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

by Grant Cardone

“Anyone that suggests to me to do less is either not a real friend or very confused!” —Grant Cardone

As I look back over my life, I see that the one thing that was most consistent with any success I've achieved was that I always put forth 10 times the amount of activity that others did. For every sales presentation, phone call, or appointment others made, I was making 10 of each. When I started buying real estate, I looked at 10 times more properties than I could buy and then made offers to ensure that I was able to buy what I wanted at the price I desired. I have approached all my business enterprises with massive action; that has been the single biggest determining factor in any success I have created.

Before you say, “I don't need extraordinary levels of success” or “success is not everything” or “I just want to be happy” or whatever else you may be mumbling to yourself at this very moment, understand something: in order to get to the next level of whatever you're doing, you must think and act in a wildly different way than you previously have been. You cannot get to the next phase of a project without a grander mind-set, more acceleration, and extra horsepower. Your thoughts and actions are the reasons why you are where you are right now. So it would be reasonable to be suspect of both!

Others might have an opinion about your success—but only you can decide if it is extraordinary. Only you know your true potential and whether you're living up to it; no one else can judge your success. Remember: Success is the degree or measure of attaining some desired object or end. Once you attain this desired end, the issue then becomes whether you can maintain, multiply, and repeat your actions in order to sustain that result.

An interesting thing about success is that it's like a breath of air; although your last breath of air is important, it's not nearly as important as the next one.

“Why do they keep pushing?” The answer is simple: Extremely successful people know that their efforts must continue in order for them to realize new achievements. Once the hunt for a desired object or goal is abandoned, the cycle of success comes to an end.

Someone said to me recently, “It is clear you have made enough money to live comfortably; why are you still pushing?” It is because I am obsessed with the next breath of accomplishment. I am compulsive about leaving a legacy and making a positive footprint on the planet. I am most unhappy when I am not accomplishing and most happy when I am in quest of reaching my full potential and abilities. My disappointment or dissatisfaction with where I am at this moment does not suggest that something is wrong with me but rather that something is right with me.

So before you say to yourself for the millionth time, “I would be happy if I just had . . .” or “I don't want to be rich—just comfortable” or “I just want enough to be happy,” you must understand one vital point: Limiting the amount of success you desire is a violation of the 10X Rule in and of itself. When people start limiting the amount of success they desire, I assure you they will limit what will be required of them in order to achieve success and will fail miserably at doing what it takes to keep it.

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.

The following is the basic series of mistakes people make when setting out to achieve goals: 1. Mistargeting by setting objectives that are too low and don't allow for enough correct motivation. 2. Severely underestimating what it will take in terms of actions, resources, money, and energy to accomplish the target. 3. Spending too much time competing and not enough time dominating their sector. 4. Underestimating the amount of adversity they will need to overcome in order to actually attain their desired goal.

A person who limits his or her potential success will limit what he or she will do to create it and keep it.

It doesn't matter how much you've already attained. As long as you are alive, you will either live to accomplish your own goals and dreams or be used as a resource to accomplish someone else's. For the sake of this book, success can also be defined as accomplishing the next level of what it is you desire—and in ways that will forever change how you perceive yourself, your life, the use of your energy, and—perhaps most significantly—how others perceive you.

When you have underestimated the time, energy, and effort necessary to do something, you will have “quit” in your mind, voice, posture, face, and presentation. You won't develop the persistence necessary to get your mission accomplished. However, when you correctly estimate the effort necessary, you will assume the appropriate posture. The marketplace will sense by your actions that you are a force to be reckoned with and are not going away—and it will begin to respond accordingly.

This major mistake should never even cross your mind as an option. It sends the wrong message to the organization—that targets are unimportant and the only way to win is to move the finish line. A great manager will push a person to do more at the risk of coming up short, not target less.

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! These actions should be an indication that you're getting off track—that you should begin thinking in terms of correcting your initial estimation of effort.

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.

However, I was fortunate enough to have two distinct experiences in my life that served as major wake-up calls. My existence and survival were being seriously threatened in both cases. The first occurred when I was 25. My life was a pitiful mess, caused by years of approaching life aimlessly, drifting with no real purpose or focus. I had no money, plenty of uncertainty, no direction, too much free time, and still hadn't made a commitment to approach success as an obligation. Had I not had this realization and gotten serious about my life, I don't think I would be alive today. You know, you don't need to grow old to die. I was dying at the age of 20 as a result of no direction and no purpose. At that time, I couldn't hold a job, had surrounded myself with losers, was terminally hopeless, and if that weren't enough, using drugs and alcohol on a daily basis. Had I continued on without a serious wake-up call, I would have continued to live a mediocre existence at best and probably much worse. Had I not committed to a life of success, I would not have identified my purpose and would have merely spent a lifetime fulfilling everyone else's purpose. Let's face it, there are plenty of people living mere existences, and I should know. At that time in my life, I was in sales and treated it with disdain. When I committed to sales as a career and then decided to do whatever I had to in order to become successful at selling, my life changed.

