1: Steve Jobs once observed: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. . . Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path.”
This week, we’ve been exploring strategies to go 10x. Rather than 2x. Which is our default mode. Do what we’re doing. But a little better.
10x is different.
We “can’t go 10x with the same model we have now,” Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy write in 10x Is Easier Than 2x.
“This includes not only our business and strategic models but also our mental models and identities as well,” they suggest. “Going 10x will transform everything in our life if we fully embrace it.”
2: The 80-20 rule tells us that 20 percent of our efforts generate 80 percent of our results. To go 10x, we need to go “all- in” on the 20 percent and leave behind the 80 percent. We have to, as the authors put it, “Radically change 80 percent of our life.”
That can be frightening.
So, how do we muster up the courage? The answer is counter-intuitive. We begin not by looking out into the future but by looking backward into our past.
“Time travel backward to the point in our lives where we made only one-tenth of what we’re making now,” Dan and Ben suggest.
Ask: “Looking back, could I ever have imagined being where I am right now?”
Well? “Probably not,” they predict. “Just as we probably can’t imagine going 10x in the future. But look at our past, and we can see that we’ve already done it at least once.
“And we can do it again,” Dan and Ben believe.
3: When we see and appreciate the 10x jumps we’ve made in our past, we are better able to see our next 10x jumps in our future.
We’ve likely gone 10x many times in many aspects of our lives.
“Anytime we’ve committed to something we wanted and transformed through that commitment, we went 10x,” they observe. We “made a fundamental and qualitative upgrade that permanently expanded our freedoms and agency.”
One of our first 10x moves was moving from crawling to walking. Talk about 10x!
“When we learned how to speak, we went 10x. When we learned how to read, we went 10x. When we learned how to make friends, we went 10x,” Dan and Ben write.
“Learning to drive a car (or fly a plane) is a jump. Becoming an entrepreneur is a 10x jump.”
Every time we committed to something beyond what we have done in the past, we were transformed by that commitment. That’s what it means to go 10x.
10x jumps transform us. Afterward, we are quite literally not the same person. We’ve “altered our identity, mental models, and way of being,” they note.
We’ve also enriched our Unique Ability [hyperlink].
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Dan and Ben recommend: “As a powerful exercise, take some time to reflect back on my previous 10x jumps. Also, reflect on the core 20 percent of each of those jumps—the things that remained when I was was one-tenth of where I’m at now. Also reflect on the 80 percent I let go of in each jump I made. By clarifying the 20 percent in each stage, I’ll see how I’ve continually refined my Unique Ability to create 10x freedoms in my life.”
Action: Capture my reflections on the questions above in my journal.