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

by Seth Godin

Your current success might have been hard-earned. But the future doesn’t care about this as much as you do.

If there’s a hole in the boat, it’s easy to spend all day bailing water with a bucket. Or we can take a moment to pull the boat onto the dock and fix the leak. When we work in the system, all we can do is bail. When we work on the system, we have a chance to make things better.

Avoid projects where the system is organized to take all the value you create.

The work of change-making is to help people decide that changing their actions is exactly what they want to do. Not because it’s important to us, but because it’s important to them.

Demanding that masses of people leap is rarely as effective as creating the conditions for them to simply walk on board.

All games have constraints. We can deny them or we can work with them.

The status quo is the status quo because it’s good at sticking around.

If you change what gets measured, you’ll change what gets done.

When the foundation that a system is built on shifts, the system will fight back, but widespread and significant changes in these underpinnings often lead to permanent changes (and opportunities for those that see them coming).

It might seem that a person supporting a system “isn’t doing their job.” But the system demands support, and that might actually be their job.

Decades years

Clearly an editing mistake

Without traditional gatekeepers, the cycle speeds up.

The successful intervention pre-writes the story. It eliminates the unstated objection before it becomes a factor.

People only invite others to join a network if they benefit from doing so. If you don’t begin with a network effect as a significant benefit for users, it’s almost impossible to build it in later.

Culture defeats tactics, every time, and culture is the most resilient component of a system.

We can’t easily shift someone’s perspective, but we can work to find the people who want to go where we seek to go.

It’s easier to help someone find what they want than it is to change what they want.

the hard work is creating a product, an experience, and a story that’s not worth finding a substitute for.

“Everyone” is shorthand for hope and an unwillingness to see time, systems, and strategies. “Someone” is far more effective.

The process is simple but easy to forget: overwhelm the smallest viable audience with a solution that creates the conditions for them to take action. Repeat.

Rather than celebrate the paths not taken, we take no path at all.

If they’re going to stock your company’s new item, that means that they have to take something else off the shelf. What will they tell their boss?

Tactics shift, but strategies are for the long-haul.

Hard decisions now ensure easier decisions tomorrow.

Risk is the price we pay to make a difference.

The most interesting strategies happen at the edges, and the edges exist because that’s where the constraints are.

Celebrate the problems ahead. Problems are opportunities to create the conditions for better outcomes.

“We’re not undoing a mistake, we’re making a new decision based on new information.”

No decision needed is the easiest decision of all.

If we can try something, experience something, or launch something that comes with an undo button, that path is far more resilient than irrevocable decisions that can’t be undone. If there’s an easy and productive way to backtrack, the best response might be, “Sure, why not?”

Outfitting a tool chest? Start with pretty good all-purpose tools instead of specialized ones that only do one thing.

Bad luck isn’t a moral failing.

The tension and stress of talking about a decision before we make it is real. Yet it’s far less than the tension and stress that goes with living with a poor decision we made yesterday.

When we sign up to be a passive bystander, we’re ceding our agency and giving up on our opportunity to contribute.

The utility of a strategy is not measured by how many people used it successfully. It’s measured by what percentage of the folks who used it succeeded.