Entrepreneurs are great at many things, but one thing a lot of us are bad at is keeping score. I’ve coined a term for this issue, which we deal with in depth at Strategic Coach, and I call it “The Gap.” The Gap is the permanent distance between you and your ideals. Your ideals can be really useful for stretching yourself and identifying goals, but falling into The Gap can have destructive, demotivating effects. When this happens, you’re playing a game that’s impossible to win.

Your confidence and capability depends on what’s happening inside your head. That’s why we do a lot of work on how you’re keeping score in the game you’re playing. Of course, most people aren’t even conscious of the criteria they score themselves by, which makes it impossible to win the game. And, really, winning is what matters here.

So what game are you playing, and what kind of score do you need to win?

If your game is based on a vague ideal, you can’t know if you’re making any progress. So the first step is to determine some real criteria for what would constitute progress. Two indisputable measures you could use are a number in the future that’s bigger than the number you have now, or an event outside yourself that others can observe and take part in.

What if you have an existing goal and you’re just not making any progress on it? Switch that goal for one you can make progress on!

People are surprised when I say this. “You can just do that?” they ask. Hey, it’s your game. Take responsibility for it. If your own rules are doing you in, change them. I don’t like ending up on the losing side of the scorecard of a game I created.

To be clear, I don’t mean that you hit the “eject” button anytime things get difficult. I mean that you work within a reality that’s tangible and quantifiable. As soon as you take action, the world responds, and there are great lessons in that feedback. Rules are only useful insofar as they help you learn, adapt, and make progress.

So rules are valuable—as a starting point. But not for the journey, and not for the end result, because they’re usually a description of what happened in the past. They help by giving you a mode for getting from one place to another, but as long as you can create better rules, then none of the existing ones apply to you anymore.

Breaking rules to be rebellious is simply destructive. This is a creative activity—the constant development of better, more relevant, more productive structures to support your progress and growth.

Take Picasso, for instance. At just fourteen or fifteen years old, he was a master with the brush and could paint as well as Rembrandt. He was a great naturalistic painter, and he fully absorbed what constituted great artwork. Then he departed from it completely. The great artists don’t reject anything; they simply use it as their starting point.

So if you’re playing to win, don’t focus on the rules, on the problems. Instead, focus on growth. Going for growth solves an incredible number of problems. It’s a game about the future that can evolve, respond, and transform any situation.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve had the experience of going 10x three times so far. I went from from $20,000 to $200,000 before creating the Strategic Coach Program with Babs; from $200,000 to $2 million coaching the Program on my own; and then from $2 million to $20 million with the associate coaches also leading workshops. Hitting the $20 million mark occurred about five years ago, so that’s when I started asking, “What’s the next jump?”

Seeing how we’ve grown so far, I figure the next jump won’t happen through a small number of us driving the organization with other people more or less carrying out orders. It’ll be participatory—everybody in the company will be involved in the same overall activity, but each person will contribute something unique through what they do inside that framework.

If you draw a circle around each individual, within that circle are a number of areas where that person’s daily activities impact the overall functioning of the company. If we could get them to just look at a discrete number of those activities—maybe five or ten—and ask, “What’s working about this? What’s not working?”, we’ll discover ways for every member of the company to make improvements on a daily basis that add up to exponential growth that’s faster, easier, cheaper, and bigger.

Issy Sharp at Four Seasons says he built the entire hotel out of things that went wrong, because he treats everything that goes wrong as an opportunity to impress the customer even more than if it had gone right.

Here’s a specific example from Strategic Coach: In our workshops, we set out binders at the beginning of each day for every person. These binders contain all the concepts and tools they’ll be working with during the session.

What works is that the binders look good and they present all the materials in an orderly way that makes them easy to find and use throughout the day.

What doesn’t work is that sometimes we’ve had slip-ups when last-minute additions or changes came through too late to get incorporated, so the binders contained the wrong exercises or were missing pieces. It’s confusing and leads to a lot of on-the-fly handing out and shuffling of papers—and that’s just not an experience we want to be part of our “show.”

