When building anything, you can approach your work from two different mindsets.
The 10% mindset focuses on finding incremental improvements in the dynamics of what you're working on. It's about growing your sign-ups, improving retention, and figuring out how to run your project more efficiently. All those 10% improvements add up, making things better.
The 10x mindset is about finding improvements that yield results in orders of magnitude. Instead of tweaking an existing process to make it better, you rethink it from scratch and find an entirely new way to do something. Big decisions and conviction are what are required to make those 10x changes happen.
When solving problems, it's useful to be aware of which mindset you are using. What doesn't work is trying to approach a problem with both mindsets simultaneously. The types of work required by each mindset are just too different in nature.
And it's not that 10x should always take precedence over 10%. There are times when 10% improvements are needed to get closer to a local maximum. But to find the global maximum for your project, 10x thinking is required.
I view both mindsets as tools in my toolkit as I build with the intent to make things better. Knowing the difference and setting the right intent for whatever you are working on is an important first step.