coach because the book is coaching you.

[00:07:12] Right.

[00:07:12] And then the other group, you know, I get the book, like you say, skim it and put it on the shelf.

[00:07:18] Yep.

[00:07:19] Or even read through the whole thing, but never really take action.

[00:07:22] And that's where the coach comes in.

[00:07:24] That's right.

[00:07:25] The coach is really powerful on a couple of levels.

[00:07:28] The one you just described and adding to that whole idea, accountability.

[00:07:32] It's the idea of either you're serious about doing this or you're not.

[00:07:36] And what's at the heart of this book is the idea that we, and by we, I mean me, I spent much of my life setting incremental goals.

[00:07:50] Yeah, I'm going to make 30% more income this year and then I make it and then I'll make 30% more next year.

[00:07:56] And I'm delighted and I was successful and it worked great.

[00:07:59] But I got to a point in my life, as you can tell from the one or two gray hairs you're probably able to see.

[00:08:06] I got to a point where I realized I want more than incremental progress.

[00:08:10] I want extraordinary progress.

[00:08:12] And I didn't know how to do that.

[00:08:14] And it really frustrated me because I was this, you know, success junkie.

[00:08:18] I was a published author.

[00:08:20] I was doing all these things and I didn't know how to do extraordinary.

[00:08:22] So I dove back into the success literature and the seminars and started peppering people I knew who were masters at all kinds of different skills and mindsets.

[00:08:34] And realized that I'd been missing something.

[00:08:37] And what I was missing was this idea that you and I were talking about before we got on about magic questions.

[00:08:42] And the idea that all success systems from Socrates to Tony Robbins to Earl Nightingale to James Clear, everybody's success system is based on a certain type of questions.

[00:08:56] They're different questions and they vary a little bit from one to the next, but they all are based on what I've come to call magic questions.

[00:09:05] They don't call them that.

[00:09:06] That's okay.

[00:09:07] The questions don't work, no matter what you call them, arose by any other name, right?

[00:09:11] Yeah.

[00:09:12] So I put together this book about magic questions where I brought this out and I said, look, this is the way to make this work.

[00:09:19] And at the same time that was happening, the world was going nuts with AI, right?

[00:09:25] Artificial intelligence.

[00:09:26] Everything you read was about AI this, AI that.

[00:09:29] And it turns out that the key to making AI really useful in your business or in your life is to create what are called, is to engineer prompts.

[00:09:43] There's a whole new business around this called prompt engineering.

[00:09:47] And you learn how to ask questions of AI so that it gives you meaningful results.

[00:09:54] And I said, you know, that's exactly what I do with human intelligence.

[00:09:59] I teach prompt engineering for the human brain.

[00:10:03] I teach people how to ask themselves the right question in the right way at the right time so that they can transform their lives literally at the speed of thought.

[00:10:16] And that book grew into something else because there was something else missing.

[00:10:21] Even with that, I thought it made great progress.

[00:10:23] There was still something else missing.

[00:10:25] And that's where the 10X comes in.

[00:10:27] The idea that we sell ourselves short.

[00:10:31] I don't know about you, but I was brought up in a kind of a traditional conservative family setting where I was told, don't ask for too much.

[00:10:43] Oh, yeah, right.

[00:10:44] Say no if I offer you a dinner.

[00:10:46] Yeah, you know what I'm talking about?

[00:10:48] Don't ask for too much.

[00:10:49] You won't be disappointed.

[00:10:50] Don't set your goals too high.

[00:10:51] Then you won't, you know, fall flat.

[00:10:53] Yes.

[00:10:54] I reached a stage in my life.

[00:10:56] I said, that's a bunch of crap.

[00:10:58] That's exactly the wrong message to teach people at any age.

[00:11:02] And I realized that what happens is the brain does everything it can to accommodate whatever you commit to.

[00:11:10] So if you commit to an incremental goal, you'll get it or it'll try to give it to you.

[00:11:16] But if you commit to an impossible goal, something you think is impossible, the brain says, oh, okay, I guess she wants that.

[00:11:23] And then you start working toward that.

[00:11:26] And what happens is we live in what I think of as an age of distraction, an age of noise.

[00:11:33] There are, you know, 8 billion people in the world, 6 billion of them are on devices, electronic devices.

