10x is easier than 2x, book review

Summary

Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy wrote 10x Is Easier Than 2x, the third in a series with Who Not How and The Gap and the Gain. all three are good. this one is worth reading slowly. here are my chapter by chapter takeaways.

1. chapter one, 10x is a mindset, not a timeline. it’s not “10x in a year.” it’s a litmus test for whether what you’re working on can ever scale. 2x mode is just working more hours doing more of the same. 10x mode forces a different question. before you set a strategy, ask whether the plan would even get you there if you had unlimited time.

2. chapter two, quality over quantity, plus set your own standards. I felt this one. I’ve been creating a lot of content lately and a lot of it has been watered down because I haven’t given it the time. so I read this whole book before recording this episode and boiled it to one or two bullets per chapter. that’s the standard coming back. and standards are personal. you don’t have to chase anyone else’s metric to be successful.

3. chapter three, want what you want, no explanation needed. this is freedom. if you want a nice car, want it. you don’t have to justify it. then find your unique ability. mine is some version of building better humans. that thread ties every business and every piece of content I make. ask “does this help me build a better human” and it gets way easier to say yes and no to things.

4. chapter four, the gap and the gain. living in the gap is measuring yourself against your imagined ideal future self and feeling short. living in the gain is turning around and looking at how far you’ve come. entrepreneurs default to the gap. the cure is daily, even just “what good did I do today.” this book has its own whole book on this concept and it’s worth the read.

5. also in chapter four, fitness function. ask “what am I actually optimizing for.” problems brought to you are often not the real problem and the optimization target is wrong.

6. chapter five, the entrepreneurial time system. three day types. free days, no work. zero. no checking email “for a second.” that’s still working. target 150 per year. buffer days, the day for meetings, admin, prep, the small stuff. focus days, where you create on high impact tasks inside your unique ability. for me Saturday and Sunday are free. Monday and Friday are buffer. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are focus. when I drift away from this, the business stalls. when I lock back into it, 10x is possible.

7. chapter six, four levels of leadership. level one solo, you do everything. level four transformational, you have a team where each person is operating in their unique ability and the org self manages. the higher you climb, the more output you get from less direct effort.

8. the whole book is worth reading. it’ll challenge how you set goals and how you spend a week. challenge accepted. try harder.

Transcript

10x as a mindset, not a timeline

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Hey, Jerred Moon here, and welcome to the Better Human Business Podcast. Today, I’m going to be doing a book review. So the book is 10X is Easier Than 2X, and it was written by Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy.

So Dan Sullivan, he’s the founder of Strategic Coach. Really, he, it’s his ideas, things he’s been doing for the last several decades. He’s in his late 70s. He’s been a coach of entrepreneurs for 40 years. Dr. Benjamin Hardy is a PhD, and they’re starting to write books together. This is, I think, their third book, and to be honest, they’re all good.

All the books are good. There’s 10X is Easier Than 2X is the one I’m reviewing today. They have Who, Not How, and then The Gap in the Game. All great books. So I obviously wouldn’t be doing a book review if I didn’t think that it was a good book, but I want to just document some of my takeaways from having just recently finished it.

So the subtitle is How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less. So I am actually very familiar with Dan Sullivan and Strategic Coach and have implemented a lot of the things he’s been teaching over the last several decades, and one of the big ones that I implemented a long time ago was his entrepreneurial time system.

And so this is where you break your week or your year into having certain different types of days. So you have free days, focus days, and buffer days. And I’ll talk more about this in a minute in my review of the book, but I had implemented that for a long time, and it worked out really well, but what started to happen to my schedule was just more and more meetings, more and more management-type tasks to where the entrepreneurial time system was getting worked out of my schedule, and when I noticed this happening, I pushed things back.

I really feel like that’s when growth happens when you are in this free space to create and lead and communicate, and you’re not just, some people like to say working in the business versus working on the business, that kind of mindset, but I think there’s even more than that. I think there’s the ability to have the free time, the ability to be creative, these kind of things really help you.

