Dr. Benjamin Hardy (#1 writer in the world on Medium.com from 2015–2018) shares how our goals impact our identity, and how most of us massively under predict the degree to which we are likely to change our ‘future self’. We also discuss how Ben grew his email list from 0 to 400k subscribers over 3 years and how to get into the right frame of mind for writing and becoming our best future selves.
Benjamin Hardy’s articles have been read by over 100 million readers. He has also been the #1 writer, in the world, on Medium.com. How does he do it? In this episode, he shares his writing process and how he plans, structures and ships his articles. We also talk about why it’s important to set the right goals to help us reach our most courageous dreams, how our goals shape our identity and personality, and the importance of the environment in achieving our goals.
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Dr Benjamin Hardy (@BenjaminPHardy) is an organizational psychologist, bestselling author and the world’s leading expert on the application of the Future Self science. His books include Be Your Future Self Now, The Gap and the Gain, Willpower Doesn’t Work and Personality Isn’t Permanent. His blogs have been read by over 100 million people and are featured on Forbes, Fortune, CNBC and many others. He is a regular contributor to Inc. and Psychology Today and from 2015-2018, he was the #1 writer, in the world, on Medium.com.
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SHOW NOTES
[02:47] How we underpredict our future selves
[04:15] How Ben clarified his goal to become a professional writer and land a six-figure book deal
[06:55] How Ben used Medium to grow his email list from 0 to 400k
[10:05] Ben’s systems and processes to create consistently popular articles
[14:47] Ben's writing process and how he plans, structures and ships his articles
[17:30] On using Medium vs LinkedIn.
[19:18] On repurposing an article for two different platforms
[27:50] What does it mean to orient our lives towards our goals? From LeBron to watching Youtube late at night
[31:26] How James Clear’s goal led him to sell 2 million copies of Atomic Habits
[33:40] The importance of environment in changing your life and achieving your goals
[39:35] Why being useful is important, and how you can get what you want by helping other people
[40:51] Resources for crafting good headlines
[44:29] Why ‘empathetic witnesses’ can encourage you to write, publish and more
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QUOTES FROM BEN HARDY
“...most people think that who they are today is who they're gonna be in the future. So their future self actually isn't imagined far different. They think that their future self is going to kind of pretty much be the same person that they are today, which is just not what the research shows. We massively under predict how much we're going to change in the future. And we spend so little time imagining our future and turning that into concrete plans and strategies for courageously becoming the person we wanted to be”
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“What is the actual objective of this article? What am I trying to accomplish? Or what am I trying to have the reader accomplish? What is the purpose of this article? Like just answering that question, like, what am I trying to accomplish? What am I trying to solve here?”
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RESOURCES:
Podcast Offer: To access the Genuis Blogging Course, email ben@benjaminhardy.com and mention the LWS interview offer along with proof of purchase of Ben’s book.
Follow Ben Hardy:
Website: benjaminhardy.com
Twitter @benjaminphardy
Instagram @benjamin_hardy_phd
Ben’s Books:
Authors mentioned:
Other books mentioned:
Courses mentioned:
Guest Blogging by Jon Morrow - (summary here) & Genius Blogging
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CREDITS
Production by Victoria Spooner. Artwork by Emma Winterschladen.
[Intro] Matt: Hello, and welcome to season one of the London Writers’ Salon podcast. I'm Matt.
Parul: And I’m Parul. And each week, we sit down with a writer that we admire to talk about the craft of writing and the arts of building a successful and sustainable writing career.
Matt: These interviews are recorded live with our global writing community. If you would like to join us for the next recording or write with us at our daily Writers’ Hour writing sessions, head to londonwriterssalon.com for more information.
In this episode, we interview writer Dr Benjamin Hardy. Ben is an organisational psychologist and the best-selling author of Willpower Doesn't Work and Personality Isn't Permanent. He is a regular contributor to Inc Magazine and Psychology Today, and from 2015 to 2018, he was the number one writer in the world on medium.com. And this is where I came to hear about Benjamin and read his work. In our interview, we dive into the heart of his book Personality Isn't Permanent explore how our goals impact our identity and shape who we are and how we live our lives. We also talk about the concept of our future self and how most of us massively underpredict the degree to which we are likely to change.
Parul: This was definitely one of my favourite interviews. And in this interview, we also talk about the brass tacks of growing an audience. We delve into how he grew his email list from zero to 400,000 subscribers every three years to medium.
And we asked him, “If you were starting from scratch today, how would you grow your following?” And his answer typically was practical and helpful. We went granular into his blog writing. We really went quite deep. We talked about everything from the structure to the tone and format of his articles, why he thinks headlines are so important, and how we can get them right. Finally, we talked about the importance of having a good environment to get into the right frame of mind for writing.
Matt: Ben was super generous in this interview with us [and] ambitious. It's very clear, as you'll find out, and just really good at deconstructing what has helped him grow his writing career—so many gems in this chat. Without further ado, let's get started. We hope you enjoy this conversation with Benjamin Hardy.
Welcome to the show Dr Hardy. We are so pleased to have you here.
Ben: Absolutely, man. And from here forward, you can just call me Ben, but yeah, really happy to be with you both. It's an honour.
Parul: And so your book came out last week. And as I was telling you earlier, I have been immersed in Personality Isn't Permanent, and I absolutely love it. I really mean it when I say it's going to the top of my list of some of my favourite non-fiction books for the last five years. And really, it's not even just about being a good book. It's actually life-changing. There are quite a few nuggets that I'm going to pull out in this interview, but one of them sticks out to me. You talk about personality being an effect and not a cause. And you say the primary causes shaping your personality or goals and the identity and behaviour that flow from those goals. Can you tell us just a little bit about the thinking behind that and why you came to write this book?
Ben: Thanks for striking it right at the heart. That really is kind of the core concept is that all of us have goals that we're aspiring towards—everyone, at least on this podcast, at least to some degree it seems like there are some goals that have to do with writing. And so those goals, whatever it is that you're conceptualising in your future, is the thing shaping your identity and your identity is the way you see yourself.
