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

by Dan Sullivan

It’s your paycheck. It’s your identity and how you’re known. It’s your story and your habits.

Chapter Takeaways Going 10x involves the continuous process of increasing the quality and decreasing the quantity of everything you do. How you do anything is how you do everything. 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. Defining and choosing your own minimum standards, no matter how seemingly impossible to yourself and others, is fundamental to experiencing a 10x transformation. Evolving yourself to the level of a higher minimum standard requires commitment and courage, which eventually leads to the development of new capabilities and confidence (Dan’s 4C’s formula). Jimmy Donaldson’s three ingredients to his 10x process are: 1) thinking exponentially and non-linearly bigger, 2) hyper-focusing on quality over quantity, and 3) building a team to handle the 80 percent so you can focus and improve in your craft. 10x goals are easier than 2x goals for many reasons. 10x goals are less competitive. 10x goals require you to focus on very few things rather than many, which improves your brain’s ability to focus—research shows that continual task switching makes flow and high performance basically impossible.50,51 10x goals promote non-linear approaches which produce novel, innovative, and competition-free solutions. Finally, 10x goals foster leadership and tea...

He stopped worrying of others’ opinions about his goals.

“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.” — GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Chapter Takeaways Society trains people to believe freedom and creativity are scarce resources to compete for. This is not true because money is a finite resource, while wealth is an infinite resource. When you choose freedom over security, then you embrace a life where you choose exactly what you want, rather than vying for what you think you need. Living a life based on intrinsic wants enables an abundance mindset that allows you to create the wealth and life you want, without needing to justify to anyone why you want what you want. Living a life based on external needs enables a scarcity mindset that causes you to compete for the limited resources you believe you need. People who live based on need feel they have to justify their actions so that others will accept them. You must make a choice here and now: Will you continue living in the “needing” world where you must compete for scarce resources and justify everything you do, or will you embrace the “wanting” world where you freely choose, create, and get what you want? You can only go 10x by embracing a purely wanting approach to life, because 10x isn’t inherently something anyone needs, but only something you can have if you choose the freedom to want and create it. Your Unique Ability is a central and core aspect of who you are, which can only be uncovered and developed by embracing what you most want. Your Unique Ability is the way in which you provide the most value for other people, which no one else could ever r...

Freedom

Csikszentmihalyi, M., Abuhamdeh, S., & Nakamura, J. (2014). Flow. In Flow and the foundations of positive psychology (pp. 227–238). Springer, Dordrecht.