2. Compress Time

Chapter 2. Set a timeline so short, you think it's impossible. We like to bully deadlines. Pick on them. Make fun of them. Even spit on them sometimes. But what a terrible thing to do. Deadlines are actually our best friends. Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals. When Richard Bryan was 28 years old, he was prematurely thrust into the CEO role of his family's 100-year-old truck-and-car dealership in Bristol, UK. His father had become incredibly ill and was forced to retire. Despite grossing over 100 million in annual revenue, the company was losing nearly 4 million dollars per year. The organization lacked clear leadership and had no succession plan in place. As CEO, Richard was floundering, but with the guidance of a mentor he was able to define and own his role as leader. He built a strong leadership team over the next 10 years and the company grew and thrived in a competitive market. In 2008, Richard sold the business to another UK-based dealer group and transitioned the family ventures into real estate investment in development. After the sale, Richard and his wife Melissa and their two children, ages 10 and 12, moved to Colorado to be near Melissa's family. With their work in the UK, they planned on staying just one year, but they grew to love the United States and wanted their children to be raised there. Over the next 15 years, from 2009 to 2024, Richard flew back to Bristol several times per year and spent a month at a time away from his family working. In April 2024, I was in Whistler, Canada, training a group of 80 CEO coaches, all of whom had previously been CEOs or founders themselves. Richard was among them. For the prior few years, he'd become passionate about and started advising CEOs as a side hustle to his commercial real estate investments. He specifically guided family businesses on their leadership and succession processes. During my training, I taught these CEO coaches the scaling framework, and it altered how most of them viewed their own goals, as well as how they guided their clients. I taught them the science of impossible goals, and a crucial element is a person's view of time. Specifically, I taught them that psychologically, time isn't the same as how we view it externally on a clock. Psychologically, time is a tool for making decisions. Rather than separating the past, present, and future, as we typically do, I explained to them that how they frame their own past and future directly shapes their present decisions and actions. Your past is a tool to improve your present. Your future is a power tool to improve your present. The future holds far more weight in the decisions we make than the past does. Therefore, to utilize time more effectively, specifically the future you want to one, make it much bigger as discussed in chapter one, and two, make the deadline far more aggressive, even seemingly impossible. To prove to them that time, particularly their own future is a tool, they can use to scale much faster, I asked them to write down a big goal they had for themselves. This particular group embraced Jim Collins' B-Hag, Big Harry Audacious Goal Concept, which Collins explains as a long-term and highly compelling goal meant to stretch an individual or organization beyond its current capabilities. Collins suggests that B-Hags are so big, often seemingly impossible, that they likely take 10 to 30 years to realize. I used the B-Hag language they were raised with to shift them from their old management model into the new science of scaling. Richard wrote down where he wanted his life to be by his 65th birthday, 11 years from that time. In 11 years, by 2035, Richard planned to sell off his investment portfolio in Bristol, have far more time to travel and be with Melissa, and be a New York Times bestselling author and full-time business coach. I then asked the group how they would achieve their B-Hag if they only had three years to do it. How would compressing the timeline alter your strategy and focus here and now? Initially, Richard rejected my question. There's no way I could do this in three years, with his immediate reaction, considering his 11-year plan. Sensing some anxiety and concern among group members, I invited them to suspend judgment and stress. Look, I'm not telling you that you have to do this in three years. I'm just asking you to ponder how you would solve this if you did commit to it in three years. Don't take this too seriously. Use time as a tool, not a reality. Because I gave the group a few minutes to journal about this, Richard began entertaining the idea of shifting his 11-year B-Hag into an impossible three-year goal. He stepped out of the room to grab a drink. While letting the idea sink in, he realized there probably was a way he could reach his goal in three years. But he'd have to go about it in a totally different way from his current 11-year plan. Though he'd never considered it before, rather than continuing to focus on and grow his investment business as he'd been planning, he would need to sell off that portfolio sooner. If he sold off those investments, he'd no longer continue spending three or four months per year in Bristol, away from Melissa. Instead, he could reinvest that money into more passive investments in the United States and shift his focus entirely to being with Melissa and being a full-time coach and author. Whoa. It started to make sense in his mind, and he began feeling pretty good about it. He walked back into the room where people were finishing up their journaling and table discussions. I pulled the group back together and asked how changing the timeline for their B-Hag altered their strategy