And it's the thing, you know, that is pushing you forward. And so your identity shapes your behaviour, and your behaviour becomes your personality. The challenge for most people is that they're not super-duper clear and tangible as far as what that future self looks like. And for most people—and it's weird because the research actually shows this for most people—most people think that who they are today is who they're gonna be in the future.
So their future self actually isn't imagined far different. They think that their future self is going to kind of pretty much be the same person that they are today, which is just not what the research shows. We massively underpredict how much we're going to change in the future. And we spend so little time imagining our future and turning that into concrete plans and strategies for courageously becoming the person we wanted to be. So like in really simple terms, back in 2015, I was really getting serious about wanting to become a professional writer.
I was in the first year of my PhD program. And yeah, I guess you could say my future self was someone who is publishing books like the ones right here, you know what I mean? Like that was not where I was at. I hadn't even written a blog post, didn't have a website. I was a first-year graduate student, but I really wanted to be an author, and I'd wanted to be an author for about five years.
And so that was when I started to get serious about clarifying my future self and then ultimately turning it into goals. And the goal that I set for myself was to get a six-figure book deal. So that was kind of the goal that then shaped my process for several years, which led me to becoming a top writer on medium.com.
Through that process, obviously, I've changed a lot as a person. I'm definitely not the same person I was five years ago. Not the same person I was even like two weeks ago after what happened.
Parul: I find it really hopeful that idea that actually who you are now and who you were before, while some of it can be taken forward, you can decide where you want to go from tomorrow onwards.
So that goal that's interesting because that was exactly the next question is going to be around the specific goal. But for you, it was a six-figure book deal. Just of interest and maybe it's a while back and you don't like—
Ben: Go ahead.
Parul: That's very specific about …that's monetary. Did you consider any other goals that were sort of more about being recognised by your peers? Or do you think it comes under that?
Ben: I think that you have to realise all goals are kind of based on different people's situations, you know? So like you, you know, your goal may be different than the goal I set. Part of my reason for having a monetary goal is that my wife and I literally had just become foster parents of three kids.
And so I was starting to feel quite compelled as like, you know, I wanted to be a professional writer, and I wanted to make a good income, and I wanted to have freedom of time and location to live wherever I wanted—stuff like that. So I wanted to actually be making a living as a writer, but I also felt quite a bit of responsibility given the fact that we had just gotten three kids. Obviously, we weren't sure if we were going to adopt them, but that was kind of part of my thinking behind setting that goal.
That goal was just that I wanted to be with a big publisher. I wanted to be able to make enough to provide for my family and also to have the flexibility.
Parul: That makes sense to me. It's like choosing one thing that's sort of more senior than any other goal that’s right for you.
Ben: Yeah. It was the goal that would help me do what I want to do. It would help me become the kind of person I wanted to be. It would help me to provide for my family. So I could be hopefully a good husband and father. It would give me the time flexibility. It was just the goal that would allow me to do what I want to do in all dimensions of my life at that time. That was what I was seeking.
Matt: So Benjamin, when I learned about you and when many of us learned about you, that was when medium was kind of just hitting its stride. And it seems like your career was hitting its stride with it. It was becoming popular, and you seem to apply a formula to medium that ended up kind of defining medium as a platform, at least in a few years.
And I have a feeling you kind of spearheaded that for the platform, but there were a few things you seem to combine, like a viral headline that was delicious that people just want to click on, right, which we'll talk a little bit more about later plus the tone of prescriptive writing. So you're kind of giving people advice and almost telling them what to do. “Pay attention to this, not that.” backed by science plus taking the raw and real elements of medium.
So kind of the combination of those four things seems to be a perfect storm. And I guess, you know, a lot's changed since 2015, 2017, 2018. Where does medium sit with your career as a writer?
Ben: Like, right now?
Matt: Yeah. Do you still publish on medium as much as you do?
Ben: Recently published a little bit. I haven't published a lot, mostly because I've been so caught up in other things, but medium has become more relevant. It stopped being relevant in 2018 because they changed a lot of their rules. It wasn't for me all about the page views. For me, it was about the email subscribers. And so I have learned over time how to throw a call to action at the end of my articles, send people to what we call a landing page, where people can put their email in and get like a free checklist or cheat sheet or giveaway.
So I was getting for literally over two years—I was getting 20,000 emails a month without any paid advertising. I mean, just on clockwork, I was getting like a thousand new emails a day, you know, sometimes 800 to a thousand emails a day, literally every day, 365 [days] for over two years. And so, my email list went from essentially zero to almost 400,000 in like three years.
That was what medium was really great for. But medium through that time was trying to become a profitable business. And so, they were always tweaking things. And like, because I was getting millions of views, I could feel all the tweaks they were making. And ultimately, they got to the point where they made their medium membership program and changed their rules so you couldn't put calls to action at the bottom of the articles, and they were really trying to turn it into a profitable business model. I didn't really want to write four clicks, although it's not necessarily bad; that was just not as valuable to me as getting email subscribers.
And I was trying to finish school. I was starting to work on books and stuff like that. So I kind of just left the platform for about a year and a half or two years, just because they didn't allow you to do calls to action at the bottom for a while. And so for me, it really wasn't worth it. However, they actually have changed it. They've changed the rules and they're allowing for calls to action at the bottom of articles again. Even within their membership site, you can't be as explicit and like as market-y, but you can still do it. You can still have a call to action at the bottom. And actually, if you looked at all of my articles, I'd have a short call to action to a landing page. And so I am actually going to go back.
I'll start writing there again because it's a valuable tool, and there is a way to build an audience there. And there's a way to build a career there. As a writer, you need to start getting email subscribers if you want to go beyond just working month to month.
Matt: That's great. And I actually want to go a little bit deeper on that because it seems like part of your success, too, is about developing systems and processes around the blogging.
And I think I was listening to one conversation where you talked about where you went from linear growth to exponential growth and talking about that call to action at the bottom of the email, an easy way for email capture. What else is included in that system for you? That process, that system to kind of go exponentially, if you will?
Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you hit a lot of them. I mean, you're very wise in how you analyse the writing. I mean, obviously, you need an extremely good headline. The article needs to be structured so it feels easy and fast to read. It needs to be written in a raw and emotional [way] and a human tone.
But yeah, being very prescriptive, giving good advice. Just giving simple how-to advice if you're writing in that you don't have to write that stuff, but that's just kind of in the realm I write in and kind of still at the same time making it so credible, which is kind of where I think the science or the quotes come in from other people.
But yeah, having a call to action where you send people not to a website. Don't send people to your website because I did that for so long. If you actually look at my website right now, my website benjaminhardy.com is literally now a funnel. People can opt-in for a free six-page feature, self checklist.
They then go to a 23-minute webinar where I break down the best ideas from Personality Isn't Permanent. Then I offer them a $147 course. If you look at a lot of other authors such as, you know, Ryan Holiday and other great people who I love and admire, their website is not a funnel. A lot of people still are very much trying to position themselves as an author, which to me is fine, but I'm still, I'm going to position myself as an author and people can read my books, but I still want to be super smart and strategic on the business side.
And so I would rather get people into the email list, get them into the funnel, offer them programs. Yeah. As far as the exponential growth, make it easy for them to get into the email list and make it easy to go to the next step. And usually, that means you're giving them something interesting, something that seems useful. In this case, you know, for so long, I gave away a peak state checklist, which was just a morning routine checklist. And that got literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of emails. Now I'm giving away a future self checklist, but it has to be small and just action-oriented and results-oriented.
What are the results you're trying to help people get? And why is this interesting and unique? And you give them something small and interesting in a super-easy way. Don't make it confusing. And then obviously, the next step is taking them to wherever you want them to go next.
Parul: You know, some of your work reminds me of BrainPickings and Maria Popova, just the level of curation.
And I know one of the things you mentioned in your book is around exposure. One of the ways to grow is to make sure you read a lot. Can I ask what your reading list looks like? How many books are you reading? How do you decide what to read?
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I read all sorts of stuff, you know, [a] little goofy, but yesterday I went on a really long ride, and I listened to the audiobook of this book just because I really want to listen to it. And actually, I noticed so many things and I'm like, freak, I could've covered that so much better. Do you know what I mean? Like now that I'm on this side of it, which is fun because I'm going to start the next book anyway, but I'm listening to a book called Disunited Nations right now, which is totally a geopolitical book. And I was recommended that book by Dan Sullivan. It's all about the history of the future of the world, like literally. And so I listened to that, but I do both listening and reading. I have my audible right here, and I'll tell you what I've been kind of stacking in front of me and whatever.
I listened to Viktor Frankl's book Man’s Search for Meaning twice during COVID-19. And that influenced my thinking for the next book I'm going to write. And it helps me honestly, further clarify a lot of the stuff I tried to write about Personality Isn’t Permanent. Because a lot of Personality Isn't permanent is about story and about the meaning we give to our lives, the meaning we give to events, which often are traumatic. And that basically, our identity is based on the meanings we give to things. And so, having gone back through Viktor Frankl's book, I kind of wish that I had read the book many times before, but I wish I had read it while I was writing Personality Isn't Permanent.
It would have totally shifted some of the directions that I went, but it's fun because you can just do the next one.
Matt: It seems to be the curse of the writer. It's never quite—the next book you read, you want to have added it into it, but I love your mindset though because there's always the next one.
Ben: Yeah. The beginning quote of this book—and I think it's a helpful thing for all writers—is that a painting is never finished. It simply ends in an interesting place. I don't know if you noticed that quote, but that quote’s literally like the epigraph. It's the beginning quote. And that is literally all art.
It's never finished. It just ends in an interesting place. And then you just have to say, “It's done.” You just let it be what it is, then not. Luckily you can keep growing and thinking differently as a person.
Matt: When you're writing articles, do you get any editorial help? Do you have anyone who is like your ideal reader that you send to before you hit publish? Or is it just, “This is ready to go.”
Ben: I would say it's ready to go. With articles, I certainly get myself into a different frame of mind than if I'm writing like a book. With articles, to me, it's just like getting into a habit of getting stuff out there. So to me, it's just getting myself in the right frame of mind.
I do a lot of journaling before I write the actual article, mostly just to get the headline right and the structure. I think a big problem that people have when they're writing is they're not intentional from the beginning, kind of like begin with the end in mind. And so, for me, the headline allows me to do that.
It's like, all right, what is the actual objective of this article? What am I trying to accomplish? Or what am I trying to have the reader accomplish? What is the purpose of this article? Like just answering that question, like, what am I trying to accomplish? What am I trying to solve here?
What am I trying to help people do? Just really hammering that out with the headline and then turning it into a structure, maybe five to ten bullet points that become subsections, you know? So it becomes like a five or ten-point listicle, but if I can get the structure right, and I really know what I'm trying to accomplish with the article, then I just dump it, you know?
And that's I think one of the beauties that I think I learned from medium.com is to not over-edit myself. In fact, I sometimes do it to a fault where I'll push, publish, and then go back and edit it because I now know that people are going to start reading it and there's a ton of typos within it. But I think there's a freedom that I learned through medium.com that, you know, you can be just a raw human being.
And so, for me, I try to build the structure first. And if there's any important quotations, like I might throw in the quotes, you know, like a quote for every section. And I might think of a story or a research thing that I could throw in, but then once the base is there, I just try to write it as if I was telling it to you.
Like in this conversation, I just try to write it as clearly and honestly I can, and then I push publish. And once it's published, I go back and edit it because I feel like I just want to get it out there to the world. And then once it's published and people are starting to read it, I'll go back through and delete a paragraph or two because I might go, “That's redundant,” or I'll chisel it.
But to me, it's better to edit it while it's live. I call it a forcing function. Honestly, you just force yourself to put it out there. So I prefer doing that personally.
