I saw an ad on the subway telling me that I should be using AI to prepare my presentations. I see online ads and posts about life and work hacks that will increase my productivity. There’s a never ending stream of AI tips and tricks that I should have adopted yesterday. We are bombarded with messages telling us that we should be moving exponentially faster.

That’s not new. Here’s a pressure cooker that will save you time and money 1. Here’s an advertising strategy that expanded a business from one floor to eight floors 2. Those incredible opportunities are both more than 100 years old. In the engineering world, the underlying idea of superstars, ninjas, and rockstars has been around for decades 3.

A 10x engineer is an engineer who can deliver ten times the impact of the average engineer. By definition, most of us are not 10x engineers; some of us have to be average. The widespread discussion of the 10x engineer implies a goal that we should all become one.

It’s impossible for all of us to reach that goal. We will be thwarted by math. If everyone’s productivity goes up by 10x, then 10x is the new average. AI has intensified the race to loftier productivity heights. If next year, everyone is 10x of where they were last year, then those long nights and intense days won’t get you any farther ahead. But if you don’t stretch to extremes, then you risk being left behind. Will AI make everyone 10x? I won’t answer that question. But I will let you know that when I googled “Can AI make engineers 10x”, the AI overview told me that it can. The first three page results told me that it won’t. And the remaing search results were mixed.

Rather than focusing on how you can (or can’t) achieve a 10x improvement with AI, let’s talk about the 1.01x mindset. A daily focus on 10x improvements can be overhwelming. Over-indexing on huge performance boosts can become counter-productive if we don’t give ourselves space to be creative or to explore ideas that don’t work. Charles Darwin only worked four or five hours each day 4. His impact was greater than mine in spite of my longer hours. Instead of stressing about being 10x of who you are today, aim to be 1.01x. You can do this with AI. You can do it without AI. The approach is AI agnostic.

Large improvements take time. Google’s stock has had famously good growth. Imagine going back to 2004 and buying Google at the IPO. If you bought $1,000 of Google, it would be worth more than $100,000 today 5. That’s a lot of money! But that big return took time. To reach 10x of your initial investment, you had to wait nine years. And then another 12 years for the next 10x. Looking back at around twenty years of stock growth sounds like an eternity. It isn’t. The average American retires in their mid sixties 6. If you start working in your twenties, you career will likely extend more than double that timeline.

While the idea of waking up one day and being 10x would be ideal, it isn’t realistic. Improvements tend to slowly accumulate. And while we may see occasional bursts of gain, they are usually the realization of hard earned potential energy that we have slowly and deliberately contributed to for a long time. Gen AI’s impact feels new and sudden. Its roots are in machine learning. The first machine learning algorithm was developed in 1952 7. So if we think about Gen AI as having started with machine learning (which also didn’t start in a vacuum), then we realize that the cool new Claude Code release was 64 years in the making.

So what does that mean for our personal journeys? In order to reach 10x we need to make many incremental changes. That’s where the 1.01x mindset comes in. As you reach for big improvements, celebrate the small ones. Try to be 1.01x every day because those small wins add up. Imagine if you improved by 1% every day. If you took five weeks off each year for holidays and vacations, you would improve by 10.36x at the end of the year.

1.01x sounds small. But doing it daily is hugely ambitious. You won’t be able to do this for 40 years. There will be days that you miss the mark. Sometimes your idea won’t pan out. Sometimes you’ll be swamped. Sometimes you’ll have a bad day. That’s okay. Reset the next day and do something small that moves you forward. Sometimes you’ll achieve a lot more than 1.01x; sometimes you won’t. What keeps you improving is a mindset that every day is an opportunity to make small incremental progress. Celebrating the small wins (that add up to big wins) keeps you motivated.

If you mark a child’s height against the wall each year, you’ll observe tremendous growth. If you mark their height every day, it will look like nothing is happening. In fact, since height varies during the day, you could discover the child is shrinking! The overall trend becomes hidden by daily fluctuations if you don’t zoom out.

Don’t forget to step back periodically and observe your larger journey. The 1.01x mindset is about your career journey, not just today’s productivity. Step back and look at your monthly and yearly growth. Seeing the big picture will keep you motivated. It also gives you a chance to feel good about your hard work and accomplishments.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Don’t get overwhelmed on your career journey, take a 1.01x step today.

  1. “Kook Kwick” Pressure Cooker Recipes, Sears, Roebuck & Co., circa 1910 to circa 1919, retreived 29 March 2026 ↩

  2. Are there definite limits to my market?, J. Walter Thompson Company, Cutex, 1917, retreived 29 March 2026. ↩

  3. What is 10x Engineer? Tech nomenclature gone wild, Omnes Group, retreieved 29 March 2026 ↩

  4. Hosie, Rachel, Why we should work four-hour days like Darwin and Dickens, The Guardian, 29 March 2017, retreived 29 March 2026 ↩

  5. MarketWatch, retreived 29 March 2026 ↩

  6. Caporal, Jack, What Is the Average Retirement Age in the U.S.?, The Motley Fool, updated 20 October 2025, retrieved 29 March 2026. ↩

  7. Foote, Keith D, A Brief History of Generative AI, DATAVERSITY, 10 September 2025, retreived 29 March 2026. ↩