You can reach 2x by doing more of what you already do. More clients, more hours, more of the same. It is a volume problem, and effort solves volume problems. That is why 2x is exhausting rather than difficult.

10x will not yield to volume. Nothing you are currently doing, done harder, gets you there. The only route left is to work out which fifth of your work produces nearly all of the result, and to let the other four fifths go.

This book is the Pareto Principle², applied over and over. Each jump keeps the 20% and discards the rest, and the 20% you kept becomes the entire field for the next round. The book’s favorite image is Michelangelo in front of a block of marble, removing everything that is not the statue.

“How do we grow 20% next year” returns a list of things you are already doing with slightly larger figures beside them. “What would have to be true for this to be ten times bigger” returns a different list, and most of it is things you would have to stop.

This is why the honest answer to “can we also do X” is so often no. Not because X is bad, but because the list is the product.

I have watched this play out in product reviews for years. Ask a team to improve a feature and they will polish it. Ask them what the product would look like if it did a tenth as much and mattered ten times more, and the meeting stops being about the feature and becomes an argument about what the product is for.

Be warned; this is a Strategic Coach book, and it carries the house vocabulary. Unique Ability, Who Not How, the Gap, and the Gain. Each idea arrives with its capital letters and a client testimonial attached, and if you have read Sullivan’s earlier books you will meet all of them again here, at length.

The examples are also, every one of them, people who made it. Nobody in these pages drops eighty percent of their clients and ends up worse off, which is not the same as nobody ever having done so. Every book in this genre has a survivorship problem.

And “easier” is carrying a great deal of weight in that title. 10x is not easier. It is differently hard, over a much smaller surface, with far more variance. What the book means is that 10x is easier to see, because the goal is so far out of reach that it eliminates most of your options for you.

There is a freedom being assumed, too. Letting go of most of your clients is a founder’s move, and it takes runway, or a partner, or twenty years of reputation to fall back on. From inside a job, with a mortgage, the advice needs translating before it can be used.

Two Things

The first is that constraints clarify. A target you cannot reach by working harder forces you to say out loud what you actually believe produces the result. Most of us have never had to say it out loud.

The second is that subtraction is a decision, and it is the one nobody schedules. We plan what to add every quarter. I have sat in very few meetings called to decide what to stop.

You can read this one inspectionally³ in an afternoon and lose nothing. The argument is in the first third; the rest is the same argument with more customers in it.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”

That quote is the clichéd but a true one from Steve Jobs in his closing Q&A in the Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997.

This applies even to the Nomenclatures¹ that we use in email subjects, meeting titles, and even files & folder names.

I’ve seen so many meeting invites titled, “discussion”, “meeting”, “decision-making for tech stack”, etc. Of course, the most common offenders are emails that have subjects sent by people without imagination, “Pick your brain”, “Is Friday OK”, “Beta Test”, etc.

A descriptive email subject is a good indicator of what the content should be, “CompanyName › Beta Invitation”, “Introduction: PersonOne ‹› PersonTwo”, etc. are fantastic examples of good ones.

Meeting invites titled, “Intro: Brajeshwar ‹› PersonBeingIntroduced” is way easier to parse fast and still get the gist of the details. Even if I’m the one inviting the PersonBeingIntroduced because when they sees the subject/title in their calendar, they know who they are meeting without reading the full content of the meeting invite. Similarly, something in the lines of, “CompanyName › Project Kickstart” would be enough to tell me everything about that meeting.

I’m going to tell you a story from the early days of my career. A back-end developer and I used to build many software, and websites for clinics, and physicians. This was the time when websites were built on TABLES². Assets in them were separate .gif, .png, or .jpg files.

For instance, to name all types of arrows, I’d used a reverse but logical naming convention, such as, arrow-left, arrow-right, arrow-up, arrow-down instead of the way we say, left-arrow or right-arrow. This was the early 2000s. After over a decade, I met the team maintaining the website later in the 2010s, and the first thing the team leader reminded me was the standard of names, files, and folder organization in the project. It made it easy for the team to navigate, know where things are likely to be, and they are sort-able easily into the right categories, groups, etc. Personally, it was a very proud moment.

We all have gone through the final_final filenames. That website_comp_v4.2_final_final_final_final_of_the_fina.psd was never the final one.

While dealing with files, if you’d rather not deal with categories/tags for folders, use international standard dates to start the name your files and folders, YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD. Something like;

• 2007-07-07-wedding-bride-with-parents.jpg
• 2008-12-11-kid-first-day.jpg etc.

