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

No more than three personal objectives each day (important and designed for flow).

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. According to constraint theory, the greatest human bottleneck is attention. Our attention is our most finite resource, even more finite and valuable than our time. Inde

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

The scariest and most courageous thing you’ll ever do is to be yourself.

2x is exhausting and soul-defeating. It’s extremely difficult to put the pedal to the metal and grind away for inches of progress. By contrast, 10x is so big and seemingly impossible that it immediately forces you out of your current mindset and approach. You can’t work 10x harder or longer. Brute force and linear methods won’t get you to 10x.

Your life’s objective is to develop mastery in and fully express your Unique Ability. There’s nothing more important to master. There’s nothing more important to dedicate yourself to. It’s your work. Your life’s work, and if you don’t do it, no one else will.

In his book The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything, Stephen M.R. Covey explains that to gain trust, you don’t earn it. Instead, to gain trust, you give trust.20 This is what building high quality relationships as well as a Self-Managing Team is all about. Rather than micromanaging and governing people, you give them vision, clari

10x isn’t about more. It’s about less. Michelangelo understood this clearly. When the Pope asked about the secret of his genius, particularly in regard to the statue of David, Michelangelo explained, “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.” Going 10x is the simplification of your focus down to the core essential. Then you remove e

“The one saying that my dad told me when I was younger was, ‘What got you there will keep you there.’ He was trying to prove the point that just because you think you’ve made it, doesn’t mean it’s time to take it easy. It means it’s time to keep it going.”

A core aspect of psychological flexibility is viewing yourself as a context, rather than viewing yourself as content.10,11,12 This enables you to not overly identify with your thoughts and emotions, since you’re not your thoughts and emotions. Instead, you’re the context of your thoughts and emotions, and as you change the context, the content chan