[00:11:40] And they all seem to be asking for our attention at the same time.

[00:11:43] I mean, it can be maddening.

[00:11:45] So we have this noise.

[00:11:47] And one of the great challenges we face in this day and age, I think, is how do you deal with the noise?

[00:11:54] How do you find the signal in the noise?

[00:11:56] How do you find something that's valuable in all this noise?

[00:11:58] And one answer to that question is you set impossible goals.

[00:12:03] You set a goal that you think you cannot achieve and then you commit to it.

[00:12:09] And your focus goes.

[00:12:12] So instead of all this other noise, you're focused on just a few things that really matter.

[00:12:20] Everything clears up.

[00:12:22] And here's the thing that blows people's minds about this.

[00:12:25] It's actually easier to do this than to do what you're doing now.

[00:12:29] It's actually easier to set and achieve an impossible goal than it is to do whatever goal you're working on right now.

[00:12:37] Now, why is that?

[00:12:39] I'm back there, Keith.

[00:12:40] So it's back to this focus idea.

[00:12:43] So let's consider something that I focus on entrepreneurs.

[00:12:48] So let's talk about dollars and cents.

[00:12:50] Let's say you have a business.

[00:12:51] You want to grow the business by 30% this next year.

[00:12:56] How do you do that?

[00:12:58] Well, there are probably a thousand things you could do, right?

[00:13:01] A little bit here, a little bit there.

[00:13:03] You know, hire salespeople, train people differently, different marketing, different messaging.

[00:13:07] There's so many things to do.

[00:13:09] You can't know enough about each of these options to really make an intelligent decision.

[00:13:15] You can't make an informed decision because there are too many options.

[00:13:18] So you get lost in the noise and you end up, and we all have done this, you end up essentially rolling the dice and saying, okay, I'm going to pick this, this, and this and hope I get where I want to go.

[00:13:28] Right.

[00:13:30] And because of the 80-20 principle that operates, you know, with human beings, we all know this, 80% of what we spend our time on gives us 20% of our results.

[00:13:40] 20% of what we spend our time on gives us 80% of our results.

[00:13:43] I always thought that was a great idea.

[00:13:45] I just never knew how to apply it because I didn't know how to tell the difference between the 80 and the 20.

[00:13:50] And with an impossible goal, your focus is so narrow that the 80 just disappears.

[00:13:59] It's a waste of your time, and you're focusing on the meat on the 20.

[00:14:04] So back to that example, you want to increase your business by 30%.

[00:14:08] You have all these ways to do it.

[00:14:11] You try to pick some and hope it works.

[00:14:12] Well, what if you decided you want to increase your business by 1,000%?

[00:14:16] 10 times, right?

[00:14:18] Yeah.

[00:14:18] What if you wanted that and you committed to it?

[00:14:22] We want that.

[00:14:23] Top squad.

[00:14:24] We want that.

[00:14:24] There you go.

[00:14:25] But even though you want it and you think it's impossible, right?

[00:14:28] In the back of your mind, it's like, I can't do that.

[00:14:31] Yeah.

[00:14:31] But you want it.

[00:14:32] So commit to it.

[00:14:33] Now, guess what happens when you commit to it?

[00:14:35] Your brain goes, oh, okay, I guess she wants that.

[00:14:38] So it says now suddenly you're looking not at 1,000 different things to do.

[00:14:43] You're thinking maybe there's one, two, maybe three things I could do right now that actually

[00:14:50] could get me to 1,000% growth if I pulled them off.

[00:14:56] So now immediately you've changed all this noise into I'm focused.

[00:15:02] This is what I'm going to work on.

[00:15:03] So now your decisions are easier.

[00:15:06] Your focus is clearer.

[00:15:09] That's where the easy comes in.

[00:15:12] Instead of trying to wrestle with all the crap we've got scheduled in our daily lives that

[00:15:17] overloads us, you're focused just on the sweet stuff.

[00:15:21] And then you move toward that.

[00:15:23] Now, here's the secret.

[00:15:24] And this is the $10,000 secret that's free.

[00:15:27] I'm moving in for the secret.

[00:15:29] Yeah.

[00:15:29] And there you go.

