The 10X Rule

The Only Difference Between Success and Failure

Grant Cardone

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Dare to dream at levels previously unimaginable. Set targets 10X.

The 10X Rule

Assess the right amount and level of effort necessary

Any target attacked with the right actions in the right amounts with persistence is attainable.
When you have underestimated the time, energy, and effort necessary to do something,

You will have “quit” in your mind.
You won’t develop the persistence necessary to get your mission accomplished.
You become disappointed and discouraged.
This causes you to incorrectly identify the problem and then you assume that the target is unattainable

Massive thoughts and massive actions

Set targets 10 times what you think you want and then do 10 times what you think it will take to accomplish those targets.
If you start any task with a mind toward limiting the potential outcome, you will limit the actions necessary to accomplish that very goal
In order to get to the next level of whatever you’re doing, you must think and act in a wildly different way than you previously have been.

Mistakes people make when set goals:

Mis-targeting—too low
Underestimating what it will take
Too much competing and not enough dominating.
Underestimating the amount of adversity they will need to overcome in order to actually attain their desired goal.

You either live to accomplish your own goals and dreams or
be used as a resource to accomplish
someone else’s.

Effort

Do 10 times more of everything.
You must be willing to do what they won’t do
It takes the same amount of energy to have a great marriage as it does an average one.
Most people's response when things are not going as they expect, is to reduce the target rather than increase their activity. Never reduce a target. Instead, increase actions

The more actions you take, the better your chances are of getting “lucky.”

Persistence

Approach every situation with an “in-it-to-win-it-whatever-it-takes” mindset.
Success does not merely “happen.” It is the result of relentless, proper actions taken over time.
Be prepared. See every action through to completion.

Don’t compete. Dominate.

Success Is Your Duty

Most people treat success as an option. And then spend the rest of their lives making excuses for why they didn’t get it.
Ask yourself how close you are to your full capability.
Success is your duty, obligation, and responsibility!

There Is No Shortage of Success

Your achievement does not prevent or limit anyone else's ability to achieve.
Success is not a commodity or resource that has limited reserves.
Success is something you created—not acquired
Success for anyone provides confirmation that success is abundant.

Assume Control for Everything

Take big actions.
Take responsibility.
Nothing happens to me; it happens because of me.
If you are willing to take credit when you win, you have to take credit when you don’t!
Good things don’t happen to victims.
Begin to ask yourself after every unpleasant encounter, “What can I do to ensure that it doesn’t happen again?”
You are the source, the generator, the origin, and the reason for everything—both positive and negative.
I may not always have a say in what happens to me, I always have a choice about how I respond to it.
“Don’t be a little bitch.”

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Success is not something that happens to you; it’s something that happens because of you.

Four Degrees of Action

Disciplined, consistent, and persistent actions are a determining factor in creating success.
Understanding how to calculate and then take the right amount of action is more important than your concept, idea, invention, or business plan.
Most people fail only because they are operating at the wrong degree of action.
Four degrees of action.

Do nothing.
Retreat.
Take normal levels of action.
Take massive action.

Do nothing and retreat are the basis for failure. Normal levels will only create a normal existence.

Doing nothing

Regardless of which degree of action you operate in, they all require work in their own ways.
Signs that you are doing nothing include exhibiting boredom, lethargy, complacency, and lack of purpose. Spending your time and energy justifying your situations— which requires as much work as the other actions.
The person not taking action has to make excuses for his or her condition; this requires tremendous creativity and effort.
Retreaters
Those who take actions in reverse to avoid negative experiences that they imagine will come as a result of taking action.
It’s their impression and evaluation of what failing and rejection mean that is causing them to retreat. Never the actual rejection or failure that has impacted them.
Fear-of-success, holding back
Any realm in which you have assumed you can no longer advance and improve—and are now deciding that there is “nothing you can do”.
Spend a lot of time justifying why they are retreating.

Normal levels

Spend their lives taking enough action to appear average and create normal lives, marriages, and careers.
Occasionally attempt to generate exceptional quality, they almost never create anything in exceptional quantities.
“Average” assumes “less than extraordinary.”
Do you have more energy and creativity available than you’re using?
Taking normal action is the most dangerous of the levels, this level is accepted by society.

