HOW TO TAKE AN ACTION : THE 10X RULE Summary

By Grant Cardone

How to take an Action

In this article, I will present the main five lessons from “The 10x Rule”, written by Grant Cardone.

The 10x Rule is about pure domination mentality, and how to be the alpha of the industry. The overall main points that Grant Cardone makes regarding how to reach extreme amounts of success can be divided into two parts - extreme 10x GOALS, and extreme 10x ACTION. There are a bunch of practical lessons that can help you wake up from your slumber, and make you reach your full potential. Let's see how.

Lesson One:

10x goals bootstrap your success Maybe you need to find a job, lose 40 pounds, or find the right partner. Although these scenarios cover different areas of your life, they all have one thing in common: The person who desires them is not there yet. To achieve success, to accomplish your goals, often turns out to be much harder than first anticipated. This is because people have a tendency to underestimate the time, energy money and effort necessary to bring their projects to the point of success. This is the reason why goals should be set MUCH higher than what you might be comfortable with.

Let's say my goal is to make a buttload of money. So I set the goal to be the reasonable amount of $500,000, which would enable a decent level of living with a good home, good food, a nice vacation every once in a while, and some of those lovely Thai massages once or twice a month! But now, pretend that I would instead have set the targets at five million dollars. Now THAT is a buttload. No matter what I end up achieving, if I miss my target, which goal would I rather come up short on? You want a big margin of safety in order to bootstrap your success. This is a trick that is being adopted within sports, and more specifically, mental trainers use it regularly with their elite athletes. The athletes set out to become number one - nothing else.

Now, this might not always be realistic for everyone, but that's not the point either. The point is that the person's actions are then aligned with their 10x goal. And if the goal turned out to be out of reach, hey, at least the athlete ended up in third place and succeeded to out-compete like 99.99% of all the other competitors. This holds true in business, personal life or whatever. Set targets so high that even if you would come up short you are still perceived as, and will be, a winner.

Lesson Two:

10 x actions is required again, the amount of time, energy, money and effort required to bring a project to success is oftentimes underestimated. When the miscalculation of the effort required becomes obvious (and it will) and you hit a wall, one becomes visibly disappointed and discouraged. This causes you to incorrectly identify the problem as a wall that you can't smash through, and sooner or later, you assume that the target is unattainable and ultimately throw in the towel.

If you instead anticipate that the amount of work required would be of the 10x character, some setbacks are to be expected, and those walls that you hit, will no longer be made out of concrete. And if this would turn out to be false - that there were no major setbacks or black or gray swans, hey, lucky you!

Regardless of how superior your product, service, or proposition is, there is always uncertainty - things for which you can't plan. The economy fluctuates, legal matters appear, competition makes your product inferior, you run out of cash, the whole industry becomes disrupted, technology changes, people problems ... more people problems, elections, wars, strikes These are just a few of potential unexpected events. Make a plan of the amount of action you need to complete in order to finish your project with the margin of safety. Then multiply that with 10! There you go!

Now you have a much more realistic number. Consider space travel and the moon landing. The fact that we can put humans on the moon and send freaking Teslas into outer space is mind-blowing, but it wasn't and still isn't an easy task. The initial target was of 10x character and the amount of action required was 10x massive. To achieve greatness, your amount of action needs to be great.

Lesson Three:

Create your own luck Having 10x goals, followed by 10x actions, will create 100 times the amount of opportunities any average person is exposed to. And the best part is - since you will be better prepared to make use of those opportunities - the amount of value following your actions will be unheard of compared to any of those average peers of yours. From the outside, this will be perceived as "luck". "Ah look at that dude! He just happened to be at the right place at the right time. If only I was that lucky!" What they don't see is the massive amount of action required to put you in that place to begin with.

Take Tiger Woods as an example. No matter what you think of him, you got to hand it to him, he's been extremely successful. But when just watching a specific tournament one can perceive some specific shots as lucky. Lucky hit, lucky bounce, lucky roll, lucky whatever.

