Episode 954 · Apr 17, 2024

Impossible Goals: How to 10X Your Life Starting Today

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George Wright III opens this episode of The Daily Mastermind with a direct question: are you happy with where you are right now? If the honest answer is no, the issue probably is not effort. You may be working hard, grinding longer hours, and still not moving the needle. The real problem, George argues, is your strategy. You are doing more of the same and expecting different results.

The shift George introduces centers on a concept from Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy's book "10X Is Easier Than 2X." The premise sounds counterintuitive at first, but it reframes goal-setting in a way that makes genuine transformation possible.

Why 2X Thinking Keeps You Stuck

Most people default to 2x thinking. They look at what they are already doing and try to do more of it: more hours, more hustle, more output. This approach keeps you locked into the same identity, the same habits, and the same ceiling. If what you were doing was going to get you the results you want, you would already have them. Doubling down on a strategy that is not working only accelerates the problem.

"Your results right now are limited by your nature unless you frame your past differently."

The fix is not more effort inside the same framework. It requires a completely different framework.

How Your Perception of the Past Shapes Your Present

George breaks down a powerful insight from the research: most people believe the past creates the present. Your upbringing, your failures, your history, all of it seems to determine who you are today. But the science tells a different story. You actually have the ability to let your present frame your past.

The filter and meaning you assign to past events is what gives those events their power. Wayne Dyer put it this way: when you look back at the tapestry of your life, those events take on new meaning depending on where you are standing. When you consciously choose a more empowering interpretation of your past, your present-day actions change, because you are no longer carrying the weight of a story that limits you.

Using Your Future Self to Drive Present Action

The second shift is equally important. Most people let their current circumstances determine what kind of future they think is possible. They look at their skills, their resources, and their opportunities, and they set goals based on what seems realistic from where they stand today. That is exactly backwards for anyone who wants a 10x life.

"When you have a huge 10x vision of your future, yourself, who you are, what you're doing, this helps you to stretch way past your beliefs."

When you build a vivid, almost unreasonably large vision of your future self and use that as the filter for your present decisions, everything changes. Suddenly, 80% of what you are currently doing does not belong in your schedule. That is not a crisis; it is clarity. The 80/20 principle applies directly here: roughly 20% of your activities generate about 80% of your results. A 10x vision forces you to identify and protect that 20%, and eliminate the rest.

The Power of Setting Impossible Goals

This is where impossible goals come in. George is not talking about wishful thinking. He is talking about goals that sit so far outside your current identity that your brain is forced to operate differently. When you commit to an impossible goal, your mind stops filtering out opportunities. It starts scanning for solutions, connections, and actions it would have previously dismissed.

David Goggins has noted that most people operate at roughly 40% of their actual capacity. An impossible goal is the mechanism that demands the other 60%. You do not have to hit the goal perfectly. Hitting a fraction of a 10x goal still gets you further than hitting a smaller goal entirely.

"I believe you can accomplish more in the next three months than you've done in the last three years."

Think about your own track record for a moment. There are almost certainly things in your past that you did not believe were possible until you did them. You have already had 10x moments. The difference now is doing it intentionally.

How to Begin Rewiring Your Approach

The practical starting point is asking better questions. George challenges you to look honestly at your current activities. What is actually generating results? What are you doing out of habit, comfort, or obligation? What would you stop doing if you were serious about your 10x vision?

From there, you build the vision. Not a modest, achievable vision, but a bold, specific, almost uncomfortable picture of your future life. Write it down. Make it real. Then use it as the lens through which you make daily decisions.

Action Steps

Audit your current activities and identify the 20% that genuinely moves you forward; protect that time fiercely.
Write a vivid, specific description of your 10x future self: who you are, what you do, and how you live.
Revisit a past experience you have been framing negatively and deliberately choose a more empowering interpretation.
Set one goal that feels genuinely impossible right now, then ask: what would have to be true for this to happen?
Eliminate or delegate at least one low-return activity from your weekly schedule this week.

