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

by Dan Sullivan

In simple terms: wealth is value. Wealth is something that someone wants—whether that be a physical commodity, information or knowledge, or some form of service. Value is qualitative and subjective, not quantitative and objective like money is. You can become 10x more valuable and thus wealthy without directly having 10x more money. And indeed, money follows wealth.

According to Dan, there are four distinct differences between needers and wanters: Needing is extrinsically motivated, whereas wanting is intrinsically motivated. Needing is security-driven, whereas wanting is freedom-driven. Needing is scarcity-minded, whereas wanting is abundance-minded. Needing is reactive, whereas wanting is creative.3

If you do anything out of perceived need or compulsion, then you don’t feel it is really your own choice, but rather, you feel the choice is being made for you. You’re being the victim or byproduct of something external.

When you live based on wants, you’re living intrinsically. You’re living on purpose—your purpose. You’re living without need to rationalize or justify. You’re being, doing, and having what you want simply because you want it, regardless of external opinions or expectations. You’re creating the life you want by creating the value you want.

Let’s clear this up one more time: you don’t need it. . .You want it. And you wanting whatever you want takes nothing away from someone else, because you’re creating wealth and freedom, and that actually makes things better for the world, not worse.

Eliminating the 80 percent—whatever that looks like for you—will be unpopular for many people in your world. It will certainly be unpopular for the needers in your world—those who don’t understand the infinite game of freedom and wealth creation you’re playing.

Indeed, as stated previously, a primary reason people don’t go for the 10x upgrades they want is because in the end, they’re too afraid of making those around them who simply wouldn’t get it uncomfortable. They end up buying into the loud agenda of culture and those around them who say they shouldn’t want more than they need. They settle for 2x over 10x and, internally, they can’t overcome the frustration and suppression this creates. Even more, they fail to realize who they truly could have become, the 10x version of themselves that transformed again and again, the David.

There is enormous external pressure to keep the 80 percent in your life, because the 80 percent represents security but not freedom. Even still, the greatest pressure you’ll f...

you think you need and only choose that which you absolutely want. Wanting is based on freedom. Needing is based on security, fear, and worry of other people’s judgements. People don’t get what they want because they’re too busy seeking what they believe they need. They become busy chasing means rather than directly choosing and living their desired end.

There are two core types of freedom: 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.7,8

Nothing happens until after you commit, and it’s only after you commit that you know what freedom feels like. As the popular saying goes, “Everything you want is on the opposite side of fear.”10

Learning to clarify what you want without justification or apology is vital to going 10x since 10x is based on want, not need. Indeed, no one needs to go 10x.

It all boils down to wanting what you want. What do you truly want, more than anything else? What would excite you more than anything else to be, do, and have? What would you be and do if you weren’t afraid of what others thought or the repercussions? How would it feel to be more honest and real with yourself and the world?

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.

Your Unique Ability is where you have superior skills, where you’re completely intrinsically motivated and thus energized and engaged, and it’s also where you see never-ending possibility for improvement.

Research shows that when someone subjectively feels their work is a calling—meaning they have a sense of purpose, and that they’re doing what they are meant to do—that they experience greater overall subjective well-being or happiness as well as greater career success than those who view their work as a job or career.20 Viewing your work as a “calling” need not be tied to any religious belief system, though it can be. Research has found a consistent link between feeling a sense of calling and heightened levels of career maturity, career commitment, work meaning, job satisfaction, life meaning, and life satisfaction. These links appear most robust when people are actually living out their calling at work.21 Other research shows that individuals who have a sense of calling are more likely to ignore career advice from mentors or advisors, particularly advice suggesting more secure or mainstream options.22 This doesn’t mean they don’t listen or take advice, but that in the end, they ultimately trust their inner voice and make their own decisions.

Mastery is not just the ability to do something well. It’s the ability to do something uniquely well. If it’s not unique, innovative, and uninhibited self-expression, then it’s not true mastery. Mastery and uniqueness are inseparable. Thus, for you to reach your highest level of mastery and personal calling, you do so by taking your Unique Ability seriously and fully developing and expressing it. You develop your Unique Ability by: Being increasingly honest with yourself and other people about what you most want for yourself and your life. Don’t justify your wants to anyone. No one else is you. No one else wants what you want. No one else has your Unique Ability and your unique vision and desires. Expanding your vision and thinking exponentially bigger for yourself about what you can be, do, and have. Continually hone your Unique Ability—that which excites you, energizes you, and which you see potential for never-ending improvement—and utilize your Unique Ability to bring forth your 10x vision. Become increasingly clear on who you are and what makes you unique and different from everyone else on this planet. Clarifying your ideal future self and what they would be doing. Be very specific about this. What context are they in? What mission are they fulfilling? What is the cause they are about? What Unique Ability does your future self have, which they are utilizing to dramatically impact and advance what they most care for? What are the unique standards your future self live...

