Hey there! Now I’m going to talk about one of the most influential principles of the The 10X Rule.
In the words of Cardone, winners are really like wizards: they don’t traffic in people’s “realities”. They create a new one. Winners aren’t worried about what you think is possible or impossible. They are in the business of making things possible by producing what they believe is possible. People who become heroes are innovators; they push against existing possibilities and social, collective ‘realities’ of what is “real”.
Those who triumph don’t accept agreed-upon facts; they simply make what they envision. What applies to salespeople, athletes, artists, politicians, and inventors is that greatness is a special form of obsession – the willingness to ignore practicality and create the reality one wants. The next reality of what will be or can be is as close as the next person who creates it.
It hit a nerve. When I read this chapter the first time, it was that flashbulb moment of true understanding.
It explains why so many of us spend our lives being average without ever realising that we’re doing so. Setting our bar so low, and basing it on so many accepted norms, benchmarks and limits, is often the price of conforming to what’s expected of us. Whereas the people I most admired for their personal and professional leadership, whether it was Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Oprah Winfrey, seemed to inhabit their own worlds. Magic? Perhaps I was setting my bar too low. What led Einstein to predict the presence of neutrinos an entire decade before they were detected in a lab?
To make this habit stick, I began making big statements – things that felt beyond reach. For example, I decided to double business revenues within 12 months. I stopped wondering about minor, incremental steps and threw away the ‘how-to’ playbooks. I just looked at what I wanted and started planning the steps that could make it so.
The catch: it worked – in fact. It was as dumbfounding as it was illuminating. It wasn’t just that I’d gone off the reservation in my new thinking. I’d moved outside the reservation entirely.
Tips for Creating Your Own Reality
- Ignore Mass Agreement: You don’t need to look around and think “what is possible?” You can just think ‘I think this is possible.
- Visualise your Big Goals: Don’t let ‘reality’ temper your imagination! Long on imagination and short on details, dream big, envisage what you want life to be like.
- Stop believing in limiting beliefs: limiting beliefs are just socially accepted facts. Issac Newton, Thomas Edison and Elon Musk thought differently and succeeded in what used to be considered ‘impossible’ and went beyond the realms of our imaginations.
- Failure Is the Path to Success: Realise that failure is just another round of attempts. Learn to associate failure not with disappointment, but as the natural way to create your reality. Failure is not the opposite of success, it is just another step on the way to success. Failure does not prevent you from reaching your goal, it actually leads you there. Failure is not the opposite of success, it is a necessary part of success.
What if everyone adopted this 10X philosophy? Mediocrity would fall into history’s dustbin and innovation would enable human progress at scale and velocity never before seen.
