“The only way to make our present better is by making our future bigger.” -Dan Sullivan
1: Marketing expert Joe Polish asked his mastermind group of entrepreneurs this question: “If you wanted to improve your profits by ten percent, how would you do it?”
Each group member spent 10 minutes writing down their best answers, Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy write in 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less.
Then, Joe invited Dr. Alan Barnard, one of the world’s leading experts on constraint theory and decision-making, to share his thoughts.
“This is actually a really bad question,” Alan said. “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.”
What does Alan believe is a far better question? How could we grow our profits 10x?
“Because there are likely to be very FEW, maybe even only ONE way to create 10x growth,” Alan explained. “Indeed, almost nothing we’re currently doing would get us there.”
He continued: “To separate the signal from the noise, we need to make the goal big enough to weed out most paths or strategies. Impossible goals help us identify the ONE or FEW conditions that have the highest possible upside. Those are the areas to focus our scarcest resource–our limited attention on.”
Alan asks one of the entrepreneurs, “Is it possible to make $1,000,000 in profits over the next 12 months?”
“Sure,” the entrepreneur replies.
“What about making $10,0000,000 profit in the next 12 months,” Alan asks. “Do you believe that’s possible?”
“I don’t think so,” the entrepreneur answers.
Now things get interesting. Alan suggests the next questions to ask are: “It would be impossible, unless. . ? What conditions need to be true for $10,000,000 profit in the next 12 months?”
The final question? How can we create these “unless” conditions?
So, the entrepreneur thinks about and writes down the conditions that would need to occur for that impossible goal to become believably possible.
“Those conditions and strategies are where we should focus if we want the highest return on time and energy,” Alan states. “Everything else we’re doing is noise.”
2: That’s the power of 10x. That’s how we make the impossible possible.
“Push it out as far as we can,” Dan and Ben implore us. “Only once we make our goal impossible will we stop operating based on our current assumptions and knowledge. We’ll be open to new ideas, and we’ll entertain different paths that we’ve never considered.”
Which is the “fundamental reason why 10x goals and vision are simpler, easier, and more practical than 2x goals,” the authors write.
When operating with a 2x mindset, we typically consider our current and past assumptions. “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 our best energy and effort.”
We expend enormous amounts of energy but lack the necessary focus to do something inspiring.
A 10x mindset is different.
“Seemingly impossible or massive goals are highly practical because they immediately separate what works from what won’t,” Dan and Ben observe. “Almost nothing works for 10x growth, which means if we take it seriously, we’ll have to be a lot more honest about everything we’re now doing. We’ll also have to be far more choosey about the paths we take forward.”
10x thinking forces us to consider a completely different route to get where we want to go. We are forced to ask different questions to different people.
3: Here’s an example. Ben’s son Kaleb is a talented high school tennis player. He wants to play in college.
Recently, Kaleb’s coach asked him, “Why don’t you just go for professional?”
The question caught Kaleb off-guard. He’d never considered that possibility.
On the drive home, Kaleb and Ben discussed the question the coach had asked.
“What if you committed to going for professional,” Ben asked his son. “Would that change anything about what you’re doing now?”
“Maybe,” Kaleb replied.
“Do you think your current trajectory would get you to pro?”
“No.”
“If we went for pro, do you think we could find a path for that?”
“Probably.”
“Do you think it would be different from a college path?”
“Yeah.”
The goal determines the process. “There are many coaches in the Orlando area where we live that could likely get Kaleb to the college tennis level,” Ben reflects. “However, there are extremely few coaches that could realistically guide Kaleb to the pro level. If we committed to the pro level, we’d have to change Kaleb’s training process dramatically.”
Interestingly, by committing to “go pro,” Kaleb is dramatically increasing the likelihood of becoming a collegiate tennis player.
“Because at least then we’d start being far more discerning and pickier about everything he’s doing,” Ben notes. “In other words, the easiest way to get 2x growth is by going for 10x, because 10x forces us to stop almost everything we’re doing, which is ultimately a waste of time anyway.”
As Norman Vincent Peale once said: “Shoot for the Moon. Even if we miss we’ll land among the stars.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Are my goals 2X or 10X? If the former, what would a 10X goal look like? How does it make me feel?
Action: Journal about my answers.