here and now. Richard raised his hand and explained what he believed would be required to realize his B-Hag in three years. I pushed back on Richard, asking what would need to happen if he went for his B-Hag in just one year, turning his everyday goal into an impossible goal. Same as before, Richard's back straightened and his eyes widened. His initial reaction was to simply reject the idea entirely, somewhat put off that I'd even ask such a question. I reminded him again to think of time simply as a strategic tool intended to cut the noise and nonsense from his thinking. I'm not worried about whether you think it's possible or impossible I told him. Does shrinking the timeline from three years to one change anything about the priority or process here and now? I'd need to sell my portfolio business as soon as possible, he replied, and go all in on what I really want to do. As Richard's final words tumbled out of his mouth, there was an audible and collective gasp in the room. Interesting, I replied. So if you make your 11-year goal a one-year goal, then your portfolio business falls below the floor, becoming noise. Is that right? Yes, it would no longer make sense to keep it here, replied. That night, after the meetings in dinner ended, Richard went back to his hotel room. He timidly called Melissa and told her about his idea and plan to realize his impossible goal in one year. Surprisingly, she was completely on board and supportive. Maybe now we can go and do new things and not be so rushed, she said. Maybe now we can roam. Over the last decade, Melissa and Richard had become overly routinized even in their vacations, going to the same places and staying in their comfort zones. Melissa sensed that if they sold the portfolio business and Richard was home more, that they would have more time together now, not in 11 years. Freedom. With Melissa's blessing, Richard committed. When he got back to Colorado, his first order of business was calling his longtime accountant and advisor in Bristol. Richard told his advisor he wanted to sell off the entire real estate portfolio and reinvest it in a more passive way with his advisor in the United States. His accountant was completely shocked as this was a 180 to everything they'd built together the prior 15 years and to what their long-term plan was. How could you do this, his accountant asked? How could you sell off your jewel assets? Indeed, over the years, Richard had acquired many sought-after properties in Bristol, even boasting the government as tenants. After explaining his thinking and his goals, ultimately his accountant understood and they began the process of listing all the properties. A few months after our meeting in Whistler, I gave Richard a follow-up call. Here's what he reported, nearly half of his real estate portfolio was sold, he'd spent an entire month traveling throughout Europe with Melissa, their niece, and nephew. He'd lost 10 pounds, hitting what was once his 12-month body fat goal, and finally he'd made enormous progress building his coaching business. With excitement and awe Richard reported to me, I think I'll be very close to completing my goal in one year. By April of 2025, the entire portfolio should be sold, my book finished, and I'll have taken several more trips with Melissa. That is incredible, I replied. How would you describe the core difference between who you are now versus who you were before utilizing time as a tool? I'm far more aggressive with my vision and growth, he stated. During a second follow-up call near the end of 2024, Richard reported that nearly all of his property was sold and that his coaching business was thriving. Furthermore, he told me that because he was focused on it, his vision for his coaching business had expanded dramatically. He now planned on being the top trainer and coach in the world on family business and succession plan. planning. Had Richard not utilized time as a tool, he would have spent the next decade traveling to Bristol, missed many vacations with his wife, and his coaching business would still be an idea, not a reality. Instead, the system of his life is scaling dramatically toward what truly matters for Richard, his family and guiding family businesses. In Chapter 1, you learn that the primary thing driving our lives is our goals. You learn that our present experience is filtered by the goals we have, including the pathways forward we take and the systems we create. You learned that impossibly higher goals are the most effective for scaling because they force you to find the most potent pathways. They force you to create a simple and optimized system, free of dilution and contradiction. The remainder of this chapter builds off the insights you gained in Chapter 1, helping you realize that the scale of the goal isn't enough. You've also got to have a deadline that is so pressing it seems impossible. The purpose of having an impossible goal with an impossible deadline isn't to stress yourself out. On the contrary, consider Melissa's response when Richard sheepishly told her that he wanted to achieve his 11-year b-hag in one year, and that in order to do it, he'd have to sell the investment business. Melissa was relieved, not stressed. Having an impossible deadline is a tool. Its purpose, as you'll see, is to filter out the false requirements you've placed on yourself and to isolate which strategy expert Dr. Richard Romalt calls "the crux." Apply time as a tool. Give yourself less time. If a timeline is long, it's wrong. Elon Musk. The year 2018 was a crazy one for my family. After three years battling the foster system in court, we were miraculously granted adoption in February