10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less

by Dan Sullivan

“Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming. It’s easier to raise $1,000,000 than it is $100,000. It’s easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.”

Think exponentially, which means thinking both much bigger and non-linearly. Hyper focus on quality over quantity, and get really good at what you do. Build a team to handle everything else so you can focus on achieving quality in your craft.

To go 10x bigger, you focus on getting 10x better. To get 10x better, you continually elevate the vision and standards of what you do. You commit to your 20 percent, hyper focusing on quality over quantity. You let go of the 80 percent, knowing that effort alone is not what produces exponential results.

To reach the level of quality that produces exponential results, you need to think exponentially bigger and different. You’ve got to have a vision and standards big enough, and specific enough, that the quality you’re creating is funneled toward that.

your goal is small, such as 2x, then your efforts will mostly be wasted. You’re not being stretched. You may technically be getting more proficient at what you’re doing. But you’re not evolving or innovating. You’re just deepening your habitual grooves, which doesn’t mean you’re actually getting better.

Without a 10x goal that your reps are directed to, you’ll just be repeating the same form and errors over and over. You’ll be optimizing for more of what you’ve already got, not something of an entirely new and different quality.

when you think exponentially, it’s no longer about the amount of effort you put in. Instead, it’s about where your effort is directed, and what your effort is directed toward. When you’re thinking 2x, you’re actually exhausting far more energy and effort than the person thinking 10x. The 10x thinker is allowing their 10x vision to guide them in radically innovative and different directions, which the 2x-thinker could never consider nor comprehend.

trying to solve a $30 million problem, you don’t have to be perfect. You’ve given yourself a huge margin for error that even if you only achieve one-third of the goal, you’ll reach your $10 million standard.

all aspects of life, the competition is highest for average goals.

“In a world that relentlessly races to the bottom, you lose if you also race to the bottom. The only way to win is to race to the top. . . . The only way to be indispensable is to be different. . . . Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth. . . . You can train yourself to matter. . . . You are not your résumé. You are your work.”

“Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity. What you do is an indication of the type of person you think you are—either consciously or nonconsciously.”

People make the leap of hiring far too late. By hiring even a personal or digital assistant, as Clear did, you can immediately free up space for your 20 percent, which work is higher value and higher leverage than the 80 percent busy tasks. The longer

you wait to get a Who, the slower your progress will be because you’ll be mired in the 80 percent. This not only keeps you split focused, but slows your mastery of the 20 percent.

10x is committing to your ambitious vision and making that vision your standard. You do this by locking into the 20 percent that will get you there and letting go of the 80 percent that got you here.

The completion of each 10x process requires the comprehensive transformation of yourself and your entire life. The whole system and model of who you are and even your very business look unrecognizably different at 10x. The initial 80 percent becomes literally non-existent. The initial 20 percent becomes your new 100 percent—it’s now your normal life, identity, and reality.

It’s not about you doing or being better than anyone else. Rather, you’re being increasingly unique and different from what everyone else is doing. Your work is innovative and distinct from what the masses of 2x’ers are up to.

quitting the wrong stuff takes huge guts. It’s scary letting go of the 80 percent because the 80 percent is your comfort zone. It’s your security blanket. It’s what you’ve already mastered and can basically do on autopilot. It’s your paycheck. It’s your identity and how you’re known. It’s your story and your habits. The longer you hold on to the 80 percent out of fear, the slower your 10x transformation will occur. The faster you let go of the 80 percent out of commitment and courage, the faster your 10x transformation will occur. Every great leader must face the dilemma

You quit everything that can’t go 10x from here, even if that means eliminating the best of what got you here.

Shedding your 2x-identity can be difficult, because as people we have the tendency to avoid loss, overvalue what we currently own, and desire to be seen as consistent.

Your identity is the story you believe about yourself and the standards you hold for yourself.

