The 10X Rule, at first glimpse, sounds insane. It asks you to commit to ten times the effort and to make goals that are, like, 10 times bigger than you ever imagined possible. When I first started reading Grant Cardone’s The 10X Rule, the first thought I had was that this was nuts! It’s impossible to keep up that kind of pace, and how would anyone ever think to set their goals at such gargantuan levels? By the time the book was half over, something odd had happened. It felt like the principles I was reading about were sinking into my soul, and I realised the 10X approach could be the key to unlocking greatness.
The 10X Rule is based on two preposterous premises. One of them is the obvious, 10 times the effort. If you know the average for your job or situation is 50 calls a day, make 500. If it feels like you are going overboard with an exponential increase in effort, only then can you stop and say: ‘Hey, this sucks.’ But if you are in a zone of mediocrity, you will always feel like you suck before others find you out. This is what 10X is all about. The second part of the 10X Rule is to set goals that are 10 times more ambitious than what you do at first. If you shoot for the moon, you’ll end up among the stars.
At first, both of these ideas struck me as pure bollocks. Not only was it a pain in the bollocks to write down my daily goals obsessively, and put in ‘ten times the effort’ and all that nonsense, but pursuing what seemed impossible, like 10X, was what discomfort zones were made for. Truly, I wanted to stay huddled in my comfort zone. But after reading farther, Cardone’s relentless refrain – that if we are operating within our comfort zone, we will only ever be mediocre, while doing what others tell us is impossible is the only way to attain extraordinary success – began to take root in my mind.
Perhaps the most fundamental point in the book’s lesson is a shift in mindset. Many of us spend our lives waiting for success to come to us, yearning for that breakthrough or that random stroke of fate to send us on our way. According to Cardone, settling for this kind of passive wish for success indicates that we have resigned ourselves to mediocrity. To achieve the extraordinary, success must be pursued with focused relentless effort and brutal resolve. I started to feel that my so-called ‘realistic’ goals were actually the chains that kept me from reaching my full potential.
True change came only after I began to apply the 10X principles a little at a time in my daily life. My first goals were small: instead of my normal 30-minute workout, I’d do an hour. Then I began to set bigger goals on the job, for projects that looked impossible – and yeah, it got hard. And sometimes pretty tiring. But I started seeing results.
Not only did I quickly increase my level of fitness, but I realised that the more effort I put into my training, the more productive I was at work: the harder I pushed, the more I achieved, the more confident I got, the higher my ambition rose. This climbing escalator of effort and achievement was motivating, and more than that: it was deeply seductive.
Sure, there were times when I thought: Well, can I truly do this? Sure, I got knocked down a few times. However, Cardone stresses that being knocked down and still trying again comes with the territory of 10X engineering. You not only shrink your gap with others and seed ten more through effort, but you learn how to make something unusual your sieve, your waterfall and almost an given. By doing a lot of the right things day after day, week after week and month after month, you learn how to ‘shoot a thousand bullets a day and go home hungry’. Permit extraordinary efforts to morph into daunting but familiar habits.
The best part of the 10X mindset is the gain. My world has improved dramatically in every way since I learned to do what the 10Xers do: frame my goals in terms of the ideal scenario, then create a plan to stretch myself to achieve it. Writing and editing my goals is a way to focus my thoughts and galvanise my effort. The horizon of possibility expands when I confront my own limits and exceed them.
Committing to the 10X Rule of work seems intimidating at first — but do it, starting small and incrementally each day, and watch as the compounding impact of consistent 10X effort yields life-changing results. Your output can leave you in awe. Others will even push you to stop so they can catch up! This sh*t turns dreams into reality!