of 2018. One month later, in March of 2018, two other big things happened. After years of fertility treatments, our round of Invitro worked and Lauren became pregnant with twins who were born in December of 2018. I also published my first major book, Will Power Doesn't Work in March 2018. After the adoption, we moved to Orlando, Florida. It was a whirlwind. Yet in the midst of that whirlwind, one thing didn't happen. Progress on my dissertation. I was nearly five years into my PhD program and had already completed all my coursework and exams. All that remained between me and being Dr. Benjamin Hardy was completing my dissertation. And as you may know, there aren't deadlines for these. In April of 2019, during a marriage therapy session, Lauren expressed her concern that my PhD wasn't going to get complete and that if I didn't make it a priority, it might never get done. She could see that I was making no progress on it, that I was busy running a training company and being a dad of five kids. She could also see that it was weighing on me. During that therapy session, we agreed that if I didn't drive back up to Clemson and make that my full focus, it might never get done. I'm thankful to have a wife who's willing to not only tell me straight, but also to say, look, you go up there and finish this even if it takes you two months. We'll be here when you get back. Though it was hard to leave my wife and kids, I drove the eight or so hours from Orlando up to Clemson and stayed in the guest room of some friends. Three weeks later, my dissertation was complete and I was scheduled to defend it. I can absolutely say that had I not gone and just laser focused on it, that I probably wouldn't have completed it. When it comes to big projects and deep work, if your split focused and have zero deadline for completion your stagnating and losing years, probably decades. Yet with an aggressive deadline and a singular focus, you can move mountains. You can do in weeks what might have taken years, decades or in all honesty, might never get done at all. According to Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the available time. From this principle, if you give yourself a month to do something, it will take a month. If you give yourself a day, it will take a day. How does this work? The brain naturally saves resources by procrastinating. People procrastinate until the reality sets in that they have to get something done. Even if you don't feel ready, a deadline forces you to become ready. Though deadlines can be self-imposed, they are far more effective when externally imposed, such as Lauren's ultimatum. Though deadlines aren't anything new, the obvious question is, why don't people use them more aggressively? The beauty of a deadline, and particularly one that seems impossible, such as Richard's one-year goal, is that they force you to strip out all the steps of the goal that aren't necessary. This same principle holds true with meetings. If you give yourself half the time to do a meeting, or less, you're forced to identify and isolate only the most crucial items and remove the fluff. If you give yourself too much time to do something, it's almost certain you're optimizing things that shouldn't exist. You're not focusing solely on the most crucial elements toward the goal. Elon Musk is a master of simplifying complexity and removing what he calls "false requirements." Over the years, he's developed what he calls "the five-step algorithm," which he uses to strip out unnecessary steps and simplify a system so it can scale. His five steps are "one, question requirements," as he states, "most requirements are dumb." Number two, remove parts or process steps. The most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist, he says. Number three, simplify and optimize the system. Four, accelerate time to learning cycles, and five, automate. Musk's first step is to question requirements. Most of the requirements we assume for our goals are just that, assumptions. More often than not, what we think is required is "false." This is where both impossible goals and impossible deadlines can be beneficial tools. They force you to question your assumptions and the requirements. It's no secret that when someone has a gun pointed at their head, almost everything falls to insignificance. The same is true with extreme deadlines, especially when there's external accountability tied to them. Quickly, you're able to cut most of the fat and false requirements from your thinking. You're able to simplify and strip out what doesn't matter. Optimize your focus and accelerate your progress on what has the most direct effect. Take, for example, Xavier Martin, a young attorney in Minnesota. Xavier passed the bar exam in 2019 and opened his law firm that year. In 2021, his firm did 500,000 in annual revenue. In 2022, after getting coaching and guidance, Xavier's firm did 1 million in annual revenue. By early 2024, after reading many books and considering his future, Xavier decided he wanted to get his firm to $100 million in 10 years. Certainly, a massive vision. However, it wasn't until he joined our program that October and learned the scaling framework that he began to really scale. The scaling framework taught Xavier the importance of applying time as a tool in the form of seemingly impossible deadlines. Following the process, he decided to take his 10-year goal and make it a three-year goal. When he did this, three things immediately happened for Xavier. One, he became far more aware of everything going on in his business, and a lot of it wasn't pretty. Two, he began developing an actual plan and process to get to $100 million, which