10x Reframes the Problem, 10% Optimizes It

“The way Page sees it, a ten percent improvement means that you’re doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly. That’s why Page expects Googlers to create products and services that are ten times better than the competition. That means he isn’t satisfied with discovering a couple of hidden efficiencies or tweaking code to achieve modest gains. Thousand percent improvement requires rethinking problems, exploring what’s technically possible and having fun in the process.”

“During Gmail’s development, Google’s leaders considered offering 100MB of storage—an enormous upgrade. But by 2004, when the product was released to the public, the 100MB goal was dead and forgotten. Instead, Gmail provided a full gigabyte of storage, up to five hundred times more than the competition. Users could keep emails in perpetuity. Digital communication changed forever. That, my friends, is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Gmail didn’t merely improve on existing systems. It reinvented the category and forced competitors to raise their game by orders of magnitude. Such 10x thinking is rare in any sector, on any stage. Most people, Larry Page observes, “tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible.””