Of course, if the file or folder are of a specific item/object but time if the variant, then it is better to have;

• brajeshwar-profile-2010.jpg
• brajeshwar-profile-2020.jpg
• brajeshwar-profile-2026.jpg etc.

Now, naming roads such as Hollywood Boulevard, MG Road makes sense as they are descriptive and tells you where they are. Unfortunately, this is not so for files, folders, groups, categories on your devices. Don’t name your files like invoice-file.pdf, or Discussion Folder, or named your team/group as design-team or AI-group.

Be descriptive, not verbose.

Try to be descriptive, be helpful, and be consistent.

Or, what reading since the 1990s did not teach me.

After decades of reading books, I have decided to finally learn How to Read a Book. There is a particular kind of embarrassment in that sentence, and I have made my peace with it.

Mortimer J. Adler published it in 1940. He revised it in 1972 with Charles Van Doren¹, and that is the edition I read, and most likely the one you have too. It is not a book about loving books. It is closer to a manual, written by a man who believed reading is a skill, that most adults quietly stopped learning it somewhere around the sixth grade, and that this was worth being blunt about.

He splits reading into four levels, each one folded into the next.

Elementary is what school gave you. What does the sentence say? Most of us stopped here and have been coasting ever since.

Inspectional is reading on a budget. Systematic skimming (the table of contents, the index, the preface, a paragraph here and there) to answer one question: what kind of book is this, and does it deserve more of my life? Adler is emphatic that this is a real skill and not cheating.

Analytical is the heart of the book and most of its pages. You classify the book, work out its structure, come to terms with the author², which means agreeing on what his words mean before you argue with them, and only then judge it. The rule I keep returning to is his one about disagreement: you must be able to say “I understand” before you are allowed to say “I agree,” “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment.”

Syntopical is reading many books on one subject and building an understanding that sits in none of them individually. It is the hardest, and it is the one that actually changes how you think.

So, What Now?

Well, the book is kind of a slog. There is a real irony in a book about reading being this hard to finish. It is repetitive, fond of its own taxonomy, and the 137-title reading list at the back³ is Homer-to-Solzhenitsyn Western canon in a way that has aged into a period piece.

Of course, the ideas are what you take away from the book. Inspectional reading gave me permission to stop apologizing for skimming. “Come to terms with the author” has made me a better arguer and a much slower one.

What follows is my own take: the whys, and some of the hows, gathered over years of reading and of stealing good ideas from the Internet.

Why Read?

1. Reading well will deepen your appreciation of literature; you’ll gain new experiences and enrich your knowledge of the world and other people.
2. Reading well requires noticing details, reflecting on them and questioning them.
3. One key to reading well and pleasurably is to slow down, take your time and read deliberatively.
4. Re-reading literary texts will allow you to pick up on what you missed the first time around and deepen your reading pleasure.
5. Reading aloud, whether a sentence or an entire page, will help you notice more about a writer’s craft and art, especially how the tone and texture complement the meaning.

How to read books the right way

1. Pick up multiple books (physical, digital, or audio) from the same topic or category to go deeper. This is Adler’s syntopical reading, and you can start it without his permission.
2. It is OK not to finish a book you don’t like.
3. Some books are more flexible and might not be read linearly. It does depend on the topic of the book you’re reading. It’s okay to pick up chapters if the book is meant to be a collection of answers to unrelated topics.
4. Write notes, highlight them, or stick tiny stickies on pages (for physical books).
5. You can speed-read⁴ parts and sections that might not be useful to remember.
6. While reading you might come across topics you don’t know much about. While you’re still finishing the book, read a brief summary to get through the current content. Write them down separately to research more later.
7. Try to write a summary after you’ve read the whole book.
8. Find your format/style or mix them up: digital, physical, audio.

Tips

Here are a few personal tips that worked for me while trying to read and learn the contents of books and get the best out of them. This will help you overcome the habit of Tsundoku⁵.

• Read reviews, from multiple sources, of a book and try to know a general idea of the content and idea of that book.
• Or listen to audio books at about 1.2x speed. You can use whatever you are comfortable with: a headphone, or in your car.
• Once you have either read the reviews or heard the audio book, decide if you want to read the book or not. When you do read it, either physical or digital, but now you know which part to browse and which part to concentrate on.

That last one is inspectional reading wearing a disguise, which I did not know until I read Adler. I had spent years arriving at a worse version of a method somebody wrote down before my parents were born. That is either humbling or reassuring, and most days I take it as both.

