The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure

by Grant Cardone

This is the focus of the 10X Rule: You must set targets that are 10 times what you think you want and then do 10 times what you think it will take to accomplish those targets. Massive thoughts must be followed by massive actions.

There is nothing ordinary about the 10X Rule. It is simply what it says it is: 10 times the thoughts and 10 times the actions of other people.

Never reduce a target. Instead, increase actions. When you start rethinking your targets, making up excuses, and letting yourself off the hook, you are giving up on your dreams!

The 10X Rule assumes the target is never the problem. Any target attacked with the right actions in the right amounts with persistence is attainable.

Tackle your project with the 10X Rule—like your life depends on it. Manage every action as though you have a camera on you every step of the way. Pretend you're being recorded as a model by which your children and grandchildren will learn how to succeed in life. Attack everything with the ferociousness of a champion athlete who is getting his last opportunity to claim his pages in the history books.

Success must be approached from an ethical viewpoint. Success is your duty, obligation, and responsibility!

The moment you start thinking someone else's gain is your loss, you limit yourself by thinking in terms of competition and shortages.

Someone once said, “No matter where I go, there I am.” This little saying suggested to me that I am both the problem and the solution.

Increase your responsibility level, assume control for everything that happens to you, and live by the slogan that nothing happens to you—only because of you! And remember, “Don't be a little bitch.”

Disciplined, consistent, and persistent actions are more of a determining factor in the creation of success than any other combination of things. Understanding how to calculate and then take the right amount of action is more important than your concept, idea, invention, or business plan.

you can't think in terms of compliments or how many hours you work or even how much money you're making when you're operating at this degree. Instead, you have to approach each day as though your life and your future depend on your ability to take massive action.

I have been called a lot of things due to my commitment to action—a workaholic, obsessive, greedy, never satisfied, driven, and even manic. Yet every time I have been labeled, it's always been by someone operating at less than the fourth degree of action. I have never had someone who is more successful than I am considering my excessive action to be a bad thing—because successful people know firsthand what it takes to achieve this kind of success. They know themselves how to get where they want to go and would never identify massive action as undesirable in any way.

Remember that success is your duty, obligation, and responsibility. And since there is no shortage of success, any apparent limitations you are experiencing might simply be the result of thinking and acting average.

Don't set your goals at a competitive level. Set them at a level that will overshadow and dominate your sector completely.

Take any action, and take it to a level that will separate you and your company from everyone else who might be in your space.

Most people make only enough effort for it to feel like work, whereas the most successful follow up every action with an obsession to see it through to a reward.

Demand obsession of yourself and all those around you. Never make it wrong to be obsessed; instead, make it your goal.

An absence of concerns signals that you are only doing what's comfortable for you—and that will only get you more of what you have right now.

American corporations have become so obsessed with “customer satisfaction” that they've lost sight of the first—and most vital—factor: customer acquisition!

“Your name is your most important asset. [People] can take everything away from you—but they can't take your name.”

Maybe you want to amass riches in order to help more people and improve conditions for all mankind. That would require you to be omnipresent—everywhere, all the time.

In order for your life not to feel like “work”—or like you're running on a hamster wheel—you must think in terms of the right volumes.

Excuses are never the reason for why you did or didn't do something. They're just a revision of the facts that you make up in order to help yourself feel better about what happened (or didn't).

Devoting yourself to something all the way means that there's no backing out.