he wasn't doing before when it was so far away. And three, connected to points one and two, he began eliminating people and processes that were below the floor relative to the 100 million plan, and he began adding better team members than he ever had before. In his own words, "When I moved the 10-year goal to three years, I was immediately forced to look a lot more critically at everything going on in the firm. It quickly became obvious that we were incredibly inefficient in many ways, which I wasn't aware of and which I wouldn't have become aware of for a long time had it not been for the aggressive deadline." In digging into the data of his company, Xavier found that his English speaking sales team was converting at one third the level of his Spanish speaking sales team. This had been going on for quite a while, but he hadn't been aware of it. His English speaking sales team consisted of eight employees based in the Philippines. He put the spotlight on the English sales team and held them extremely accountable for their performance. Within a month before the end of October, they doubled the conversion rate of getting qualified leads to sign up for a consultation call from approximately 30% to 60%. Despite doubling their performance basically immediately, this team didn't want to be held accountable so they all quit leaving Xavier in a pickle. Yet an important move he made almost immediately after moving his 10-year goal to three years was hiring a phenomenal general manager. This general manager was by all accounts a rock star who knew the industry extremely well. He was also deeply inspired and excited by Xavier's impossible goal of going from $3 million to $100 million in revenue in three years. This general manager, rather than Xavier, found a new English speaking sales team in the United States. In less than a month with this new team, even before the end of 2024, their conversion rate of qualified leads to consultation calls was matching their Spanish speaking team at 90%. The general manager also hired a strong marketing director, operations manager, and three additional attorneys. Meanwhile, Xavier was digging deeper into the various systems within his business. He found increasingly more inefficiencies he was completely unaware of. He realized the team was missing 30 to 40% of all calls coming into the office. He further found that 15 to 20% of the calls the sales team got were from existing clients simply asking basic questions that should have been answered from a secretary. In considering his strategy and focus on reaching $100 million revenue, it became clear to Xavier that they were taking on way too many different types of cases. Nearly 20% of the cases they took were what he called petty misdemeanors, which weren't as profitable. They stopped doing child support cases and adoption cases among others. Instead, they decided to fully focus on the few key types of cases such as felony, divorce, and custody cases. They were going to become the best in the world at these. Before the end of 2024, less than 90 days after applying the scaling framework, Xavier's entire business was transformed. In 90 days, his team was far better, the systems were far more efficient, the focus of the company was much sharper, the result was that in those 90 days, the revenue of the company shot up over 30%, the profitability of the company grew by nearly 50%. Xavier and his team are all fully committed to $100 million in three years and are making the moves to do so. In a report published by McKinsey in 2014 titled "Grow Fast" or "Die Slow", they analyzed the life cycles of 3,000 software and internet companies. What they found in their study was that high growth companies yield 5 times greater returns for their shareholders than medium growth companies. They also found that growth predicts long-term success. The super growers whose annual growth was over 60% when they reached $100 million in revenue were 8 times more likely to reach $1 billion revenue. Put simply, if you're not growing fast, you're unlikely to grow much at all. The reason for that will be detailed in the next section of this chapter. The McKinsey study found the same thing, Elon's 5-step algorithm teaches. After you've simplified your focus, you've got to accelerate like crazy. Fast feedback loops are where rapid growth happens and without rapid growth, you're stagnant and stalling. Re-examining Kennedy's 7+ year moon mission applying time as a tool. You will have a much harder time dealing with a gnarly challenge if you have not distilled it down to a crux. No one solves a problem they cannot comprehend and hold in their mind. Dr. Richard Rammelt, Strategy Professor in The Crux. We now return to President Kennedy's "We Choose to Go to the Moon" speech discussed in the introduction of this audiobook, but this time for a different reason. Without question, this story is perhaps the most famous example of a leader using time as a tool to realize an impossible goal. With absolute respect for Kennedy, NASA, and what was accomplished, we're going to review NASA's process of getting to the moon. Though they achieved the impossible and changed the world as a result, the truth is that NASA's process of getting to the moon was linear and sub-optimal. Though Kennedy used time as a tool, he could have been more aggressive. His deadline of 1970 was arbitrary, even political, less than strategic. Humans like round numbers and completing a mammoth impossible goal by the end of the decade was a clean and simple framing. He was a great story. Like a company with a 10-year vision, Kennedy's deadline was somewhat lazy. First, let me give a little