The scariest and most exciting thing you’ll ever do is be your truest self, holding nothing back, and with no apology. This is how you develop mastery in your Unique Ability.

This next concept is one Dan calls Always Be the Buyer.24 There is a fundamental and crucial distinction between what Dan calls a “Buyer” or a “Seller.” Being the Buyer means you have clear standards for yourself, and you know what you want. The opposite is being a Seller, where you’re desperate to be in a particular situation because you think you need it. As the Seller, you’ll twist yourself into uncomfortable shapes to be accepted. You’re unclear on and uncommitted to your intrinsically crafted standards. You continually lower or change your standards to “get the sale.” In every social situation, you’re either being a Buyer or a Seller. The difference between a Buyer and a Seller is the Buyer can walk away. The Buyer is not desperate to be there. The Buyer is the one who does the rejecting, whereas the Seller is the one who gets rejected.

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...

Going 10x will transform everything in your life if you fully embrace it. If you want to 10x, you have to radically change 80 percent of your life. This is a scary thought.

The Gap and The Gain “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.” — DAN SULLIVAN2

The gap is a lens by which you measure what is against what could be. In the gap, you’re measuring what is against what you believe should be.

When you’re in the gap, then your past becomes a problem. It becomes a nightmare because your past isn’t what it should have been. You’re not where you “should” be as a person.

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.

While in the gap, your experiences are driving you. If things aren’t how you ideally want them to be, then you’re the victim. In the gain, you’re antifragile. Everything happens for you, not to you. Every experience has something to offer. Every moment you learn and become better, not bitter as a result.

High-hope people take every experience they have as a learning opportunity—no matter the experience. Everything happens for them, not to them. They utilize every experience to improve how they live and approach life. This is pathways thinking, which is taking every experience you have and using it for learning and iteration. Every experience is a perpetual goldmine filled with more and more lessons.

Thich Nhat Hahn said, “There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.”

Therefore, measuring yourself against someone else’s results and standards is a sure path to becoming average or good, but never uniquely great, one-of-a-kind, and world-class. You can’t beat someone else at being them, just like someone else cannot beat you at being you. The scariest and most courageous thing you’ll ever do is to be yourself.

Your agency as a person is based on what you choose to develop yourself into. We all will become someone. It’s your responsibility to define what you want and to direct your focus and attention toward that.

First, you define your Dream Check. This Dream Check should be ballpark 10x what you’ve been paid to this point for a Unique Ability project. This is a massive, even absurd, amount of money to be paid for something that would ultimately be extreme play and transformational for you to do. Then you ask yourself these two questions: What specific value would I need to provide such that my Dream Check would be a no-brainer and extreme bargain for the person who would happily pay me? What would need to be true of my Unique Ability to be valuable enough that someone would see it as a no-brainer and extreme bargain to write and pay me my Dream Check?

Chapter Takeaways Many high achievers are prone to being in “the gap,” wherein they constantly measure themselves and their experiences against unreachable ideals. This makes them feel terrible and unsuccessful, regardless of what they’ve achieved. Ideals are like a horizon in the desert. They provide illumination and direction but are unreachable. No matter how many steps you take toward the horizon, it will continually move out of reach. Ideals are the same. They are useful for direction, but you shouldn’t measure yourself against them. Being in the gain is a twofold concept that enables you to effectively measure your progress and transform every experience you have into greater learning, meaning, and growth. To be in the gain, you only measure your progress backward against where you were before. You never measure yourself against anything external—whether that be your own ideals or other people. If you’re living in “the gap,” then going for 10x growth will be a nightmare for you and everyone around you. Firstly, you won’t recognize, value, or appreciate the progress you’re making along the way, since you’ll be measuring yourself against continually moving and unreachable ideals. Secondly, being in the gap alienates you from those around you, making life a drag and “success” an impossibility for them and you. Third, without transforming every experience you have along the way into learning and growth, you won’t continually get 10x better and more unique, which is what ...

