Episode 1005 · Aug 8, 2024

10X Your Leadership: Build Trust, Empower Your Team, and Grow Exponentially

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George Wright III opens this episode of The Daily Mastermind with a challenge that cuts to the heart of every entrepreneur and leader: if you want to achieve 10x growth, you have to think, lead, and operate differently. This is not about working harder. It is about leading better.

Drawing on the ideas in *10x Is Easier Than 2x* by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan, George walks through what separates leaders who scale from those who stall. The answer, he argues, comes down to two things: trust and transformation.

Why the 2X Mindset Keeps You Stuck

Most people in business default to doubling what they already do. Work more hours, close more deals, hire more staff, and grind harder. George calls this the 2x mentality, and it is a ceiling, not a strategy.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

That quote anchors the episode. Real growth is not comfortable, and the shortcut of incremental improvement will eventually run out. To achieve 10x results, you have to shed old habits, old assumptions, and old ways of leading.

The Core of 10X Leadership: Trust and Transformation

George draws from Dr. Hardy's work to identify the foundational principle every 10x leader must master.

The core, the real core principle of leadership is trust, trust and transformation.

This is not abstract philosophy. It means your team has to trust you enough to take risks, make decisions, and innovate without waiting for permission at every turn. And transformation means you are actively helping every person on your team become better, not just more productive for your bottom line.

When people trust that their leader wants them to grow as individuals, they bring more energy, more creativity, and more commitment to the work.

Who, Not How: The Leverage Question

One of the most powerful reframes in this episode is the shift from "how" to "who." Most leaders spend enormous energy trying to figure out the mechanics of scaling. George flips that question entirely.

You need to figure out who, not how. You need to figure out who it is you need to put in place, not how you're going to get to 10x.

Scalability comes from people, not processes alone. When you develop leaders inside your organization rather than just followers, you multiply your capacity without multiplying your personal workload.

How to Cultivate Trust as a Daily Practice

George gets practical here, laying out concrete steps every leader can take.

Let go of control. Micromanagement destroys trust. A self-managing team is the engine of 10x growth, and you cannot build that while hovering over every decision. Accept that mistakes will happen, and treat them as the cost of building a capable, autonomous team.

Invest in your people's growth. Share your vision clearly, and then find out what your team members want for themselves. Help them develop new skills. When people see that you are invested in who they are becoming, not just what they are producing, trust grows.

Build a culture of respect and involvement. The policies, the environment, the way you communicate day to day: all of it either builds or erodes trust. Intentionally create a culture where collaboration and respect are the norm, not the exception.

Reward innovation and creative problem solving. If you want your team to think bigger, you have to recognize and celebrate the people who bring bold ideas. Reward those who look for solutions rather than fixating on problems. Reward those who go the extra mile because they care about the mission.

Why Empowerment Is the Multiplier

George brings this all together with a clear conclusion: empowerment is the mechanism that makes 10x possible. You cannot scale yourself. You can only scale your leadership. And leadership at scale means building people who can run without you in the room.

This is the shift from manager to leader. Managers drive results through control. Leaders create results through the growth of others.

The law of attraction applied to leadership, as George describes it, is this: the effort you put in matters, but what multiplies it is your ability to step back and let your team attract and create results independently.

Action Steps

Identify one area where you are micromanaging and commit to handing it off with full trust this week.
Have a one-on-one conversation with a team member focused entirely on their goals and growth, not your business outcomes.
Create a simple ritual to recognize innovative thinking or creative problem solving on your team.
Audit your current focus: which 20% of your activities produces the most meaningful results, and which 80% could be delegated or eliminated?
Start asking "who" before "how" when you face a growth challenge. Name the people who could own the problem.

