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

by Dan Sullivan

Essentially, psychological flexibility is moving toward chosen goals even when it’s emotionally difficult. You acknowledge and accept your emotions, but they don’t control you.

A core aspect of psychological flexibility is viewing yourself as a context, rather than viewing yourself as content.10,11,12 This enables you to not overly identify with your thoughts and emotions, since you’re not your thoughts and emotions. Instead, you’re the context of your thoughts and emotions, and as you change the context, the content changes as well.

What got you here won’t get you there. To quote the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, “Every next level of your life will require a different you.”

10x isn’t about more. It’s about less. Michelangelo understood this clearly. When the Pope asked about the secret of his genius, particularly in regard to the statue of David, Michelangelo explained, “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.” Going 10x is the simplification of your focus down to the core essential. Then you remove everything else.

10x becomes your perceptual filter for everything you do. Everything becomes either 10x or 2x. Anything that’s not 10x doesn’t meet the filter and gets released from your attention. According to constraint theory, the greatest human bottleneck is attention. Our attention is our most finite resource, even more finite and valuable than our time. Indeed, the quality and depth of our attention determines the quality of our time. Most people’s attention is scattered, tugged, and seemingly never right here and right now.

my research, I uncovered a radically novel concept, which I called the point of no return, that identified a core difference between wannabe entrepreneurs and successful ones. The point of no return is the moment of full commitment, wherein your identity and energy shift from avoiding what you fear to fully approaching what you most want.

This is a fundamental reason why 10x goals and vision are simpler, easier, and more practical than 2x goals. With a 2x goal, there are too many potential pathways to reach the desired destination. This creates paralysis-by-analysis and makes it extremely difficult to know where to focus your best energy and effort. Conversely, with a 10x goal, only a limited number of strategies or paths will work.

“The only way to make your present better,” said Dan Sullivan, “is by making your future bigger.”

Going for 10x requires letting go of 80 percent of your current life and focus and going all-in on the crucial 20 percent that’s relevant and high-impact. Every time you go 10x, this same process will occur. It applies every time you make a 10x jump, no matter how many 10x jumps you’ve made to this point. This framework is the foundation of 10x or 2x thinking: in order to achieve 10x, you cannot rely on your past self’s thinking.

The term for someone like Linda, who has a 10x mindset in a 2x organization or industry, is Rate-Buster.29,30 This expression originated in factory work when a pieceworker radically outproduced the established norm leading to extreme opposition by fellow workers who feared the rate-buster’s high productivity may either lead to a reduction in the piece rate or in a higher expectation of required output. No one likes the rate-buster because the rate-buster makes them look bad and establishes a new standard and norm. The rate-buster makes the 2x people around them uncomfortable.

Elevating and committing to specific standards is how you evolve your identity. Elevating your standards and 10xing yourself involves a process outlined in Dan Sullivan’s The 4 C’s Formula: Commitment Courage Capability Confidence Nothing happens until you commit. As you commit to a specific standard far above your current capability and confidence, it pushes you outside your knowledge and comfort zone: hence, courage. Through courageously adapting toward your commitment, you experience many “losses” and failures along the way, which you can utilize as feedback and learning. By adapting and applying your learning, you develop capabilities and skills you previously didn’t have, which you would not have developed without having fully made the commitment. Commitment leads to mastery, wherein you’ve normalized the new standard. At this level, you have a higher degree of confidence.5

“As weird as it sounds, it’s much easier getting five million views on one video than 100-thou-sand views on 50 videos. . . You could upload one great video per year and get more views than if you uploaded 100 mediocre videos. It’s very exponential. To do well on YouTube, you just need people to click your videos and watch them. . . If you get people to click your video ten percent more, and watch your video ten percent longer than mine, you don’t get ten percent more views, you get like four-times the views. You have to think exponentially. A ten percent better video gets four-times the views, not ten percent more views. Once you understand that, you funnel your energy better, and really hyper-obsess over these videos. Triple the amount of time you’re putting into that video cause you’re not going the get triple the views, you’re going to 10x the views. So [I help those I mentor] make their videos really good, and also help them build out a team, like an editor. Cause if you’re doing five jobs, then you can only put 20 percent of your time into each. If you hire an editor, that editor can put 100 percent of his time into that. You can’t spend ten hours per day editing, but he can.”

What about you? Are you living exponentially or linearly? Are you focused on effort or volume, or are you creating something qualitatively different and better than anything else out there? Are you spread thin, doing five or more different jobs, or do you have a growing team of people handling your former 80 percent?

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.

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

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.

every day moving forward, he would write in his journal exactly what he wanted. He wanted to train himself to live life based on wants not needs, freedom not security, and abundance not scarcity.

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. You carve away everything that’s not “The David” and transform yourself into your most powerful, valuable, and genuine self-expression.

The basis of Unique Ability is to continually be conscious of the activities and the settings you like and that energize you—and the things that don’t. This is where freedom starts: with the understanding that your own judgments about your own experience are 100 percent valid…

‘Well, that might be good for the next 90 days. But you’re going to notice at the end of 90 days that seven of those someone else could do. There’s just 2–3 that are really yours.’ I’ve been on this now for 25–30 years and it’s interesting that you think you’ve gotten to the end of it. But I find, because I’m always doing new things, that what I thought was my Unique Ability before I started taking on a bigger challenge and producing a bigger result, you can fine-tune it even more.”