For a while, we just noted these incidents as mistakes, until we backed up and really looked at this, asking what worked and what didn’t work. That allowed us to see that we needed to get the three teams who have input into the workshops to work together and give their final check-off before we put the binders together.

It’s a small thing, but we have hundreds, probably thousands, of these small things going on throughout our organization. Each of them is an opportunity to take something that didn’t work in the past, put a spotlight on it, and use it as the raw material for a solution that will take our whole system to a higher level.

This is such a crucial activity that I created a dedicated Strategic Coach tool called The Experience Transformer to guide our clients through the same process. We use this tool inside our company as well, and each time something big happens—good or bad—we have to remember to stop and apply it. Just having it in the toolbox isn’t enough. As entrepreneurs, many of us have a natural inclination to always want to start everything from scratch, but this puts us in danger of neglecting, wasting, or undermining the useful things we’ve already put in place. So we make it a consistent habit—especially in emotionally-charged moments—to stop and use thinking structures like the one I’ve described here that allow us to escape reactive, emotional thinking and access the higher, more strategic parts of our minds. This kind of elevated thinking is central to the Multiplier Mindset where 10x becomes a real possibility.

Some of you may be familiar with my saying that “forgiveness is when you give up the hope of having a better past.” I believe that every entrepreneur, by the time they reach a certain level of success, accumulates a litany of “sins” they have trouble forgetting even if they’re not top of mind—bad decisions, bad hires, moments of incompetence or failure, even letting other people down. These are irksome and often lie at the root of why entrepreneurs feel perpetually dissatisfied.

As long as you’re still bothered by the perceived failures and defeats in your past, you may hear other people’s praise and accolades, but you won’t be able to accept them.

Here’s a way I’ve found to shake off this unnecessary burden:

1. Start by writing down 10 things from your entrepreneurial past that give you a negative feeling when you think about them. I realize this may not be easy because many entrepreneurs are naturally averse to analyzing their history. They prefer to look forward. But stay with me; I won’t make you look at this for more than about three minutes.
2. Once you’ve done that, take your best profit year ever and multiply that by 10.
3. From the position of 10x greater profit, look at those 10 negative things from your past. How much would they matter if you achieved that bigger context?

This is the entrepreneurial equivalent of general absolution. Whatever “sins” are in your past, 10x has the power to wipe away their seeming importance and their emotional sting. The Multiplier Mindset is focused on results, but it can also have a significant psychological and emotional impact when you consider how a big success that has a huge positive impact on you, your team, and the people you want to be a hero to outweighs the relatively small “lessons” it took to get there.

One more thought to leave with: There’s no such thing as failure—only success and market research.

The people I spoke to got very excited as they talked about what they did, but almost never mentioned what they sold. They just weren’t interested in having that conversation. But how they grew and multiplied themselves—they found that fascinating.

These entrepreneurs came from a range of totally different industries. In business terms, they had nothing in common with one another. In talking with them, however, I began to see that they had far more in common with each other than with anyone else in their respective industries.

Imagine a group of people who’d climbed Mount Everest. After such a literally “peak” experience, they would share an incredible bond and all kinds of reference points that other people who hadn’t had that experience couldn’t really understand. Any sort of epic adventure and achievement will unify people at a certain level.

It’s the same with people who’ve achieved 10x—except the commonality isn’t any external factor, but an internal clarity, confidence, and capability they’ve gained from achieving something big.

This leads me to think that 10x is an industry unto itself. Those who’ve attained it have passed from a commodity-based industry, where what draws people together is what they sell, to a realm of 10x aspiration, progress, and results. At that level, you’re no longer in your original industry, but in this new, limitless industry that simply can’t be commoditized because it’s internally generated.

That’s the first 10x transformation—where you as an individual reach a multiplier level and transcend your industry. The next transformation occurs when you take this dynamic into your company, so every aspect of it has the capability of going 10x—including all your team members.

