SPI 780: 10x is Easier than 2x

SPI 780: 10x is Easier than 2x

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he looks forward to fantasy football each year, even though he loses every time, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Every few years in the world of business and entrepreneurship, at least in the online space, there seems to be books that get passed around amongst entrepreneurs, right? They get shared, they get gifted to people, they get brought up in masterminds, they are spoken about on YouTube, on podcast episodes like this one, or even just written up in blogs in listicles.

And the book that people have seemingly been talking about a lot, including myself as of late, is called, is called 10x is Easier than 2x. I’ve brought this up a couple of times in the past, but I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into it. Maybe 10x the amount. No, probably not. But really, I wanted to dive into the principles of this, what it means, what it might actually look like for you.

Because again, I definitely recommend you pick this up. It came out in 2023, almost exactly a year ago, in fact. And it’s by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, Dr. Benjamin Hardy has been here on the show in the past and 10x is easier than 2x is he and Dan’s next project together. And it’s been absolutely well received.

And although the first chapter is quite a long account of Michelangelo and how he was able to develop as an artist and as a master at all the different things that he’s done, I’m not going to get into that. I do want to get into what 10 X is easier than 2 X actually means. And my thoughts on it and the theory behind it.

And I am practicing this right now. So the real central idea behind this book is that if you aim for the ambitious, right, the exponential growth, if you aim for things that are bigger, you will actually move faster. And that sounds obvious when you hear about it, when it’s put like that. But when we talk about goal setting in our businesses or in our lives, often we think of, okay, well, where are we at now?

And how can we optimize that? How can we do more of what is working and less of what isn’t? How do we 2x our output? How do we 2x the revenue? How do we increase conversions? You know, we get into that granular effect. And as a result, we can only grow so much. And 2x is twice the amount of effort often.

It’s twice the amount of thinking. It’s twice the amount of, of sweat and blood and tears sometimes. And so the growth potential, by doing pretty much what you’re doing now, just doing it better, isn’t as high as if you completely reworked kind of by first principles, but also just, you know, you go bigger, right?

The idea is you just go bigger, you’re going to get more, but you have to, it’s not a linear improvement. It’s not incremental improvements. It’s 10x thinking. I think it was, who is it, Einstein, we hear that quote, you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

And I think we know that sort of to be true. But if you do kind of similar to what you’re doing, you’re going to get kind of similar results, even if it is a little bit of growth or 2x improvement versus 10x improvement. And I love this kind of thinking because it really helps you go back to the drawing board. It helps you think differently about something, approach something in a different way. And in order to do that, often it will require you to get other people’s opinions to start from scratch and approach it differently. And whenever I’ve thought about. Major growth in my business ever since 2008 2009 the biggest growth has come from a the most riskiest of moves, the boldest of moves, but things that were within the principles of 10 X thinking, right?

Not just okay, let me write twice as many blog posts or do twice as many podcast episodes. It was let me acquire this company that has this incredible team that can now help support Smart Passive Income, and that is what has since become Team SPI over here at SPI Media, right? It’s like if you create a software, don’t create a software that just helps people do something a little easier, create a software that completely changes how people approach something or what a person does in in the space that you are building a software for, right?

An example of this is ConvertKit recently with their Creator Network, right? They are an email service provider that I’m an advisor for, and a lot of the discussion over the years has been about, of course, increasing business and revenue, but through traditional means, through the means of getting more people in the door, more free trials, converting those free trials to paid users, the affiliate program, all that kind of stuff that everybody else is talking about, and just trying to find ways to do those better.

And although that’s a good thing to do. What is really helped lately is their Creator Network. They came up with a solution to help creators grow their email list with the unfair advantage that they have, which is the number of craters already on their platform. And to this day, within the last couple of years, the Creator Network has been the number one thing within ConvertKit that has helped me grow my email list.

It’s also become a lot easier to talk about the value of ConvertKit when it’s just working that well, and that’s a completely different way of approaching email service, which is not just let’s help you write great emails, let’s create a entire ecosystem that allows you to grow your email list and grow your business, right?

So that’s, that’s, that’s an example. An example in the world of SPI recently has been our switch from one off courses to community and banking on community and people. We see where the puck is going, or we saw in 2020, and we started to allocate our resources, even build teams specifically to help support the entrepreneurial community and provide not just great information, world class information, but the right kind of support and accountability and connection to other people in the space that you’re in to help you get to where you want to go.

And this was something that was very risky. We had a successful business model, but does that mean we have to keep going with it? Well, what got you here won’t get you there. So the cool thing about 10X growth is it requires a fundamentally different mindset and approach, right? So instead of focusing on small incremental steps, it encourages you to dream bigger, right?

This is what I love most about this. It’s like, let’s dream bigger. And I think a lot of us, adults, especially we lose that muscle. We lose the dream muscle. And one thing that I do when I’m with other people who are entrepreneurs is I like to have these dream sessions and I don’t mean like we go to sleep and you know, try to do inception kind of things.

What I mean is we sit down and talk about goals, but we also push each other, right? In my mastermind groups, we push each other. Like, is that really what you want to do? What is it that you really want, right? We go deeper into it. And what we discover is that it unlocks a lot more opportunity, it unlocks a lot more excitement when we dream bigger in that way.

And it often will put us into directions in our business that weren’t even on the plate or on the blackboard to begin with, right? So setting really big goals, taking bold actions, that was something that internet business mastery taught me. This is the podcast I first listened to back in 2008, Jeremy and Jason, they always talked about how important it was to take bold actions because that’s what helps you earn bold results.