And so I’m going to dive into this book and just know that I’m very intimately familiar with all these things. I’ve been implementing them for a long time, so I highly recommend them. Also, I think that you should read the book. So bottom line up front, I think that it’s really good for entrepreneurs or anybody who just wants to change their way of thinking.

So I’m going to go over my chapter takeaways. There’s six chapters. I’m just going to do one or two bullets on each. So the first chapter, my kind of takeaway there was 10X is more about being a mindset. There’s not necessarily like a time limit. It’s not like going 10X in one year, three years, or five years.

It really is just a mindset and it becomes a litmus test for what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. So that was my biggest takeaway for chapter one is asking the question, does this scale? Could this get me to 10X? If there’s no time limit, would it eventually get there or am I in a 2X mindset?

quality over quantity and standards

So 2X is typically just working more. It’s just working longer hours. It’s just doing more of the same things. Whether it’s not being creative or thinking outside the box or really putting your ideas and strategies under the microscope and saying, hey, will this actually get me to the next level? Will this get me to 10X?

So that’s chapter one for me is it’s all about the mindset and I think it’s a phenomenal mindset to have. Just take a step back before you implement something new, before you set strategy or set goals or whatever and just think, hey, is this a 2X mindset or 10X mindset? And really, you’ll need to read the book probably to get more into the weeds of that, but I think that’s a great takeaway for me.

The second one, which has really pushed me, I feel like I’ve been creating a lot of content. I’m creating content here. I write. I do stuff at the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast and I honestly feel like my content has gotten a little bit watered down. I haven’t had the time to focus and create really good content.

And so this podcast today, I sat down. I read this entire book in preparation for the podcast. I’ve taken a ton of notes and then I boiled my notes down to one or two bullet points. So I’m trying to make my content better. So the biggest thing from chapter two was quality over quantity. And I think that really, that is a standard I have for myself that has been lost recently and I’m bringing it back.

And it’s just going to be a staple from here on out. So quality over quantity. Try hard in every single thing. You don’t let yourself get watered down. Don’t just try and do more. It’s easy to get in that trap if you’re trying to be a content creator these days or even doing things in business. So my biggest takeaway was quality over quantity.

Another one from chapter two was set standards for yourself. This is something I’ve been talking about on the Garage Gym Athlete podcast for years is you don’t have to have, you don’t have to follow someone else’s standard, right? Like you don’t have to run as fast as someone else or look the way someone else looks.

And this is specifically a fitness, but the same in business, like just set your own standards in the Better Human Business podcast. If you scroll back, you’ll see like I have the rules and I’m going to do more of those kind of episodes because I haven’t even gone over all my rules, but those rules are standards for myself.

They’re the standards I set for myself through learning and through doing hard things. And so I think focusing on quality over quantity and setting standards for yourself of what that means. My biggest chapter two takeaways, and that one really challenged me just in my current space and where I’m at right now.

Chapter three, I feel like you have to reread this chapter a few times, but the biggest takeaways for me were want what you want, which I think is just such a freeing mentality. And he talks about wanting versus needing and how wanting is more of a freedom based thing. So want what you want, but have no explanation.

Like you don’t need an explanation of why you want what you want, but you just don’t need it. If you want something that then you just want it, then go and get it. Don’t try and justify or work things backwards or just if you want, if you want a nice car, you want it. Don’t worry about what other people think.

want what you want and unique ability

Just go get it if that’s what you want. You just really have to want what you want and then own that mentality and idea. And then the other big concept from chapter three is finding your unique ability and trying to only operate in that. This is very hard. This has been very hard for me. I’ve known about this unique ability concept from Dan Sullivan for 10 years.

It’s very difficult for me. I feel like my unique ability specifically, I just put it in the realm of building better humans. So I do that through trying to educate people in health, wellness, fitness, programming, business, mindset. That’s the thread that ties everything I do together in life as I’m building better humans.

