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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Sullivan
Read between
June 8 - June 25, 2023
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.
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.
There are two levels of freedom—surface-level freedom and higher-level freedom. Surface-level freedom is external and more measurable. This is “freedom from”—where you’re freed from ignorance, poverty, and slavery. But there is a more abundant kind of freedom that is internal and qualitative. This is “freedom to”—which is where you take full ownership over your life.
10x is the means, and freedom is the end.
Dan Sullivan, discovered four fundamental freedoms that 10x people seek: Freedom of Time Freedom of Money Freedom of Relationship Freedom of Purpose
Expanding your freedom is what Dr. James Carse would call the “infinite game,” which is about continually transforming yourself and the game you’re playing, and never getting caught or stuck within any finite game or set of rules.
“Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it. This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed, or it will die.” — ROBERT GREENE24
How you do anything is how you do everything. 10x becomes your filter and norm.
Rather than operating in quantitative time, you’ll learn to leverage time qualitatively, wherein you have far more flow, fun, and transformation. You’ll be less scheduled. Your time will be less thinly-sliced and fragmented. You’ll have bigger and wider blocks of freedom for deep work, active recovery, and peak experiences.
Your vision will become so compelling and exciting that the right people will see multiple 10x futures for themselves in your vision.
“The road to hell is paved with the pursuit of volume. Volume leads to marginal products, marginal customers, and greatly increased managerial complexity . . . Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we want leads to high returns . . . Strive for excellence in few things, rather than good performance in many . . . It is not shortage of time that should worry us, but the tendency for the majority of time to be spent in low-quality ways . . . The 80/20 principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20 percent of activities, we could work a two-day week and achieve 60
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“There are literally infinite things I could do to grow my profits by ten percent. The goal isn’t big enough to create focus and specificity. If, however, you asked, ‘If you wanted to grow your profits by ten times, how would you do it?’ that would be a much better question because there are likely to be very FEW, maybe even only ONE way to create 10x growth.
Impossible goals help you identify the ONE or FEW conditions that have the highest possible upside. Those are the areas to focus your scarcest resource - your limited attention on.”
Seemingly impossible or massive goals are highly practical because they immediately separate what works from what won’t, illuminating the few paths that have the greatest efficacy. Small goals are unable to clarify effective pathways because they are too marginal or linear from your current location. 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
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The goal determines the process.
Chunking-up the goal to its next quantum level up and making it 10x bigger forces you to find different pathways to get where you want to go. You ask different questions to different people.
“Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”
“If we didn’t have ambition—some big goal we are after—how would we know what little things, what distractions, to say no to?” — RYAN HOLIDAY10
Having a 10x mindset means you know and understand that to accomplish more, you must actually do and focus on increasingly less.
working more hours does not equate to better results, but on the contrary, working more hours usually means you’re grinding your wheels on not innovating your thinking enough.
Working too many hours means you’re living 2x, not 10x. It means you’re focused on ef...
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20 percent of your focus is producing 80 percent of your best and most desired results. This “20 percent” consists of the activities you do and particular relationships you have. Just a few things you’re investing in are making up almost all the results. Conversely, 80 percent of your focus is producing a mere 20 percent or less of your best results, meaning you’re investing lots of time and energy into stuff that’s literally holding you back, greatly.
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.
What got you here won’t get you there.
2x is trying to optimize the horse and buggy, getting millimeters and inches for your efforts. 10x is stepping back and inventing the car, like Henry Ford did, where you’re getting miles for the same efforts.
Who Do You Want to Be a Hero To?11 The idea is simple—clarify with precision the exact types of people you want to work with, who also appreciate and value what you do most.
The reason for their linear growth became obvious—they weren’t providing high-leverage and niche services. Almost all of their service was broad to broad clients.
The sales reps particularly resisted the idea, as focusing on High Stakes Freight clients would dramatically cut their call lists from about 300–400 active prospects down to maybe 30–40. The sales reps couldn’t see how they could realistically make a living with so few prospects, even knowing they made more money with each High Stakes prospect.
10x is qualitative, not quantitative—it’s about different and better, not more. The more different and better you are for a highly specific type of person, the more asymmetric the upside in everything you do.
Back in 2019 when the business was mostly built around Routine Freight clients, the team was getting pretty complacent. By doing mostly routine tasks, they’d reached a level of efficiency and weren’t being challenged much. However, when they shifted to High Stakes Freight clients, which are all unique and highly challenging, the operations team was being tested again and learning and growing like they did when they were first starting.
“Good is the enemy of great . . . The good-to-great companies did not focus principally on what to do to become great; they focused equally on what not to do and what to stop doing. . . If you have a cancer in your arm, you’ve got to have the guts to cut off your arm.”
What is your 80 percent
“A 2x goal would involve doing the same things you’re doing now, only more of them. But a 10x goal jumps you out of that, beyond that. 10x requires operating in an entirely different way that bypasses the stresses and complications of a 2x goal.” — DAN SULLIVAN17
when the “why” is strong enough, you’ll find the “how.”
“Nothing happens until after you commit.”
After a person’s perceived point of no return—which was the moment of commitment often involving financial investment—their focus, motivation, and insights skyrocketed.
A core aspect of hope is pathways thinking,23 meaning highly hopeful people continually adjust their pathway until they ultimately find and create a way to their goal, even in the direst of circumstances.
“Every time we hired an assistant, our business doubled the next year,”
“The listings are where all the leverage is,”
You need Whos, not Hows, to go 10x.
Her new 20 percent became recruiting all of the best agents around the city and building a powerful culture in her franchise.
Hiring Whos to free-up your 80 percent isn’t a cost, but a massive investment in yourself and your business.
Transforming herself through her 10x jumps excited her. It’s what she lived for. And every time she did it, she became freer and more expanded as a person, with qualitatively better and more time, money, relationships, and overall purpose.
Every time you go 10x by letting go of a previous 80 percent and going all-in on a new, more expansive 20 percent,
10x goals enable you to clearly identity the 20 percent of things and people in your life that are producing most of your results, and the 80 percent of things and people in your life that are holding you back.
20 percent,
Chad doesn’t just raise the standard for his clients. He also raises the standard for himself. Each year, he takes on fewer clients, but the value of each client is 10x the average of his former clients.
He knows that achieving more does not mean doing more.
“An Essentialist produces more—brings forth more—by removing more instead of doing more.”
Anytime someone wants you to remain as you are, they do so for their own self-preservation. Your evolution threatens their current security, and they want that security more than the freedom that you seek.