It all started, small, with a harmless ASAP, and then a cheeky FYI. Sometimes, I remember pausing in the middle of meetings and pondering, “Let’s double-click on the OKRs before we boil the ocean on this NPS dip,” and nodded along.

Nobody disagrees with you in a meeting these days; they “push back to build alignment,” which is corporate for “no, and I will smile while saying it.” Somewhere a UX researcher is drowning a perfectly good sentence like “people don’t like this button” under a life vest made entirely of consonants: CTR, CSAT, NPS, and, if the deck is feeling ambitious, a lone, defiant ROI.

The acronyms I can just about live with these days; they’re at least honest about being shortcuts. It’s the phrases & jargons that have quietly colonized my brain that worry me. “Let’s take this offline” is a sentence that has never once resulted in an offline conversation, only a calendar invite for Thursday that slides into “next sprint,” the corporate underworld where unresolved decisions go to reincarnate as new tickets.

“Low-hanging fruit,” as if anyone in the history of quarterly planning has ever picked it, rather than just pointed at it approvingly in a slide and moved on to slide thirteen. “We need to operationalize the learnings” is just “we should probably write this down.”

One of my favorites is “leverage synergies,” a phrase so devoid of content it should officially require a laugh track. Somewhere, in an alternate universe with better labor laws, two departments are simply working together, and nobody had to invent a portmanteau¹ of “energy” and “lever” to describe it.

Ah! And then there is the “North Star Metric.” We didn’t need six thousand years of celestial navigation vocabulary to say “the number we’re staring at in the dashboard until it goes up.” Sailors used actual stars to avoid actual death. We are using them to avoid saying, “We don’t really know if this feature worked.”

The tell, always, is that the jargon shows up hardest exactly where the thinking is thinnest. Nobody needs a TLA (three-letter acronym; we even made an acronym for that, which should honestly disqualify the entire species from further language privileges) to say “the database is slow.” But tell a room, “We’re facing latency-driven churn risk impacting our activation funnel,” and suddenly you sound like someone who deserves a promotion instead of someone who forgot to add an index.

I’m not against efficiency. Truly. Some acronyms earn their keep; HTTP didn’t ruin anyone’s day. But most corporate jargon isn’t compression; they are costumes. It doesn’t make the idea smaller and faster. It makes the absence of an idea harder to notice.

So, can we circle back on plain English? Put it on the roadmap. And, I’ll own the action item.

Let’s start with a confession. I was no longer a child by then, but I still like to remember that as my childhood computing.

In our small town, our school was among those that introduced computers early. It was introduced as part of an optional curriculum in the ’90s. We had to pay ₹50 each month to be part of the computer class. It changed my life.

For our class, there were just about five computers, and we were too many. So, I started a revolt that computers were useless for school, and hampered our study for the upcoming 10th exam. Everyone signed the letter that I wrote to the principal, and he agreed to let only those who wanted to stay behind and join the classes. Almost everyone decided to withdraw. A few of my friends and I remained. We were the only ones studying computers. We all had one, sometimes more, computer each during our classes. I’m a bad person.

I wrote my first program in QBasic on those. I saved all of my programs on a 5.25-inch floppy disk. That was one of my most prized possessions. Unfortunately, I lost it when I left my hometown for Bombay.

I also had a cousin who everyone thinks is crazy and weird. He was the first one to have a personal computer at home during the early ’90s. I used to visit him just to hear him talk. He was also the person to suggest way early that the Internet would change everything: “You can do anything, anywhere, from a computer connected to the Internet.” This story was from before the Internet was even introduced in India on Aug 15, 1995, and even way it reached my hometown.

My first brush with a laptop was when a local uncle handed me an IBM laptop for a church to look at to see if I could fix it. I’m not very sure what it was, but I think we got it fixed to an OK state by reloading a fresh AUTOEXEC.BAT. We just had to make sure it can run WordStar. This is how I remember it, and unfortunately that uncle passed away before I could bring up that story again.

I even went on an adventure that I will remember the rest of my life. I went to repair computers at an army camp, accompanied by my childhood friend, who had absolutely no clue about computers.

I also remember visiting a computer show at an upscale hotel. I replaced the shutdown screen (it is just a BMP image) with something in MS Paint and they thought they got “hacked.”

References

• Childhood Computing by Lily
• Childhood Computing by Susam Pal

Or, why almost-human is worse than not-human at all.

In 1970, a Japanese robotics professor, Masahiro Mori, published a short essay in an obscure journal called Energy. He called it Bukimi no Tani, “The Valley of Eeriness.” In English, it as The Uncanny Valley.

