Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dr. Benjamin Hardy: The Mindset Shift That Stops You From Feeling Like a Failure | Mental Wealth Series | E4
29 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What low point did Dr. Benjamin Hardy experience after his book launch?
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Chapter 3: What is the difference between ideals and goals?
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Chapter 4: How can you practice gain thinking daily?
Yap gang, we made it. This is the grand finale of our mental wealth series.
Chapter 5: What does it mean to become your future self now?
All month long, we've been talking about how to build a successful business without burning out, numbing out, or losing yourself along the way. And today's episode ties it all together. I'm sitting down with organizational psychologist Dr. Benjamin Hardy to talk about how to stop chasing an impossible version of success and start becoming the person you actually want to be.
If you haven't yet, head to yapmedia.com slash mental wealth to download your free mental wealth playbook. Your final challenge is the I Am, I Should Future Self Worksheet, where you'll get clear on who you want to become and start acting like that person today. Let's close this out strong, Yap fam, and get right into it. Ben, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
I'm happy to be back.
I heard you say on another podcast that when you released that book in 2018 that you came on my podcast to talk about willpower doesn't work. You actually considered it a failure because it didn't reach New York Times bestsellers list. And that's like every author's dream. But nonetheless, like when you came on my podcast, I remember thinking it was such a big deal.
Chapter 6: How does future identity drive behavior?
You were such a big blogger. And we had scored Benjamin Hardy, like episode number seven. And so you were a big deal to us and to the outside world. But inside, you felt like a failure. So I want to talk about that. I think it will give us some color on your journey and help us understand the gap in the game concept as well.
Absolutely. No, I mean, I think it's a beautiful, interesting place to start. So I guess for a little context, I would say in 2000, so I served a church mission from 2008 to 2010.
Chapter 7: What strategy did MrBeast use for his future self video?
And like going on that experience was very transformational for me. I grew up in a really intense environment. We probably even talked about it. But ever since I came home from that experience in 2010, I wanted to be a but I didn't know what form it would take. And I didn't really start approaching that goal until 2015.
So from 2010 to 2015, I went to school, studied psychology, got into a PhD program for organizational psychology. And then once I was in my first year of my program,
Chapter 8: How do you set timelines for future goals?
that's when it really hit me and I got really committed I guess you could say to my future self of becoming a professional author so this was early 2015 you know I was very already very excited very motivated and I had already learned a lot of success principles I guess you could say and so I actually grew very fast as a blogger and that's what took me to the medium.com and I grew and
And so essentially, from 2015 to 2017, I grew enormously as a blogger and was able to get a book deal and be able to start providing for my family. I mean, that was essentially my dream was to become a professional author and to be able to provide for my family. At the time, my wife and I had three foster kids. We've adopted them since and et cetera, but...
So essentially, I got a multi six-figure book deal to write a book. I'm living my dreams. It all happens way faster than I thought in early 2018. Honestly, it was March of 2018, the book comes out. And I did have way in my head, like I'd built everything up in my head that it needed to be a certain level. It needed to be a New York Times bestseller.
And I admittedly as well, threw so much money at it. Early 2018 was the first year I started to make like pretty dang good money and I threw a lot of it at that book and I was just throwing everything kitchen sink at it and yeah it just didn't end up launching and exploding the way I thought it would like I just expected it would go a certain way because
most everything to that point in terms of my writing and my growth, it was all going very, very well. And so, yeah, it didn't hit the goal. And for probably four or five months, I was in a very deep depression, very deep slump. And kind of back to the idea of the gap and the gain now, it's kind of funny that... I launch a book. I mean, I'm a professional author. I release my first book.
Like I've never written a full book before. I release this book and to my publisher, they were very happy with the results. But for me in my head, I just totally felt like a loser. And I guess I've learned to measure my own self differently. So The Gap in the Gain is something I learned from Dan Sullivan. I read his little book on the subject. Maybe actually it was in 2018.
I read his little book and I was still blogging back then. And it was just an idea I loved. And I thought if I ever get a chance to write books with Dan Sullivan, I'm going to make this a major book. And the idea is very simple. I mean, it's basically the idea that as a person, we all feel happy or sad based on how we measure ourselves and how we measure our experiences.
The reason I went into a deep depression after I had made a monumental achievement, I mean, I'd never done that before. It was totally new. And yet I felt like a loser because I was in the gap. I was measuring what was against what I thought it should be, which is an ideal. When you're in the gap, you're measuring yourself against your ideals, which are always changing, always moving.
Whereas the gain is the opposite. You measure yourself backward against where you were before. Truth was, is I was way further than I'd ever been. And if I was just measuring myself backward against my past self, competing only against my past self, I was radically further than I ever was. And I just did something huge. And so I'm learning and I've learned over the years to be more in the game.
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