How to think 10x bigger when setting business goals
Simple. Not easy.
That's my honest summary of 10x thinking after years of watching entrepreneurs try it, mangle it and occasionally pull it off. Setting a goal ten times bigger than what feels realistic sounds like motivational poster material, but in practice it's a math exercise that quietly breaks your current business model, and that breaking is the whole point.
Let me walk through where the idea came from, why most people use it wrong, and how to apply it without lighting your company on fire.
Where 10x thinking actually comes from
Grant Cardone popularized the concept in "The 10X Rule," published by Wiley in 2011. His version is blunt. Set targets 10 times bigger than what feels realistic, then back them with 10 times the expected effort. It's an effort-heavy framing, and it made the idea famous.
The roots run deeper, though. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras coined the term BHAG, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, in their 1994 book "Built to Last," recommending a 10 to 30 year horizon. That's a generation of work, not a quarterly sprint. Around the same era, Andy Grove was developing OKRs at Intel, a system John Doerr later spread through his 2018 book "Measure What Matters," and here's a detail most people miss: aspirational OKRs are typically considered successful at roughly 60 to 80 percent attainment. Hitting 100 percent means you sandbagged.
Then there's the moonshot version. X, formerly Google X, Alphabet's innovation lab founded in 2010, explicitly aims for 10x improvements over 10 percent gains. Their reasoning is worth stealing: a 10 percent improvement means competing with everyone using the same tools, while a 10x improvement forces you to start from scratch, which is often easier than optimizing a crowded approach.
Most recently, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy expanded the framework in "10x Is Easier Than 2x," released in May 2023 by Hay House, drawing on Sullivan's Strategic Coach program, running since 1989. Their argument flips Cardone's. It isn't about 10x effort. It's about 10x focus, which usually means doing far less, in a category with a dramatically higher ceiling.
Four decades of the same idea, refined. That should tell you something.
Why does a 10x goal work better than a 2x goal?
Because a 2x goal lets you keep your current methods and just push harder, while a 10x goal makes your current methods mathematically impossible, forcing you to redesign your strategy, your offers, and your economics from scratch. That's where breakthroughs come from. The goal is a forcing function, not a pep talk.
Here's the thing. If you're doing $500K a year and set a $1M goal, your brain reaches for the obvious levers. More hours. More sales calls. A bigger ad budget. You can grind your way to 2x, and plenty of people do, at the cost of their health and weekends.
Set a $5M goal and none of that math works. You can't personally make 10x the sales calls or work 10x the hours. There aren't enough hours. So you're forced to ask what you'd have to sell, at what price, to what market, through what channel, for $5M to be plausible. Usually the answer means changing the offer itself.
I saw this firsthand building Ringba. Early on, the temptation in any software business is linear growth: add a customer, add revenue, repeat. The decisions that mattered were the ones where we asked what the business would need to look like at ten times the scale, then built infrastructure and pricing for that version before we needed it. Uncomfortable at the time. Obvious in hindsight. I wrote about some of those decisions in The Pay Per Call Revolution, and the pattern holds everywhere I've looked since. The constraint is almost never effort. It's the model.
The value of a 10x goal isn't hype. It's structural. Sit with that.
The SMART trap
The counterweight is the SMART framework, tracing back to a 1981 paper by George T. Doran in Management Review. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound. It's fine. It's also quietly dangerous for top-level business goals, because "achievable" anchors you to what you already know how to do.
SMART is great for tasks. Lousy for direction. Use it downstream, never upstream.
How to actually set a 10x goal
If I were starting this on a Monday morning, I'd take my current annual revenue, or my single most important metric, multiply it by 10, and write it down with a date 3 to 10 years out. Collins and Porras liked longer horizons, but a decade feels real enough. Then list everything you currently do to grow and honestly mark which activities could scale 10x. Most can't. That short list of survivors is your real strategy. Next, redesign the offer before the marketing, because a 10x business usually charges differently, packages differently, or serves a different customer than the 1x version. From there, translate the goal into OKRs with quarterly key results and grade yourself the way Grove intended: 60 to 80 percent on genuinely aspirational targets means you're doing it right. Finally, buy accountability. Business coaching commonly runs $200 to $1,000+ per hour, and high-end masterminds range from roughly $5,000 to $50,000+ per year, which is real money and still cheaper than three years of drifting.
As I mentioned, Sullivan and Hardy say 10x is about subtraction. The activity audit is where that happens. Most founders discover that 80 percent of their calendar has no path to 10x, and cutting it feels like losing progress. Honestly, it stings. But it's shedding ballast.
One warning. Don't confuse the 10x goal with 10x expectations for your team this quarter. The big number is a design constraint for you, the strategist. Pushed down raw onto employees, it reads as delusion, and good people leave.
The goal doesn't need to be loud. It needs to be load-bearing.
FAQ
Isn't a 10x goal just setting yourself up for failure? Only if you grade it like a SMART goal. Judged the OKR way, reaching 60 to 80 percent of a 10x target means you likely grew 6 to 8x, while hitting 100 percent of a 2x target means you merely doubled. The "failure" wins by a wide margin.
How long should the timeline be? For a true 10x revenue goal, 3 to 10 years is realistic for most businesses. Collins and Porras suggested 10 to 30 years for BHAGs, which fits company-defining missions more than revenue targets.
Should I share the 10x goal publicly? Share the direction with your team, but translate it into quarterly OKRs first. Raw 10x numbers handed out without a plan tend to demoralize.
Do I need a coach or mastermind to pull this off? Need? No. But structured accountability raises the odds, which is why founders pay $5,000 to $50,000+ a year for good rooms. If money's tight, a free peer group of three or four serious operators meeting monthly beats going alone.
If you want more breakdowns like this, I write regularly at adamyoung.com. Do the multiplication this week, before you talk yourself out of it. The number will feel absurd. Write it down anyway.