Massive Action

Money and power follow attention, so whoever can get the most attention is the person who takes the most action and sooner or later will get the most results.
Domination = to mentally occupy the space of the public.
People don’t know you or about your new product—and the only way to burst through obscurity is by taking massive action.
The goal is to be seen, thought of, and considered.

Average levels of anything will fail you.

10X Goals

People’s failure to think big enough usually means they will never act big enough often enough, or persistently enough!
To maintain your enthusiasm, you have to make your goals substantial enough that they keep your attention.
The things upon which your life depends most are based on the actions you take daily.

I write my goals down every day and
I choose objectives that are just out of reach.

Word your goals as though you’ve already accomplished them.

I am in perfect health and physical condition.
My net worth is over $100 million.
My income is over $1 million a month.
I have written and published 12 or more best-selling books.
I own companies that I am able to control from a distance and have great people working with me.
I am making a positive difference in my community
I continue to create unique programs that people want and that improve the quality of others lives.
I have endless energy and interest in my career.

When you are setting a goal, be sure you are clear about what you want it for, and then tie it to a greater purpose.
Ask yourself whether the goals you have set are equal to your potential.
You—and your goals—are manipulated by your surroundings.
What are some goals you would set if you knew you could achieve them?

Be Obsessed

Until you become completely obsessed with your mission, no one will take you seriously. Until the world understands that you’re not going away—that you are 100% committed and have complete and utter conviction and will persist in pursuing your project—you will not get the attention you need and the support you want.
To create a 10X reality, you have to follow up every action with an obsession to see it through to success.
Most people make only enough effort for it to feel like work, whereas the most successful follow up every action with an obsession to see it through to a reward.
If your ideas do not excessively preoccupy your own thoughts, then how can you ever expect them to preoccupy the thoughts of others?

Go “All In” and Overcommit

Overcommit and overdeliver!
Learn to commit first, and figure out how to show up later.
If you are not creating new problems for yourself, then you aren’t taking enough action.
The successful looks for problems to resolve. The unsuccessful make every attempt to avoid problems.

Fear Is the Great Indicator

Fear is something you want to seek and embrace.
Fear is actually a sign that you are doing what’s needed to move in the right direction
You want to be scared, it means you are pushing yourself to new levels.
Most of the time, what you fear doesn’t even occur.
FEAR stands for False Events Appearing Real.
Reframe your understanding of fear and use it as a reason to move forward rather than as an excuse to stop or retreat.
Fear = that you should do!
If you’re afraid to call on a client, then it’s a sign that you should call that client. Fear of speaking with the boss indicates that you should march into his office and ask for a moment of his time.
Time is what drives fear. The more time you devote to the object of your apprehension, the stronger the fear becomes.
Fear doesn’t just tell you what to do; it also tells you when to do it—now
Most people will not follow through with their goals when enough time has passed from the inception of their idea to actually doing something about it.
I refuse to feed my fear with time.
The person who takes action on whatever he or she fears the most will be the person who advances his or her cause the most.
When you allow fear to set you back, you lose energy, momentum, and confidence—and your fears will only grow.
Use fear as an indicator to determine which actions will provide the greatest return.
If you aren’t experiencing fear, you are not taking new actions and growing.
What are your three biggest fears?
Who do you fear contacting who could help you or improve your business?

The Myth of Time Management

Most don’t even know how much time is available to them or what tasks are most necessary to accomplish in that time.
If you don’t know how much time you have—or need—then how on earth can you expect to manage and balance it?
The first thing you must do is setting distinct and definitive priorities.
Do you create your own time, or does someone else do that?
What can you do to create more time?
How do you treat time to make sure your time is money?
What is the most important thing that you should do with your time?
To really understand, manage, maximise, and squeeze every opportunity out of the time you have, you have to fully understand and appreciate how much of it you have available to you.
You must first take control of your time—not allow others to do so.
The first thing to do when managing time and seeking balance is to decide what is important to you. In which areas do you most want to achieve success and in what quantities? Then determine the total amount of time you have available and decide where you are going to allot time to each of these endeavours.
Log how you are spending your time daily.
The busier you become, the more you have to manage, control, and prioritise.
Start with a commitment to success and then agree to control time, you will create an agenda that accommodates all you want.
You have to decide how you are going to use your time. You must command, control, and squeeze every second out of it in order to increase your footprint and dominate the marketplace.
How much time do you spend on wasteful activities every day?
What are some of your own time wasters?