context. While writing this book, I interviewed a NASA engineer of over 30 years. She explained that NASA's values are safety, integrity, excellence, and teamwork, with safety being by far NASA's greatest consideration. She further told me that NASA's systems engineering process is purposefully linear, repetitive, and iterative. They aren't focused on efficiency but instead ensuring safety as well as customer and congressional satisfaction. Finally, she explained that given NASA's position as a governmental agency, a massive constraint on NASA is how it receives funding. Despite often establishing five to ten-year plans or missions, NASA receives its funding annually and often isn't approved for what its larger goals require. Given this information and for the purpose of learning and achieving our own impossible goals effectively, let's dig into NASA's process of getting to the moon. Could NASA have gotten to the moon faster than the nearly seven-plus years that Kennedy gave them? Isn't it interesting that they barely made the allotted deadline? Not really given Parkinson's law, it's almost predictable that they achieved the goal just in time. So what if Kennedy had said we will get to the moon in five years by 1968? Or what if he had said we will get to the moon in three years by 1966? How would a more compressed timeline have altered NASA's process? Would it have helped or hurt? It's no secret that when a person or organization has an open-ended or large amount of time to accomplish something, they spend a majority of that time distracted, whether on peripheral or other issues. Only when the deadline and its consequences loom near does one's attention laser in on the essential components to be solved. Research shows the individuals and organizations typically devote less than ten percent of their total time to value added work, while the rest is consumed by unnecessary steps or unbalanced operations. In the case of the 1960s moon mission, NASA was no different. Despite achieving the impossible, their extensive seven-plus-year deadline coupled with their linear and overly conservative process led NASA to optimizing many things that weren't essential to reaching the moon. By having a tighter deadline, they could have bypassed the noise and focused more quickly and more directly on the signal or core constraints of their goal. The strategy expert Dr. Richard Romalt calls the core constraint or bottleneck of a particular goal the crux. He drew that term from rock climbing, wherein the crux is the most difficult problem or obstacle of the climb. If you don't solve the crux, you can't complete the climb, and no matter how much time you've invested on those other aspects, mastering the crux is how you solve the problem. When it comes to business and other objectives, people often struggle identifying the crux, let alone optimizing their path and system around it. Instead, they invest large amounts of time and resources on fringe issues. Many times optimizing things that shouldn't exist and that don't produce the intended result. Had a shorter time frame been agreed upon, NASA would have been forced to identify the crux of the moon mission faster and to optimize their process on that. For instance, NASA did excessive test flights during the Mercury and Gemini missions. These programs were preliminary to the main Apollo program and intended to provide foundational learning and innovation that would enable Apollo's success. The Mercury missions, from 1961 to 1963, focused on basic spaceflight and orbiting. The Gemini missions, from 1965 to 1966, tested things like docking and longer flights. Those these introductory missions provided important learning, they were also expensive, overly conservative, and very bureaucratic. With a more intensive timeline, they could have radically simplified the steps to their goal. They could have jumped straight to solving and optimizing the crux of the Apollo specific systems, which were landing the lunar module on the moon as well as ascending from the moon and reuniting the lunar module back to the main command module. By understanding and optimizing the crux from the beginning, rather than waiting to the end, they could have simultaneously solved the intermediary aspects of orbiting and maneuvering far more efficiently. They likely could have skipped the Gemini missions altogether, as well as the development of prototype rockets unfit for the actual goal, such as the Saturn I. Furthermore, with way too much time on their hands, the astronauts engaged in enormous amounts of non-critical training activities. These included extensive general survival training in deserts and jungles, PR and marketing, detailed simulations unrelated to the lunar landing, as well as simulating highly unlikely and unrelated scenarios. An important factor in realizing goals is known as readiness to change. Put simply, until a person is ready, they stall and avoid needed learning and work. They distract themselves and justify a lack of progress. They celebrate effort over results. A key factor to increase one's readiness is a heightened awareness of the consequences for changing or not changing. The reality of time and its consequences is the most potent lever for readiness. Deadlines, though uncomfortable force readiness, they force you to face the brutal facts. They force you to stop putting your energy in noise and distractions. Depends are a feedback loop that force results. They force you to find the crux of the issue and to solve it, because now the consequences are real and we're not just messing around. Had NASA had half the time to get a man on the moon, they would have solved the crux