To go 10x, you approach time qualitatively, not quantitatively. This is actually what Einstein’s relatively theories are based on and it’s a more accurate view of time than the outdated and mechanical Newtonian models. Newtonian time, which is inaccurate, views time as abstract, fixed, and linear—the past is behind us, the present is now, and the future is in front of us. Newtonian time also views time in absolute terms, meaning time is the same for everyone, everywhere, and in every situation. Twenty-four hours for you is the same as 24 hours for me.3 Einstein’s relativity theories of time, in addition to modern research in psychology and neuroscience, shatter Newtonian views of time, providing a much more compelling and transformational approach to time. Einstein time is subjective, qualitative, non-linear, and flexible, not fixed. Put simply, time is not the same from one situation to another, nor from one perspective to another.4 No two people are having the same experience of time. Twenty-four hours for me and 24 hours for you are not the same.

The ancient Greeks had two words for time: kairos and chronos.5,6 While chronos refers to chronological or sequential time, kairos signifies a period or season, a moment of indeterminate time in which an event of significance happens. Chronos is quantitative. Kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature. Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment. Kairos is what many philosophers and mystics would refer to as “deep time” or “alive time.” In kairos-time, the world seems to stop entirely. It can be measured in long exhales, a shared laugh, a colorful sunset, a courageous moment. It is qualitative time where you move forward in the present, untethered by any moving clock or calendar.

Advancement is kairos. Busy is chronos.

Being busy isn’t how you become world-class.

If you’re never fully unplugged, you’re also never in the zone. Your ability to turn 100 percent “on” and work in a flow state is in equal proportion to your ability to turn 100 percent “off” and fully release and let go. Focus is contraction. Recovery is expansion.

One study found that only 16 percent of respondents reported getting creative insight while at work.27 Ideas generally came while the person was at home or in transportation, or during recreational activity. “The most creative ideas aren’t going to come while sitting in front of your monitor,” says Scott Birnbaum, a vice president of Samsung Semiconductor.

Being busy is staying at the surface. To find big ideas, you need lots of free time. But also, higher quality time. Lots of time where you’re rested, relaxed, and open. This is one fundamental reason why recovery is so essential. Your best and most innovative ideas will occur while you’re unplugged from the busyness of work and able to really expand and contract your thinking—going hyper-micro and hyper-macro—expanding the vision, coming up with new ideas, etc.

“Tightly scheduled entrepreneurs cannot transform themselves.”

There are two modes of experimentation: Explore and Exploit To go 10x, you’ll want both. Exploring happens on Free Days. It’s when you’re detached from the stress and strain of work, and have the freedom and openness of mind to relax, think, and explore. I call this recovery-flow or kairos-recovery. Exploring is about learning new things via reading books or studying ideas way outside your discipline. But also, in exploring, you can look for new opportunities beyond what you’re currently doing. You’re testing and exploring new things that you’ll eventually commit to and exploit. Exploiting happens on Focus Days. This is when you’re in focus-flow or kairos-focus and getting stuff done. You’re totally in the focus cave and executing on what you’re fully committed to.

For each person, Focus Days and Buffer Days will be different. Your Buffer Days are for any form of preparation or organization—whether that be meeting with key collaborators, working with consultants or coaches, meeting with your team, or preparing notes or resources you’ll later use on your Focus Days. Focus Days, conversely, are all about creating results. On Focus Days, entrepreneurs do nothing outside their 20 percent most high impact tasks. Focus Days are for the highest paying activities, which continually go up as you go 10x in your Unique Ability.

Structure your week for high performance and stack similar activities and meetings next to each other on the same day. Switching from different types of tasks, such as creative tasks to administrative tasks, is ineffective.

Each day, go for no more than three important results. Once you’re done with those three, call it a day. Celebrate and recover. Make sure those three activities are 10x, not 2x. They are the highest and most enjoyable use of your time.

It takes courage and vulnerability to get direct and quality feedback. You’ve got to be completely honest that “this” is where you’re currently at. There’s risk in getting feedback, but only if you need to be right. If you’re more interested in getting it right, then you’ll regularly seek feedback as a forcing function to produce and transform your thinking.

