10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea

Any choice you make— any decision— will benefit from 10-10-10.

We all want to lead a life of our own making. But in today's accelerated world, with its competing priorities, information overload, and confounding options, we can easily find ourselves steered by impulse, stress, or expedience. Are our decisions the right ones? Or are we being governed, time and time again, and against our best intentions, by the demands of the moment?

A transformative new approach to decision making, 10-10-10 is a tool for reclaiming your life at home, in love, and at work. The process is clear, straightforward, and transparent. In fact, when you're facing a dilemma, all it takes to begin are three questions: What are the consequences of my decision in 10 minutes?

In 10 months? And in 10 years?

Sound simple? Not quite. Recounting poignant stories from her own life and the lives of many other dedicated 10-10-10 users, Suzy Welch reveals how exploring the impact of our decisions in multiple time frames invariably surfaces our unconscious agendas, fears, needs, and desires -- and ultimately helps us identify and live according to our deepest goals and values.

10-10-10's applicability is uniquely broad. Whether it is used by college students or busy mothers or senior business executives, artists, government administrators, or entrepreneurs, 10-10-10 has shown its effectiveness in decisions large and small, routine and radical, consistently changing lives for the better.

Readers of O magazine discovered this pragmatic and innovative idea when Suzy Welch first introduced it in her column. Now, in this immensely useful and revelatory book, she fully explains the power of 10-10-10, a transformative idea that can replace chaos with consistency, guilt with joy, and confusion with clarity.

Publishers Weekly

Regular readers of O magazine might already be familiar with Welch's straightforward 10 minutes–10 months–10 years philosophy for making major life decisions. The former editor of the Harvard Business Review and current Business Week contributor expands on these guidelines, mixing in her own epiphanies. She has a winning reading manner and a pleasant voice, and while her tone clearly conveys an unmistakable confidence in the set of tools she's offering listeners, she never sounds like she's preaching (this is also helped by plenty of self-deprecating anecdotes that illustrate why she needed the system she developed and now shares with readers). The production is very clean and suits the material nicely; there's just a little music, and the direction of the reading feels perfectly paced. A Scribner hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 30). (Apr.)

Suzy Welch, former editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review, is a work-life columnist for O The Oprah Magazine. She is the coauthor, with her husband Jack Welch, of the New York Times bestseller Winning and of the column "The Welch Way," published in BusinessWeek magazine and internationally by the New York Times Syndicate. She lives in Boston.