But it’s taken me a while. That’s been like how the everything I do, because I do a lot of different things, how it all connects. That’s been a challenge. That’s where a unique ability has been a challenge for me. But as long as I’m on that thread and I’m like, hey, is this podcast episode, is this thing that I’m doing right now, does this help me build a better human?

Does it help me help someone else become a better version of themselves? And so when I can ask myself that question, the answer is yes. I feel a lot better about what I’m doing. And it makes sense. I have this big why behind what I’m doing now, as opposed to just, oh, I should create some content today, or I should do this thing because I’m supposed to.

I hate that. And I just, I can’t get stuck in that for me. I have to have a bigger purpose for what I’m doing. So if you’re new to the unique ability concept, you probably need to read the chapter a couple of times. And to be honest, they might do an entire book on that. They probably should. So that’s chapter three.

Then we get into chapter four. He talks about the gap versus the gain. So this was actually the second book they’ve written in the series. There’s a whole book on the gap versus the gain. So I’ll explain it briefly, but I also recommend you read that book as well. I might do a review on that one too.

Phenomenal mindset shift book. If you just feel like you need a mindset shift, and this, nothing to do with entrepreneurship, the book does, but like anyone could read the gap versus the gain and come away with some solid takeaway. So what is the gap versus gain takeaway? That was a lot of what chapter four was.

So the gap is when you are measuring yourself to an ideal or a future self. So I want to earn more money or I want to be fitter and you’re looking to the future and then you’re measuring yourself to where you’re at now and you’re like, I am short of what I want to achieve. So that’s the gap. That’s what he calls living in the gap is like just constantly looking at what you want to be, what you want to do in the future and then saying, Hey, I’m not good enough.

I haven’t achieved anything. I’m just, that’s being in the gap. So it’s a very negative mindset and to be honest, a lot of entrepreneurs are that way and that’s why he came up with that whole mentality. So that’s the gap. The gain is looking at where you’re at now, but then turning backwards and look where you’ve come from.

So looking at, wow, two years ago in business I was here or two years ago in fitness I was here and looking at how much you’ve progressed and how much you’ve gained and he’s just talking about how that’s so much more of a positive place to be and I couldn’t agree more. It’s very easy to get in the gap situation.

the gap and the gain

So just taking a few moments to realize how far you’ve come. Even if you just do that at the end of every day, Hey, how much progress did I make today? What good things did I do this day? Those kinds of things I think is phenomenal. And then another smaller one, a part of chapter four, something they call fitness function and it’s really answering the question, what are you optimizing for?

And so I think that as a business owner, this is something that you should be very aware of because going back to just that mindset of 10 X versus two X, ask yourself, what am I actually optimizing for when you’re trying to solve a problem? Because I get a lot of problems brought to me as an entrepreneur from my team and oftentimes the problem we’re trying to solve is not the real problem, right?

Like we might just have to do things differently or there’s a completely different way or there’s a bigger problem that we need to optimize for. And I think always being aware of what are you optimizing for? Is this a two X or 10 X problem that we’re trying to solve and could we just do away with it completely?

So always thinking in that regard, am I optimizing for the right thing? Chapter five, this is where the whole entrepreneurial time system comes into place that Dan Sullivan and created. And so there are three different types of days and I’ll give you an example in a week. Dan likes to measure that in the course of a year, but I’m just going to give you a week.

So let’s start with free days because they say that you should plan your free days first. So there are three types of days, free day, buffer day, focus day. On the free day, you should just do nothing. There should be absolutely no work. Let me clarify that. It’s not that you should just sit on the couch and do nothing while you could.

A free day is really just absolutely no work, especially as an entrepreneur. We need that mental break. We need the time off. So free days could very easily just be Saturday and Sunday. You could just go ahead and bake those in and count those as your free day. If you want to add Friday as a free day too, cool.