Mori’s idea was simple. As a thing becomes more human-like, we warm up to it but up to a point. A stuffed bear, a cartoon, an industrial robot shaped like a friendly arm, which are all very charming. Then somewhere near the top of the curve, something breaks. The doll’s eyes are too glassy. The prosthetic hand is too close to skin. The wax figure almost breathes. Affinity collapses into dread. Only when likeness becomes indistinguishable from the real does warmth return.

The original essay does not dramatize the valley; rather, it just advises designers to stop short of it. Don’t aim for perfect human likeness. Aim for a safe plateau, a place of affection without deception. The goal is to belong without pretending. It was a deeply humble essay. A robotics pioneer telling his own field to settle for less.

The uncanny valley effect is a hypothesized psychological and aesthetic relation between an object’s degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object.

Half a century later, the trench is no longer about androids and prosthetic hands. It runs through our inboxes, our timelines, our phone calls. A voice that almost breathes. A paragraph that almost thinks. A face in a generated video that almost blinks the way a face should. The discomfort we feel is that Uncanny Valley rediscovered in text and pixels.

The instinct to dismiss the feeling, to call people hysterical, sentimental, or behind the times, misses Mori’s point. The valley is how we sort the living from the uncannily still, the genuine from the rehearsed, the friend from the thing wearing a friend’s face.

When something feels off, the feeling is the signal. I have learned to trust that small shudder more, not less, as the imitations get better.

Mori’s counsel still holds. Maybe we do not need machines that pass for us. Perhaps we need machines that are unmistakably machines—useful, legible, and honest about what they are. A well-shaped spoon never pretended to be a hand. It was a better tool for it.

The Uncanny Valley is not a problem to be bridged. It is a line that teaches us where the human ends and the costume begins.

References

• The Uncanny Valley, Masahiro Mori, 1970. Translated by Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato.
• IEEE Spectrum’s The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori
• The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment

We need an easier, simpler, yet secure way to manifest our avatar in the scary yet exciting and inevitable world of AI-Internet. Everyone is going to become “intelligent”, monotonously similar, and erroneously generic.

You do not need to stand out or be unique; you need to be you.

We should be able to spawn personas and avatars that reflect the context of the digital realms we want to be part of. Of course, you are likely to use an AI tool as your companion, either from a third-party provider or as part of your Operating System.

• Applying for a job where you are focused more on your skills that are relevant to that job, and highlighting key areas where you have had success, rather than just listing everything that you have ever done.
• Playing a new game, and you want to be that gamer avatar, where you are the master of planning and strategy. The AI remembers your particular persona and contexts to help you play more meaningfully.

BODD is an attempt to be a portable context layer that’s tool-agnostic, human-readable, version-controllable, and parsable by any AI tool that accepts system prompts or context files.

Tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and others work better if they know and have a better memory of you. However, we still do not want to reveal everything either.

The tools are getting better, and better ones will come along to replace the current ones. BODD helps you separate and maintain your memory and context across tools.

A very early stage in maintaining context data and serving as your Digital Doppelgänger(s) in Plain-Text (Markdown). Plain enough for a human to read, and format common for AI to interpret and consume in their own ways.

› Check out, play, tinker with, and extend the BODD template. Suggestions, ideas, pull requests, and anything else are welcome.

It is never the suave dinner, the Mediterranean resort offsite, or the Zuora-esque storytelling deck that the sales team rehearsed for three weeks. Sales gets you in the door. But the companies that own accounts for a decade? They didn’t do it by being interesting. They did it by being reliably, boringly, impossible to argue against.

ServiceNow is the clearest example I keep coming back to. IT workflow is not a glamorous category. Nobody writes breathless blog posts about enterprise ticketing systems. But look at how ServiceNow expanded inside accounts and it had almost nothing to do with sales motion.

IT deployed it. IT had no problems with it. So HR asked to use it. Then legal. Then facilities. Each team adopted it because the previous team never complained about it. By the time procurement reviewed the expanded contract, the decision had already been made three floors up, with no sales rep in the room.

That’s a compounding loop most GTM teams never build intentionally.

Salesforce did a version of this too. The pitch in the early 2000s was “no software,” and that got them in the door. But that’s not why they still own those accounts twenty years later. Quarterly releases that came on schedule. Honest status pages. Support that enterprise IT teams could actually work with. They became the system the forecast ran through, the comp plans referenced. They stayed dominant because they stopped surprising people in bad ways.

Microsoft didn’t try to out-engineer AWS in the cloud. What Azure offered was familiarity. If you were already running Windows servers and Office 365, it was the path of least resistance. Not the most capable option. The least risky one. For large enterprises with procurement committees and risk reviews, those are not the same thing.

