Thread by @jmikolay

Anyone who wants to become a great creator is up against The 10x Creator, a creator ten times, 50 times, or 100 times more productive than the average creator: (thread)

The concept of a 10x Engineer has been around for 50 years, and today a similar dynamic range of productivity applies to creators.

Like 10x Engineers, 10x Creators are valuable and rare.

They’re not just one standard deviation away from the mean, they’re extreme outliers — one in 2,000,000 — five standard deviations away from the mean.

10x Creators aren’t just marginally better than average creators at *one* skill, they’re decisively better at *three* — and the combination of these skills gives them massive, compounding, and unfair advantages.

First, great creators are better at shipping valuable products and content. They have more specific knowledge, and they’re better communicators, writers, and thinkers.

They refine what they’re creating and throw that output back into the process.

Second, great creators are better at building systems.

Competing for attention on the internet is not just a *creative dilemma* demanding content production, it’s also an *engineering endeavor* demanding technical execution.

In recent decades, technology has abstracted away so many problems that top creators now look a lot like engineers: pulling together systems, automating tasks, removing barriers to the act of creation, and performing orders of magnitude better than the average — without code.

Creators winning attention do so systematically: they stack technologies to generate and capture demand; they delegate progressively more complex processing tasks to people and machines; and they create the potential to solve harder and harder problems.

Instead of working in the system, they’re working on it.

https://twitter.com/jackbutcher/status/1364654049816158213?s=20

Third, top creators are better at leveraging the systems they build.

Their creative systems are so efficient and their feedback loops are so tight that they *can’t help* but produce great work.

Each of these skills is meaningful in its own right, but it’s the combination of all three skills, acting together within one person or one small business, that has a magical effect on top creators, sustaining their creative process as one opportunity collides with another.

Many creators try to get better at the first skill (shipping valuable content).

That's necessary, but the best content is rarely ten times better than average content. More often, it’s two or three times as good, so it’s hard to get 10x+ advantage from great content alone.

The way to get better as a creator is to ship content *as a byproduct* of building systems and working on larger projects.

While shipping valuable products can get you 5x upside, building and leveraging systems can create unlimited upside *while throwing off valuable content.*

Great creators push as far to the extreme as possible.

“Just from being marginally better, like running a quarter mile a fraction of a second faster, some people get paid a lot more – orders of magnitude more. Leverage magnifies those differences even more.” -@naval

By combining three skills — and pushing them to the extreme — 10x Creators lock in the potential for runaway outcomes.

If we want the same results, we have to do the same.

Here's the full post!

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letter.substack.com/p/the-extreme-…