10X Is Easier Than 2X
A 10x goal forces you to keep only your best 20% — a 2x goal just burns you out.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
Hardy and Dan Sullivan's principle applies the Pareto (80/20) rule at the extreme. Going for 2x lets you retain 80% of what you already do and simply tweak the rest, which is why it is exhausting — you end up doing double the work of the same activities. Going for 10x is paradoxically easier because it forces you to keep only the best 20% and discard everything else. The oversized goal becomes an incredible filter that strips out bad practices and dead-end paths, leaving only the most efficient routes.
Origin
The idea crystallized while Hardy and Dan Sullivan were writing the book 10X Is Easier Than 2X; they concluded that 2x growth preserves 80% of activity while 10x growth forces you down to the vital 20%.
Core principles
- 012x growth lets you keep 80% of what you do and tweak 20% — which means doing more of the same and burning out.
- 0210x growth forces you to keep only the best 20% and cut the rest.
- 03A big enough goal acts as a filter that strips out dead-end paths automatically.
- 04What got you here cannot get you there when the goal is 10x.
How to run it
- 1
Name your default 2x plan
Write down the incremental version of your goal (e.g. last year's revenue plus 20%) and recognize it as your past shaping your present.
Watch out Doubling a linear goal usually means doubling effort and burning out, not becoming more efficient.
- 2
Reset to a 10x goal
Multiply the goal by ten so your current plan visibly cannot deliver it.
- 3
Let the goal filter your activities
Ask of every activity whether it can plausibly produce 10x. Everything that cannot is a dead-end path to strip out.
Pro tip The bigger goal does the pruning for you — it exposes which 80% cannot work.
- 4
Rebuild around the best 20%
Concentrate resources on the small set of activities that actually create the results.
In the wild
Hardy describes the typical company that did 5 million last year and sets 6 or 7 million as this year's goal, letting the past dictate the target. That plan is just more of the same activity.
→ Such businesses stay linear and never reach true scale because their goal never forces a new model.
Hardy asks a business owner planning for 2 million whether their 2-million plan would get them to 10 million. It obviously would not, which he frames in Elon Musk's words as optimizing things that shouldn't exist.
→ Moving the goal up made the current plan fall away, forcing the owner to solve for a genuinely different business model.
Common mistakes
Letting the past set the goal
Basing this year's target on last year's number is linear thinking that guarantees you keep doing what you already do.
Trying to 2x by working twice as hard
Doubling output of existing activities burns you out without making you more efficient.
Is it for you?
Best for
Entrepreneurs stuck optimizing an existing model who need a forcing function to change it.
Not ideal for
Situations requiring steady maintenance rather than transformation.
From the transcript
“if you're going for 2x growth, you can keep 80% of what you're doing. All you have to do is tweak 20%”
“That goal becomes an incredible filter. It just strips out everything that can't work.”
From the episode
Benjamin Hardy: 10x Is Easier Than 2x, How Dreaming Bigger Will Transform You and Your Business
Benjamin Hardy