The Myth of 10x

Or 100x, or however you chose to measure productivity

You’ve probably heard tech people talk about 10x founders, 10x engineers, 10x marketers, yadda yadda…

Ever since automation, no-code, and agents became consumer-ready, Silicon Valley types started foaming at the mouth at the prospect of a single person yielding ten times (sometimes a hundred times) the results.

But I’m genuinely starting to wonder what that truly means. It’s hard to deny that people can do more nowadays than they could five or ten years ago. Though, there’s a very real argument to be made about “productivity” being a fool’s errand meant to soothe investors and executives’ egos, rather than an actual measure of impact or success.

I don’t usually jump to conclusions with deconstructing the meaning or intention of the things we’ve come to value, particularly when it comes to the stuff by which people’s livelihoods pivot. But this one has been wracking my brain for a while.

It may come as a blow to our collective professional ego, and it’s more than likely I’ll gather some Zappier and N8N wizards’ ire. But I ask you to run with my train of thought for a moment. At least I hope this might help you find where to focus your energy, lest you end up in the crosshairs of AI layoffs.

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Bullshit all the way down

10x Myth #1: Everything that could be optimized, *should* be optimized

Bullshit jobs aren’t too much of a controversy. There’s an unlimited potential for the kinds of tasks that could be automated, optimized, or just replaced with the right process (i.e., learning how to trust people’s talents). But simultaneously, the type of CEO to do away with bullshit jobs is also the type to not really care about how their decisions impact their employee’ lives.

Sometimes, it’s worth it to have an inefficient process so that someone can pay their bills.

That’s a balance we constantly coexist with across industries. And we tend to point our fingers at the people who side on either extreme as incompetent, or callous, depending on where they stand on the spectrum.

I used to be a part of the latter. I absolutely believed that I was under a moral obligation to fix anything that *could* be optimized. I have come to regret that.

Once you know the people who are at risk of being replaced by name, once you’ve heard their stories and cared for their wellbeing; it takes a particular kind of asshole to still believe the world will thank you for your “efficiency”.

In companies, no amount of process or efficiency will come to replace the value of belief and perseverance, and you only get those through caring about the people who build alongside you.

Sure, improve what you will, I’m not arguing you should stagnate in favor of a handful of people. I’m just pointing out that every great company, project, or endeavor in history was built by people who truly believed in their common goal; no amount of tech can change that.

But that’s just my personal belief. It’s still worth arguing that better industries open up more time for more involved and passionate work.

The Backlog is like a Gas

10x Myth #2: You’ll achieve more with less effort.

Bill Gates famously said you should hire a lazy person to do a hard job because they’ll find a way to make it easy. That’s pretty much the perfect summary of my career over the past 15 years. I’ve found every loophole, automation and process to make everything I do as a marketer, consultant, or founder easier, faster and more efficient.

And yet, the one thing I haven’t found the perfect formula for is impact.

No matter how big and convoluted my flows got, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of users I was juggling with personalized flows, no matter how much of the efficiency theater I participated in to woo executives. I’ve never found a way to beat good old elbow grease when it comes to actually doing something that moves the needle in a significant way.

There’s a reason cold emails and DMs are still a thing, as much as all of us hate them. When properly targeted and designed, they are the most effective way to get results you can grasp and measure. Beyond the conversion funnels and programmatic SEO, there is no better way to know you did something and feel the accomplishment than reaching out to a human being, and getting a response.

For many, even though there’s a vague idea of their involvement, their tangible impact towards the end goal of a project is at best a single-digit percentage increase on a PowerPoint.

You can get a tool to send out email summaries all day long, or cut down podcast interviews into short-form content, and there’s no denying all of these are neat things to do. But as many in the marketing world know: there will always be something more to be done. There’s always a different angle, a new channel, a campaign, or piece of content you could create. But how many of those will achieve anything?

Work is like a gas; it expands to fill any container. But when the container in question is the hours of your day, wouldn’t it be worth considering when to call it “good enough?”.

In all of my years of being the lazy person in the room, no one has denied how much I can “get done” in what seems like inhuman time. But what I’ve found is that the only purpose of “making a hard job easy” is to make it easier to get someone else to replace you. Efficiency and automation make it so that the task no one else could’ve done yesterday is easily outsourced tomorrow.

There are some existing studies demonstrating how productivity increases don’t correlate at all with either the final outcome or the reward for the everyday worker. Value capture starts and ends at the top, so why are we working so relentlessly to give away every minute of our time?

Do you write novels in your free time?

10x Myth #3: You’ll own your time.

“Use AI, you’ll be able to carve out time for the stuff you would rather be doing!”

Yeah, except that’s not how people’s motivation works. Creativity and passion aren’t something that you switch on as soon as you have a spare moment. Unless you’re practicing your passion regularly and carving out the time, regardless of how much time your job takes up, chances are you’ll spend that newfound time scrolling the TikTok feed.

The myth about AI enabling anything that isn’t there already is grounded in the senseless hope that some magic bullet will give us all of the answers.

That’s a pretty sensible consensus that most of us know. But it doesn’t stop AI startups from using it as their pitch, and people believe them.

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Let me lay it all out.

We all know the tech world is rife with theatrics and productivity performances. And I believe this applies to every job out there in different measures.

When we’re talking about a worker becoming a 10 or 100x, we should really be taking that measurement with a big chunk of salt. Is that 10x based on vanity metrics? Is it just a 10x on the quarterly deck? How much of that 10x value actually helped them achieve something worthwhile?

It’s easy to say AI will augment anything that you do, but the trick to using it is finding the stuff worth doing in the first place.

The hype today may be too dense to really see what’s being achieved. Still, if the latest studies and news are anything to go by, it’ll take some time for people to discover how AI’s usefulness may eventually meet the expectations, if ever.

There’s not much of a call to action coming out of this piece, except for three tidbits you should always practice regardless:

1. Never underestimate the value of people who believe in you. Those are the actual 10xers.

2. Don’t fall victim to the efficiency theater everyone partakes in. Most numbers on a slideshow are there only to make someone happy.

3. If you want some tool to come and give you permission to do what you actually want to be doing, start building towards it yourself today, there’s no magic bullets.