[00:15:30] And you're going to hear this and you say, well, that's the reaction is, well, that's

[00:15:34] not worth $10,000 until you realize, well, actually it is.

[00:15:38] The secret is this.

[00:15:39] When you say something is impossible, what you really mean is it's impossible for you.

[00:15:46] Yeah.

[00:15:47] For who you are in this moment, you do not have the capabilities to do this.

[00:15:53] That's all you're saying.

[00:15:54] Maybe it's possible for somebody else.

[00:15:56] Maybe it'll be possible in the future.

[00:15:58] Who knows?

[00:15:59] But it's not possible right now.

[00:16:00] And the problem is that's a perfectly valid thing to do, by the way, to make that determination.

[00:16:05] The problem is we end up getting lazy and whenever there's something that's a little bit

[00:16:10] challenging, we say, ah, that's impossible.

[00:16:12] Ah, that's impossible.

[00:16:13] I can't.

[00:16:13] Yeah.

[00:16:14] What I'm saying is take the impossible literally.

[00:16:18] Think of something that you really want, but you really don't think you can do it.

[00:16:22] And if you set a goal and you say, you know, I think I can achieve that, you're not being

[00:16:27] ambitious enough.

[00:16:28] You're not being audacious enough.

[00:16:31] Add a zero to it.

[00:16:33] Right?

[00:16:34] Set an impossible goal.

[00:16:36] Commit to it and watch what happens.

[00:16:38] And your brain starts thinking differently.

[00:16:40] But what happens is the way to reach an impossible goal, here's the secret, is to increase your

[00:16:47] capabilities.

[00:16:49] So what you were saying before is I don't have the capability to do it.

[00:16:53] It's impossible for me, for Keith, for Audrey.

[00:16:56] It's impossible.

[00:16:56] I can't do it.

[00:16:58] What happens if you add to your capabilities?

[00:17:00] Well, you do that and it's like climbing a mountain.

[00:17:04] You look up at a mountain and say, I can't get up there.

[00:17:07] You climb halfway up the mountain and you look around and say, wow, this is incredible.

[00:17:12] I've never seen this before.

[00:17:14] Your perspective changes.

[00:17:15] Your mind shifts.

[00:17:17] And that's what happens when you set an impossible goal.

[00:17:20] You start adding capabilities and suddenly it becomes in your mind possible.

[00:17:25] And then not only possible, you actually achieve it.

[00:17:28] And not only do you achieve it, you realize this is actually easier than what I was doing.

[00:17:32] So the impossible becomes easy.

[00:17:35] And here's the kicker.

[00:17:36] Here's the thing that, again, people don't necessarily want to acknowledge, but they think

[00:17:43] they realize it makes sense.

[00:17:45] We've all done this in our lives.

[00:17:47] We've all done this many, many times.

[00:17:48] Sometimes think of when you won't remember back to this, but it's a rhetorical story.

[00:17:56] Think about when you were crawling around on the floor at nine months old or whatever

[00:18:00] and trying to learn how to walk, right?

[00:18:02] You were emotionally incapable of walking.

[00:18:05] It was impossible.

[00:18:06] You were psychologically incapable.

[00:18:08] You were physically incapable.

[00:18:09] What'd you do?

[00:18:10] You kept trying to walk, right?

[00:18:12] You didn't give up until you learned to walk.

[00:18:14] Pretty soon after you learned to walk, you were running.

[00:18:17] What was impossible was now easy.

[00:18:21] And people hear that and they go, yeah, well, that's whatever.

[00:18:24] That's when I was a kid.

[00:18:25] None of that really counts, right?

[00:18:27] Okay, how about this?

[00:18:28] You learned to talk.

[00:18:30] You learned to read.

[00:18:31] You learned to write.

[00:18:33] All the same thing.

[00:18:34] At one point, they were literally impossible for you.

[00:18:37] Your brain, your body, incapable of doing it until you added capabilities and suddenly

[00:18:43] you could do it.

[00:18:45] People say, yeah, but that's when I was a kid.

[00:18:47] That really doesn't count.

[00:18:48] Okay, how about when you learned to ride a bike?

[00:18:50] How about when you learned to drive a car?

[00:18:52] These things are way beyond you and then you did them.

[00:18:55] And so when I'm doing this in front of a group of people, there's always somebody in there

[00:18:59] that says, that still doesn't work.