Treating success as an option is one of the major reasons why more people don't create it for themselves—and why most people don't even get close to living up to their full potential. Ask yourself how close you are to your full capability. You might not like the answer very much. If you don't consider it your duty to live up to your potential, then you simply won't. If it doesn't become an ethical issue for you, then you won't feel obligated and driven to fulfill your capacity. People don't approach the creation of success as a must-have obligation, do-or-die mission, gotta-have-it, “hungry-dog-on-the-back-of-a-meat-truck” mentality. They then spend the rest of their lives making excuses for why they didn't get it. And that is what happens when you consider success to be an alternative rather than an obligation.

It is entirely okay to admit that you wanted something that didn't come to fruition. In fact, this is the only thing that will help you eventually reach that goal—despite the obstacles you'll encounter along the way.

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

Politics and the media perpetuate these shortage concepts by suggesting that there is not “enough” of certain things to go around—that “if you have something, I cannot.”

“I promise better education for your kids,” or “I will make it more possible for you to be successful.” The underlying implication of these claims is that only I can do this—not the other guy. These politicians first emphasize the topics and initiatives that they know followers consider important—then they create the sense that citizens aren't capable of doing things for themselves. They highlight the “scarcity” that exists and do their best to make people feel that their only chance of getting what they want and need is to support them. Otherwise, they imply, your chances of getting your share become even more remote.

It's extremely difficult for people to “agree to disagree”; people operate under the assumption that one person's beliefs cannot be maintained if another person's conflicting beliefs exist. This notion—based once again on the concept of limits and shortages—only increases the amount of tension we have with one another. Why does one person have to be wrong and another right? Why the need for shortages?

Those who suffer from victim thinking—which I roughly estimate to be about 50 percent of the population—will hate this chapter and probably picked up this book by mistake. Anyone who uses blame as the reason why something happened or did not happen will never accumulate real success in life and only further his or her status as a slave on this planet. Those who give control over to another for their success—or lack of it—will never be in control of their lives. No game in life is truly enjoyable without first accepting control over your understanding of the game, how you play the game, and then the outcome of the game. People who assume the position of victim will never be secure—simply because they elect to turn over responsibility to another party and because they never elect to know for themselves what they can do. They therefore never take charge over their outcomes going forward, saying, “I am a little victim; bad things happen to me often, and I cannot do anything about it.”

Success isn't just a “journey,” as countless people and books suggest it is; rather, it's a state—constant or otherwise—over which you have control and responsibility. You either create success or you don't—and it isn't for whiners, crybabies, and victims.

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.

Most people fail only because they are operating at the wrong degree of action. To simplify action, we are going to break down your choices into four simple categories or degrees of action. Your four choices are: 1. Do nothing. 2. Retreat. 3. Take normal levels of action. 4. Take massive action.

When the alarm goes off in the morning, the “do-nothing” group will not respond at all. Although it may appear that they're not taking action, it actually takes a lot of energy not to get up in the morning. It takes work to lose a job because of lack of production. It is work to be overlooked for a promotion and have to wait another year to be considered and then go home and explain it to your spouse. It takes tremendous effort to exist on this planet as an underappreciated and underpaid employee—and even more energy to make sense of it. The person not taking action has to make excuses for his or her condition; this requires tremendous creativity and effort.

Be honest with yourself: Do you have more energy and creativity available than you're using? Average student, average marriage, average kids, average finances, average business, average products, average body type . . . . Who really desires “average”? Imagine that the products and services we're so often tempted to buy used “average” in their advertising: “This fairly average product can be found at an average price and delivers mediocre results.” Who would buy such a product? People certainly don't go out of their way to find and pay for run-of-the-mill merchandise. “We are offering cooking classes that will guarantee that you become an average cook.” I can do that now without taking classes. “New movie opening this weekend—average director, average acting, and the critics are raving, 'two hours of average action.'” Oh—can't wait to stand in line for that one!

When you are taking massive action, you aren't thinking in terms of how many hours you work. When you start operating at the fourth degree of action, your mind-set will shift and so will your results. You will end up instigating opportunities that you will have to address earlier, later, and in a different way than you would on a “normal” day, so a routine day will become a thing of the past. I continued this commitment to massive action until one day it was no longer an unusual activity but a habit for me. It was interesting to see how many people would ask me, “Why are you still out this late at night?” “What are you doing calling on us on a Saturday?” “You never quit, do you?” “I wish my people worked like this.” And even— “What are you on?” I was on something; I was treating success as my duty, obligation, and responsibility, and massive action was my ace in the hole. Signals that you're taking massive action are having people comment upon and admire your level of activity.

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.