Matt: It's so funny you say that I find myself doing that. Sometimes I'll publish something, a blog post, and then I'll go back and edit it. And I always feel a little guilty about doing it, but hearing—
Ben: Yeah, I literally will publish it, send it to my email list and then edit it. You know, people are starting to read it, even if it's just a small amount of people, you know, put it on Facebook, then people are reading it and you're like, “All right, I really kind of need to get this right now.”
Matt: Hmm. I love that. One or two more questions about medium in your system, but—
Ben: As much as you want.
Matt: Cool. If you were starting from scratch today, 2020, would you start with medium?
Ben: It depends on the topic. If it was me, I’d probably be way more focused on LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn, at this point, if you're in like self-help or a business, or something like that, I think LinkedIn is a more useful platform in that regard.
If you're more writing about things like society or social issues or politics or technology, some of those might even be still better on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an enormously bigger place. I think LinkedIn has more potential, but I think medium is a radically different culture. So I think you could use both, but if I was starting today from scratch and if I wanted to build a career as a writer, and if I knew it what I knew where I'm like, okay, I've got two years, let's say to invest in a single platform to like grow. And to turn it into a business so I could become a professional author. I would probably—given my field, I would go all-in on LinkedIn. You know, that's me right now as a writer, you know, I think LinkedIn and Instagram. Medium is still cool, and people make plenty of money on medium, and you can still go viral on medium.
I think it's harder than it's ever been on medium. It's definitely a different platform. Medium controls things a lot more than they used to. So I think it used to be more of a free-flowing environment where it wasn't as intensely curated. And I think they have their own political agendas and things like that, and they're emphasising things.
And so I'll even have articles where I'll send my email lists to it, and it'll get a ton of claps and it will just not get into the medium curations. There's still plenty of room to grow on medium and I recommend using it. It's just not what it used to be.
Parul: I have a question about that. So around LinkedIn versus medium, do you have different avatars in mind? So would you repurpose the same article for both?
Ben: Yeah, I think so. I think that there are different cultures, though. Medium is, as Matt was describing, kind of a raw environment where people like, just like, you know, whereas LinkedIn, you can do that, but it feels kind of a little bit more professional tone, you know what I mean?
So it's a different culture. It's a different environment. So I would tailor it slightly different, but I still think there's some beauty in holding to that rawness and just that, you know—so I think there's room to have a personality on both platforms. But you would definitely have a slightly different strategy for each platform, and you'd need to know that what would lead to success on one platform would be different than what would lead to success on a different platform. Although there would be a lot of crossovers, probably like 50% crossover. The other 50% would be like, nope, this platform—you need to do certain things in that platform. You'd need to do certain things. So it's about knowing what works on each platform.
Parul: And I often talk about blogging and thinking of the person you have in mind. When you started writing on medium, did you have someone specifically in mind you were writing for?
Ben: Yeah, definitely with medium. I mean, I'm usually writing, I'm writing to—a lot of my articles are just writing to someone who, I'm assuming, is completely open and ready to make some massive jump in their life. I'm just speaking to someone, with complete assumption, that they're a completely open, excited, ready-to-go person.
Like with Willpower Doesn't Work, I was completely writing that book for my younger brother, Trevor, who happens to currently be in an addiction treatment facility.
With Personality Isn't Permanent, I don't even know who I was writing for. I mean, I know I was writing it for various people in mind. But when it honestly—
Parul: You wrote it for me!
Ben: Yeah, perfect. Well, I'm so glad, and I'm grateful I get to know you. I tend to get into a different mindset with articles than I do with books. Like with articles, I just get myself in the most hopeful, excited mood I possibly can.
And I'm just writing with just pure optimism. I mean, I still want it to have some grounding. But I'm just trying to speak to someone hopefully to either give them that optimism or assuming that they already have it and they're just wanting some form of energy or action to take them to wherever they're trying to go.
Parul: I know you're a very busy guy. You're building a writing career, but you went from zero to five kids. And today, you've got a very busy household. You've written this book, [and] you're on your way to write another book. How do you juggle your time? What do your habits look like for writing?
Ben: Definitely in the morning, my wife and I have arranged things where I just leave at like five in the morning, you know, like that at five or six, five or six in the morning I left. And I usually exercise before I write, but I'll wake up, leave, I come to my office, my wife just literally handles the morning routine. And usually, when school's going on and we're not in the middle of a pandemic, I'll be completely done by like two thirty, so I can pick up the kids for school and I'm done by two, like two or two thirty. So like I'll wake up at like five, be done at two.
Now that the pandemic has gone on, I've felt a little guilty because my wife's at home all day with the kids. And so I usually try to end it like one, you know, and just go home. So I try to get all my stuff done in the morning when it comes to writing. When I was doing preparation for the Personality Isn't Permanent launch, I actually did about 220 podcasts.
Yeah, it was a lot. I've done literally that many in 2020, most of them during COVID, but they would start at nine and end at like two. Before nine, I would have to do writing, you know, so I was writing a book proposal or writing blog posts or writing articles. Actually, I wrote another book which is coming out in October called Who Not How, which is a co-authorship with a guy named Dan Sullivan.
It's almost a purely entrepreneurial book with a ton of psychology in it. If I don't get the writing done before, like eight or nine in the morning, I find that my writing becomes less sharp later in the day. I can still do some good writing, but I'm less motivated to do it. And so even when I was a graduate student, you know, as a full-time PhD student, I usually had class, you know, like from eight or nine in the morning until like noon. And so I would have to just bang out a blog post before 8:00 AM usually.
And so I would just wake up, go to the gym, write a blog post and just be done. I don't need more than probably 60 to 120 minutes. So one to two hours of just flow state writing a day. If you do it consistently, that should be enough. Obviously, there are certain days where I really need to dig in and do like three or four hours, but I would say, for the most part, I write for maybe one or two hours a day, but I just do everything I can to get myself into the right frame of mind so that while I'm doing it, it's really clean and effective.
When I'm editing, as an example, sometimes editing takes way longer. Actually, going through and editing this book—and I went through this book literally probably 40 times—to just chisel every sentence and just—you know what I mean? That takes a lot longer, but when it comes to blog posts, I have way lower standards. I just want them to be really well communicated, and I want them to be useful, but they're just little paintings that are never finished—just being in interesting places.
