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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Seth Godin
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April 24 - May 15, 2025
A useful business model has a few attributes: • It gets easier over time. Past success makes future success more likely. • It’s a welcome contribution to the lives and projects of the people who are paying (in time or money) for the work. • It’s resilient. When the world changes, the model adjusts and persists or even thrives. The tools of the internet have encouraged people to try to turn hobbies into jobs. We invest our heart and soul into a podcast or a movement, and hope that one day, it’ll turn into a business. The journey to a business model is an investment, it doesn’t work the first
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Importante
Time is fuel. Without time there’s no point. Our experience of time determines our choices.
A few years ago, Lisa Nichols was sitting with her 87-year-old grandmother. “Lisa,” her grandmother said, “when you’re my age, your job is to sit in a rocking chair and tell people the stories and lessons of a life well lived.” Then she looked at Lisa and said, “and at your age, your job is to live a life worth talking about.”
When we do our work as a professional, we show up to solve a problem for people who know they have a problem and who have the means to pay to solve it. Some of our work is unpaid. It builds an asset. Our reputation, our experience, our network of trusted partners. Some of our work is directly related to our business model, and we charge a fair price for it. And often, we create value without regard for whether it matches our model. A healthy career and a useful project will have countless moments where we’re not getting paid. Optimizing for the business model isn’t the point. Creating a
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Strategy helps us see that now is also easily extended. We can include yesterday and tomorrow in our experience of what’s right in front of us. As we grow up, we learn that investing in tomorrow is smarter than always insisting that we get something today.
Strategy challenges us to make each circle bigger. The circle of us can grow and include the people we interact with and the community we hope to lead. And the circle of now embraces our relationship with time. Effort in the short run creates the conditions for the long run we’d like to live with. Who do we want as leaders, neighbors, or co-workers? Selfish tantrums are for toddlers. When we expand our circles, we are able to step into the possibility of better. While the smallest circle of now is this instant, some people plan a week ahead while others imagine their life or the life of their
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Our strategy is to use systems, alter systems, and build systems that expand our circles in ways each of us couldn’t do on our own.
Most overnight successes, aren’t.
The strategy is not a procedure. The strategy is not a to-do list or even a guarantee.
Our work is a method, but there isn’t a checklist. The method is to see time and systems and to find a resilient path forward. In the words of Cleo, the mysterious math genius, “You are not locked into a single axiom system. You may invent your own, whenever you wish—just use your intuition and imagination.” Hope is not a plan.
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. Strategy is interesting because of the complexity of its two companions: time and systems. Time resets each day, bringing with it new chances to make new decisions. And systems involve the interconnections of multiple people (and their interests) over time.
A key aspect of strategic planning is understanding opportunity costs, which are the benefits foregone by choosing one option over another. Strategy demands humility, because accurately predicting the future is impossible.
Successful people figure out how to trade their time and their effort for the change they seek to make in the world.
63. Sharing Your Strategy: The Modern Business Plan
I’d divide the modern business plan into six sections: 1. Truth 2. Assertions 3. Alternatives 4. People 5. Money 6. Time
Successful hunches might have been enough in the past. But for the work that lies ahead, for the changes we seek to make, we need to talk about it. Show your work.
But it’s the discomfort of articulating and altering our strategy that pays the biggest dividends. 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.
But going faster is useless if you’re running in the wrong direction. Strategy is a commitment to seeing the race course before we begin. Your effort is up to you. Surfing is better when we see and understand the waves.
If the customers stick around, that’s good. If they bring their friends and colleagues, it’s likely to be a success. Inevitably, the project will change in response to those that use it. But without customer traction, nothing happens.
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.
People who are finding traction rarely feel burned out. Burnout comes when our goals don’t align with our strategy. We hope for something that doesn’t arrive, waiting, apparently powerless, for the world to bring it to us.
The system didn’t want to kill all the whales. All the system wanted was to make a profit by solving the problem of darkness. When it found a cheaper and more efficient way to do that, it did. There are countless conspiracies. They’re not a secret. We simply need to see the systems.
