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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Seth Godin
Read between
December 9, 2024 - August 23, 2025
Strategy is often an unseen option, apparently too sophisticated, expensive, or elitist for most of us. But once we see it, our next steps become clear. We have what we need to make better plans.
Strategy is the soil, the seed, and the gardener working together over time.
Who will we become, who will we be of service to, and who will they help others to become This is strategy.
Once our basic needs for food, shelter and health are met, most people dance with three conflicting desires: • Affiliation • Status • Freedom from fear
“What happens next?” is a different question from, “What will I do now?” The easy out is to simply react to events and follow the checklist. Our freedom and agency demand we take a different path, though. Our work begins by finding a strategy and creating a different future.
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.
Elegant strategies use systems. Even when they set out to change the system, they don’t fight it directly but use the system as a tool to change the system.
Systems respond to strategies, and elegant strategies give us leverage. Three things to focus on: • The strategy gets better as you grow. Anyone can sprint, but elegant strategies are something that you can maintain. • Systemic advantage defeats heroic effort. Heroic effort is thrilling, but long-term elegant strategies rarely require miracles on a daily basis. • They’re simple to explain and difficult to stick to. Over time, the pressures to vary from the elegant strategy increases—a thousand little compromises that eventually lead to mediocrity.
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.
A series of 17 questions shines a light on the work to be done. It brings tomorrow forward to today, right here and right now, allowing us to articulate a strategy. • Who are we here to serve? • What is the change we seek to make? • What are our resources? • What is the genre we’re working in? • Who has done something like this before me? • What systems are in play? • Am I changing someone’s status? • Why would anyone voluntarily choose to be part of this work? • What will they tell their colleagues? • Who gains in status, affiliation and power by supporting this work? • Will early
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The rat doesn’t know someone built the maze.
As Michael Porter has pointed out, a strategy isn’t a goal. And a strategy isn’t a list of tasks. A strategy is the set of choices we make (and stick with) as we seek to compete.
But as soon as the brothers announced that “This is Rome,” there it was. Built, but incomplete.
Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone. He also didn’t wire the world, or create 800 numbers, or come up with the smart phone. What Bell did was build the Bell System. He published and licensed the protocol for local businesses to hook up their phone networks to the larger global network.
Strategy is a philosophy, based on awareness of our goals and our perception of the systems around us. Tactics are the hard work we do to support our strategy. But great tactics don’t help if the strategy is working against us.
Strategy is a flexible plan that guides us as we seek to create a change. It helps us make decisions over time while working within a system.
the modern business plan into six sections: 1. Truth 2. Assertions 3. Alternatives 4. People 5. Money 6. Time
A market is a category. A market is a place with competition. In a market, people have habits and budgets and social pressure to engage. And in a market, people make choices.
People don’t do things because you want them to. They change because they want to.
The first step is seeing the system, and the second step is to commit to a strategy for change. Our blueprint begins with three questions: • Who is it for? • What is it for? • What is the system?
Tasks fill our days, but strategies determine whether we’ve wasted our effort.
Effort is often part of our work, but effort by itself is not a strategy.
In Russian, they call them Офисный планктон—office plankton. Low-level workers who simply follow instructions.
Marketing is the art of building a product or service that tells a story. A true story—one that resonates and changes the person who experiences it.
We can’t waste time because it’s not ours to waste. It’s simply the way we keep track of everything else.
Strategy always involves a delay. We need to do something non-obvious or un-fun now so we can get the result we seek later.
We talk about tension as if it’s a bad thing. But the only way to launch a rubber band across the room is to pull it backwards, creating tension. Tension permits the water spider to walk across a puddle without drowning. And tension keeps us focused on the world around us.
Better might not mean faster and more comfortable. It might simply be the kind the others want.
A tactic is what we do next. A strategy is all the nexts, one after the other. Tactics are for now. Strategies see and respect and value time. If your tactics work, they should advance your strategy. If your strategy is flawed, all the successful tactics you engage in won’t help.
If you see a feedback loop, you’re seeing a system at work.
Status is “who eats lunch first”
What the system makes is probably what the system values. And vice versa.
The Dartmouth Atlas study of health care has shown that when the number of hospital beds available increases, the number of patients admitted to the hospital increases. The same is true for medical devices and tests.
Creating tomorrow by repeating yesterday is not a useful way forward.
If we’re competing with everyone, in every venue, it’s no wonder we’re not getting much done.
Pick your distribution, pick your future.
if you hesitate to ship the work because it might not be perfect for everyone, you’re actually stealing from the someones who need you.
Money in itself is nothing, but the story of money means that it is a proxy for many things.
A chicken is merely an egg’s way of making another egg.
Good ideas are required, but they’re rarely sufficient.