Parul: I definitely saw a really interesting focus on habits because you're talking about this routine and you're saying, you know, writing one to two hours a day up to 120 minutes, but what struck me was how you talked about almost like sleep hygiene as well as the morning routine.
And I wonder if that—that sounds like it plays a big role as well, making sure that you switch off your devices, you get to bed early.
Ben: Oh yeah. I mean, I sleep seven, eight hours every night. I mean, I sleep well. It makes it easier if you have a companion of some sort. Like, I actually think it's easier to go to sleep if it's just two people going to bed at the same time in a routine. It's not always required.
I had decent sleeping habits before I got married. Yeah. I have pretty dang good sleep habits. I prize sleep, you know, even though I wake up early, we go to bed at like nine or ten. We just don't have anything else to do. I find, and I wrote about it obviously in Willpower Doesn't Work or Personality Isn't Permanent that I just find like—I get that there are some people who are night owls.
I think, for the most part, most people I find waste their time at night generally. And I think about it from the perspective of willpower, just that your willpower is so freaking fried by the end of the day that most people's capacity for high-quality work or high-quality decision-making isn't that high at night. And so, generally, they're just burning their time.
Matt: This was the one that really hung with you, right?
Parul: I literally got Matt on the phone. I was like, “Matt, listen to this. It's so simple. How did I not realise this?” It's just really, really powerful. For example, we do the Writers’ Hour every single morning, but you know, whether we are actually ready for it, so to speak, we've been distracted all the evening before. It's possible that by the morning, we're not in the right state to even write anything as good as it could be.
Ben: I think just a little bit. It was just a little bit of preparation, you know. I found when I was in a really good flow, and I find that my flows are based on my goals, you know?
And so like back in the day when the whole flow was just crank out the next article and see how much virality I could get and see how many emails like—there was a flow for like two to three years where it’s just my whole focus, and therefore my identity was based on just cranking out as many articles as I could. So that's what I was thinking about.
That's a very different flow than I'm in right now. I'm in a much slower flow of trying to do bigger books, thicker ideas. So it's a different flow and cadence, but when it came to just cranking out articles, I definitely found that if I gave myself five minutes, just literally five minutes at the end of the day, to just think in my journal about what would be the next thing I would write about tomorrow morning, then it gets your brain thinking about it so that you're more likely to start getting ideas.
You could train your brain to get flashes of ideas. I was thinking so much in terms of headlines that often headlines would just pop in my head. Like I remember when I was brushing my teeth one night, the headline came to me, and it would, you know—I'd been studying headlines and just writing a lot of blog posts.
Like the headlines popped up. Tell me what you did today, and I'll tell you who you are. And I'm like, all right, that's what I'm gonna write tomorrow morning. So like, you can train your brain to start thinking about it and even just giving yourself a five-minute journaling session at night and just be like, “What are a few ideas that I could write about tomorrow morning” so that you've already even just done a little bit of the thinking so that when you wake up, you've got something to work on.
I know some writers, as an example, leave themselves open sentences so that the next day they have somewhere to work from. But like, do you know what I'm talking about?
Parul: No, but I do. I was thinking of James Altucher when you were talking to us in terms of coming up with as many ideas, you know, getting yourself into the frame of mind and idea generation.
Ben: Yeah. I mean, I just think a little bit of it—just thinking about it at night, just for a second. What do I want to write about tomorrow? What could the article be? Usually, you can come up with something—at least something that you can then mess with in the morning, and that usually takes away some of the friction of starting.
Parul: Yeah, it's interesting to hear you talk about yourself then versus now. Clearly, your goals have changed, and one of the big components of your book, which I can't stress enough how much I love, is that your personality is determined by your goals. And you say this is how successful people live.
They become who they want to be by orienting their life towards their goals. Not as a repeat of the past but acting bravely as their future selves, not by perpetuating who they formerly were. At one point, you were trying to push out loads of articles, and now it's a book, but I wonder if you can just talk us through some other examples that you've seen, especially some people that you've seen who you've admired in terms of them orienting their life towards their goals. I feel like it takes a while to sink in. To me, It's now so true, but something really powerful, though.
Ben: Yeah. I'll give you a few examples, and forgive me if these examples are too American, you know what I mean? This is where my culture is, but like LeBron James, he's someone who is interesting because I've heard him talk about this.
So the main idea here is that you can't understand someone's process fully without understanding their goal because their process is them attempting their goal. Like one of the things that LeBron James said in an interview recently before the NBA season kind of collapsed because of COVID-19, he was doing so well that people thought he was going to win the MVP this year, the Most Valuable Player of the year award.
This is pretty cool for LeBron James because he's like 35 years old. He's been in the league for 17 years, and it's like, people probably didn't expect that because they're like, “Well, he's amazing, but he's kind of old now.” But anyway, someone was asking, you know, LeBron, is it your goal to become the MVP? And he said no. And they're like, “What do you mean?” He said, “If it was my goal, my process would be completely different.” He's like, “My goal has always been to be the best in the world.” He's like, “I've always wanted to be the best in history. That's the thing that shaped my process.”
Every once in a while, a by-product of my goal is that I did become the MVP, but he said, “If my goal was to become the MVP on a yearly basis, rather than becoming the best in the world. Then I probably would have a lot more MVPs because the process of getting an MVP one year is different from the longevity of trying to become like a Michael Jordan,” as an example.
So like, that's someone to me who's obviously orienting his process towards his future self. And you know, obviously, in the book, I talk about how a lot of people are focused on status versus growth. [The] status would be like an MVP, like, you know, it's nice to get that status. Like even me, like a status would be to, if this book hit the New York Times bestseller list, it'd be a nice status.
But at the end of the day, my process is beyond that status. And even if I do get that status, I want to never be the former anything. And so I don't want to get attached to that status, right. Like that's the last thing that needs to matter to me. At the end of the day, I can use that status to propel growth.