Starting today means doing something differently. Not working harder inside the same model, but stepping back, raising the target, and letting that bigger vision reorder your priorities. It is never too late to start living the life you were meant to live.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

All right, guys, welcome back to The Daily Mastermind, George Wright III with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. I'm glad to be back with you here today. I had some travel yesterday back in sunny Arizona, down at our men's clinic down there and doing some work from my condo. And I tell you what, man, it is really good to be here. It's really good to be able to spend time with you and I appreciate your support in the show. For those of you that are first time listening, make sure you hit like and subscribe so you don't miss any episodes. And I'm going to be releasing a couple of new things here over the next week. We've done a series and a big round of interviews. And man, I think from a business standpoint, a money standpoint, a mind and a body, you're going to get a lot of new content. I am really excited about the stuff that we're going to do. But today I want to talk to you about how impossible goals will help you to 10x your life, how impossible goals will help you to 10x your life. So I want to start out by just saying this. I want to ask you a question. Are you happy where you are? Are you happy with the results that you're getting in your life right now? Are you happy with the direction that your life is going? And if not, why not? And I ask you this, maybe sort of obvious, but I want you to ask yourself why you're not. What's holding you back? What is it that you're not doing or what is it that you could do differently? What is it that's holding you as far as obstacles? And today I want to share some concepts with you. One in particular that I want to really emphasize on how you can approach something in your life differently and how the approach you might be taking isn't working. So I'm going to share this strategy with you that literally will reshape your process and the results that you're getting in your life. And it's something that I've applied personally in my life. and it talks about, and it's really all centered around this idea of setting impossible goals, setting impossible goals. Now I know that sounds really like something that is impossible, right? But it's really important that you take a minute and you listen to what I'm saying here because it's going to reframe a little bit how you look at things and how you structure your life and your activities and your productivity. But first let's start with why your results aren't working. And, you know, I think that the results that most people are doing are not working because they're just trying to do more of what they're already doing. They're like, well, if I can grind harder, if I can work more, if I can get an extra job, if I can do more of what I'm doing, I can get more results. And that whole philosophy is flawed. That's 2x thinking. It's 2x thinking. So it really starts with your perception of what the strategy is you need to be using. And it starts, this whole concept of setting impossible goals and really 10X in your life starts with your perception of the past, present, and future. So I want you to follow me for just a minute here You know that I always talk about the fact that your thoughts create your life right Your thoughts create your life Well if that true then your thoughts and your perceptions are key And your thoughts and perceptions of the past, present, and future really are what drive your activities. They're what drive your actions. They're what drive you to do what you're doing. Now, of course, your story does and your beliefs do. We've talked about that, that the story that you have, that you're telling yourself of who you are and what your identity is and things like that, that does drive your actions. But what I'm seeing is that a more granular detail, your perception of the past, present, and future, how you approach your past, present, and future is really ultimately what's going to drive some results for you. So let me just break something down for you that I learned. I learned this through several different times and seasons in my life. It's a concept that Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy talk about in their new book, 10X is easier than 2X. I know that sounds kind of ridiculous, right? 10X is easier than 2X. But as crazy as that sounds, when you really break it down, it will make sense to you. So I want you to really give me a minute and let's talk through this for a second. So let's talk through past, present, and future. First, most people believe that the past shapes their present life, right? Let's think about that for a minute. You know, the fact that you got a divorce, the fact that you, you know, changed careers, the fact that you have a certain, you know, environment or upbringing or parenting. You believe, and most people believe, that their past, even if you think you're a positive personal development thinker, you believe that your past sort of shapes your present. And even if you don't think about it consciously, your past is creating your present moment. But research and science have shown us something totally different. And that is that the truth is that you do have the ability to have your present frame your past. Think about that for a second. Have your present frame your past. Your perception or filter you put on things that happened in your life. The perception and filter you put on things that happened in your life. That is what's going to frame whether that event in your life had significance, whether or not it was a positive or a negative. It's not the past itself that determines who you are. It's the frame and the filter you put on those events looking back. It's like Wayne Dyer says, when you look back on the tapestry of your life, right, the events take on new meaning. So if instead of being like most people where the past creates your current vision of your present, you start to begin to put a better filter on your past. The results is that your actions are going to change because your results right now are limited by your nature unless you frame your past differently. So that's the first most important. You