Criticism Is a Sign of Success

Criticism comes as a natural result of getting attention.
Weak and overwhelmed individuals respond to others’ success by attacking it.
What lower performers do; they make others wrong for doing what is necessary in order to make themselves feel okay about doing nothing!
The highest performers respond by studying successful people and duplicating success.
What criticisms would you most like to hear from people?

Customer Satisfaction Is the Wrong Target

Make your primary focus commanding attention and generating customers before you worry about making them happy.
I am most worried about non customer satisfaction; people who are dissatisfied because they do not have my product and may not even know that they are unhappy. Knowing that until they get my product or service, they can’t be satisfied. This isn’t a pitch. This is what I believe to be true.
Surveying those who did not become customers.
The quality of the clients you attain will have a direct effect on your level of customer satisfaction.
Complaints are your customers’ very direct way of telling you exactly how to make your product better.
When you’re building a business, your primary target is not customer satisfaction (yet); it’s the acquisition, referral, and loyalty and then more acquisition using the customers you’ve attained.
Find your organisation’s customer acquisition and loyalty weaknesses by surveying the people you do not acquire. Ask them about the processes—not about the people.

How long were you here?
Did you meet a manager?
Were you shown optional products?
Were you presented with a proposal?
Did anyone offer to bring the product to your home/ office?

Customer acquisition is the primary target, followed by customer loyalty, followed by customers who spread the word about you.
Unless people know who you are, no one will pay attention to what you represent.

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Competition Is for Sissies

Competing with others limits a person’s ability to think creatively because he or she is constantly watching what someone else is doing.
Forward thinkers don’t copy. They don’t compete—they create. They also don’t look at what others have done.
Never make it your goal to compete. Instead, do everything you can to dominate your sector in order to avoid spending your time chasing someone else.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t study others’ best practices in industry trends; however, you want to make it your job to take those concepts to another level.
The first step is to decide to dominate. Then the best way to dominate is to do what others refuse to do. Find something they cannot do, maybe because of their size or their commitment to other projects, and then exploit that.
Never play by the agreed-upon norms within which others operate.
I am not a competitor. I am the space.
Like every other aspect of growing your business, you have to keep showing up over and over and make it obvious that you are not going away.
You can’t dominate if you don’t penetrate, and you won’t penetrate by using reasonable levels of activity. Your biggest problem is obscurity (1) get noticed and (2) get through the noise
The more we put out, the more people we helped.
Two things will happen when you take the right amount of action

You will get a new set of problems and
your competition will start promoting you

Do what they will not do, go where they will not go, and think and take actions in 10X quantities that they cannot comprehend.
It doesn’t matter what you do—it does matter that your goal is to dominate your sector with actions that are immediate, consistent, and persistent and at levels that no one else is willing to operate at or duplicate.
What are some practices you can do that would separate you from your competition?

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If it is to be, it is up to me.

Successful or Unsuccessful?

Have a “Can Do” Attitude
Believe That “I Will Figure It Out”

No one values a person who not only doesn’t have the information but doesn’t want to know the information.

Focus on Opportunity

Figuring out how to solve a problem equal to new products, services, customers. The bigger the problem is, the bigger the opportunity.

Love Challenges
Seek to Solve Problems
Persist until Successful
Take Risks
Be Unreasonable

Act without rational consideration and not in accordance with practical realities.
Don’t act in accordance with the agreed-upon realities. If you do, the supposed “impossible” can never become possible for you.

Be Dangerous

Being careful requires you to take actions cautiously—and there is no way that you will ever hit 10X activity levels by being cautious.

Create Wealth

Think in terms of creating money and wealth, not salaries and conservation of funds. Create wealth through the exchange of great ideas, quality service, and effective problem-solving.

Readily Take Action
Always Say “Yes”

Say yes for now until you become so successful that you are forced to add “no” to your arsenal and start managing your time and efforts.