True 10x leadership is not about doing more. It is about developing the trust and culture that allows your team to do more, grow more, and achieve things that once seemed out of reach. It is never too late to start living the life you were meant to live.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hey guys, today and this week on The Daily Mastermind, I want to talk to you about reshaping your identity and really 10xing everything that you're doing. Why am I talking about this? Well, at the end of this week, on Thursday, we're actually launching an Academy Live event, which is going to be talking all about a major growth strategy that I believe can help you to grow your business. And that strategy is creating authority in the marketplace. It's the way that you're going to be able to cut through the noise, cut through all the people that are using AI and trying to become experts and truly truly dominate your space and that's going to require you to be able to create authority and to do that I believe one of the biggest hurdles people have is reshaping their identity and finding ways to truly stretch their thinking and become 10x thinkers so this whole week we're going to be talking about that Monday Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday leading up to our event which is on Thursday night so I hope you'll join me and look at the links in the show notes for more details. Welcome back to the Daily Mastermind, George Wright III with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. I'm at my office late tonight and I want to be able to talk with you a little bit about leadership. You know, all week we've been talking about this idea of transforming your life towards the end of the year and into next year. And the concepts we've been talking about are around this 10X is easier than 2X, which is a great concept, great lessons and strategies provided by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan. But I'm going to start you out with the quote of the day as we usually do. And if you're not getting these images over on our Daily Mastermind Facebook or TikTok or Instagram page, I highly recommend you do it. They're just great ways to get yourself motivated and inspired it every day. And the quote of the day is, a life of ease is a difficult pursuit. A life of ease is a difficult pursuit. And sometimes I jump in there, I'm doing different quotes, but the bottom line is this. You've got to learn to make a difference in your life by analyzing and becoming aware of what it is you're focused on. You've got to get rid of this 2x mentality. You've got to shed the idea that you can just double your growth and you've got to get out of the box and truly grasp your vision again of what it is you want to accomplish And so we talked a little bit about three core areas you going to have to transform One is your identity The other is your time And the other is the one I want to talk to you about today, which is leadership. I'm going to share a couple of ideas from the book, but really I just want to talk to you about leadership in general, because whether you're running a company, you're a CEO, you're an entrepreneur, or whether it's a family, an organization, whatever it is, what you're going to learn very quickly is that if you want to have a 10x life, you're going to have to learn principles and strategies and characteristics of a leader, not a manager. Most of us think of leadership as something that we can instill in other people. But true leadership is a real abundant mentality that allows you to help people to grasp the vision of what you want to do and help to build and leverage and grow exponentially what it is you're working on. And you can't do that without leadership. So in the book, Dr. Hardy talks a little bit about the idea that the core, the real core principle of leadership is trust, trust and transformation. And the idea here is that I think you've got to really think about the idea. Do you trust, not just yourself, because you have to trust in your abilities, but does your team trust you? Do you inspire in them the things that they need in order to truly transform as individuals rather than just your company. See, a lot of times as, you know, line level workers or builders or entrepreneurs, as well as managers, we're kind of looking for a way to grow with the team and have them contribute towards overall growth of the organization. And what you really have to do is you have to look at individuals as individuals that you have to instill trust in. Trust that you're going to help them to create their best possible potential, that you're going to help them to become someone who can follow their core talents and become better in their own right. And when you do that, as you start to motivate people on your team, you're going to gain trust. And, you know, the idea of gaining trust also involves all kinds of little details like instilling motivation. And motivation is going to come from individuals that feel that they have some sense of autonomy. You've got to be able to help individuals to figure out, you know, how they can empower themselves to go to the next level. and to do this you know you have to have the right people but you also have to figure out how to put systems and culture in place that are going to allow people the autonomy to grow And so I always talk about leadership in you know typically you know your John Maxwell 101 characteristics of a leader, but I want you to think a little bit differently. I want you to think about how you can change your filter and your perspective on what it is it's going to take to create more leaders in your organization, not just yourself being a leader. It goes back to this concept of most of you to get to a 10x in your life, you need to figure out who, not how. You need to figure out who it is you need to put in place, not how you're going to get to 10x. Because the people, the scalability of people through leadership is really going to be a huge, huge factor in your growth. And transformation is going to come from progress and it's going to come from progress that's developed by leaders. So learn to, you know, I'm going to give you a couple of practical things. Learn to cultivate trust and let go of control. It's one of the toughest things to do when you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to get your organization growing or you're a manager, you're trying to get your results. You've got to learn to cultivate trust and let go of control because trust is going to be that cornerstone of self-managing companies. And if you want your company to be able to grow at a 10x level, it's got to self-manage. You have to allow your teams to make decisions. You've got to allow them to make mistakes. Just accept the fact you're going to have mistakes. And so as you allow your team and you let go of control, you give them trust, then you've got to invest in their growth. You've got to find ways to invest in your people to help them create new skills and perspectives and share what it is you want to accomplish, but find out what it is they want to accomplish. In addition, cultivate this culture I talked about. The way you do policies, the environment that you have, the collaborative and communication efforts. All of those things will create a culture of trust and respect and involvement with the people that you're working with. Also, encourage innovation. Find ways to help people to think out of the box. Find ways to reward people for thinking out of the box. Innovative thinking and innovation is going to be a key to you 10x in your life and your business. Really, really reward creative problem solving Reward and recognize people that look for solutions not just focus on the problem reward and recognize people that are following their passion and that are going the extra mile Leadership is going to be all about like I said in the beginning building trust And to do that you got to learn to let go stop micromanaging and move towards empowerment. Empowerment of your people because you will need that leverage to 10x things that you're doing. And this leadership role is going to be huge and you've got to create the culture to be able to take it to the next level. So of course, there are many, many ways that I've talked about developing characteristics of leadership, but the one I wanted to really highlight for you in a short moment today in the podcast is just the idea of focusing your leadership on developing trust in the people that you have and transformation in the people that you have. When you do that, you're going to find so many things are going to change. It's like law of attraction 101. You think all the effort you put in is what's going to grow you. But what it is, is it's that action followed by stepping back for attraction. It's learning to let go. And that's a great segment into tomorrow because tomorrow we're going to talk about, besides these three ideas of transforming your identity and in addition to your identity, time and leadership, the real core message between 10X in your life and why it is easier is you've got to learn to let go of about 80% of what you're currently focused on. Because 80% of what you're currently focused on needs to be replaced with 10x ideas. The 20% that you're doing really well with, you can 10x, but you've got to learn to get out of the box and replace 80%. So letting go is going to be a tough thing. Letting go is something that a lot of you will not have very much success with unless you can learn to build your vision, unless you can learn to identify the real benefits of it. And so that's my message I want to share with you today on leadership. But tomorrow we'll kind of pull this all together in the 10X and we'll talk about what is the 2X? What is the 10X mindset? How do you focus on more quality and less quantity? And then what can you do to kind of get rid of the 80% and move and pivot into an area of the seemingly impossible, but ultimately things that you know is going to take you 10X. So that's my message for today. I hope you're having a great night and I'll look forward to talking with you tomorrow. Once again, my name is George Wright III, and this has been The Daily Mastermind. Share that show.

About the host

George Wright III

George Wright III is an entrepreneur, investor, and the host of The Daily Mastermind. Over more than two decades he has founded and scaled several multimillion-dollar companies and built a renowned seminar business that put some of the world's biggest names and brands on stage. With 25+ years across marketing, sales, and executive leadership, he's made a career of turning bold ideas into results — and momentum into lasting growth.

Today his mission is singular: empower driven entrepreneurs everywhere to master their mindset, unlock their potential, and live their ultimate destiny. Through The Daily Mastermind, George shares the Prosperity Principles and strategies that help people create massive change — in their business and in their life.

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