So LeBron is a good example. I'm trying to think of others off the top of my head. I mean, as far as how I see it, that's actually true of everyone. Like, everyone’s daily process, whatever that is, is them attempting whatever goal they have, even if the goal is just to fit in with their friends or to get through the day, we all have a goal.
And it's the thing driving our behaviour. A lot of us just haven't really clearly conceptualised why that is our goal and then admitted—you know what I mean? So sobering something like—
Parul: You said something like, you know why if you sit there watching YouTube videos late at night, you've got a goal.
Ben: Yeah. My goal is to chill and watch YouTube. I mean, trust me, I watch YouTube too. And every time I open it, I just have to acknowledge that my goal was to open YouTube and sit and watch it and veg out for a minute, you know what I mean? It's a different way of looking at behaviour, but it's just the truth that that's what we do.
And I will share one more which has been influential to me, and maybe it will be relevant to you, guys. And that is James Clear. Actually, a lot of people have compared my writings to James Clear, although I think that there are plenty of differences, and I'm actually not aspiring to be like James Clear.
I think he's great. And I think he's brilliant. And what he did with his book Atomic Habits is freaking impressive. He's sold almost 2 million copies. His book is a prototype, you know? He's almost a prototype of someone who went from blogger to now top author. He's on like Tim Ferriss level now. Although as a celebrity, he's probably not Tim Ferriss level as an author in the book world, you know, his book is selling Tim Ferriss numbers and not very many bloggers make that leap, even writers like Ryan Holiday. James Clear is going to pass Ryan Holiday this year in books sold. And James has only written one, and Ryan's written nine.
James’ book is going to pass in numbers, all of Ryan's books, you know, and Mark Manson's book did the same, you know, as far as you know, The Subtle Art. And so I think one of the things that I did in studying James Clear, you know, and I've talked to him plenty of times, it was obvious to me. And by the way, his book Atomic Habits took him like four years to write, like he pushed the publication date back year after year after year because he wanted a book that he really believed in so that he could try to take it to a higher level than just hitting the New York Times list.
He wanted a book that he could sell millions of copies to. And so it was obvious to me in watching his process, both in the development of the book, but also how he's launched it and what he's done over the last few years that his goal was very different than just hitting a bestseller list and then writing the next book.
It's obvious that his process was based on a much different goal. That influenced me. I want Personality Isn't Permanent, as an example, to be a book that sells millions of copies. Although I think I write more than James and so I'll be working on the next books a lot faster than James, what he did in launching that book influenced and shaped what I did with this book, as far as how I plan on launching it and also what I plan on doing with it because I think that that's a better approach.
Parul: Yeah. We've been reading a lot of Ryan Holiday and Perennial Seller.
Ben: Hmm. Yeah. I love Ryan's work. He's definitely a friend. He's a cool dude.
Matt: One of the other things you talk about in your book is the importance of the environment. And so you say the environment is among the most powerful and important personality leavers. If you're serious about changing yourself in your life, you must change your environment.
And so we're curious, did you change anything to design your environment as you were trying to achieve that future self as a prolific writer, as a six-figure author?
Ben: Yeah, I think so. One of the big ones was becoming a foster parent. You know what I mean? Like as weird as that sounds, that shoved me over the edge, like that gave me a lot of internal and external motivation, which obviously not everyone would need something like that to become a great writer. That was just a big environment shift for me. To be fully honest with you, even before I moved out to Clemson because my wife and I were from Utah, we moved to Clemson, which was an environment shift.
And when I got into my PhD program, that's actually when I finally started getting serious about pursuing writing. That was in 2014. I got into my PhD program. It started in the fall of 2014. And just by going there and being in that new space and—you know, I was able to really start thinking about my writing career, and I felt like I was ready to start taking it seriously.
Like more minor environment shifts that are more tactical. When I was starting, I was making $13,000 a year. I was a graduate student. And so I had to like, just work on campus, like I'd wake up, go to the gym at Clemson, where I went to school, at like five thirty in the morning and I would go to campus, you know what I mean?
And I was like in a college freaking building cranking out these articles. I definitely didn't have a pristine environment, you know what I mean? But I definitely put myself in the right frame of mind. Like I would still wake up. I would journal in the right environment. I was quiet.
It's not like you need, like—I have a much better environment now. I have a separate house. This is my office where I write and stuff. I've got awesome pictures and stuff like that. I mean, I'd be happy to carry my computer and show you guys the environment, but I still need a place to go where I can be quiet.
I think that more than anything, you just need a quiet place where you can think and where you can be in the right frame of mind where it just feels like this is your energy place, where you can just write and think and visualise and create and get yourself into the right frame of mind, where you're creating from the perspective of your future self. The frame of mind you get in when you're writing really impacts the quality of the writing because there's another person on the other side of whatever it is you're writing. They're the reader. And you want to know to some degree how to impact that reader. You want to get yourself into an environment where you can really, you know, it can be a simple environment, but you want to get yourself into a place where there are not as many distractions where you can get into that creative mode.
And that creative mode is almost most importantly thinking about who's on the other side and what impact or what experience you want to give them. I will say other environment shifts, you know, now that I'm actually thinking about it more fully. I certainly did invest small bits here and there. Firstly, [I] invested in an online course that taught me how to write viral headlines.
Eventually started to develop relationships with people like Ryan Holiday, Jeff Goins, other people. Like those became part of my environment. I was getting mentoring from people, and I sought mentoring. And then eventually, I would make bigger and bigger investments into bigger groups. And so I did over time change my environment, where I was having people who I aspired to be like increasingly in my network.
Parul: That's really interesting to me because of the friendship and chat you have, even outside the physical building, seem to also make a difference. How did you cultivate these relationships? Were you on their courses and you were chatting to them? Did you reach out?