And right now, everybody I think is playing it safe. The most dangerous thing you can do is play it safe. We’re even seeing this, you know, I have a little insider view in the Pokemon creator community because I’m a Pokemon YouTuber myself. The channel, by the way, just yesterday at the time of this recording hit 800,000 subscribers.

We are on our way to 1 million. And right now our channel is the number one Pokemon channel that has the most views per video on a view per subscriber basis. So a lot of creators who’ve been in this space for a while aren’t seeing very many views right now. And what I’m finding is that it’s because they’re creating the same kinds of videos, the safe videos that had once worked before and that will get a good amount of views, nothing that’s gonna help them get loads of views to break through the barrier to get into the algorithm, the algorithmic wave that you can ride.

And what we try to do at DPM at Deep Pocket Monster is we’re looking for ways to always, always create content that is different, that pushes the boundary, that is a little bit risky. That’s, that’s a little bit bold. And as a result of that, not only does the algorithm favor that, I mean, just published a video yesterday, which starts the new arc in, or a series of videos in the world of Pokemon that we’re doing on the channel involving a giant binder that I partnered with a company with to create.

Not only that, we’re seeing the community say, thank you. You’re the only one trying something different. You’re trying something new. And, you know, sometimes it’s a little bit risky, but that’s how you get those rewards. And if you were to just play it safe, that’s actually the most dangerous thing you can do.

Now, I’m not just saying just kind of willy nilly go crazy and try everything. I mean, you still want to be calculated. You still want to create consciously. But at the same time, consciously understand that if you just play it safe, you’re not going to really get big results. 2x ing or just doing more of what you’re already doing is not going to help you scale bigger.

Now one of the key principles in the 10x philosophy is the power of compounding effects. So while we are talking about big moves and bold moves, It’s also those small, consistent improvements or actions that will compound over time. And I think it’s important to understand that you have to decide what you’re going to incrementally improve on that will compound over time and lead to a much bigger result.

And for us at Deep Pocket Monster, it is storytelling. So how can we do better storytelling on YouTube? We’re learning about it. We’re educating ourselves. We’re getting inspired and investing into conferences and other things to learn how to tell a better story because that has become the biggest differentiator between our channel and everybody else’s.

So those incremental changes in storytelling have a compounding effect over time. For example, in this last video that we created, we had obsessed over how to introduce the story of this big binder that after 30 seconds. Of this video, the analytics tell us that over 80 percent of people are still watching.

4 out of 5 people who start this video are still watching after 30 seconds. And by the end, we still have 60 percent of that audience. Because we’re telling better story. And that holds people longer. That tells YouTube that these videos keep people on YouTube. So they send it out to more people, and this grows our YouTube subscriber base.

It grows our fanship. It grows my audience. It grows the Card Party, live event and the ticket sales. It all makes a difference there in a much bigger way because of that small incremental improvement that we’re trying to do over time. In the world of SPI, it’s community and partnering with other people who have expertise.

This is our SPI Pro EIR or Experts in Residence program. That’s another big 10 X move, right? But we’re incrementally trying to figure out how to improve the connection between those experts and our community and encourage those experts to even bring more community members in, which then in turn makes the community even stronger and more populated and more lively, which then in turn gets more people to talk about it and with our affiliate program, et cetera.

So as you can see, these things start small, but do not have a linear reward. They have an exponential reward. So, I want to encourage you to embrace the 10X mindset, right? Number one, pick something that is the first domino that will knock over all the rest. And obsess over incrementally improving that over time.

For us, again, it’s storytelling or community and connection. For you, it might be something else. That is going to be really important for you to grow over time. But also with your goals, dream bigger. And if you need other people to be on the outside looking in for you because you can’t read the label when you’re inside the bottle, talk to other people.

This is the best way to explore and dream biggers with other people. If you have a team set aside some time on the calendar next week, a one hour meeting, and you call it a dream meeting, dream together as a cohort of people here for the benefit of the business and the audience that you serve.

Dream together. It’s so much better. This is what I do with my family. My wife and I talk all the time about life looks like two years from now, five years from now. What are we doing? Where are we going? And building toward that is really amazing. So this is how we unlock our full potential. Right? I think all of us have been holding ourselves back, myself included, for a very long time.

I remember reading, I think it was Train Like a Navy SEAL or something like that, a person who had lived with a Navy SEAL for a while and learned about their habits and how they did what they did, how they pushed themselves. And this person discovered that at the point at which you want to give up or just you feel strained, right?

Like in a workout, for example, you’re doing pull ups or something and get to like seven and you’re like, Oh, okay, I think I’m done. With the right motivation and with the right goal setting. You actually can discover that you’re only like, what is it, 60 percent of the way to failure. Or something like that.

I think it might even be like a third of the way. I can’t remember the exact value off the top of my head, but it was like not even close to a hundred percent. When you think that you’re done, you’re actually not even close to done. So you can always push a little bit further, push a little bit harder.

And that relates to these things that you’re doing in your business. This relates to your life and how you live and what’s important to you, but it also works with your dream and how big you want to go and how you might get there. So I want you to think about that a little bit, put some time in your calendar dream.

Push through, push through that barrier that you think you have, and I promise you great things are going to happen because I’ve been practicing this 10x is easier than 2x mindset over the last year. I mean, it’s been game changing. It’s been game changing. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. I look forward to serving you in next week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!