1: The year was 1990. Jim Carrey was a struggling young comic.
Sitting in his car high up in the Hollywood Hills overlooking the lights of Los Angeles, he took out his checkbook and wrote himself a check for $10 million. He dated it five years in the future: November 1995. In the notation, he wrote, “For acting services rendered.”
Five years later, just before Thanksgiving of 1995, he got paid $10 million to star in The Mask.
This week we’ve been exploring the idea of Unique Ability. Which is “the purest and most honest expression of ourselves,” Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy write in 10x Is Easier Than 2x.
“Our Unique Ability is how we create value and wealth that is unique and specialized,” they note. “It’s our radically unique way of doing what we do, such that no one else can compete with us even if they wanted to.”
Dan and Ben write: “Jim Carrey was highly specific in the standards he set for himself. His wasn’t a random evolution but a highly conscious and specific one, based on the fitness function he chose for himself. . . He transformed himself and his Unique Ability over and over through full commitment to his dream and calling. He became a true master of his craft. No one else could do what he did.”
2: Dan Sullivan is the co-founder of the Strategic Coach, one of the world’s most successful coaching programs for entrepreneurs.
One of the strategies Dan teaches the entrepreneurs in his program is the “Dream Check.” The idea is to imagine the biggest check we’ve ever received. And then we 10x it.
According to the 80-20 Rule, 20 percent of our efforts generate 80 percent of the value we create. Our Dream Check “clarifies our 20 percent that we’ll go all-in on,” Dan and Ben explain. It tells us where to focus. “By going all-in, we become 10x more capable in that 20 percent, which is highly specific and nuanced, not broad.”
Imagining our Dream Check helps us clarify how we must develop our Unique Ability to earn such a check. “Our Unique Ability is how we transform ourselves again and again into the most unique, valuable, and true form of ourselves,” they note. “Unique Ability is how we create unique wealth and value, which others will happily pay increasing amounts of finite money for.”
Living in our Unique Ability is the key to 10x growth. “The more we develop our Unique Ability,” the authors write, “the higher the value the right people will place on it. The more we invest in our Unique Ability, the more 10x transformations we will make. . . such that being paid the seemingly unrealistic or absurd amount of money is actually not crazy at all. With the level of Unique Ability we acquire, it actually feels totally normal and natural to be paid at that level, even though right now it seems and feels unfathomable.”
Jim Carrey’s story about envisioning being paid $10 million clarified for him how he needed to grow and develop. By doing so, he became one of the most unique and successful comedians ever.
3: Another powerful question Dan suggests we ask is: “Who do I want to be a hero to?” Answering this question “illuminates our fitness function, 20 percent, and the focus of our Unique Ability development. . .
“First, we define our Dream Check,” Dan and Ben write. “This is a massive, even absurd, amount of money.”
Next, we ask two further questions. First: “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?”
And second: “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?”
The likely answer? We would have to become 10x better in our Unique Ability.
We’d “have to be able to produce 10x value for the person who wants it—whatever specific results those are,” they explain. “Who do we want to collaborate with? Who do we want to create specialized value with and for? What kind of Unique Ability would we need to have to get that Dream Check? What specialized skills and abilities and results do we want to create and develop?”
10x is not about bigger. It’s about better.
“Hence, to get our Dream Check, we’d become 10x better and more valuable in some unique and specific way to whomever we want to be a hero to,” the authors write. “What would our 20 percent be—where we’d go all-in to further master our Unique Ability and transform ourselves into the kind of people where getting that Dream Check isn’t just crazy, but feels completely natural?”
More tomorrow.
_______________________________
Reflection: How can I identify and develop my Unique Ability to create value that would justify my own “Dream Check”?
Action: Write myself a “Dream Check” for a significant amount and then brainstorm the specific skills and value I need to develop to make that check a reality.
What did you think of this post?
