The 10x Rule

By Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo

A great book on goals setting and how to achieve them is authored by Grant Cardone, “The 10x Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure”.  The “10x” means ten times doing what the average people would do.  The author says you need ten times more thoughts and actions of what average achievers would do in order to achieve massive success in life.  In other words, you need to dominate the skill, the endeavor or the profession you have set for yourself, not to show that you are better than most people, but to set a good example or be a model for others in the pursuit of excellence.  Here are the other great ideas of the author.

The Four Degrees of Action

The author classifies four kinds of action we would undertake in relation to our goals: (1) Do nothing, (2) Retreat, (3) Take normal levels of action and (4) Take massive action.  The first degree doing nothing of course achieves nothing.  The second degree means we start taking steps to achieve our goals but when some form of hardship comes, we retreat and give up.  Taking normal levels of action means we don’t give it our all and so we get average results and it takes a lot of time to reach our goal.  The author recommends massive action (action number 4) which is giving it our best on a regular basis so that massive results are achieved in the shortest time possible.   Massive action means “disciplined, consistent and persistent action” a phrase many times repeated in the book.

Writing Goals Regularly

Average and mediocre people only write goals once or twice a year.  Outstanding successful people write goals regularly and even daily.  What makes life exciting is to always have goals to work for, thus the need to come up with new ones once you’ve accomplished previous ones on your list.  As I’ve learned from other self-help authors, goals should be equal to our potential or what we are capable of.  If your goal is below your potential, it’s going to be easy to accomplish them and you will get bored.  On the other hand if its way above your capabilities and talents, you will get you frustrated trying to accomplish them.

Starve Fear of Its Favorite Food

I love this advice.  “What’s fear favorite food?”, the author asks.  The answer is time.  If you delay doing the things you need to do, fear grows and becomes fat.  So big and fat that you feel you are don’t have the capability anymore of beating it.  Procrastination has turned your goal into a huge scary monster. We have to remember that our success is outside our fears.  Fear is that big obstacle that gets in the way.  Once we overcome our fears by doing what we are supposed to do, success comes to us little by little.  The author illustrates this point with an example of John who needs to make an important phone call.  John needs to make a call to a client, a task that immediately causes him to feel anxiety. So rather than picking up the phone and making the call immediately, he gets a cup of coffee and thinks about what he is going to do. His lengthy contemplation only causes his fear to grow, as he imagines all the ways the call could go badly and all the potentially terrible things that could happen. If confronted, he’s likely to claim that he needs to “prepare” before he makes the call.  John is waiting for that perfect moment to make the call when he is “totally prepared” which of course does not exist.  There is no such thing as perfect preparation.  What John needs is action not preparation, because he already did the latter.  The author tells us if you feel fear, instead of entertaining it, make it a go signal that it’s time to act because success is waiting at the other side of fear.

The Turtle vs. The Rabbit VS. Smokey

We are familiar of the story of the race between the turtle and the rabbit.   The turtle won because although he was slow, he ran at a constant pace whereas the rabbit kept on resting and stopping to do other things.  The author says if there was another creature who has the persistence of the turtle and the speed of the rabbit, this animal would leave the two behind or smoked them both.  That animal would then be named Smokey.  Mr. Cardone says we should be like Smokey who is persistent at the same time quick or doing massive action towards our goal.  Then we will achieve massive success.