How to create a 10x change

The title of this post reflects the question that I have been asking myself for at least 6 months now. In this post I intend to show my current answer for that question and what path I took to get there.

Anyone can be creative!

Even though I heard from different people, I don’t believe that creativity is something that you are born with, like a gift, I firmly believe it to be a mindset. After learning to play guitar, that became even more evident to me; people who don’t know how to play often said “Oh man, I wish I could play, but I don’t have the skill, I wasn’t born for that” or people who know how to play (even much better than me) would never try to create their own music or even their own interpretation of a famous song, instead they would only stick to tabs and tutorials to reproduce content created by other people.

In my perspective, both cases are a consequence of the fear of failure. The pipeline of actions to have this mindset seems to be something like: people watch their idols performing seamlessly or hear magical stories of how some of them had magical insights in a moment of suffering ; try their luck on a field of interest and fail (as we ALL do in the beginning) and get discouraged; start believing that successful individuals got there because they had a head start (from birth or out of pure luck).

After noticing that pattern, I began studying how successful people explain that, in all my areas of interest like music, sports and business. And even if all of them would say it in a different way, it comes down to practice, focus, patience and passion. From a psychological perspective I dove into practice and started creating my own way of doing things (music at first and now a startup) on a daily basis. From this experience I learned:

• Invention and Innovation are two different things; Invention is personal or creates a new perspective for a small group, on the other hand Innovation is a network of social events.
• I could invent, but not yet innovate and that became my new goal.

In my quest to innovate I discovered frameworks of thinking, more specifically, slow thinking (as Daniel Kahneman would say on his book Thinking Fast and Slow), and have been practicing everyday to make my “creativity muscle” stronger so I can apply that in a company.

The Framework

When talking about innovation many business leaders claim that any successful innovative product must be either different or 10 times better than the current market leader. OK, that seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, if you answered yes to that question, the next question is “What does 10 times better mean?”, is it better for me (company), better for the environment or just a better design?

When funding new products, a good rule of thumb is that the new product must be at least 10 times better than the old way of doing the same thing or customers will stay with what they have.

Ben Horowitz, co-founder Andressen Horowitz

I finally found an answer when taking Eugene Shteyn’s course at Stanford and reading his book. The 10X diagram, which puts products and services in perspective, so we can compare the ones we have today and know where to look for the trends that will shape our future. So here it goes:

“What such transition does to a business is profound, and how the business manages this transition determines its future.”

Andy Grove, former Chairman of the Board of Intel

The diagram above analyzes products and services in relationship of 3 parameters: Money (How much?), Scale (Who/What?) and Time (When/How often?). So let’s map out how the food market was about 40 years ago and what changed a few years later:

The family meal was the traditional way of consuming food. People would spend something like $100 (Money), once a week (Time) to buy food for a whole family (Scale). That was the common practice then and the next trend on the market was about to start; A new way of consuming that was at least 10x better than the previous.

Better for your health? Better for the environment? Not necessarily. But it was a leap on the Money x Time x Scale for that market at that time.

Some people discovered that they could create a meal that, among other things, would be a mix of fat, sugar and salt, that was really tasty, cheap at the same time and easy to cook. Even though fast food, didn’t sell the healthiest food, their chains became insanely popular in a really short period. Their leap on the diagram was: People would pay $1 (Money), at every hour of the day (Time) to satisfy one organ, their tongue (Scale). As you can see on the diagram, they disrupted the food market.

Other Examples

As an exercise I highly recommend trying to locate other examples on the 10X change diagram, like TV and Netflix for example. The image below illustrates how Microsoft would release an update Windows updates every few years for $X and would target families and small business. The second mark on the diagram shows Apple’s iPhone that targets one person, with early updates at a cheaper price. Finally the last ones shows how the App Store now provides daily updates, for smaller software applications with basically no cost.

Conclusion

My final point here is that frameworks like that shows why anyone can be creative! You just need to structure your thoughts and know where to start and identify the trend . Despite not being an expert yet, I think I made huge progress on the past 6 months and I hope my learning is not over!