[00:19:01] I mean, that's just, those are rites of passage.

[00:19:03] Everybody does that.

[00:19:04] I say, okay, in your life, was there ever a time that you were making one-tenth of what

[00:19:12] you're making now?

[00:19:14] And everybody goes, yeah, sure.

[00:19:16] You know, I was selling lemonade.

[00:19:17] I was washing dishes.

[00:19:19] I was mowing lawns, whatever it was, shoveling snow.

[00:19:24] Yeah, that was a time.

[00:19:26] At that time in your life, could you have looked forward to where you are today and would

[00:19:31] it have been possible in your mind to be earning what you're earning today?

[00:19:35] And everybody in the room goes, no, no way.

[00:19:38] It would have been ridiculous.

[00:19:39] That's the point.

[00:19:40] You've already done this.

[00:19:42] You already know how to do this.

[00:19:44] And once you sort of open your mind to that and understand that this really simple process

[00:19:50] of committing to something impossible because you want it, right?

[00:19:55] You want it so badly, you commit to it.

[00:19:57] And then adding capabilities, which you know how to do, and then pretty soon it's not impossible

[00:20:03] anymore.

[00:20:03] You've done this over and over and over.

[00:20:05] And one of the exercises we do in training sessions is to get people to go back through

[00:20:11] their own lives and come up with some other examples of that, right?

[00:20:13] I come up with some sort of generic examples that we've all gone through one way or the

[00:20:17] other.

[00:20:18] And then they come up with those amazing examples of when they've done that.

[00:20:23] And it tends to blow their mind.

[00:20:24] And they realize this actually makes sense.

[00:20:27] I actually can do this.

[00:20:30] And then do you want to hear the other gotcha that blows people's minds?

[00:20:33] Of course I want to hear.

[00:20:36] You're still going?

[00:20:37] Okay.

[00:20:37] I'm still here.

[00:20:38] I'm still here.

[00:20:39] Okay.

[00:20:39] So when people commit to an impossible goal, almost the first thing they say to themselves

[00:20:45] is, how do I do this?

[00:20:47] And that's the wrong question.

[00:20:48] That's the question we've been asking ourselves our whole lives.

[00:20:51] And it works fine in many situations.

[00:20:53] But in this situation, when you're talking impossible, ask a different question.

[00:20:58] Ask, who can help me do this?

[00:21:00] So instead of saying how, you're saying who.

[00:21:04] Instead of saying what, you're saying who.

[00:21:07] Because what will get you to impossible is to add capabilities.

[00:21:12] We've already covered that, right?

[00:21:13] It always makes sense.

[00:21:15] What's the quickest way to add capabilities?

[00:21:18] Find somebody who already has those capabilities.

[00:21:21] Figure out how to collaborate.

[00:21:22] And there's a right way and a wrong way to do that too.

[00:21:26] Figure out how to collaborate with those people.

[00:21:28] Here's where it gets really interesting.

[00:21:29] Maybe you start with one person.

[00:21:31] You're running a business.

[00:21:32] You're the front woman, right?

[00:21:33] You're the pretty face, the smart person behind it, the visionary that created it.

[00:21:38] You're the person people want to watch.

[00:21:40] But you really don't want to do HR.

[00:21:42] You really don't want to do spreadsheets, right?

[00:21:45] You don't really want to do marketing.

[00:21:47] You don't want to make sales calls.

[00:21:49] All those things are needed to grow a business.

[00:21:54] But you don't have to do them.

[00:21:55] If you buy into this idea of adding capabilities from someone else, you find someone else who wants to do what you don't want to do.

[00:22:04] And then you collaborate with that person.

[00:22:07] Maybe you hire that person.

[00:22:08] Maybe you have a consulting relationship.

[00:22:11] But here's where it gets interesting.

[00:22:12] Once you get this sense of the way to get to impossible is to find the right who's, right?

[00:22:20] The who's who can help you do these things that you either can't do or don't want to do.

[00:22:27] There's no limit to what you can do because there's no limit to the who's.

[00:22:31] With 8 billion people in the world, I guarantee you there's enough talent out there to take you wherever you want to go.

[00:22:38] You just have to find it.