Indeed, most people are so apathetic about their goals that they only write them down once a year. As far as I'm concerned, nothing worth doing is done only once or twice a year. The things upon which your life depends most are based on the actions you take daily. That is why I make sure to always do two things: (1) I write my goals down every day and (2) I choose objectives that are just out of reach. This opens me up to my full potential, which I use to fuel my action each day. Some people suggest that setting improbable goals might cause a person to become disappointed and lose interest. But if your goals are so small that you don't even need to consider them on a daily basis, then you are going to lose interest!

I will never tell another person what his or her goals should be. However, I would advise that when you do set your goals, take into account that you have been educated with restrictions. Be aware of this so that you don't underestimate the possibilities. Then take the following into account: (1) You are setting these for you—not for anyone else. (2) Anything is possible. (3) You have much more potential than you realize. (4) Success is your duty, obligation, and responsibility. (5) There is no shortage of success. (6) Regardless of the size of the goal, it will require work. Once you've reviewed these concepts, then sit down and write out your goals. And then be willing to rewrite them every day until they are achieved.

The biggest regret of my life is not the fact that I haven't worked my ass off—because I have. It's that I didn't set targets 10 times higher than what I originally thought I could accomplish from the very beginning. Why? Because my goals were influenced and limited greatly by the way I was brought up. I am not blaming anyone; it is just a fact. I spent the first 30 years of my business career getting the 10X effort part right and will spend the next 25 years getting the 10X goal-setting part right. So I recommend you do the following: 1. Set 10X targets. 2. Align them with your other purposes. 3. Write them down every day—when you wake up and before you go to sleep.

How do you dominate, you may wonder? The first step is to decide to dominate. Then the best way to dominate is to do what others refuse to do. That's right—do what they will not do. This will allow you to immediately carve out a space for yourself and develop an unfair advantage. Let me be clear: I want an unfair advantage if I can create one. Though I am always ethical, I never play fair. I seek out ways in which I can get an unfair advantage—and one surefire way to do this is to do what others won't. Find something they cannot do, maybe because of their size or their commitment to other projects, and then exploit that. Maybe they are cutting back during a time when the economy is uncertain. This would be your moment to expand into those spaces where they are contracting. A company I was working with that was in dental implants told me the leader in the field had cut all travel expenses and elected that all client contact is done by phone and over the Internet. To get a competitive advantage, we decided to dominate the personal contacts while the leader retreated. Domination—not competition!

The good thing about social media is anyone can play in the space, regardless of his or her financial situation. It allows for unlimited creativity, and rewards only those who use it consistently and persistently. When I first started playing with social media, I posted twice a day. I don't know what I was thinking—it was a moment of “little think.” We simultaneously began sending out e-mail strategies once a month and found ourselves getting requests from people who wanted to be removed from our e-mail campaign. My colleagues suggested I back off. That is when I woke up and came to my senses. Instead of backing off, I made the order to increase the number of posts to 10 times what we had been doing. I then instructed my employees to start sending out electronic strategies twice a week instead of monthly (eight times) and began personally posting comments on Twitter 48 times a day (once every 30 minutes). Each of them was written by me, and they were set up to be dropped in at a certain time. Although you might assume that the complaints and “unsubscribe” requests would increase with this massive outflow campaign, they didn't. Instead, we started receiving e-mails and posts of admiration for my activity level, and compliments for my willingness to provide people with free sales and motivational information. The questions came flooding in: “How can you do all this? How big is your staff? Where do you find the time? Do you ever rest?” And for every person commenting, there h...

For one company I once consulted with, we identified places in which “only practices” could be employed. We discovered that the industry in general struggled with the practice of following up with customers. So we looked at what our competitors would not do and found that none of them would call back clients as they left the store. This led the company to immediately initiate programs during which clients were called back as they drove out of the parking lot. Managers then immediately started calling clients' cell phones as they left the company's premises and asked them to return. If the call went to voicemail, the manager left a message requesting the client to, “Please come back immediately. I have something you must see.” Or the manager would send a text suggesting that the company had something to show the client right away. If there was no successful contact made, another manager repeated the callback program that same day and again the next morning. The results were crazy. Almost 50 percent of the clients returned immediately, and almost 80 percent of those became buyers at that time. Another 20 percent returned as a result of the later calls and increased the sales of that organization to new levels. This is an example of “only practices.”

Even if you are in a weak market, you suffer less when you dominate it. Weak markets actually create opportunities because the players in those markets typically have become dependent and weak because they don't know how to operate in a more challenging environment. Don't feel sorry for them; dominate them. They're not having bad luck; their average think and actions are simply failing them. The marketplace is brutal and will punish anyone and everyone who does not take the right amounts of action. Now is the time to shift into making your every thought and action aimed at dominating your sector, market, competition—and the every thought of your potential clients. Quit thinking about competing. Despite what everyone says, it's not healthy. It's for sissies.