Ben: I learned from them, I was a student, and I'm still a student. I choose the people I really want to learn from, and I just very much study what they teach, and then I reach out and share. And one of the things I always try to do is be useful, you know, like how can I help you? And so I've always tried to just be a good student. Most of the people I ask questions to get ignored, even still, and there's nothing wrong with that, but just constantly just trying, just reaching out, just trying to be useful. I'm not trying to be annoying and mostly just over time trying to help. I mean, for a long time on medium, once I started to do it, you know, I actually literally had Jeff Goins and Ryan Holiday's medium log ins, and I actually was the one changing their articles, changing their headlines, restructuring their articles.
And I took all of Ryan's articles off of Thought Catalog and stuff. And I put them all on medium, but I retitled them and restructured them. I didn't change a single word. I just literally changed the title and the structure. And I think I got Ryan probably 70,000 email subscribers, you know, like in 2017 or 18, like I did the same thing for Jeff.
Matt: So, what did that look like? I mean, were you already engaging with Ryan and you said, “Hey, I'd love to help you out. Let me do this.”
Ben: Well, I mean, by that point, yeah. I mean, that was in like 2017-ish. Like I had already paid him. I paid him to help me write a book proposal. And so like he knew who I was and stuff like that. And like he had read my work.
He helped me get a book deal and stuff like that. But yeah, I just told him, “Dude, Ryan, if you ever just want help on medium, I'll just do your medium for you. Like, let me just take all your articles. Here's how I do it. I have a call to action.” We literally made him a landing page. I told him to make a giveaway, a giveaway that was relevant to his audience, which had to do with books and stuff.
And so we're like, let's just do this really easy. We made his landing page, and I just said, “Let me just do it for you. So you don't have to think about it.” I think that's the whole Cal Newport thing is [to] develop rare and valuable skills. Just develop skills and then see how you can serve people. And so it was just like, look, it will only take me five minutes a day, but I would be happy to take an article off your Thought Catalog, throw it into medium.
I'll retitle it. We'll put the call to action at the bottom. You don't have to do anything and I'll just help you do your medium. And obviously, that was a great way to help, but there are easier ways. There are ways that anyone can help, you know, someone they want to help in small and simple ways.
I think just being useful, like I really like the Zig Ziglar quote, where he said, “You can get anything you want,” just by helping other people get what they want. And so that's just kind of how I approach relationships. I just like being a giver. One thing that humbles the heck out of me is if you strive to be a giver at some point or another, you—I wouldn't say you become a taker, but you can ask, you know, and that was what I actually learned with this book launch is I asked for a lot of help as you guys even saw with emails, at least as Matt saw.
And a lot of people helped, and I was super humbled and sometimes I would prefer just to give than to ask. But in this case, I was grateful to ask, and I was humbled by how many people helped.
Matt: That's great. [It] reminds me of Gary Vaynerchuk. Give, give, give, give, ask.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. It's a true principle. It's a true principle. You just got to keep giving, you know, and that's what your motive has got to be. And that honestly has been my motive in my articles and in my books is how can I just give as much as I possibly can to the reader? You know, if I'm going to write an article, how can this article be as useful as possible. I think that that's gotta be the motive for good work. How can you make this as useful as possible for the person on the other side? And I think if that's your motive, you can do a lot of cool stuff.
Parul: Can I ask about the course you took?
Ben: Yeah. Absolutely.
Parul: For the writers who are relatively new to writing articles or want to improve their craft, where would you send them to learn a bit more around crafting good headlines apart from maybe looking at yours and around holidays and seeing getting that sort of style?
Ben: Of course, I took—which definitely is recommended—is from Jon Morrow. Jon Morrow is an interesting blogging teacher, really masterful guy. I think he's like paraplegic, to be fully honest with you, but I took his course back in 2015, it's called Guest Blogging, and it just taught me so many things. I have no clue if it's still available. I think it was like 197 bucks. It might be more than that now. I actually did a course, or I did a full day training called Genius Blogging, and I'd be happy to literally give it to any of your people.
The only request I have is that they buy Personality Isn't Permanent, which may be like 16, 17 bucks. If they do that and send us their receipt, I'll just give them my Genius Blogging course, which I've sold for over a thousand bucks. That would be a good primer, to be fully honest with you. [It] would be a $16 investment. I think Personality Isn't Permanent is a freaking great book that you'll like, but we'll give you a six-hour course. You may want to then go and get the $200 or the $300 John Morrow course, but for $16, get this primer, learn headlines, learn articles, structuring, learn how to do calls to action and stuff.
So like, I'll give you my genius blogging [course] if you'll just go buy Personality Isn't Permanent.
Matt: We've got a bunch of, “yes, yes, yes, yes.”
Parul: That’s really generous.
Ben: I mostly want people to read this, to be honest with you, because I really think that this is an important book. When I launched Willpower Doesn't Work, I did a full-day training at Genius Network and Genius Network is like a marketing mastermind.
People paid $3,000 to be there. And I spent six hours just teaching all my blogging strategies. And that was right when I was like in the right frame of mind like that was 2017 or 18. And that was when I was still blogging focused. I'd break down all of my top headlines. I show structure. I teach how to pitch on the big platforms.
I even give away my book proposal. So if anyone actually eventually wants to one day do traditionally published books, I literally have the proposal for this book in that course. And Ryan Holiday is the person who helped me write that proposal. And so I show, step-by-step, here's how you make a proposal. Here's the first part, the second part, the third part. And like that course has got a lot of stuff.
Parul: That’d be so helpful.
Matt: Very generous of you, Ben.
Ben: Happy to, but happy to. I love writers. I mean, I want everyone in here to be successful.
Matt: That’s cool. Maybe just a couple more questions. We know you've got a jet. You've got a busy, busy month ahead of you.
You have a book promo. One of the reasons why your book is so important to us in particular when the whole lockdown happened, we started something every morning—wasn't at 5:00 AM, but every morning from 8:00 to 9:00 AM here in London, we opened up something called Writers’ Hour. We just sit down, open up a zoom room. And for the last 11 weeks, we have had about a hundred writers writing with us, dedicated writing sessions.
Ben: You’re just sitting there writing in the same room?
Matt: We sit in, we set intentions for the first five minutes and then everyone goes on mute, and we write for 50 minutes, and then we come back, and everyone shares how they did.