The scariest feeling is being surrounded by events and not understanding them. Your lack of comprehension becomes your greatest threat and starts eating away at you. A lot of people are feeling this way about the economy right now.

Thinking in terms of 10x makes just about anything that’s happening on the planet explainable. It’s a global philosophy that allows you to process and take advantage of the speed at which changes are taking place today.

Human beings normalize things very quickly. Just watch a tennis player responding to a 110 mph serve — it’s incredible. They’ve simply normalized that experience. Their reflexes and hand-eye coordination are geared to it.

So what we have to do is say, “This change is going to constantly be with us.” The microchip continues to increase in speed and power. It continues to have a greater and greater impact on everything in our society. What kind of thought would organize everything in a way that makes it not scary and actually let you take maximum advantage of what’s happening? That thought is “10x.”

So here are four questions to get you thinking this way:

• • What in my life supports 10x?
• • What in my life doesn’t support 10x?
• • What’s lacking in my life that I need in order to go 10x?
• • What’s present in my life that I could take advantage of to go 10x?

The more you process every event in your life through this thinking, the more you’ll find yourself in the 10x flow.

Right now, fast change is not only possible, it’s inevitable. So the question becomes, are you going to be creative with that experience or reactive? Whether the consequences of change are good or bad will be entirely a function of your mindset.

If you adapt your mind to thinking 10x, no matter what happens around you, you will have a creative experience. You’ll feel like you’re on top of events and will actually enjoy them.

Educational and organizational structures that stress incremental change simply don’t prepare people for the world we’re living in right now. An incremental outlook lacks the crucial elements that engage people the most — which 10x provides, because it’s:

• • emotionally satisfying
• • psychologically reassuring
• • intellectually enlightening

I don’t see any evidence that people who keep their heads down and keep doing what they’ve always done get rewarded these days. They’re certainly not any safer. If two people are in a situation that’s crumbling around them, the one who’s capable of thinking 10x bigger will be able to create a new and better possibility for themselves. They’ve become accustomed to generating reality from scratch. The incremental thinker, on the other hand, will lose the foundation for growth they were expecting to build on.

If you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur of any kind, 10x is the most promising future imaginable. It perfectly situates you to take advantage of opportunities and generate endless entrepreneurial growth.

Project yourself out of your present circumstances into a 10x future — one where your results happen 10x faster, 10x easier, 10x cheaper, and 10x bigger. Looking back, what would you change now?

Here are some of my initial thoughts on what it means to think about the future in this way:

1. Investment: If something isn’t going to produce or contribute to a 10x result, it’s not worth your time, attention, or effort.
2. Distinction: Looked at from the 10x perspective, everything belongs in one of two categories — “the past” or “the future.”
3. Qualities: Everything that contributes to 10x has four qualities — faster, easier, cheaper, and bigger.
4. Material: Everything in your business can continually be transformed into a better building block for endless 10x improvement and growth.
5. Transformation: If you have a 10x perspective about every aspect of your life, everything will continually transform itself to support your progress.
6. Tools: You surround yourself with the thinking tools that help you appreciate, learn from, and accelerate your progress.
7. Solutions: The continual achievement of 10x progress solves every problem you will ever have by creating endless new opportunities, resources, and capabilities.
8. Energy: 10x progress is much easier to achieve and expand on than incremental progress because it motivates and energizes everyone who comes into contact with it.
9. Uniqueness: Focusing on 10x progress immediately sorts out what each person’s Unique Ability is and shows how all of these abilities need to contribute to one another.
10. Ease: You find it incomparably easier to stay within your Unique Ability as you focus on growing your business and your life 10x.

Start asking yourself what a 10x result would look like in each area of your business and life. You’ll begin to notice dramatically bigger possibilities for the future that make it increasingly easier to make decisions and take action in the present.

I could give countless examples of multipliers from history or from the remarkable things I’ve seen my clients do, yet people are ultimately most interested in their own story, their own future.

Then I got it: Ten times.

“What if this was 10x better?”

