This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

Trees compete for light and only one grows to be the tallest, but all of them are part of the forest.

Plant your seeds in places where the conditions are right.

The number on the car’s speedometer isn’t always an indication of how fast you’re getting to where you’re going. You might, after all, be driving in circles, really quickly.

Elegance is simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness. It’s not only a solution that gets a result. It’s arguably a better solution—the least complex and clearest way forward.

Our project needs to be accepted by people who have the power to choose—and our job is to create the conditions for that to happen.

Heroic effort is thrilling, but long-term elegant strategies rarely require miracles on a daily basis.

Buildings (and people) get replaced all the time. Roadways (and the rules of systems) fight like crazy to stay the way they are.

Better waves make better surfers.

to fundamentally change something, we must build a new system that makes the existing system obsolete.

Information changes systems.

culture is the driver of most systems, and culture is the result of the interactions between and among people. Strategies stumble when they depend on someone with power dictating how things will occur.

If you want to grow a garden, you’ll need to plant seeds, but it’s the ecosystem and the climate that will determine what happens after that.

Sometimes the best way to win is to help others succeed.

We often spend more time figuring out how to win the game we’re in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place.

We’re here, now, but we live in the future. We are making history. If you could have tomorrow over again, would you do it differently?

Strategy is the hard work of choosing what to do today to improve our tomorrow.

It’s the first move, or the fifth, that led to this problem, not what happened at the last moment. Creating the conditions for success is a very different project than finding a heroic move that saves the day.

Coordinated action is the only thing that changes the system.

Fruit flies like a banana. If you want to attract the flies, it doesn’t pay to order them to appear, or even to insist. Placing a ripe banana on the windowsill is enough to create the conditions for change to happen.

at your age, your job is to live a life worth talking about.”

Most overnight successes, aren’t.

Hope is not a plan.

If you sell your time at the lowest possible price, you’ll always be busy helping someone else get to where they’re going. Successful people figure out how to trade their time and their effort for the change they seek to make in the world.

Working on the right things is the way forward. And writing them down is one way to confirm you’re working on the right things.

A Formula 1 race car is very likely to win on the track, but will fail a hundred times if you try to run errands with it.

Too often, though, we celebrate the brittle head start without noticing that in the long run, the turtle did a lot better than anyone expected.

The secret of successful product development isn’t an innovation that bursts forth as a polished and finished product. Instead, it’s sticking with something that is almost useless and nurturing, sharing, and improving it until we can’t imagine living without it. The goal at the start is traction with a few, not perfection for the masses.

Resilience comes from acknowledging that the x-axis is time, and that today is not the same as tomorrow.

People don’t do things because you want them to. They change because they want to.

Strategic work isn’t a form of stalling, and it doesn’t minimize the emergency of right now. Instead, it embraces the fact that we succeed when we commit to culture change instead of first aid.

Skiing works better if there’s snow and you’re headed downhill. Too often, we blame our lack of effort or skill when the real problem is that we went to the wrong hill. It’s still our mistake, but a different sort of error.

The successful blueprint aligns the change you seek to make with the life you seek to live.

“Should” is the insistence of culture to cause us to conform to the systems it cares about—but should might not be what you need to make a difference.

When the person you could have been meets the person you are becoming, is it going to be a cause for celebration or heartbreak?

Creating tomorrow by repeating yesterday is not a useful way forward.

Systems don’t start out to be selfish, but resilient ones often end up that way.

It’s not easy to persuade someone to want what you want. It’s much more productive to find people who already want to go where you’d like to take them.

The need for a unanimous standing ovation is a trap.

people also crave celebrity. The myth of the influencer, the loneliness of the overlooked, the desire for connection and meaning… they all end up pushing people to share their ideas and their lives.

Why are we on social media if it makes us unhappy, and why are we exhausted by the modern news landscape? If it’s not helping us, why do it? Because we are insatiable.

Now is important, but it’s insufficient. Now plus tomorrow and the tomorrow after that is our project.

Derek Sivers

When in doubt, look for the fear. It’s probably the cause of whatever surprising behavior you’re encountering.

Your idea might be rejected because it’s not better. But it’s probably going to be rejected because it’s new.

Systems problems demand systems solutions, and we cross the chasm when we create the conditions for the defenders of the status quo to eagerly embrace our movement.

If the change you make depends on others joining in, making that compelling and easy to do is your first and only job.

If you seek to make systems change and you haven’t built the scaffolding for others to join you, it’s unlikely you’ll succeed.

they’re

Should be "there are"

If you’re not ready to play a game based on dominance, don’t start.

It seems obvious, but it’s not: If you’re interested in developing your own resilient path, focus on games that are based on skill—and go get those skills.