Chapter Takeaways The public education system and traditional corporate structure are based on a quantitative and linear model of time, which is focused on busyness and effort, not flow, creativity, and results. To go 10x, you approach time qualitatively and non-linearly. Entertainers have different segments of time, which are optimized for helping them develop higher levels of mastery in their increasingly valuable performances. To go 10x, adopt an entertainer or performance model of time, which is focused on quality, not quantity. It’s also focused on you becoming 10x better in your craft, which involves hyper-focused days, preparation days, and recovery days. The more you go 10x, the more recovery and large blocks of open time for novelty, relaxation, fun, and connection are essential. Commit to scheduling Free Days throughout your week, month, and year. Choose the number of Free Days that scares you a little bit. You’ll be surprised that you achieve more and better results by doing less. Working less is essential to making more money and going 10x. Freeing yourself up is a purpose of your team, especially when you evolve to a self-managing company. You’ll never know how good your team is until you go away. Also, they’ll never know how good they can be until you let them manage themselves. Structure your week for high performance and flow. Stack and schedule similar activities like meetings on the same day. Only have meetings on various days of the week. Have several da...

there are four levels you’ll evolve through as an entrepreneur if you continue going 10x to 10x, which this chapter will walk you through. The four levels are as follows: Level 1 to Level 2 Entrepreneurship: Level one entrepreneurship is being a rugged individual who either does everything themselves or micromanages the few Whos they have. Level two entrepreneurship is where you evolve beyond How-focused rugged individualism to Who-focused leadership, applying Who Not How in all areas of your life and business. Level 2 to Level 3 Entrepreneurship: Going from level two entrepreneurship of being a leader applying Who Not How to level three entrepreneurship means you’ve replaced yourself with better-fit leaders who run your Self-Managing Company. You’re now freed-up from the day-to-day operations to fully focus on exploring new possibilities, innovating the best 20 percent of what you’re now doing, expanding vision, and collaborating within your Unique Ability. Level 3 to Level 4 Entrepreneurship: Going from level three entrepreneurship of having a Self-Managing Company to level four entrepreneurship means everything happening around you, including in your business, operates as Self-Multiplying Unique Ability Teamwork. In a Self-Multiplying Unique Ability Team, all individuals are encouraged to continually and autonomously refine their own roles down to their 20 percent. All right-fit Whos embrace the freedom of being intrinsically motivated and transforming their Unique Abil...

When the “why” is strong enough, you find the “how.”

Core Applications Start getting Whos immediately to handle the 80 percent of tasks you’re currently doing. The first Who you’ll likely want is an administrative assistant of some form to take most of the logistical and procedural tasks off your plate, enabling you to focus where you’re best. Get a Who that organizes and systemizes you, so you can stop having to continually organize yourself. The more dedicated you are to your creativity and craft, the less bandwidth and cognitive load you’ll be able to give to procedural and organizational tasks. Get Whos to happily and successfully handle that stuff for you. Remember, Frank Sinatra didn’t move his own pianos. Neither should you—whatever that means for you. Begin investing in Whos in all the key areas of your life. This will enable greater depth, quality, and flow in all aspects of your life. Every Who you get is an investment in you, your life, and your results. Before you feel ready, train up leadership to replace you from being the organizational leader of the business. Create a Self-Managing Company that operates and runs without you involved in the day-to-day. The leader(s) you hire or develop will be better than you at leading the organization and team, unless that is 100 percent your Unique Ability. Even still, your best contribution is continually expanding yourself as a person and leader, expanding your vision, and increasing the quality and impact of your Unique Ability for increasingly niche people. Create a cul...

Chapter Takeaways There are at least four core levels of entrepreneurship that you’ll need to pass through to go 10x again and again. The faster you go up these levels, the faster and easier each following 10x jump will be. Level one entrepreneurship is being a solopreneur or micromanager, where you’re a rugged individual who either does all the How yourself, with very little Who. Or, if you do have Whos, you micromanage them, stunting your own freedom and growth, and stunting their autonomy and growth. This is where Tim Schdmit, the founder and CEO of the U.S. Concealed Carry Association (USCCA), was for over a decade until he shifted to level two entrepreneurship. Level two entrepreneurship is evolving beyond the rugged individual to becoming a leader who applies Who Not How. By applying Who Not How, you begin operating far more in the 20 percent of your 10x process—which is your Unique Ability. You fully trust the Whos to handle the Hows of their various roles, and you don’t micromanage them. You give them autonomy and trust with clear vision and standards. Level three entrepreneurship goes beyond applying Who Not How in all aspects of your life to creating a Self-Managing Company. In a Self-Managing Company, you’re no longer managing or leading the day-to-day aspects of the business. Instead, you’ve trained up or hired leaders to lead the team and business for you. You’re still a visionary and leader of the business as a whole, and you’re not entirely disconnected. How...