[00:22:40] And invariably people say, well, yeah, but I hate doing this so much.

[00:22:44] I don't want to just dump it on somebody else, which is the way most delegation happens, right?

[00:22:48] We're afraid to delegate or don't really know how to let go.

[00:22:52] And I think that's good.

[00:22:53] Well, but that's legit too, especially for an entrepreneur.

[00:22:56] Because an entrepreneur thinks that they are the hottest thing at the dance, right?

[00:23:02] Because they created the business.

[00:23:04] They have the vision.

[00:23:06] And they know that nobody else can do this thing over here that they hate doing.

[00:23:10] Nobody else can do it as well as they can do.

[00:23:11] So they don't want to let go of it.

[00:23:13] But that's the point.

[00:23:15] Are you really going to look me in the eye and say that you're better at doing something you hate than this person over here would be who loves doing it?

[00:23:23] I don't think so.

[00:23:24] So I think that's a big delusion.

[00:23:27] Yeah.

[00:23:28] But then they kind of, just like what you said, they don't want to let go.

[00:23:31] So they cling to this idea of, well, who would want to actually do that?

[00:23:35] Again, $8 billion.

[00:23:37] Work with me on this.

[00:23:38] It's a big number.

[00:23:38] I guarantee you, if you can take the thing you like least in your daily routine, the stuff you do each day, look at your activities, you find the activities you like the least.

[00:23:50] I guarantee you that at this moment, somewhere in the world, somebody is doing that activity and loving it.

[00:23:57] Yeah.

[00:23:58] And what it comes down to is you build your capabilities by adding theirs.

[00:24:05] You make them happy.

[00:24:08] They make you happy because they're doing this thing that you didn't want to do.

[00:24:11] And guess what else happens?

[00:24:13] Here's the big benefit.

[00:24:14] You're free to focus on what you do best.

[00:24:17] You're the visionary founder or whatever role you see yourself.

[00:24:21] I think of this as casting a movie.

[00:24:24] Okay.

[00:24:25] You're the director.

[00:24:27] You can be whatever you want in the movie.

[00:24:29] You can stay behind the scenes or you can be the star.

[00:24:31] But you figure out what role you want to play.

[00:24:35] And then you think of these other, these who's as roles, right?

[00:24:39] What role do I want this other who to play?

[00:24:42] And then you look for somebody who wants that role, just like you would as a director.

[00:24:47] You don't want to find the person who goes, I don't want to act.

[00:24:52] I don't want to be that person.

[00:24:53] I don't want to be the bad guy.

[00:24:54] I want to be the hero.

[00:24:55] You don't need that person.

[00:24:56] What you need is somebody who wants to be in that role and wants it so much that they show up in character every day and they're just ready to go.

[00:25:04] Then you start having this thing that just expands with no limits.

[00:25:09] Wow.

[00:25:09] I love that.

[00:25:10] So that's different from our conventional wisdom.

[00:25:13] That's awesome.

[00:25:14] It is.

[00:25:15] It pretty much turns conventional wisdom on its head.

[00:25:17] And it takes a – not everybody's ready for this.

[00:25:24] Only a percentage of people are ready for this because it shakes up their lives.

[00:25:28] And a lot of people fight change.

[00:25:30] You said it earlier, but, you know, clinging – the entrepreneur clinging to something they don't want to delegate because, you know, they're afraid or whatever.

[00:25:37] Maybe they're afraid somebody else would do a good job, right?

[00:25:40] Who knows?

[00:25:41] Human beings are very complex creatures.

[00:25:43] Once you want something enough, it starts with what do you want enough to commit to it even though you think it's impossible.

[00:25:49] Now, that's a bit of a trick for a lot of people.

[00:25:53] But once you get there – one reason it's a trick is because nobody's done it before.

[00:25:57] Most people haven't thought that way in their lives.

[00:25:59] Yeah.

[00:26:01] And now I'm saying take off all the blinders.

[00:26:04] Take off all the limitations.

[00:26:05] I'm not saying, you know, what do you want to do that's a little bit better than what you're doing now?

[00:26:10] I'm saying what do you want to do that's impossible, but you want it.

[00:26:14] In fact, I've got a newsletter that I entitled, If Anything Were Possible, because it's such a great frame to put around any question.

