The Power Law of Wealth: How to Build Only What Can Scale | Dr. Benjamin Hardy

So how do you keep yourself going? I wanted to ask you about your family because I know you've built quite the large family.

I think a lot of people...

they keep building because they have to, right? But when we're talking about the science of scaling 10X, 100Xing, when you do that, you pretty quickly come to the point where you could sit on your butt and play golf for the rest of your life and do literally nothing.

What are you building on the back end that keeps you engaged when others are just tempted to say, you know what, I made my 10, 20 million, I'm out? Yeah, no, I think

it's a gorgeous question.

I think that Everyone kind of has to decide if they want to keep being driven by a future or if they want to just ride the momentum of their past.

Certainly, it's incredible to have a great past that you're compounding off of.

Just for example, for me, I've got 10 books that my past self wrote.

i get to enjoy the compounding of those books you know in terms of royalties opportunities people like you that i get to talk to so i'm stoked to compound off my past but i think that humans you know even back to just classic victor frankel talks about how like i one of my favorite quotes from his you know speaking of the concentration camp right and just where he was at i think it's such a beautiful context for studying human psychology he said that what man needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal so um I think you see it pretty classically, that when people get very successful and then they stop being driven by a bigger future, they stop having meaning in their life.

Meaning actually comes from goals and meaning comes from the future.

Just like in the present we're what gives the past meaning, it's actually our future that gives our present meaning.

and obviously you can still have deep meaning and joy just, you know, spending time in the present.

It's not like, um, it has to be 24 seven all the time living in the future, but it's, it's the future even gives meaning to things like family and things like faith and things like, you know, things.

And so, yeah, goals, Yeah, I guess it's all simply just to say, human beings do need to be challenged.

You know, your brain actually does start to atrophy pretty quick if you're not learning new things, engaging it, challenging it, just like the body.

The body wears out pretty fast as you age if you're not challenging it.

And so it's the exact same thing with the identity and with the mind.

Like a muscle.

Yeah, that's good.