HOW TO 10X YOUR FUTURE!

The topic of this week’s show comes from the growth comes from something of an epiphany when I hit 250 episodes. The epiphany arose from the fertilized ground from some coaching I received 15 or so years ago around the concept of 10-exing your business. My coach at the time presented an idea that to 10X your business is easier than to 2X your business. When I first heard him say it, I didn’t fully grasp the concept. I went through the exercises and did all the work. We even did a bunch of strategic planning around 10Xing our company at the time, and we blew through that goal within about 3 and half years, but the seed of the idea still hadn’t really sunk in. I knew it was possible to do because we had done it, I just hadn’t picked apart the ‘why’ it worked. 

So, here’s the premise: the reason it’s easier to 10X something than it is to double it is based on the idea that a goal of doubling something typically entails simply giving up something, usually your time, to get a reward that isn’t really that much better than what you had before. It also typically entails simply doubling your efforts and working twice as hard or twice as long. Maybe it doesn’t come out exactly as twice the effort and time, but the way the human mind works, if I tell you that your goal for next year is to double your business, your brain automatically starts to calculate how much more effort you have to put in, how you can become more efficient to get more work out in less time, how to increase your fees, maybe work 5- 10 more hours per week, and even then you’ll struggle to imagine doubling because you know what it took to get you where you are now. 

If you billed out $150,000 last year, that means your new goal is $300,000 in the coming year. Your brain will have a difficult time doing the math because you know how many hours and what kind of effort it took to get the $150,000 out the door. If you billed out $500,000 last year, doubling is $1,000,000 in production the following year. 

Here’s the secret, friends, when you start thinking in 10X multiples instead of 2X, doubling your time and efforts won’t even scratch the surface. Doubling your growth is what we call linear thinking. There is a straight line from $500,000 to $1,000,000. But to go from $150,000 to $1,500,000, or from $500,000 to $5,000,000 takes exponential thinking. You can’t 10X something with linear thinking. For your mind to even grasp the concept you have to freak out a little bit first. You have to go through the ‘birthing’ process first, which entails a little bit of freaking out and denying that it could even be accomplished without killing you, ending your marriage, and imploding the business. This is all very normal, by the way. It’s part of the growth process. 

By the way, it’s extremely important to say that the X in 10X is not just your gross or net revenue. This whole idea of 10X-ing instead of just doubling, or 2X-ing, is that the X stands for everything in your life that you want more of, is good for you, and makes the world a better place. The X in 10X represents your confidence, your health, the things that give you pleasure and make you a better person. The X stands for your network and your connections. It stands for your wealth and your fitness, your clients and customers, your free time, your energy, your relationships, your reputation, and the love you have in your life. The X in 10X stands for everything and anything that you can and should be expanding exponentially to increase your life, your love, your impact, and making the world a better place. When we talk about how 10X is easier than 2X, it’s not just because it’s more difficult to double something than it is to exponentially increase it, we talk about it to pull our brains into exponential thinking and out of linear thinking.  

Here’s where the epiphany I had comes into play because it’s part of the exercise of exponential thinking. When I hit 250 episodes of this show, I sat for a moment in amazement because I never imagined I’d ever have that many episodes out there. It wasn’t a goal of mine and I never really cared about the number of shows I would eventually have. The challenge I gave myself was simply to see if I could come up with content for at least one episode every week for a year. Once that year had come and gone, I had already built a solid habit of writing, researching, recording, and producing and now I was on autopilot in some sense. I didn’t even think about stopping because I love doing it. When I looked back from 250 episodes to that first year of doing the podcast, I realized that there was a point midway through that first year where I would have hit episode 25. I never thought about this when I was at episode 25, but 10 times 25 is 250. 

The epiphany I had was that there was a time in my past that I only had 1/10^th the number of episodes that there are now. I realized that I could look back into my past for strength, for recognition of this 10X mindset, and for confirmation that 10X is very possible. The problem for most people is three-fold: one; they’re constantly drawing on the past for guidance about what to do next, but the ‘next’ that they do is closely tied to the results they got in the past. Two; most people have a very difficult time visualizing what their future could look like on a much grander scale. And three; they tend to have an unrealistic sense of time. What I mean by that is that we tend to overestimate what can be accomplished in a year, and completely underestimate what can be accomplished in 5 or 10 years. This idea has been pointed out by a variety of people over the last 100 years because it’s true. We look to our past for data to construct our future, but the past can only tell us what has already been accomplished, not what could have been accomplished.

There was a time in your past when you only had 1/10^th of what you have now. There was a time in your past that you only billed out 1/10^th of what you bill out now. There was a time in your life when you only sold 1/10^thof what you sold last year. There was a time in your life when you only knew 1/10^th of what you know now. 10X is possible in almost every area of your life and business, but the belief that it’s possible comes first. After the belief, there are 2 primary things you can do to set off on the 10X path.

The first exercise is to go into the future where you’ve already reached a 10X result. Don’t worry about the time it might have taken to get there, that part isn’t important right now and it’s a point that stops a lot of people. They might be able to envision growing exponentially, but they get stuck thinking, ‘I have to do it in 2, 4, or 7 years!’ The reality is that the time it takes will be the time it takes. The important part is to be able to time travel in your mind to that point in time when you’ve already achieved a 10X result and then look backward. What are you doing in the business at 10X of what you’re doing now? Who works in what areas of the business? What did you have to do to get there? Who are your clients? How did you get them and how do you keep them? What are you doing more of? And what are you doing less of? How have your relationships changed? Who have you had to add as a relationship, and who have you had to let go of in that area? What new networks are in place that weren’t there before? 

