Tony Robbins Said He “Wished” He’d Written My New Book.
A little backstory on a new framework that’s changing business.
The exact words of Tony Robbins from the Forward of my new book, The Science of Scaling: Grow Your Business Bigger and Faster than You Think Possible:
It’s rare that a book marks a paradigm shift and remodeling of an entire field of thought. This book redefines business strategy and scaling. It’s rare that I read something and think, “I wish I had written this.” But this is one of those rare books… If you’re looking for the clearest, most actionable blue- print I’ve seen for creating exponential impact… Then don’t just read this book — study it. Digest it. Apply it Because this isn’t a book about scaling. It’s a book about becoming the kind of person — and building the kind of organization — that can’t help but scale.
Although Tony’s words may be intriguing, let me just state a few key things:
- William Thackeray said, “Whatever you are, be a good one.” (often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln).
- Either you’re playing the game or creating the game.
- If you think holistically and look for patterns, you’ll see that the majority of industries, including fields of knowledge — could be innovated, even completely disrupted.
For the majority of this short post, I’ll briefly breakdown The Scaling Framework from my new book, which we help companies implement at my training company, Scaling.com.
- Frame
- Floor
- Focus
Your frame is what you see, and is based on your goals.
Your floor is what you filter out, defining what you don’t do.
Your focus is what you filter for, defining the paths and partners you develop to realize your goal.
Within those three above statements rests nearly the whole of both cutting-edge psychology and competitive strategy. Let me briefly explain:
As human beings, our perceptual filter (what we see and the meaning we give what we see) is primarily impacted by how frame or contextualize our own past and future. Yet, what research is increasingly showing is that a person’s future is the primary driver. I’d say the future is 10x more powerful than the past in terms of it’s impact on our present — both what we see and what we do.
In the simplest terms, human beings are driven by their goals. Our goals shape what we see. They shape what we perceive to be “signal” (relevance) and what we perceive to be “noise” (or irrelevance).
Two psychological concepts come to mind here:
- Selective attention: The ability to enhance relevant signals and manage distraction. Essentially, our mental filtering tool for finding what’s relevant and ignoring all else.
- Pathways thinking: One’s resourcefulness and flexibility in finding or creating workable routes or paths to a desired goal.
People are driven by their goals. Their present experience comes down to filtering and selecting the pathways they deem as viable or effective for accomplishing those goals.
The problem with most people is that they are really bad at goals.
What do I mean by this?
I’ve already explained that human perception is driven by goals (what we see and don’t see). But also, human systems are also driven by goals.
Dr. Donella Meadows, wrote in her classic text, Thinking in Systems:
One of the most powerful ways to influence the behavior of a system is through its purpose or goal. That’s because the goal is the direction-setter of the system. . . Systems, like the three wishes in the traditional fairy tale, have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce. Be careful what you ask them to produce . . . If the goals are defined inaccurately or incompletely, the system may obediently work to produce a result that is not really intended or wanted . . . Be especially careful not to confuse effort with result or you will end up with a system that is producing effort, not result.
If you want to make rapid progress whether personally or in your business, you can’t have a complex system going in many different directions.
Steve Jobs was right. You need to go from complex to simple, which isn’t easy. It takes real thinking and it also requires important decisions.
If you want to scale your company — say 10–100x in a short period of time — you need a simple and focused system.
The only way to get there is by defining the goal of that system very clearly and powerfully. By clear, I mean highly specific. For example, $100 million in revenue. by powerful, I mean both extreme in scale and timeline. For example, $100 million in revenue within 3 years or less.
Elon Musk said two things that are very important here:
- “If a timeline is long, it’s wrong.”
- “The most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing which should not exist.”
If everything you’re doing is to reverse-engineer a goal, then you probably should frame your goal in a way that forces-out all bad thinking and all bad pathways. Said another way, you want a goal that stops you from “optimizing [things] which should not exist.”
Research shows that most businesses are spending 10% of their time (or less) on things that actually matter.
Most businesses are optimizing things that shouldn’t exist.
I call this being “below the floor.” Anything below the floor is stuff you’re saying “yes” to that shouldn’t exist. That’s stopping you from scaling.
You can absolutely achieve 10–100x growth in your business within 3 years or less. But you’d need to actually set that as the goal, and then you’d need to be really honest with yourself about everything you’re currently doing.
Almost nothing you’re currently doing would scale at that level.
But, if you do commit to that true scale goal (even if it seems impossible), then your selective attention and pathways thinking will kick-in and quickly you’ll begin generating pathways to get there.
I’ve done this, and I’ve helped thousands of companies do this.
If you want to learn more- go to Scaling.com and watch a 10-minute video to see if you’re ready for this level of scaling. Most people aren’t.