got to take your present moment and determine what your past was Second most people believe that your present moment who you are what you do what you believe all of your current circumstances and identity actually determine your future result what you can accomplish to get done in the future. But if you really want a 10x life, if you really want a 10x future, you've got to do the opposite. You've got to shape your current present activities by your huge, vivid vision of your future life, your future self. When you have a huge 10x vision of your future, yourself, who you are, what you're doing, this helps you to stretch way past your beliefs. And this changes the filter on what you do and how you act and what you're doing for activities. It's so important. It requires you, if you have a big, huge vision of the future and using that to determine your present activity, that requires you to eliminate a lot of what you're currently doing. See, think about that for a minute. Most of us, we look at our skills, we look at our talents, we look at our opportunities, we look at what it is we have available to us, and we determine where we can set our goals, how much further we can go, how much more money we can make, how much we can do to get our life to X. But if you put your current present circumstances aside, set aside who you are, who you think your identity is and all of that. And you just think about what that 10X future is. Just think about what that 10X future is. And you use that as the filter to determine what you're doing right now. Well, a lot of things change. And this is the difference between the 2X and the 10X thinking. See, 2X says you can do more, twice as much of what you already do. And that means you're going to be doing the same activities. 10X, your 10X future says most of what you're doing is not going to get you there. Because if what you were doing was going to get you there, you'd already be making the progress, right? Like I asked you in the beginning. 10X says probably only 20% of what you're doing is going to get you there and you need to reinvent the other 80%. This is back to that 80-20 principle we've talked about, which is that 20%, and this is kind of a universal law that applies to a lot of things, but in business, 20% of the activities that you work on really create about 80% of the results. If you think about it, because you spend 80% of your time on things that really don't get you much results in your life. And this is the key to really growing. If you want a 10X life, you've got to create that vivid vision of that life and then structure your current present day activities around that. And that means you're probably going to have to get rid of about 80% of what you do. And this is difficult. This is hard. I mean, it's much harder when you don't have a vision of where you want to go, but ultimately it's got to be done. So in order to drive you to your future vision, a big, impossible, huge vision, it's going to be very important for you to frame everything you do in the past differently And it going to involve you setting some impossible goals The impossible goals is the key That why I bringing this up Goals that maybe seem impossible but they may not be impossible if you stretch. There are examples after examples after case studies of people that have proved otherwise. Look, if you search your life right now, there are probably many things you didn't think you could do. If you look at your past and you see how much you've grown, how much you've developed, the things you've made it through, you realize that you've probably had 10x experiences in your life already. But imagine if you were doing that proactively. Imagine if you were setting some wildly impossible goals and working everything in your current day to get you those goals, what the changes that you would, you'd be able to accomplish. Remember, hitting, and think about this for a minute, just hitting a fraction of your 10x goals is going to get you further along than not hitting your subpar goals or even hitting some of your subpar goals. I mean, David Goggins talks about, I mentioned it a lot, most of us are only tapping about 40% of our ability. You've got to stretch way past that ability. And to be honest, it's faith and belief that requires you to just set some huge goals and then try to redefine who you are and where you're going. You've got to find ways to push yourself past your limits. And this involves asking better questions and asking questions. Is what you're doing right now getting you the results? Is what you're doing right now creating most of the return? Because a funny thing happens when you set impossible goals. All of a sudden, your mind starts to look for ways for you to make that happen. It tries to look for ways for you to make that happen, and it pushes you outside your comfort zone. And I want you to know this. I believe that you can do this. I believe you can set impossible goals and 10x your life. I believe you can accomplish more in the next three months than you've done in the last three years. I believe you can do more in this month than you've done all year long so far. So remember, it doesn't matter what you've done up to this point. What matters is what you do going forward. I believe you have greatness. I think you have a lot of untapped potential. And I believe that it's never too late to start creating the life that you were meant to live. The one you want to live, the one you deserve to live, the one that is a 10x life. but you've got to start today. You've got to do different things to get different results. So that's my message for you today. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope it inspires you to do some things differently. Do me a favor and share this show. If you liked the concepts we talked about, if you were inspired or motivated or learned anything, just do me a favor and share this with one person. Help us to be able to grow the show. And at the end of the day, I look forward to hearing from you. So hit me up on The Daily Mastermind on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, basically every social channel. and I look forward to hearing from you what you're working on and how you're doing. Once again, this is George Wright III. This has been The Daily Mastermind and I appreciate you. Have a great day.