However, almost no member of today's middle class has one-third of his or her income left for discretionary income. This group is currently being hammered by something called the middle-class squeeze—a situation in which increases in wages fail to keep up with inflation for middle-income earners. At the same time, the phenomenon fails to have a similar impact on the top wage earners. Add to that the fact that much of the supposed middle class's wealth has come from assuming debt and home equity calculations that were more ink than real money.

What is the point of me telling you all this? Ask people in the middle class if this feels secure or desirable—and although they may claim that they're grateful not to be “poor,” they will likely tell you that they feel more like a member of the working class than the middle class. Consider as well the fact that the dollar is worth less today than it was yesterday and will be worth even less tomorrow. Someone who's making $60,000 a year pays $15,000 in taxes. If that person is lucky, he or she is left with $45,000 a year—which is really worth only $32,000—for a home, schools, insurance, food, car payments, fuel, medical emergencies, vacations, and savings. Does this sound desirable to you? Middle class was a dream sold to countless Americans as a good goal toward which they should strive. Yet in reality, it is really only close to “good”—and probably better described as a mousetrap with a big fat piece of cheese on it.

I contend that the middle class is the most suppressed, restricted, and confined socioeconomic demographic in the world. Those who desire to be a part of it are compelled to think and act in a certain way where “just enough” is the reward. The idea that one would only have enough to be “comfortable” or “adequately satisfied” is a concept that has been sold—by the educational system, the media, and politicians—to convince an entire population of people to settle instead of strive for abundance. However, it only takes a bit of waking up to discover that it is a promise without fulfillment. Today the wealthiest 5 percent of people control $80 trillion, which is more money than has been created in the history of mankind. If you knew that you had the same energy and creativity to make it to the next level, wouldn't you give it a try?

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.

Someone once asked me if I've always been as obsessed with success and work as I am today. I answered, “Absolutely not!” At first, I was—until about the age of 10. Then I let it go and didn't become obsessed until I was 25. I have remained that way—to some greater or lesser degree—ever since, and I regret those years I was not obsessed with my dreams and goals. I can tell you that my life has gone much better since I've been passionate about my dreams and goals—even when things went wrong.

In this way, we see how obsession is a natural human state. It doesn't become a “problem” until a parent, caretaker, teacher—and eventually, society as a whole—begins suppressing this fixation. They often make the child feel as if his or her commitment to a goal is wrong rather than something natural and very right! At this point, many children begin to assume that their intense interest in life and discovery—their innate commitment to be fully engaged—is somehow wrong or unnatural. They have essentially been bullied by others—who have long ago given up on their own obsessions—in order to change their behavior. This is when a person moves from higher levels of commitment and action to “average” levels.

Lest you think I'm talking about something with which I have no personal experience, I should tell you that I just had my first child. I will admit that although her obsessive nature rears its head at inconvenient times for me, I never want to suppress that. It is my fervent wish that my daughter becomes obsessed with whatever her dreams are, never gives up achieving them, and then spends the rest of her life improving on them! I love the feeling that comes with being obsessed about an idea, and I admire seeing others who are that fanatical. Who isn't moved by the people or groups that go after the things in which they believe with all their heart—who is so consumed by their ideas that they wake up to their dreams each day, work on them all day long, and then go to sleep and dream about them again all night? As soon as other people see the intention, conviction, and commitment in the passionate individual's thoughts, eyes, and movements, they quickly get out of the way. I suggest that you become obsessed about the things you want; otherwise, you are going to spend a lifetime being obsessed with making up excuses as to why you didn't get the life you wanted.

There are certain things in life that have limits, but you don't unless you impose limits on yourself.

One of the major differences between successful and unsuccessful people is that the former look for problems to resolve, whereas the latter make every attempt to avoid them. So remember: Overcommit, be all in, and take massive levels of action followed up by massive amounts of more actions. You will create new problems and deliver at levels that will amaze even you.

Pretty much everyone in the world was convinced that their only saving grace was to save—so they did. It's always intriguing to me that when people start saving money, they immediately begin saving everything else—almost automatically. It is as though the mind is unable to distinguish between saving paper bills or numbers in a bank and conserving energy, creativity, and effort. The whole world held back in its expenditure of both dollars and effort while just a few people expanded. Who do you think came out on top?

People have asked me how—and why—I decided to expand when things were so uncertain. My answer to them was, “I would rather die in expansion than die in contraction. I would rather fail pushing forward than in retreat.” Consider this yourself: At which of the four degrees of action introduced in Chapter 7 do you choose to operate? If you allow the economy to determine your choice, you will never be in control of your own economy.

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. As strange as it may sound, you want to be scared until you have to push yourself to new levels to experience fear again. In fact, the only thing that scares me is a complete lack of fear.