10x thinking: why thinking bigger might mean doing less

I’ve read 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy a few times now, and I’ve recommended it and bought it for so many people that I probably should be taking commission at this point!

It’s become one of my go to books when I need to get out of the weeds, lift my head up and think a bit bigger. One line from it that has always stuck with me is:

“The only way to make your present better is by making your future bigger.”

That, for me, is really the point of 10x thinking.

It isn’t necessarily about selling ten times more. Growth could mean 10x the customer experience, 10x the operational efficiency, 10x the profit, 10x the quality, 10x the speed, 10x the impact from the same resources, or a 10x reduction in the bullshit, waste and friction that gets in the way!

If you ask how to make something 10 or 20% better, you can normally tweak what already exists. Make the process a bit quicker, add another channel, improve conversion, work a bit harder.

But ask what 10x could look like and those incremental answers start to run out pretty quickly. You have to think differently, and importantly, you have to think about what not to do.

The book talks a lot about the 80/20 principle. Most people have heard of Pareto, so I’m not going to give anyone a lesson in that, but what I find really interesting is how ruthlessly you can apply it.

If 20% of what you’re doing is driving the majority of the impact, what happens if you really focus on that? And what happens if you stop protecting the other 80% just because it already exists?

Steve Jobs is a great example. When he returned to Apple, one of the big changes was dramatically reducing the number of products the company was trying to build. Rather than trying to make everything better, Apple focused on a much smaller number of product categories and put its best people and energy behind them.

The question wasn’t really, “How do we make all of this better?” It was closer to, “What actually deserves our focus?”

That’s the bit I really like, because you can apply that thinking pretty much anywhere.

In customer experience, perhaps the question isn’t just “how do we reduce call waiting times by 20%?” Maybe it’s “why does the customer need to call us in the first place?”

In operations, maybe it isn’t “how do we make this seven step process faster?” Maybe it’s “if we designed this today, would all seven steps even exist?”

With profit, maybe it isn’t automatically “how do we sell more?” Maybe it’s looking at where complexity, poor process, rework, unnecessary cost and activity are quietly eating away at margin.

And then, obviously, there’s AI.

Whatever side of the AI debate you sit on, it is changing what’s possible. Research, analysis, admin, development, production, customer service and plenty more can now be approached in completely different ways.

That doesn’t mean AI is the answer to everything. It clearly isn’t. But it does mean there are processes and ways of working we’ve accepted for years that are worth questioning again.

If something takes two days, does it still need to? If ten people touch a process, do all ten need to? If we were building the process from scratch today, would we build it like this?

Don’t just take a crap process, add AI and make the crap process faster! Question the process itself.

Which brings me back to 10x.

My challenge to myself, and to anyone else running or leading a business, is pretty simple: how might you work smarter, not harder?

What would actually need to change to 10x your growth, customer experience, operational efficiency, profit, impact, or whatever matters most to you?

Think BIG. Then get ruthless.

What is actually driving impact, and what isn’t? If you could only keep the 20% creating the greatest value, what would make the cut? And what would happen if you culled, changed or challenged a load of the rest?

Test it. Learn. Repeat.

Because I think 10x thinking is as much about the journey as it is the final number. It forces you out of your comfortable lanes and makes you challenge assumptions you probably wouldn’t challenge if the goal was just another 10 or 20%.

Aim for 10x and hopefully you get there! Maybe you get to 3x or 4x.

But if aiming that high forces you to rethink the model, remove a load of waste, focus on what actually matters and end up way further ahead than the 2x you originally thought possible, that still feels like a pretty useful exercise to me.

The destination matters, but so does what aiming much higher forces you to change along the way.

I’d highly recommend 10x Is Easier Than 2x to any business owner or leader.

And damn, I still won’t get the commission ;)