Anyone who knows me knows I'm obsessed with the simple concept in 10X Is Easier Than 2X by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. I can't go a day without recommending it to entrepreneurs. It's one of my favorite books.
While I highly recommend reading the whole thing, the core idea is this.
As an entrepreneur, when you set a 2X goal, the answer to how you'll achieve that goal is mostly just doing what you're currently doing, but doing more of it. More ads, more salespeople, more conferences, more inbound content, more… more… more.
This is not a theory either. I lived it for years at Tatango, as each year I'd just continue to do what we did the year prior, but more of it, and while it sometimes worked, it left me completely exhausted. Does this sound familiar? If so, that's why you need to set 10X goals.
A 10X goal is the opposite, as doing what you're currently doing, just more, is not going to achieve a 10X result.
What you'll find is that when you start thinking of your goals in 10X, the only way there is to drop most of what you're doing and pour everything into the small handful of things that actually produce the kind of results needed to hit a 10X goal.
That's why 10X is easier. Not because it's less ambitious, but because it's less work, fewer things to manage, fewer decisions, fewer things to track. The size of the goal forces you to let go of everything that was never going to have a massive impact, hence the name of the book, 10X Is Easier Than 2X.
How This Works in Practice
An entrepreneur comes to me and says, "I want to grow revenue from $1M to $2M this year." A 2X goal. So I ask how they'd do it. And what I get back is a laundry list of things they're currently doing, with the plan to just do more of that. More ads, more salespeople, more conferences, more inbound content, more… more… more.
So I force them to 10X their goal. I ask: "Forget $1 million. What would you have to do to get to $10 million next year?"
Now I wish it was this easy, but when I work with entrepreneurs, I'll be brutally honest, suggesting a 10X goal over a 2X goal usually starts with a long list of reasons that this exercise is stupid, a waste of time, 2X is hard enough, 10X is insane, etc. Most of the time these kinds of objections are because the entrepreneur is still thinking in 2X mode, and setting such a lofty goal just means even more work, and for most entrepreneurs they're already exhausted, which is why it seems impossible.
But after a while, and the entrepreneur realizing that I'm not going to let up on this 10X thing, something magical always happens, the entrepreneur throws up their hands in frustration and, in protest, says something like "it's still impossible, but if we had to increase revenue 10X next year, we'd have to get rid of everything and focus all our efforts on building out our sales team."
And as you can see in this hypothetical, the entrepreneur has already gone from trying to figure out how to do more ads, more salespeople, more conferences, more inbound content, more… more… more, to now hyperfocusing on one thing. How do we build our sales team?
The constraint forces them to throw out everything that won’t have a massive impact and focus all their efforts on the one or two things that actually could.
That's one of the most interesting parts about working with entrepreneurs I've found with this framework. My job is rarely to give an entrepreneur the answer. It's to reframe the goal so they can find the answer themselves. The entrepreneur knows their industry the best, knows what's working and what's not, so they're the best equipped to answer the question. It's just my job to ask the right question.
Applying the 10X Framework to Time
The same trick works on timelines, but instead of increasing your goal by 10X, try reducing the time you're given by 10X.
I see entrepreneurs all the time who tell me they want to launch their startup in 100 days. My answer? "Okay, how would you launch it in 10 days?" They squirm a little, telling me again it's impossible, but eventually they come around and realize the answer wouldn't be to work harder, it would be to get rid of all the little things and focus on the one thing that would help them meet that deadline.
Even if You Miss, You Win
Here's the other beautiful thing about shooting for 10X. Even if you fail to hit it, the framework that got you reaching for it might land you at 4X or 5X. The 2X framework never would have gotten you there. So shoot for 10X, and even if you only land at half of it, you're far ahead of where playing it safe would have left you.
Just don't fall into the trap of thinking 10X is crazy, so you set your goal at 3X, thinking it's the same thing. Remember the book is called 10X Is Easier Than 2X for a reason. It's not called 3X Is Easier. If you set your goal between 2X and 5X, your mind is just going to revert to 2X thinking, same stuff, just more of it. It's only when you get to 10X where there's no way the answer would ever be to just do more of what you're currently doing.
A Word of Caution
As a leader at your company, don't just go around the company asking employees to figure out how they can increase their goals by 10X, because remember most people will default to "it's impossible, unless you're asking me to work 10X harder," and you can see how demoralizing this will be for employees. Usually I recommend trying this framework out on yourself first, then slowly testing it on innovative, forward-thinking leadership team members, before attempting to make this a company-wide way of thinking.
This Framework Isn't Just for Business
Don't just use this framework for business, it works for almost everything. Want to lose some weight? Don't set your goal at 5 pounds, set it at 50 pounds. Want to save for retirement? Don't set your goal at $100 per month, set it at $1,000 per month. Want to learn how to play tennis? Don't give yourself 10 months, figure out how to do it in 1 month. A word of caution, this framework is great but exhausting for the people around you, trust me, my friends and family are all sick of me telling them to constantly 10X their goals, but I'm only trying to help.
So the next time you're stuck looking at the daunting amount of work required to hit your 2X goal, take whatever that goal is, multiply it by ten, and ask what you'd have to do then. I think you'll be surprised. The answer isn't to do more. It's to do less.