Book Review – 10x is easier than 2x - MBC REI – Thoughts About Passive Investing

Grant Cardone made thinking 10x bigger popular with his book “The 10x Rule” [1] back in 2011. However, he focused on the mindset that you need to reach these seemingly impossible goals. Building on this idea, and providing some additional insight into how to actually make this work, Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy published “10x is easier than 2x” [2] in 2023.

Since you cannot simply work your way to a 10x success – there just isn’t enough time in the day – you need a more focused effort on specific tasks. This book helps you figure out what to spend your time on and how to get out of the trap of incremental improvements and into extraordinary success.

I had 4 key takeaways from the book:

To get exceptional results, you need to become someone else. You need to raise your standards to a higher level, and keep working until those new standards become your new normal. This requires you to fully commit to this goal, and ultimately leave behind much of what brought you to this point in your life. That journey can be scary and will likely generate resistance from both yourself and others, which will try to keep you making incremental improvements. Something that sticks with me is the clear statement that you do not need to justify what you want out of life to anyone, simply the fact that you want it is enough.
Setting goals that you don’t know how to accomplish gives you the ability to identify the things you need to do. If you feel that the goal is impossible, ask yourself the questions “This is impossible unless what conditions are met?” That opens up your thinking to understand what needs to happen before you can meet the goal, then you can focus on how to make those conditions a reality. Then, stop working on everything else (which is likely where 80% of your time or more is currently being spent) and focus on those tasks. You want your focus to be deep and narrow, on just the most important things. Pay attention to the quality of that work, not the quantity (number of tasks) since you want to become better at those tasks not just do more. Because results are not linear, a 10x change in impact requires only being 10% better, as long as you are improving the most important things.
Focus on the progress you have made (the gain) and not how far you are from your goal (the gap). You will never hit your ideal life as that ideal will constantly change as you evolve, always remaining out of reach. Focusing on how far you are from the ideal will lead to negativity and unhappiness. Instead, take the time to reflect on the progress that you have made and celebrate your wins. Even if you make mistakes, you can turn those into wins by focusing on what you have learnt instead of what you lost. By focusing on the progress you have made, you are happier and more grateful and are able to enjoy the unique journey that is your life.
Set up your environment so that it supports your goals. There are two main parts to this, choosing the right team and allocating your time effectively. If you don’t have the right team in place, you will be constantly pulled down into the weeds and will not be able to evolve as you need to, so make sure you are surrounded by people who are able to evolve with you. The ultimate goal is to have a self-managing team where you are able to detach from the day-to-day activities without the team suffering. Then you can split your time into focus days, where you go deep into high impact activities, and freedom days, where you recharge. On focus days, you want to group a small number of similar, very high impact activities together (no more than 3 per day) to allow you to go deep into the work. On freedom days, you detach from work completely and do things that build your energy and allow you to be more creative.

This book is targeted at entrepreneurs and business owners so the specifics are not always as applicable to those working for someone else, as employees do not have as much control over their time as business owners do. However, the underlying lessons and approaches to focus on the most important tasks that you have to accomplish can be applied by most people, at least to some degree.

What are your thoughts on the book? What is one thing that you are changing based on it?

If you have any questions or comment about this post, please email them to me at blog@mbc-rei.com, I will reply to the questions that are straightforward and will turn the questions requiring more detailed answers into future blog posts.

For additional reading:

This article is my opinion only, it is not legal, tax, or financial advice. Always do your own research and due diligence. Always consult your lawyer for legal advice, CPA for tax advice, and financial advisor for financial advice.

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