“The world is divided into two types of people: those who are ‘needers’ and those who are ‘wanters.’ Needers compete for scarce resources and opportunities, while wanters are involved in the continual expansion of cooperation among abundance-minded individuals.” — DAN SULLIVAN1

Dan learned to stop justifying what he wanted. He stopped being constrained by needs or rationalizations. He stopped worrying of others’ opinions about his goals.

go of scarcity and competition-based needing and replace it with abundance and creativity-based wanting.

Unique Ability. When you embrace your Unique Ability, you stop worrying about what other people are doing. You stop competing entirely. But also, you realize in the realest sense who you truly are.

Someone who is a lifetime needer spends a great deal of daily thinking and communication in a never-ending process of justification.

in the world of wanting, there’s no scarcity, because it’s a world of innovation—not of taking. Wanters are creating things that didn’t exist before. You’re creating something new that in no way requires taking something from someone else.”

Wanting is about abundance and creation. Creativity is not a scarce resource and takes nothing away from anyone else. Rather, creativity actually creates new resources and opportunities which previously didn’t exist and which would not have existed without someone proactively creating them. Wanting requires no justification. When you want something, you don’t need to justify that want to anyone else. This will be particularly vexing to the self-righteous needers among us who will attempt to manipulate and guilt you into doing what they believe you should be doing, based on their scarcity frame of reference. To go 10x, as well as to live the life you are uniquely suited to live, you can’t pay heed to the scarcity-mongers.

Wealth is what you want, not money.

However, when you realize that wealth and money are not the same thing, and that wealth is actually created, then you realize there is no finite pie.

Money is an abstraction, it’s a finite game. Wealth is reality, it’s an infinite game. There’s no scarcity of wealth. Wealth is the byproduct of choosing freedom, and you can create as much wealth as you want.

You can become 10x more valuable and thus wealthy without directly having 10x more money.

You can 10x the value and quality of your time, money, relationships, and purpose. And that’s really what 10x is all about. 10x is the means, freedom is the end.

10x is a qualitative game of increasing the value of your freedoms—and to do so by creating the wealth (skills, knowledge, products, etc.) you intrinsically want to create, and then sharing that wealth with the specific people who increasingly value and appreciate your value.

When you live life based on want, rather than need, you’re playing an infinite game. You see that reality is created and chosen—and is based on wealth, freedom, and value. You recognize that each of these things is qualitative, individual, and personal. You’re not competing with anyone else. Instead, you’re collaborating with other abundance-minded creators.

Needing is scarcity-minded, whereas wanting is abundance-minded.

wanting is creative.

Committing to what you want most is the only way to be free.

You’re creating the life you want by creating the value you want.

You do what you want, because you want to. That’s enough.

Freedom from—which is externally escaping from what you don’t want, and is avoidance-motivated. Freedom to—which is internally committing to and courageously choosing what you most want, and is approach-motivated.

An obvious challenge people face is that they don’t know what they want. They’re far too busy justifying what they think they need. They haven’t learned to be brutally honest with themselves and others. They’re still living in fear.

Your Unique Ability is how you create value and wealth that is unique and specialized. It’s your radically unique way of doing what you do, such that no one else can compete with you even if they wanted to. Your Unique Ability is also your unique vision and purpose—your “why” for what you’re doing.

Wherever you are now, going 10x from here will require a total remodeling of both yourself and your business.

“Your level of capability in the future depends upon your measurement of achievements in the past. You can’t move forward and grow until you’ve acknowledged how far you’ve come and have properly measured your gains.”

And how can you possibly have both—where you’re stretching and transforming toward huge dreams yet fully happy and satisfied with where you now are? Again, it all comes down to how you measure yourself and your experiences. The gap is a reactive and external approach to measuring yourself and your experiences. The gain is a proactive, creative, and internal approach to measuring yourself and your experiences.

you’re only measuring yourself backward against where and who you were before.

“The only way to measure the distance you’ve traveled is by measuring from where you are back to the point where you started, not from where you are toward the horizon.”

You squeeze more juice out of your experiences because while in the gain, you’re the one defining what your experiences mean.

happiness and positive emotions—especially gratitude—lead to more creative thinking, better decision making, higher performance, and self-determination.

confidence is the byproduct of past successes, more than the cause of future success.