faster. They would have had too. But, it would have been in a different and better way. Much of what NASA did during those seven years probably wouldn't have happened, as it would have been deemed noise. I've seen this with organizations and leaders at all levels. For instance, one company I advised was doing over a hundred million dollars in annual revenue and seeking to reach one billion dollars. When I asked the CEO when they planned to reach one billion dollars in revenue, he told me they'd get there in ten years or less. I hear this a lot. Ten years seems like just the right amount of time to achieve something big. The truth, though, is that overly long-term goals misuse time as a tool. The future is better viewed as a psychological and strategic tool rather than a concrete reality. The purpose of the future is to impact, shape, and direct the present. A ten-year goal isn't a powerful enough rendering of the future to make a sizable impact on the present. I asked him, "What does that ten-year goal require of you today?" He had no response. "What happens if you gave yourself three years or less to reach one billion dollars?" I asked. "Well, we'd have to get moving," he replied. "Not only would you have to get moving, but you'd have to find a better path than you're on now," I replied. The shorter timeline would force you to simplify your focus to the crux and scale that. Another person I recently spoke to, a young and ambitious 22-year-old told me about his dream of one day owning a European soccer team. I asked him when he'd realized that and he told me when I'm 55 years old. "What if you gave yourself to age 30?" I asked. He got uncomfortable. "There's a lot of things I want to do before that, like get a PhD and run a firm," he told me. If you committed to own the European soccer team by age 30, how much of what you plan to do between now and age 55 or the next 33 years would become irrelevant, I asked. "I'm not sure. I really want to get that PhD," he said, honestly. "I understand," I replied. "It's hard to choose between conflicting goals, but if you committed to own the soccer team by 30, rather than 55, how important is that PhD? Is the juice really worth the squeeze? Is it really essential or is it a false requirement you've placed on yourself?" "I'll think about it," he replied. When it comes to running a company, if you give yourself too much time to do something, you can't filter the present hard enough. The purpose of the impossible goal and deadline is that the filter becomes extremely intense. If you only have 18 months to do what you thought you had 10 to 15 years to accomplish, you can't waste your time on nonsense. Going back to McKinsey's grow-fast or die-slow model. There's an important reason for this. If you're not going fast, that likely means you're unfocused. It likely means you're optimizing things that shouldn't exist, false requirements. An inherent problem with long-range goals is that they justify you making bad decisions today. If you have 10 years to do something, it doesn't matter that much what you do today. You can therefore keep poor team members on your team, keep conflicting or irrelevant products or objectives in your system, etc. These unforced errors that come through uncritical filtering compound over time, making it increasingly less likely that you'll scale in the future. Consider Xavier from earlier in this chapter. It wasn't until he gave himself an unreasonable deadline that he was able to critically filter all aspects of his business, including his team, the types of cases they did, and the processes. Had he not given himself the extreme deadline, he wouldn't have been required to fix these situations for possibly years in the future. Maybe he would have grown linearly for the next few years, but his bad processes and bad decisions would have compounded becoming worse. Like an addict who doesn't fix the problem quickly, the addiction can get to the level where correction almost becomes impossible. The same is true of companies trying to scale. If you're not scaling quickly, you're likely making lots of bad decisions all around that will eventually sink you. Unlike NASA, with the US government behind you, you likely don't have unlimited resources. You can't get away with optimizing stuff that shouldn't exist. Aggressively utilizing time as a tool will force you to weed out the false requirements and lesser goals you've placed on yourself. The unnecessary means goals will get in the way of the end you want to create. Aggressive deadlines will enable you to isolate the crux faster, and to simplify and optimize your system around that. By bringing your goal much closer to the present, you'll filter your present much better. You'll simplify and accelerate your focus on what has the highest leverage and impact. Quickly, you'll see that you can achieve more in months than you previously planned in decades. Please refer to the graphs illustrating growth over time in the PDF. Journal prompts and applications. What is the biggest and most important goal you have in your business? What if you gave yourself half the time to achieve it? Or, like Richard, what if you gave yourself 12 to 18 months to achieve it? How would that change your process and focus? What would you be required to eliminate? Are you willing to be that honest and rigorous with yourself? Or are you comfortable maintaining a complex system that is unlikely to scale? How focused and simple is your system and business model? Is it focused on the crux that actually matters? That is the highest lever to your goal? Go to scaling.com/book1 and complete the form to evaluate your current readiness to scale.