10x question

I was watching an episode of How I AI and the episode itself wasn't really what stuck with me. One slide did. A flowchart with a single question at the top:

If I got 10 times better at this, would I have 10 times the impact?

Yes → this is the real job. No → automate it.

The example they gave clicked immediately. Giving a talk: if you got 10 times better at finding a novel insight, building a narrative, connecting with a room, the talk gets 10 times better. If you got 10 times better at formatting slides or writing speaker notes, the talk remains the same. So you know where to put yourself.

I'm a designer and builder, and I've been running everything through this question.

The insights that shape a design direction: yes. The narrative that makes a product decision land with a team: yes. The moment when you understand what someone is actually trying to do, not just what they asked for: yes. These are the things I want to be 10 times better at. They compound.

The layer styles, the file organization, the annotation templates – important enough to exist, not important enough to perfect. Good enough ships. And I can probably automate more of that than I think.

This framework gives me permission to stop optimizing the wrong things. I have a tendency to reach for the tangible stuff when the real work feels fuzzy. The question cuts through that. It forces me to name what's actually driving impact, and that naming alone has been useful for building narratives around design direction.

This is a small filter doing a lot of work.