How I used 10x thinking
(Author’s Note: In this article I conduct a personal experiment to analyze the notion of 10x thinking)
What is 10x thinking ?
10X thinking, initially used by Google (at its GoogleX), has been the ‘Google’ way of encouraging teams to develop highly innovative products. The aim was to create products that improved the current way of doing things by a factor of 10. The term ‘10x’ thinking broke the common practice of working for 10% improvement, motivating teams to ‘re-invent the wheel’- to move from incremental change to radical change and solve hard problems.
“It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change.” — Larry Page, Google CEO
So important is innovation that it is also mentioned in the MIT Sloan mission — ‘ to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice’. Understanding innovation and innovation management at MIT has been enjoyable and thought provoking. It got me to think about how I can use 10x thinking in my personal life.
Conducting a 10Xperiment
In order to understand 10x thinking, I conducted a thought experiment to achieve 10x gains on the time I take to get ready for the gym i.e. the time from when I wake up to the time I leave home. You can read my previous article to get a sense of where this is coming from. Can I reduce my 30+ minutes to 3 minutes ? Is this 10X thinking ? Will this be beneficial ? Will this really reduce the friction to go to the gym ? I decided to run the experiment anyways.
Below is the Breakup of my daily time schedule
- 5:50 — Alarm rings
- 6:00/6:05 — Get out of bed (after 1 snooze)
- 6:10 Finish brushing
- 6:20 Throne time
- 6:30 Change to gym wear, take a quick bite and leave
I analyzed the constituents of time spent in various activities and decided to Optimize the non-productive time.
Step 1 # Optimizing
1. Snooze problem — This was the easiest one to solve. A matter of curtailing my laziness , I resolved that I should ‘Jump out of bed’ and not ‘Snooze out of Bed’.
2. Clothes problem — Easy to solve as well. I re-stacked my gym wear layering per day usage instead of by garment.
Optimizing outcome
-6:00 — Alarm and get out of bed
-6:05 Finish brushing
-6:20 Complete other activities and leave
Jumping out of the bed and not snoozing has done me wonders. I now start my mornings with a burst of positivity and energy. However, my new total of 20 minutes was yet far from the desired 3.
With little option to further optimize, I realised the necessity to alter my morning routine of brush, bathroom, tea. Now changing this was going to be extremely difficult — was this even possible for me to do ?
Understanding Dependancies and myself?
Dependancies are mental habits/beliefs that we have acquired from society and usually accepted by people in our community (Concept of Collective intelligence) and built into our daily routines. For example my dependency of brushing immediately after waking up is an outcome of a belief, passed across generations in my community, that it is best to do so. While this used to be common-sense for me, I decided to try out a change.
Step #2 Re-constructing dependencies
1. Brushing — How do I bring this time down ? (pre-gym Mouthwash + brush after gym)
2. Morning activities — Too difficult to push to after gym , but can I ?
3. Morning snack — Can I do without tea (Hot) in the morning ? (I substituted it with healthy Soylent)
Re-constructing my dependencies is currently a work in progress and I am still away from the desired 3 minutes. However, the 10Xperiment has made me think in new ways — and achieve way more than what I would have without it.
My framework for 10x thinking in personal life
1. Identify a problem to be solved
2. Map out the improvement due to Optimization
3. Identify your dependencies by asking yourself questions. (Hint: Catch yourself answering— ‘I can’t’ or ‘This is who I am’). Change the question and repeat.
4. Work towards removing dependencies (Identification itself will help you internalize how you can change your behavior)
5. Enjoy significant improvement.
Conclusion
10x thinking does not always make you reach a 10x improvement — well definitely not immediately. However, it did make me think - think deep and thorough I did. The quote below sums up my thoughts on 10x succinctly.
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”
― Norman Vincent Peale
( I have limited the mental model point to dependency for simplicity. If you are interested in reading more around that topic, I suggest reading Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow to understand System1 /System2 thinking and Mental Representations)