[00:26:25] You can say, okay, you know, what do I want my business to do next year?

[00:26:29] Well, I want to grow 30%.

[00:26:31] Okay.

[00:26:32] Let's ask the question again.

[00:26:33] If anything were possible, what would I want my business to do next year?

[00:26:37] Now you go, well, I want it to grow 10 times.

[00:26:40] Bingo.

[00:26:41] Now you're thinking the way you need to be thinking.

[00:26:44] So what is one actual insight that you can leave us with?

[00:26:49] I had to boil it down.

[00:26:50] It would be to embrace the impossible, just what we've been talking about.

[00:26:56] Think bigger.

[00:26:57] Most of us think that we want something and then we create a goal to get it.

[00:27:07] And what I think is it's the exact opposite.

[00:27:10] I think our goals create us.

[00:27:12] So I think if you want a bigger present, if you want your life to be bigger now, you need a bigger future.

[00:27:21] And if you project to a future that is impossible, that is that big.

[00:27:27] And I sort of use the word impossible and 10x interchangeably because 10x is something you can wrap your brain around, right?

[00:27:35] Take my business, make it 10x better.

[00:27:38] Make my health 10x 10 times better.

[00:27:39] Make my relationships 10 times better.

[00:27:41] Have 10 times more friends.

[00:27:43] Whatever way you define it, you can sort of put a number next to it.

[00:27:49] But I'm really talking about something that challenges you so much you think it's impossible.

[00:27:55] Once you've done that, you start to create yourself as someone who can achieve that because the payoff – this is the dirty little secret of this whole thing.

[00:28:07] The payoff of achieving an impossible goal is not the goal.

[00:28:12] It's the person you become to achieve the goal.

[00:28:16] It's the growth you have gone through to get where you can achieve that goal.

[00:28:24] Growth to me is the ultimate objective in this whole thing.

[00:28:28] It's the big win.

[00:28:29] So sometimes people say, well, what if I set a 10x goal and I don't achieve it?

[00:28:34] And it's like, okay, I'm still not communicating this well.

[00:28:39] So let's take an example.

[00:28:41] Let's say you want to grow your business by 1,000 percent, 10 times.

[00:28:47] And you think it's impossible.

[00:28:49] And you start working on it.

[00:28:50] And you do it – you say, I'm going to do this in two years.

[00:28:55] Two years.

[00:28:56] Two years from now, you're only at 800 percent more.

[00:29:00] Is that a bad thing?

[00:29:02] No.

[00:29:03] That is a great thing.

[00:29:04] But that's what I mean.

[00:29:05] And to get there – so you didn't hit the 10x goal.

[00:29:09] That wasn't really the payoff anyway.

[00:29:11] The payoff was imagine how much you had to grow as an entrepreneur to get to that 800 percent.

[00:29:19] Absolutely.

[00:29:20] That's the payoff.

[00:29:21] And then here's where it gets super exciting.

[00:29:24] Then you think about what's my next goal.

[00:29:27] Well, your next goal starts at that elevated position that you've taken yourself to.

[00:29:33] You've grown from here to here, right?

[00:29:37] Right.

[00:29:37] That's where you start your next goal.

[00:29:39] So now if your next goal is an x on top of that, from here to there is 100x.

[00:29:46] And it's all possible.

[00:29:48] It's all possible once you understand the power of committing to an impossible goal and the power of adding capabilities by adding who's, by finding the right who to do the job.

[00:30:02] Wow.

[00:30:02] That's phenomenal.

[00:30:05] So as we get near to the end of our discussion, I mean, we've been talking here faster than I thought.

[00:30:12] You know, like 15, 20 minutes, you know, we've been going at it.

[00:30:15] This is awful.

[00:30:16] This is fun.

[00:30:17] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:30:19] So there's the question on your list here.

[00:30:22] It says, what is the 10x reality check that you mentioned on your website?

[00:30:28] Yep.

[00:30:29] So I've actually changed the name of that.

[00:30:31] I just call it 10x quiz now because people, if they are interested in this at all, if they think, you know, okay, maybe it's not real, but maybe I want to learn a little bit more about it.

[00:30:44] The first thing to do is to figure out whether you're in the frame of mind, you're in the right place in your life to go 10x, to achieve an impossible goal.