Ben: I think that that is completely so cool. That is so cool. That is like, so freaking cool. Such a genius idea. We kind of stumbled on it. And now, looking at your book around Personality Isn't Permanent because many people say, “Oh, I'll never show up at 8:00 AM. I'm not a morning writer.” And then I know many people here listening. All of a sudden, they somehow have become a morning writer.
Ben: You can do it.
Matt: So it's nice to hear that your book is basically the science behind why this is working. One of the things that you also talk about is the ‘empathetic witnesses’ as being important. So creating a network of empathetic witnesses, and I think that's also what we're creating here is a group of people that can reaffirm the identity of yes, we are writers, and yes, we are successful writers.
Ben: And also to encourage you, right. Encourage you to do stuff that you maybe don't even think you can do yourself, you know what I mean? Like yes, you can write everyday inflow for 50 minutes, and yes you can push published. Like, I just think you need people to encourage you as well to do stuff that maybe you wouldn't have done if you weren't greatly encouraged by an amazing group of people who are supporting and encouraging you, right?
Matt: Yeah. And I guess, are there any other tips that you have in, like, if we're trying to continue to build this community of empathetic witnesses, any other tips that you might have for either to become that witness or to, to share as someone who's trying to transform?
Ben: I don't know if you guys have the bandwidth initially, but it'd be cool if you could, you know, this would be complex.
I know as someone who's created communities and tried to do accountability partnerships, it's complex, and maybe, the simplicity of what you got should just stay as it is. If you could push it forward one more level if people want that other level and have them find an accountability partner within the group.
And I don't know the full structure of the program. Maybe it's just literally writing for one hour and reporting how it went, which seriously is one of the most amazing things I've ever actually heard. And I love it. I wouldn't want to take away from the beauty of that. [There’s a] part of me wants to have people break out in like two by twos and have goals for themselves that maybe are private, but they're also still part of this hour-long community.
It's an extension of this community where they're pushing each other as empathetic witnesses and as accountability partners. They can push each other when they're struggling, they're helping each other set goals. And they're really tightly like bound together, but they're also part of this bigger community.
I think that accountability and obviously some form of goal-setting—if there's some form of investment that they could make, you know. I think that maybe that's a free room, you know what I mean? I don't know how you guys do that, but like, if there are additional ways that they can get invested to push themselves to the next level.
My writing only gets better the more invested I get in a project, you know. The more I put myself into something, the more I really give myself to it, the more invested you can become in that goal and in your identity as a writer, the better you can be. So I don't know how you could increase people's investment and commitment to it, just to push them to a level of risk, you know, like a level of, “Are you really going to go just a little bit outside your comfort zone?”
Parul: That makes sense. I think we can. I think it's possibly something we could incorporate.
Matt: The way that we started this is around, you know, looking at 2015 Ben Hardy and who he wanted to be, as you look forward to the future version of Benjamin Hardy, what does that future self look like?
Ben: You know, I'm going to continue to be writing books. My hope is to sell millions of copies of this book, and that's something that I'm committed to figuring out how to do. The reason I want to do that is because future Benjamin Hardy is definitely—I'm going to get out of like the entrepreneurial aspect of writing. I'll still be writing books, but I'm definitely going to be shifting more towards focusing, like my wife's pregnant with our sixth kid.
That'll probably be our last, but a lot more family, a lot more faith-oriented stuff that really matters to me. I'm going to be spending a lot more time, um, doing stuff related to my faith, but I'll continue writing books. And I hope to continue writing mainstream books that get better and better. And I want to just keep pushing myself as a writer, but I want to get myself out of a lot of the communities that I love, but I want to focus and simplify my life on my family and my faith, and really dive deeper and deeper into those things while at the same time pushing myself as a thinker and as a writer. So I'll keep writing books, but I'm gonna be way more simple, and you know, who knows what that'll look like?
We'll be travelling a lot, but yeah, in order for me to kind of really dedicate myself at the level that I want to in those realms, I really need to sell millions of copies of Personality Isn't Permanent. So it was like position[ing] myself to do it the way that I want to do it. So that's kind of what I’m going to try to figure out how to do in the next two years. So millions of copies of this book.
Matt: Well, we'll try to do our part. So thank you very much.
Ben: You are doing more than your part. It's so generous.
Matt: I want to be conscious of your time. Ben, we are so happy and so pleased.
Ben: Thank you for letting me be with you. I mean, you guys are amazing. I mean, it's just such a generous, generous experience. Thank you both for letting me be with you and for everyone here who is on this call.
Matt: Well, the chat has been bumping. So a lot, a lot of love for you. So thanks so much, Benjamin Hardy. [The] new book Personality Isn't Permanent is out now. The goal is to sell millions of copies. So we'll try to do our part.
Ben: You guys are awesome. Definitely get in touch with Connie. If there's anyone that wanted that genius blogging course, [what] we'll ultimately need is their email. And we'll just be able to get them literally banged up right into Kajabi, where the course is, so that they can get immediate access.
Matt: Right. We'll sort that out.
Ben: Yep.
Parul: Thanks so much.
Ben: All right, guys. Have a great day.
Matt: Thanks, Ben, take care. Good luck.
[Outro] Parul: Thank you for tuning into the London Writers’ Salon podcast. If you'd like to join these weekly interviews live for the chance to ask our guest writers your burning questions. Well, you can become a member at londonwriterssalon.com forward slash pound membership. You'll get access to our library of salon interviews and workshops, our private online community, where you'll find world-class resources on the craft of writing and find creative friends.
Honestly, we think it's the best writing community in the world, and we would love for you to join us.
Matt: And if you're a writer struggling to find time to write like so many of us, you're welcome to join our free virtual hour-long, silent writing sprints called the Writers’ Hours. We hold them four times every Monday to Friday.
And all you need is something to write with, a hot drink to cheers us with, and the desire to write. We think it's the world's best virtual co-writing space for writers, creatives, and, frankly, anyone who just needs to get something done. You can sign up for free at writershour.com, and we hope to see you there until we write again. Cheers, everyone.