Players in these free-flowing competitions don’t repeat plays by rote. They flow, in sync, with a mixture of practiced movements and improvisation.
“We do this not because it is easy…but because we thought it would be easy.”
74. Some Reasons We Avoid Having a Strategy • We’re not able to see the system • We see the system but we can’t choose between working with it or on it • We’d prefer to get the benefits of our actions sooner rather than later • It’s often more satisfying to be picked by a powerful system than to alter it • We’re concerned that our strategy won’t work and we don’t want to fail • We’re concerned that our strategy will work and we hesitate to embrace the responsibility that would come with that • We’ve been indoctrinated to follow instructions and ask for tactics • It’s easier to go along
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75. A Framework for a Strategy
People don’t do things because you want them to. They change because they want to. The same is true for complex systems.
Culture defeats tactics every time, which is why strategy is often about creating culture.
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.
Both insights involve traction. The first recognizes the traction needed to make forward motion so you can get to where you’re going. And the other recognizes that traction is always easier when your strategy is aligned with the world you live in.
Our strategy sets us up for success when it’s based in the reality of the systems all around us, the desires of those we need to work with, and the insight to embrace resilience instead of insisting that the world align with our needs at all times.
What do we talk about when we talk about strategy? Consider these building blocks: • The future is an unvisited city, but we can see it from a distance • The audience can be chosen • Don’t play games you can’t win • Projects can be managed • We make decisions • A difference can be made • Assets can be built • Networks can be created • Traction is the way forward • Sunk costs can be ignored • Organizations change • You’re not sitting in traffic—you are traffic
Unseen systems conceal and undermine our agency. They fool us into believing we have fewer choices than we do.
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? We can’t change everyone, and we can’t change everything, but if we’re specific, generous, and persistent, we might be able to change enough. All human interactions live in systems, and we can either work within the system or work to change it. 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.
80. Strategic Marketing
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. The first job of the marketer is to find a problem and to solve it, helping the customer get to where they are going. And the second, which (from a marketing perspective) is ultimately more important than the first, is to give that person a story to tell others. To engage with the web of community. To help that person improve their status and affiliation because they are engaging with others using the story that you helped them create. When we see
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The successful blueprint aligns the change you seek to make with the life you seek to live.
Importante
Do the things you need to do to get what you need in the long run. • Don’t do the things that keep you from creating the change you seek.
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. And that requires trust. Trust in our understanding of what’s being offered, and trust that the world won’t let us down.
“Don’t eat the marshmallow” is a lot easier to work with if you understand and trust the path to getting that bonus marshmallow.
86. Strategy is the Partner of Freedom • The freedom to create, to write, to invent, and to share widely. • The freedom to connect, to reach out to nearly every everyone. • The freedom to learn and to teach. • The freedom to choose the information we consume, the time we spend, and the people we associate with.
When the person you could have been meets the person you are becoming, is it going to be a cause for celebration or heartbreak? This is something we must work on right now, and tomorrow, and every single day until the meeting happens.
Too often, our approach to our work is to view it as a repeated chance to buy a very low-odds lottery ticket. This approach is always outperformed in the long run by consistent and persistent strategic work.
A strategy is the most reliable way to get to a future we’d like to live in.
Instead of attachment and a relentless addiction to one and only one outcome, we can develop a resilient strategy that helps us build the future we seek to live in. We can choose to get on the bus. To go build that future we’re yearning for.
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.
The strategy we adopt has tension at its center. We’re not here to “do our job.” We’re here to make a change happen.
When Google launched Gmail, there were a limited number of trial accounts. Getting an account satisfied the curiosity of early adopters and gave them status. They didn’t want to be left out, and so they scrambled, trading attention for the chance to go first.
Jealousy and the status quo are powerful forces.
This might be the right moment to understand our power and to do something with it. Tomorrow keeps arriving. Perhaps we can choose a strategy to make it better.