[00:30:52] So I've created a little quiz.

[00:30:53] It's a fun little quiz.

[00:30:55] And it takes about five minutes.

[00:30:57] And at the end of the quiz, it will either – one of two things will happen.

[00:31:03] Either it will say you're not quite ready, but what we're going to do is give you a free membership to our newsletter, if anything were possible that I mentioned to you earlier.

[00:31:15] You get that for free, obviously, you can unsubscribe if you don't like it.

[00:31:19] But it's like nothing else I've ever seen.

[00:31:21] It's a newsletter that essentially surfaces stories about people and their wisdom, people who accomplish the impossible.

[00:31:31] I mean, who doesn't like reading that?

[00:31:33] I can't wait to read it each week.

[00:31:35] So you would get signed up for that even if the quiz results aren't what you would hope they would be.

[00:31:41] But then some subset of people are going to find out that they really are ready to go.

[00:31:46] I mean, they are raring to go.

[00:31:48] And at that point, they would be invited to book what I call a discovery coaching call with me.

[00:31:55] It's an actual coaching call.

[00:31:58] Normally, a coaching session would be an hour or hour and a half.

[00:32:01] This is only a half an hour because it's free.

[00:32:03] Yeah.

[00:32:04] But it's a coaching session where they would begin to design a life, a future that would blow their minds.

[00:32:13] And then, you know, see what they wanted to do from there.

[00:32:16] But at the very least, they would get a new way of looking at their lives and their future that they didn't bring to it.

[00:32:23] So that alone is worth the price of admission.

[00:32:26] Absolutely.

[00:32:26] And where can we find that?

[00:32:27] What's the website?

[00:32:29] Keith Ellis dot com.

[00:32:31] K-E-I-T-H-E-L-L-I-S dot com.

[00:32:35] And there's a little page they'll get that explains what this is all about.

[00:32:39] Talks about the $10,000 book, yada, yada, yada.

[00:32:41] And then it goes at the bottom and it says, if you think you're ready to find out if you're ready.

[00:32:46] Right.

[00:32:48] Click this button and take the quiz.

[00:32:50] Don't be scared.

[00:32:51] Don't be scared.

[00:32:52] I'm going to do it.

[00:32:53] That's it.

[00:32:54] Yep.

[00:32:55] Absolutely.

[00:32:56] Well, Keith, this has been amazing.

[00:33:00] And this is kind of backwards, but I want to close out with your fun thing or accomplishments.

[00:33:07] How do I answer that?

[00:33:08] When I think of accomplishments, the first thing I always think of is my family.

[00:33:12] Not because I have done anything spectacular with my family, but because I have a spectacular family, if that makes sense.

[00:33:19] Yes.

[00:33:20] I'm just blessed with that.

[00:33:21] So if somebody, if they put it on my gravestone, what I would want somebody to think of as an accomplishment is he was a good husband, good father, good grandfather.

[00:33:33] You know, that stuff.

[00:33:34] If I've done that, I've accomplished what I want.

[00:33:37] I've done some other stuff, written some books and had some success in business, made money and all that cool stuff.

[00:33:44] And those are great.

[00:33:45] But even there, to me, the real accomplishment is what I was saying earlier.

[00:33:50] It's setting a goal and then becoming the person for whom that goal is possible.

[00:33:55] It's the growth.

[00:33:56] So I'm a very different person than I was even a year ago and hugely different than I was 30 years ago.

[00:34:04] And those are accomplishments.

[00:34:06] That's the accomplishment that I'm most looking for.

[00:34:09] I don't know if that's a good answer to your question or not, but there you go.

[00:34:12] Hey, whatever answer you give is the good answer.

[00:34:16] Good.

[00:34:16] It's the great answer.

[00:34:17] Yes.

[00:34:17] Yes, definitely.

[00:34:19] Well, Keith, if there's nothing else, then we're going to say farewell for now.

[00:34:22] Yeah, the CHOP squad and I are going to hop over to KeithEllos.com and take the quiz and see where we land.

[00:34:33] Terrific.

[00:34:34] Well, this has been delightful.

[00:34:35] Thank you so much for having me on.

[00:34:37] Yep, you're so welcome.

[00:34:52] Thank you for listening to The Business Job.

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