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

by Seth Godin

Strategy is difficult to see and not easy to talk about, because it happens over time. To find a better strategy, we need to be prepared to walk away from the one we’ve defaulted into.

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. Strategy is our chance to make an impact.

Who will we become, who will we be of service to, and who will they help others to become This is strategy. A strategy isn’t a map—it’s a compass. Strategy is a better plan. It’s the hard work of choosing what to do today to make tomorrow better.

Once our basic needs for food, shelter and health are met, most people dance with three conflicting desires: • Affiliation • Status • Freedom from fear

If you want to understand why someone makes a choice, look for what people actually want, not only the proxies and substitutes they say they want.

Don’t surrender your agency and revert to the numbing day-to-day grind of compliance. You can make things better.

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.

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 parts of the system are unseen, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. As they say, gravity isn’t just a good idea—it’s the law.

Systems have nodes (buildings) and connections (roads). Those roads have conventions that we all need to understand to stay safe. 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. A useful skill in surfing is picking the right place and time to go surfing. The systems in our lives are like waves, making our work easier or more difficult.

The alternative is to dig a small channel that helps a river to go where it was going anyway. When you make it easier for the current to flow, the current will respond. A small channel quickly becomes a torrent, and then the river itself.

Systems are everywhere humans engage to fill a need. Sometimes they persist longer than we’d like. Sometimes they move in directions we don’t appreciate. Often, they’re cultural, invisible, and hard to notice. But systems define our lives.

You can’t step in the same river twice, because your footprint the first time turned the river into a different river. And it changed you as well.

But we’re not powerless. Individuals organizing others with persistence and generosity change the world, and do it every day. With the right strategy and resources, we can make an impact. Sometimes.

It’s unlikely anything we build is going to be built from scratch. But with time and focus, we can find the leverage to alter systems we care about.

Complex systems create unexpected and unpredictable outputs. They’re probabilistic and unstable, not deterministic the way we expect.

Decisions may feel as though they’re voluntarily made. But the system exerts influence on each participant through each decision. Each decision is the sum total of all the expectations, feedback loops, and invisible and visible rules that we adhere to.

A more resilient and leveraged path is to work with systems instead of fighting them outright.

DNA tests, passports, digital surveillance, rankings, membership lists, and SAT scores are all transformative because they surface data and turn it into information. Information changes systems.

Some of the houses had their electric meter in the basement. Others had the meter in the entrance hall, where residents couldn’t help but notice the power usage every time they entered or left their home. All other things being equal (and they were), the houses with visible meters used one-third less electricity than their neighbors.

The movies need heroes. Corporations need CEOs. Inventions need inventors. And yet, 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. Our job is to find a plan and then create the conditions for our project to spread from person to person, within and across the systems that already exist.

Serious games are all around us, whether we choose to play them or not.

The seeds you plant today won’t grow for weeks or months. The systems we support, the people we dance with, the ruckus we create—it’s not for today, it’s for tomorrow. 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?

30. Seeing Time

Time is simply nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen all at once.

Perhaps we’re here because of everything that happened in the past. Or perhaps it’s more useful to realize that the future is counting on us to create what comes next. There’s the world right outside our window, the world of here and now. But we also remember yesterday. Who we were and what happened. And we also know there is tomorrow. If we take action today, something will happen soon. We can invest (or withdraw) from the days ahead. We can pay the price or enjoy the benefits of the work we do today.

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

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 support translate into more support later? • Where is the network effect? • What do I need to learn to make this work? • Who do I need to work with? • Where is the dip and when should I quit? • What will I do if it doesn’t work out? • How much is enough?

there. Too often, we pick a job we want to do and work backward to answer the questions, but that’s arrogant and insulates us from the reality of the systems we need to dance with in order to reach the people we’d like to serve.

Plenty of kids in Cleveland dream of being a pro baseball player, yet few say that their passion is to grow up to be a blacksmith. We’re not born with a specific passion, it is produced based on what we encounter and what’s expected, even if we can’t put the strategy into words. It might be that our actual purpose is simply to be of use, to be productive and to make a difference. In other words, to have an elegant strategy.

Life without a project fades to gray.

“Simple” doesn’t mean that you’re making a smaller impact or settling for less. It means choosing a strategy that puts you on the hook. It’s a chance to be a meaningful specific, not a wandering generality. A strategy that’s worth talking about and improving. A strategy that’s easy to describe and difficult to stick with. Falling in love with an outcome often prevents us from doing the work we’re capable of contributing.

We often have more agency than we’d like to admit. Hiding is easy, but our project demands that we show up and make an impact.

A strategy is the set of choices we make (and stick with) as we seek to compete. Hard choices are easy to hide from, since choices feel risky. And competition is challenging. It’s easier to have a meeting about our mission statement than it is to get serious about choosing and persisting with a strategy.

When the deal falls apart, the team loses the game, or a partnership hits the rocks, it’s easy to focus our energy on the most recent event. “What if they had called a different play?” This overlooks the real issue. 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.

Tactics require skill in the moment and can consume us. Strategy is easy to skip, because we’ve trained our whole life for tactics. 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.

His strategy was correct, and the tactics were good enough to support it.

There are three ways to put effort into a project: • Chores and tasks • Leverage • Emotional labor

We can choose where we provide leverage, or we can put as much time as we like into tasks or chores.

43. You Might Need a Strategy To • Get into the college of your choice • Find a new job • Increase sales of your new product • Decide where to live • Get your neighbors to come to the local block party • Pass the school board budget • Get married without spending more than you should • Change the bullying culture at work • Help a new kid feel welcome • Have enough savings to retire with

As a system matures, a small head start can lead to more assets, allowing investment, patient decisions, and the building of trust. The feedback loop amplifies small advantages. People want to buy from the market leader, giving that leader even more of an advantage.

These small changes get deep into the workings of how the nodes in the system make decisions. System changes are more permanent and resilient than the more satisfying broad strokes we often embrace. Important solutions aren’t the work of right now. They are the persistent yet impatient work of building a strategy that’s effective.

Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you… Those ten people need what you have to sell or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find ten more people (or a hundred, or a thousand, or perhaps as few as three). Repeat. If they don’t love it, you need a new product or more insight about the ten people you choose. Begin again. When you serve the smallest viable audience, your idea spreads. Your business grows. Not as fast as you want, but faster than you could ever imagine. This approach changes the posture and timing of everything you do.

You can only market to people who are willing participants, like this group of ten.

Effective marketing isn’t about hype or hustle or even about getting the word out. Instead, it focuses on engaging with people who seek to engage with us. Our job is to find a resilient path forward by helping people get to where they hope to go.

The system works because it fools us into believing that we’re voluntarily making a decision—that our choices are actually our choices. But this is often an illusion. The system (whichever system we’re captured by) has limited our choices. We can “pick any card,” but we rarely see the entire deck. Yet we have a chance to see the system instead of merely being part of it. Every strategy depends on being conscious of the change we seek to make and the systems that can amplify or impede our progress.

When we get compensated for creating value in a way that enables us to do it again, we’ve found a business model.