None of these companies won long-term by being the most interesting option. They won by becoming the option no one in the account wanted to argue against.

“Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM.”

In enterprise sales, your champion is constantly defending the decision to buy from you. Every renewal, every expansion, every time something goes slightly wrong, they’re the one standing in front of the room. The more predictable your execution, the easier their job is. And the easier their job is, the more they go to bat for you.

Reliability compounds in ways that features don’t. A feature can be copied. A three-year track record of doing what you said you would do is very hard to replicate quickly.

Most teams pour energy into the new logo: the pitch, the demo, the close. That matters. But the GTM motion that actually builds a business is what happens in the twelve months after the contract is signed.

How many of your customers, right now, could tell a clear story about why staying with you is an easy decision? Not why you’re great. Why switching isn’t worth it.

Innovate the Business, Technology, Culture; Not with the Pitch Deck.

Every investor you will ever pitch has read thousands of decks. They have seen every unconventional layout, every clever font choice, every founder who decided the standard format was beneath them. They have passed on nearly all of those decks.

The uncomfortable truth is that your pitch deck is not the product. It is a signal, not of creativity, but of judgment. Investors read decks with muscle memory. The moment your format breaks that rhythm, you are no longer being evaluated on your idea. You are being evaluated on your judgment.

Breaking the format is, almost always, poor judgment. It works at about 1% or less.

Stick to the Sequoia Capital or Y Combinator format. Both have been refined through thousands of deals. Both reflect the cognitive map most professional investors carry into every meeting. They differ slightly in emphasis, but the logic is the same: problem, solution, market, traction, team, ask. In that order, with nothing extraneous.

A top-tier investor will spend, on average, three to four minutes with a cold deck. In those minutes they are running a rapid pattern-matching exercise against every deal they have ever seen. When your deck uses a non-standard format, it derails that rhythm. Their brain spends cognitive energy figuring out where to look rather than evaluating what you are saying. You have introduced friction at the worst possible moment.

Two frameworks have become the de facto standard for early-stage pitch decks. They differ slightly in emphasis, but both reflect decades of pattern recognition about what investors need to see.

Sequoia Capital

Sequoia’s framework is organized around the narrative logic of a great business. It moves from context to solution to market to traction to ask in a clean, logical arc that mirrors how an investor builds conviction.

• Company Purpose: One sentence. What do you do?
• Problem: The pain you are solving and who feels it.
• Solution: Your product and why it works.
• Why Now: The timing insight that makes this the right moment.
• Market Size: TAM, SAM, SOM. Show you understand the opportunity.
• Competition: The landscape and your defensible position.
• Product: Screenshots, demos, the actual thing.
• Business Model: How you make money.
• Traction: Metrics, growth, proof of demand.
• Team: Why are you the ones to build this?
• Financials & The Ask: Use of proceeds and what you need.

Y Combinator

Y Combinator’s approach is even more ruthlessly minimal. Shaped by thousands of application reviews and Demo Day presentations, it strips the deck to its bare essentials. The underlying philosophy: if you cannot explain your business clearly on ten slides, you do not understand your business clearly enough.

• Company: Name, tagline, and a single-sentence description.
• Problem: The specific, felt pain of a real customer.
• Solution: Simple, direct, visual if possible.
• Traction: The most important slide. What have you proven?
• Unique Insight: What do you know that others do not?
• Market Size: Bottom-up thinking is more credible than top-down.
• Business Model: Simple, clear revenue logic.
• Team: Relevant experience, co-founder relationships, why you.
• The Ask: Round size, use of funds, what you will achieve.

Keep it Simple, Stupid

Simple does not mean sloppy. It means every word, every slide, every design choice serves one purpose: clarity. One idea per slide. Data over adjectives: “3x YoY growth,” not “explosive growth.” Clean, readable fonts. Make your traction slide the visual centerpiece. If a slide does not answer one of the core investor questions, it does not belong.

One thing founders consistently get wrong: leaving out the uncomfortable slides. If you skip the competitive landscape, the investor does not assume you have no competition. They assume you are naive about it. Always be the one to address the hard questions before they can ask them.

The decks that get meetings are not the ones with custom animations or unusual structures. They are the ones where the investor finishes the last slide and immediately thinks, “I need to meet this team.”

Try asking this before you send it: can a sharp investor, with no prior knowledge of your company, read this in four minutes and clearly explain your problem, solution, market, traction, team, and ask? If the answer is no, keep cutting.

Innovate the business. Not the deck.