Habitually Commit

Devoting yourself to something all the way means that there’s no backing out.
Do whatever is necessary to make that pledge a reality and fulfil your commitment.

Go All the Way
Focus on “Now”

Unsuccessful people make excuses to put off the tasks they should be completing immediately.
Taking massive action—while others think, plan, and procrastinate. Taking actions immediately
Procrastination is the ultimate weakness.
Take action in massive quantities and immediately.
Anyone who puts off doing what he or she can do right now will never gain the momentum and confidence that result from doing so.
Every second you spend thinking is a second of action that you’re wasting!
While others are trying to figure out how they will get something done, you will have already finished it.
Discipline yourself to perform now—not later.

Demonstrate Courage

Courageous referred to as such as a result of taking action regardless of their fears.
Courage comes to those who act, not to those who think, wait, and wonder.
Courage is only attained by doing—especially doing things that you fear.

Embrace Change

The successful keep an eye out for what is coming next.
Never subsist on yesterday’s successes.
Continue to adapt, to remain victorious.

Determine and Take the Right Approach

The successful know that they can quantify what works and what doesn’t work, whereas the unsuccessful focus solely on “hard work.”
Figure out how to work “smart” and handle the situation by finding and using the right approach until you succeed.
Successful people invest time, energy, and money in improving themselves.
Don’t focus on how hard the work is but rather on how rewarding the results are!

Break Traditional Ideas

Create traditions. Break that which already works in order to get to a better place.
Do not be a prisoner of the thinking agreed upon by others. Figure out ways to take advantage of the traditional thinking that holds others back.
Highly successful individuals are not concerned with the way things “have always been done”; they’re interested in finding new and better ways.

Be Goal-Oriented

Pay more attention to the target than the problem.
If you don’t stay focused on your goals, you will spend your life achieving the objectives of other people.

Be on a Mission

Consider your daily activities to be part of a more important mission that will change things significantly.
You must undertake every activity with the zealous attitude that this endeavour could forever change the world.
Approach everything as a calling for which you will forever be known.

Have a High Level of Motivation

Be goal-focused and mission-driven.
Make what you do each day to stimulate yourself toward actions and inspire yourself to keep going.
Motivation is an inside job. You can’t motivate anyone else. You can encourage, you can challenge, and you can inspire.
True motivation comes from within.
Set goals daily to keep yourself enthused. Keep your attention on the possibilities.

Be Interested in Results

Successful people don’t value effort or work or time spent on an activity; they value the results. The results are all that matter.
Quit patting yourself on the back for trying, and save your rewards and accolades for actual accomplishment.
Be hard on yourself and never let yourself off the hook until you get results.

Have Big Goals and Dreams
Create Your Own Reality

Don’t deal in other people’s realities.
Create a new reality for yourself that is different from the one that others accept.
Not interested in what other people deem possible or impossible; only care about producing the things you dream are possible.

Commit First—Figure Out Later

Most people assume that they have to figure everything out first and will commit once they do; however, they never seem to get around to it.

Be Highly Ethical

If you don’t do everything within your power to succeed—then you are stealing from yourself, your future and people who need you.
It is unethical not to fully utilise the gifts, talents, and mind with which I have been blessed.
Do something significant that aligns with their potential.

You can only do as well as the people around you.
Continuous Learning
Be Uncomfortable

Be willing to put yourself in situations that are uncomfortable.

“Reach Up” in Relationships

Having people around you who are smarter, brighter, and more creative.
The average person typically spends his or her time with like-minded people

Be Disciplined

Getting Started with 10X

First; make your initial list of goals
Then a list of actions that will propel you in that direction.
Start taking those actions.
Note

Do not reduce your goals as you write them.
Do not get lost in the details of how to accomplish them at this point.
Ask yourself, “What actions can I take today to move me toward these goals?”
Take whatever actions you come up with—regardless of what they are or how you feel.
Do not prematurely value the outcome of your actions.
Go back each day and review the list.

‍The goal has to be more valuable than the risk—or you have determined the wrong target.
‍It is impossible for you to ever do anything exceptional if you continue to live your life with thinking and actions that are mediocre.z

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