Create Self-Expansion: Dan Sullivan & Dr. Benjamin Hardy Discuss Their Book “Who Not How”

Dan Sullivan

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you probably have big goals for your business. But how often have you started to work on one of those big goals, only to hit a wall when you realize you don’t have the capabilities, knowledge, or resources to achieve it yourself?

This problem is all too common, and it’s a byproduct of the “how” mindset that is so ingrained in our society.

Luckily, there is an extremely simple solution. Instead of asking yourself, “How will I achieve this goal?” you just need to ask yourself, “Who will help me achieve this goal?”

This is the basis of my Who Not How framework and it’s at the center of nearly everything we do at Strategic Coach. This is such an important concept that I’ve recently written a book titled Who Not How with my good friend Dr. Benjamin Hardy.

Not only does this book go in depth on the methodology behind implementing Who Not How in your life and business, but the book itself was actually created using the exact same framework.

A revolutionary new way of thinking.

Most people who discover the Who Not How way of thinking or read the book have an almost immediate breakthrough, because this new way of thinking opens up your future dramatically.

If you’re stuck in the “How” mindset, your future is tied to everything you can accomplish as an individual. But once you understand that you don’t have to do everything yourself—that you can find “Whos” to accomplish your “Hows”—your future becomes exponential.

I was recently on a seminar with my good friend and fellow podcast host Peter Diamandis. We were talking about having an exponential mindset, and someone in the audience said that time is the one thing that can’t be exponential. No matter how you slice it, time is linear.

But that’s only true if you’re still stuck in the “How” mindset.

With Who Not How, you’re no longer limited by time because you can have many “Whos”—tens, hundreds, even thousands—accomplishing your “Hows.” At any given time, you might have 100 people working on your “Hows.” That’s exponential.

When you use Who Not How, your capabilities expand dramatically. Instead of being limited to your own skill sets, you gain the skill sets and capabilities of everyone you collaborate with. And there is perhaps no better time to be utilizing this framework than in today’s technological age, where you can access all the benefits of the amazing technology available to us without having to learn it yourself.

In the famous words of Harry S. Truman, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”


Ready to implement the Who Not How framework in your business? Buy the book on Amazon today for a limited-time promotional price.


Using Who Not How to write the book.

One of the things I like most about this book is that it’s about the Who Not How framework, of course, but we also used that framework to write the book itself.

This book was a collaboration between Dr. Benjamin Hardy, Tucker Max, Hay House publishing, and me. And it wouldn’t have been possible without that collaboration.

The idea for this book originated when Ben heard me speak about Who Not How at a Genius Network event. He came up to me and said the concept was so revolutionary, it had completely changed his mindset in just a few minutes—and as a writer himself, he saw massive potential for a Who Not How book. I agreed.

Ben started to work on the book himself, but quickly became stuck. So, naturally, we asked ourselves, “Who could help us create this?”

That’s where Tucker Max—a bestselling author and the founder of Scribe Media, a ghostwriting service—came in. As an expert on creating bestselling books, he worked with Ben and me to finalize the drafts. Hay House then took care of everything else to get the book published and out to the masses.

Ben has written a number of books, but he has never collaborated with anyone else on a book like we’ve done here. He’ll be the first to tell you that this was the easiest, most powerful book he has ever written—and it’s all because of the power of Who Not How.

Implementing Who Not How in your life and business.

Shifting your perspective from a “How” mindset to a “Who” mindset is one thing, but implementing this strategy in your life and business can be a bit more challenging.

At Strategic Coach, we use a number of tools to assist in delegation and in communicating clearly with your team and other collaborators. Throughout all of these tools, there is one common goal that is central to successfully implementing the Who Not How framework: You need to be extremely clear about the outcome of your project and what success looks like.

In the book, we suggest using an Impact Filter for this (one of the most popular and widely-used tools we’ve ever produced at Strategic Coach), but the idea is the same regardless of how you approach it.

The first step in tackling any goal should be to clarify exactly what the goal is, what the outcome should be, and what success looks like. Once you’ve done this, then—and only then—can you begin the search for your “Whos.”

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