The reason we do this is not just to gain the benefit of practicing the art of envisioning, it’s to make the extraordinary ordinary. We’ve talked many times in the past that if your business is based on extraordinary people, it will fail every time. You have to base it on ordinary people that are made extraordinary by the systems within the business. However, when it comes to the human brain, although we know that it’s capable of doing extraordinary things, it is exceptionally good at doing every day, ordinary things. We’ve been told for decades now that, on any given day, humans only use 5% to 20% of our brain’s abilities. That means that between 80% and 95% of our brain capacity and ability remains untapped. That confirms what I just said that the human brain is not good at extraordinary stuff but is instead really good at doing ordinary things. The trick is to make the extraordinary ordinary and then it becomes doable. When you can see what things look like as 10X of what it is now, the brain starts to accept it as ordinary and not extraordinary. 

This is why it’s so important to not talk about as if it’s far off in the future, you have to speak about as if it’s already happened. You have to get good at transforming the unfamiliar into the familiar. The human brain uses heuristics, or shortcuts, to make very rapids decisions and it does so quite efficiently with things it deems normal, ordinary, and familiar. So, step one is to travel into the future in your mind and just imagine what 10X looks, feels, sounds, smells, and tastes like, and do it often. By the way, one of the ways the brain turns the extraordinary into the ordinary is by drawing and writing. This is just one of the ways the brain does this, but something like 40% of our brains are connected to our writing hands. There is lots of data and a bunch of studies that have been done on how physically writing lights up the brain. When you write about a future state or image, even if it only exists in your head at the moment, you are literally making the extraordinary ordinary and familiar to your brain. This is what makes it possible to achieve. 

The second step in this process is to then travel back in time to your past when you only had 1/10^th of what you have now. Go back to a time when you had 1/10^th the success, the volume, the assets, the quality of relationships, the health, the network, or whatever it is that you’d like to grow and then just practice confirming to yourself that 10X can be accomplished. As I mentioned, there was a time when I only had 25 episodes of this show, and now there are over 250 episodes. Now I can imagine when there are 2500 because I’ve hit 250. The number is still big in my head, but it’s not so out of the realm of possibility to me because I know what it takes to 10X something. It’s as easy for me now as simply saying, ‘well, if I keep the same schedule of production, I’ll hit 2500 episodes in the year 2067. That’s easy math! 2500 episodes minus (-) the 250 or so I already have equals 2250 more to go. 2250 episodes divided by 50 weeks or so is 45. That means it will take me 45 years to hit 2500 episodes at my current pace. If I want to change that I can play with the numbers. What if I produced 3 shows per week instead of 1? That’s 150 episodes per year instead of 50, so that cuts the 45 year number by 2/3rds, or 15 years. 

Do you see what’s happening with this exercise? Once I accept that it’s a possibility regardless of the time frame, now I can just play with what it would look like to be in that state. Over time, my brain will start to attract all the necessary resources to make it a reality. 

We first go forward into the future to a time when a 10X result already exists and ask ourselves all those questions from earlier. Then we travel back in time to a time when we were only doing a fraction of what we’re doing now so as to normalize a 10X existence. If you’ve already done it once, your brain now knows it to be normal and a possibility. By the way, you already do this second part. Almost everyone is really good at going back in time because that’s what most people do to inform their future. They look back in their past to tell them what it would take to double or triple what they’re doing now. In essence, we try to drag the past into the future and make it fit. Instead, what I am proposing that you begin doing is to, instead, look to the future and make your past justify itself to your future vision. 

A couple of things to highlight as we close out this episode: the goal is not to work 10 times harder or longer than you are now, it’s to reach a 10X goal without any significant sacrifice to your quality of life. 10X-ing is the opposite of work because it’s a focus on doing more of the right stuff, the extremely high value stuff that creates a 10X impact and result. Right now, you’re likely doing things that get you a one-to-one return or result. You do some activity, and you get back a dollar amount or an end result roughly equal to your output. You know that if you work so many hours you can complete X number of appraisal reports. So, tomorrow, you try to put in X number of hours to achieve the desired result. The massive problem with that is that you’re constantly reinforcing in your brain the idea that X units of effort lead to Y units of result. 

A 10X mindset and behavior is totally different in that it first recognizes the adage that the good is the enemy of the best. You get satisfied with the good, which eventually becomes ‘good enough’. With 10X thinking, we start to focus on the opposite of work and, instead, start to focus on how we can achieve many multiples in return for your one unit of effort. It’s a focus on doing more of the right things and less of the busy work. 

My friends, I implore you to try out the exercises I mentioned in this episode. We are in a very exciting time where, contrary to popular belief, the opportunity to grow exponentially has never been better. If you don’t see it, you just don’t see it yet, and I know there are a lot of people that will never see it, and that’s ok. Not everybody is destined for a 10X life or lifestyle. Many multiples more will choose to shrink instead of grow in these times, and that’s ok too. However, the reason many will choose to shrink instead of grow is due to a fear and scarcity-based mindset, and too much reaching into the past to inform their future. If you’re one of those that knows there is opportunity out there, but maybe not sure how to make it a reality, the ideas in this episode are the first steps. 

Until next week, I’m out…