If you have the freedom as an entrepreneur to just have three days off every week, you have three free days. But there’s absolutely no work. That’s the big thing and that’s the big kicker, which is hard for a lot of entrepreneurs. So there’s no checking email. There’s no hopping on your computer for a second.

There’s no responding to some Instagram DMs because that’s a part of your job. It’s a true free day. So when you actually put really hard stipulations around the free day, just not, hey, I’m not working eight hours straight today. I’m only working two hours sporadically on a Saturday. That’s still working.

So free day is pure free day. His goal for you is 150 per year and just having that complete free day. I think that it’s great. I think I really like to shut things down on the weekend completely. Don’t check anything. No messages, no email. I’ve been pretty good about that for a long time. And then occasionally I will take just a free day off like on a Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever.

Do something with my wife or kids now that summer’s coming up. And then there’s the buffer day. So going back to a week, Saturday and Sunday, let’s just say those are your free days for me right now. How my buffer days looked, are there typically Mondays and Fridays, so Mondays and Fridays and when I’m going to have meetings, lots of meetings.

free buffer focus and leadership

So all my meetings I try to put on Monday or Friday. So I’ll do my meetings there. I do all of the little kind of like B.S. tasks that just have to be done. They’re just like a lot of little things, kind of administrative tasks, maybe some stuff that can’t be delegated, just taking care of those kind of things.

So it’s we all have that stuff. It could also be time for learning or preparation for the next day. So getting things in order for your focus day, which I’m about to talk about. So really, the buffer day for me is just all those little tasks that they don’t take a lot of time. They’re not that big.

They’re not big impact tasks. And you’re meeting with your team, you’re delegating those kind of things. So that’s Monday, Friday. And those are buffer days. And you need those because sometimes we only want to be productive. But that’s why a lot of times entrepreneurs, we focus so much on productivity.

We lose all the other stuff that we should be doing, all those little things. Now for me, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are what I try and really strive for to be my focus day. So focus days are where you’re just really working on really high impact tasks that align with your unique ability. So for me, that could be creating podcasts that could be writing that could be that could be working on a very specific project that’s impacting the growth of the company.

Those are my focus days. And I’m not perfect on this schedule. This is just, this is my ideal schedule. I try to keep it this way 80% of the time. Sometimes a meeting will come up and it has to happen on a Wednesday. But I, over time, I’ve become more and more strict about those things not happening and not slipping into my schedule because they will, and you just have to not let them happen.

So I really love the entrepreneurial time system. I’ve been using it for a long time since I was first introduced to it. And I was getting away from it unintentionally, like it was just like accidentally, like more meetings are slipping in. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, and this book just brought it right back front and center.

Hey, no, this is how you’ve gone 10X before. This is the schedule you keep. This is how you work on your most important tasks. So let’s bring it back. So I’m getting real strict with my schedule again. And probably my biggest takeaway is the amount of focus it requires to go 10X and it does require focusing on the important tasks, culling all the non-essential, getting rid of all the things that aren’t important, delegating whatever you can, and really operating on this free focus and buffer day schedule.

So that was my biggest takeaway for chapter five. Now chapter six is all about four different forms of leadership. And I’m not going to review that or talk about my major takeaways. He talks about going from like kind of solo entrepreneur to becoming a transformational leader. And so like level one is you’re just doing everything, working yourself.

Level four is you have a team that’s like self-managing and everyone is also operating within their unique ability. So if you think about that, like if I’m only ever operating in my unique ability and I only have team members who are operating in things that they love to do and their unique abilities, just think about how happy everyone is and how content they would be with their job and not having to do tasks they don’t like.

So that is definitely a lofty goal and somewhere I hope to get as an entrepreneur and something that I have on my radar and I’m going to dive more into. But the whole leadership concept would take another 20 plus minutes to talk about. But phenomenal book overall. If you’re looking for something to challenge your mindset, but also give you enough practical and tactical takeaways, I highly recommend 10X is Easier Than 2X by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy.

Phenomenal read and I definitely will be reading it again. It was that good.