
One of the most important things when building a team is building a rapid growth path. The people in your team should all have wild unstoppable aspirations to become x10 faster in what they do. Great team members are separated from the rest by their relentless desire to improve, and they don’t think small. A lot of people want to improve by 50% or by x2, but those who have the most tidal effect on a company are those who think big and long term.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine what being x10 faster looks like, so it’s easy to casually wave it off as a manager’s lip service. But it’s not. It’s a real thing. And you’ve all done it before.
Imagine the first time you did a project using some new technology or in a new field. The first project might have taken a month or two, and at its end, you probably thought that if you had to do it again, knowing what you know now, it would only take you a week or two. Congrats, you’ve become x4 faster in that area. Do that twice in a year and you’ve blown through the x10 better mark.
There are multiple ways to improve, there’s no one correct or sure way, and different ways are often right at different times of one’s career.
Time efficiency is a huge one for me and for me it includes multiple tricks like:
- Staying focused on a single task until I’m done with it or it has reached a stopping point. Context switching is brutal.
- Not procrastinating tasks even if you don’t like them. You either do them or you don’t but you must be upfront about it. This one is especially hard for me and I’m working extra hard on it.
- Do the big things first, you’ll find time for the smaller things. A good example is that I insist that each sprint will have at least one major story in it. When I look back at the end of the month I love feeling that I accomplished something great that our customers use and love. It’s harder to feel that way if all I did was move many small tasks around.
- Not getting distracted when I don’t want to. One can do that by setting aside time for a specific task and by signaling to their surroundings that they don’t wish to interfere (for example by putting headphones on).
- Reviewing and eliminating sources of inefficiency every few weeks. Just thinking about it intentionally helps, and often I find that a new behavior or distraction creep crawled into my habits.
Another great way to become x10 faster is by learning and gaining experience with more efficient frameworks, tools, languages, algorithms, and methodologies. This one is the source of our professionalism and also an endless fountain of speed. Imagine how much time it would have taken us to write notification and queuing services from scratch. Probably a few months. Instead, we use Amazon’s SNS and SQS and can achieve the same outcome x10 faster. The first time one writes a service that connects to the SNS/SQS architectural pattern it probably takes a week. By the third and fourth time, it takes no more than a day. A few months in and it takes a couple of hours at most. A couple of hours instead of a few months. Just by knowing that these services exist and gaining some experience with them.
Every time we embark on a new project that is remote enough from anything else we’ve done before it might take us a long while. Just imagine a new project that you might estimate in a month. By the end of the project, we often find ourselves thinking that if we had to do it again we would have done it better and faster. It’s natural but we don’t always classify it under “becoming x10 faster” even though we should. If you aspire to continuously learn about new frameworks, tools, and methodologies then you’re connected to an endless stream x10 speed improvement opportunities.
There are other ways to improve x10, some are move obvious than others. The ones above are my main ones and they all require my intentional efforts, discipline and aspiration day in and day out.