But what isn't shown is the tremendous amount of practice - thousands and thousands and thousands of hours on the driving ranch and millions of puts. So is he really "lucky" in that tournament, or is it just hard work paying off? Or, take to fund managers as an example, running to different funds. Which one will be more "lucky", picking more successful companies? The manager who does 100 due diligences and company meetings per year, or the manager meeting and analyzing only 5 companies per year? Warren Buffett is famous for reading a tremendous amount of annual reports every year. I'll just leave it at that. Sometimes actual luck and uncertainty might have something to do with it, but it can't be calculated with. Besides, you don't see or hear about the big number of times the successful went for it and failed. After all, the world pays attention only when they're winning.

Bottom line - the more actions you take, the better your chances of getting "lucky". So go! Take action and create your own luck!

Lesson Four:

FEAR Do what you fear, that is how you will excel. Fear is the great indicator of what you should focus on. An absence of concerns signals that you are only doing what's comfortable for you, and that will only get you more of what you have right now. Fear stands for False Events Appearing Real. Use this frequently avoided feeling as a green light for what you SHOULD do. For instance, if you're afraid to call on a client, that's a sign that you should call that client.

In fact, you will be amazed at how much stronger and more confident you'll become. And everyone fears something in life. However, it's what we each do with that fear that distinguishes us from others. It actually works as a competitive tool - one that is for free and un-utilized for the most part.

So, bottom-line: Eat your fears. Don't feed them by backing off or giving them time to grow. Learn to look for, and use fear, so that you know exactly what you need to do to overcome it and advance your life.

Lesson Five:

Don't compete. Dominate! Competition is for sissies. We've all heard the story about the tortoise and the hare. The lesson, of course, is that the tortoise wins because he plods along and takes his time. Whereas the hare, rushes, becomes tired and misses his opportunity to win.

From this story, we're supposed to derive that it's good to be a tortoise - someone who approaches his goal slowly and steadily. Bulls***! If there was a third player in the fable, let's say, the Duracell rabbit, which had the speed of the hare and the steadfastness of the tortoise, it would outperform them both and have no competition whatsoever. The suggestion here is to approach your goals like the tortoise AND the hare, by attacking them ruthlessly from the beginning, and also staying with them throughout the course of "the race".

Take the competition to your playground, where you go all in with energy every time. Even if you fail, you keep going all in! As most people won't do what's necessary to be at your level, you will achieve great results no matter the field. And then just keep stacking - wood and fuel, wood and fuel. MORE wood, MORE fuel, until the fire is so hot and burns so brightly that not even competitors, or market changes or anything can put your fire out. These were some of the major lesson from “The 10x Rule”.

So, in order to reach your full potential: Set 10x, MASSIVE goals. Doesn't this seem to be a reappearing pattern of successful people? Projects usually require more than you first anticipate. Plan for, and deliver 10 x actions. When you are taking 10 times the action, soon other people will perceive you as being "lucky". If they only knew. If there is something in the path to success that you fear, grab that fear by its ugly tail. Enhance the speed of the hare and the constant motion of the tortoise, and you will be unstoppable.

Your chances of Success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself. Robert Collier a gentleman was walking through an elephant camp and he spotted that the elephants weren’t being kept in cages or held by the use of chains. All that was holding them back from escaping the camp was a small piece of rope tied to one of their legs. As the man gazed upon the elephants, he was completely confused as to why the elephants didn’t just use their strength to break the rope and escape the camp. They could easily have done so, but instead, they didn’t try to at all. Curious and wanting to know the answer, he asked a trainer nearby why the elephants were just standing there and never tried to escape. The trainer replied; “when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.” The only reason that the elephants weren’t breaking free and escaping from the camp was that over time they adopted the belief that it just wasn’t possible. The moral of the story is; No matter how much the world tries to hold you back, always continue with the belief that what you want to achieve is possible. Believing you can become successful is the most important step in actually achieving it.

And finally, the book in 3 sentences:

1. The 10X Rule says that you should set targets for yourself that are 10X greater than what you believe you can achieve.
2. You should take actions that are 10X greater than what you believe is necessary to achieve your goals.
3. The biggest mistake most people make in life is not setting goals high enough. Taking massive action is the only way to fulfill your true potential.