That question has an immediate effect on your mind. Say you ask it about your business. You might respond with excitement, or your brain might come back with a bunch of objections like:

•            But my clients wouldn’t pay that much!

•            But I don’t want to be ten times busier!

•            But I don’t have the support structures for that!

All these responses are extremely useful, because they highlight what stands between you and that 10x, which allows us to start asking further questions like:

•            Imagining your income is 10x greater, what kind of people are you dealing with?

•            You’re now 10x freer and 10x more focused on what you do best in your business. Which activities did you give up?

•            If you’re 10x more productive, what kind of team members do you have around you?

So “10x” is about much more than just money—it can mean whatever’s most important to you. Maybe you’d like to:

•            Reach 10x more people with your business and create value for them.

•            Make 10x the contribution in your community.

•            Have 10x more free time to spend with your family and on your other interests.

Why ten times? Why not five or even two?

The reason is that we’re pretty smart rats, and as smart rats, we say, “I bet I don’t have to change too much to get double the result.” You keep doing a lot of old stuff—just more of it—and it gets you into trouble. The knowledge, attitudes, skills, and habits that got you here aren’t the same ones you’ll be operating with at 10x.

Plus, small multipliers simply aren’t exciting enough. Ten times—now that’s a reason to wake up in the morning! It also gives you a standard for looking at your world: Once you get into that frame of mind, you find yourself asking, “Why am I still doing this? Does it contribute to 10x?”

Ten times is on the outer reaches of imagination, where your thinking goes “POP!”—from incremental change to a quantum leap. It’s an entirely new, unfettered perspective.  And it’s actually the safest way to think about the future, because it will introduce you to all the growth you need in order to deal with a rapidly changing world.

One of the multipliers Jason singled out as particularly helpful was a Strategic Coach structure called The Unique Process.

A Unique Process is a way for entrepreneurs to communicate much more directly and powerfully about what they do and to convey how it will create value for the listener.

Watch this conversation on YouTube to find out how Jason met Strategic Coach and developed his own process, and to hear an overview from me of how this great multiplier works.

For most people, the prospect of being directly involved in the marketplace is unthinkable, and they separate it from themselves so they don’t have to be exposed to the uncertainty, unpredictability, and mysteriousness of it. They move backwards and create layers of separation like:

• • “I’m going to work for a large organization.”
• • “I’m going to have recognized credentials for my job.”
• • “I’m going to have status within my part of the organization.”
• • “I’m going to be unionized so I’m protected by union rules.”

Their justification for these choices is the security they receive, but that security comes at the price of having no multipliers.

I’m not making judgments about anyone’s decisions. We all come from different places and have different goals for what we’re trying to achieve. No one can really know what another person’s history or context is.

It’s just that every time you introduce another layer between yourself and the marketplace, you lose the multipliers in life. If you want more multipliers, you have to get closer to the marketplace.

It’s certainly not for everybody, but my feeling is that it shouldn’t actually be any more incomprehensible living out in that universe than it is living in the middle of some large organization.

I’ve spent my career helping individuals create all sorts of structures to make this into a comprehensible, structured, and, to a certain extent, predictable way of living one’s life. I call it “Successful, Sane, and Satisfying”:

• • Successful: You should be able, as an entrepreneur, to live a life that is continually more successful.
• • Sane: You should be sane as you do this. In other words, you feel cool, calm, and collected—and it’s fun.
• • Satisfying: You get an enormous amount of enjoyment and reward—psychological and emotional, in addition to financial—from what you’re doing.

The thing you have to give up as an entrepreneur is all the other frameworks for thinking about the world that most people use to make things understandable for themselves. In exchange for giving that up, you get the opportunity to invent life on your terms and have it be exceptional.

I look at the world, and I think it’s a wonderful place. Other people look at it, and they think it’s a scary place, it’s getting worse, it’s dangerous. That’s strictly a function of the frameworks they have for looking at the world. My frameworks say that things are getting better but that you have to be smart about how you live your life in order to be able to take advantage of it.

It’s all a personal choice—but I think my framework has a better shelf life.