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

by Seth Godin

96. What Does It Mean to Be a Strategic Thinker? It means that you see the system. It means that you develop the assets and skills that you will need to work with the system or to change it. It means that you have the empathy to understand how others make choices. And it means that you work to reduce delays in the feedback loops so you can adjust your tactics based on the system’s response to your work. The operating plan and tactics that accompany our strategy are focused on these feedback loops—on allowing us to become more nimble when we encounter responses from the status quo.

97. Tactics are Not Strategies Tactics are how we win short-term games. Tactics are flexible, disposable, and sometimes secret. Strategies are for the long-term games. Strategies are worth sharing, inspecting, and sticking with. 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.

How did we end up with weddings that cost $2,000,000? A wedding is a semi-public ceremony. It celebrates connection and status. Many people who attend a wedding will either host a wedding for their kids or plan one for themselves. When they do, they take the standards of the weddings they’ve attended and are likely to ratchet them forward. The feedback loop is amplified.

Every choice comes with a cost. When we spend an hour reading a book, it’s an hour we didn’t spend listening to speed metal. When we take on one client, we’ve chosen not to pursue a different option.

When we recognize that time today is the investment we make to transform our lives tomorrow, the invisible axis becomes even more obvious. The choices we make today to make tomorrow better are our strategy.

If you seek to be part of a system, it helps to understand how your actions will change the system, and it helps even more if you can discover how the system will respond or react to your actions.

What the system makes is probably what the system values. And vice versa.

Systems produce what they produce, not what the organizers or participants might have been hoping for. The healthcare system doesn’t make health. It makes treatments. Sometimes health is a by-product.

As long as culture is delivering the resilient and useful results we seek, there’s no issue at all. But when it’s no longer fulfilling, it might be worth looking hard at the system we’ve decided to support and the systems we’re building.

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

When a system creates negative effects, it almost always happens gradually. Each node makes what feels like a reasonable decision at every step along the way, until the descent is far greater than we signed up for.

If we’re competing with everyone, in every venue, it’s no wonder we’re not getting much done.

A foundation of our blueprint is acknowledging which judges we are prepared to choose, and which wannabe judges we’re eager to ignore.

Here are some of the choices that customers and clients dictate: • The price • Support and service • Exclusivity • Co-creation • Durability • The status it brings • Public persona of the brand • Sustainability

If you raise your prices 30%, you might exchange your value-seeking customers for those that use high price as a signal of quality. The work we do and the way we transact is a story and a signal, not simply an exchange of goods.

The best way for a freelancer to succeed is to find better customers. Better customers that pay more, demand more, and spread the word as well. Better customers aren’t always easy to find, which is why the more common and convenient approach is to take what you can get.

The customers you pay attention to—and those you fire—change the way you spend your days (if you’re not firing customers, you’re surrendering your future to whoever walks in the door). You can identify and reward the customers you’d like to spend your days with. You have the freedom and power to do this if you choose. 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.

112. Choose Your Competition and Choose Your Future It’s not surprising that Lance Armstrong cheated. During his career, at the highest levels of bike racing, it was impossible to win without doping. Everyone else is doing it. When there’s scarcity, competition ensues. And if you choose a competition where the most successful path is short-term thinking and a race to the bottom, you’ve decided how you will spend your time.

When we match where we seek validation to the work we hope to do and the rewards we hope to receive, our strategy is in alignment.

Distribution is the act of bringing the thing you make to the people who want it. Distribution is harder to visualize, but ultimately is just as important as the other choices you make.

We can’t have an impact on everyone. None of us can. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make things better for someone. Implied in that statement is that our strategy is going to leave someone behind, ignore folks, or even be criticized. The need for a unanimous standing ovation is a trap. There’s a way out: The people who need you, the someone who will benefit—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.

When we wonder about what we really want, insecurities arise. What if we get what we hope for and we don’t like it? Or what if we fall in love with the change we seek to make and then discover we can’t accomplish it?

Systems want something. Before you engage with one, investing your time and your passion, it’s worth understanding what the system wants. Choosing to engage with things that want what we want is a powerful choice.

People will trade almost anything once they’re offered an option that enhances laziness or seems to multiply free time.

And this helps us see that what most people in most systems want is reassurance. Freedom from fear. Knowing that they’re going to be okay, and that tomorrow will be okay too.

Status, safety, affiliation, and curiosity are universal and always interacting, as people around the world seek success and hope for solace.

A chicken is merely an egg’s way of making another egg.

Often, systems arise because they help us achieve our goals. But over time, the most powerful systems actually change our goals, and put us to work helping them satisfy their needs, not ours. Systems create culture, and culture is the way a system quietly persists, creating gravity where there was none.

Our strategy is the narrative for how we will engage with our project over time. Play all the notes in a song at once and it’s nothing but noise. It’s the space between the notes that makes it into music. Now is important, but it’s insufficient. Now plus tomorrow and the tomorrow after that is our project.

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

Good ideas are required, but they’re rarely sufficient.

The hard work isn’t to appeal to everyone. The hard work is to get out the vote, to get the folks who want the change you want to show up, persistently and generously, over and over.

The first group are early adopters, not adapters. They’re eager. They’re looking for something new. Their role in the system is to bring innovation, and they gain status and satisfaction by looking for something better. This is less than 3% of the population. That means that when you bring something new to the world, 97% of the folks you interact with will not embrace it.

Anthony Iannarino teaches that that the job of a sales team isn’t to persuade people to buy from us. It’s to find the people who WANT to try something new, and to politely and eagerly send everyone else on their way.

The job of the marketer is to make something so remarkable that this tiny group of adopters can’t stop telling their peers. They’re the ones that get the word out, not you. This phenomenon has been clear for decades, and yet people keep looking for a shortcut. A shortcut to change the entire system. A shortcut to promote an idea to every human and explain why the new way is better. A shortcut to get picked. Your idea might be rejected because it’s not better. But it’s probably going to be rejected because it’s new.

Does launching a breakthrough new product change the culture and deliver a profitable return? Perhaps. But not today. Maybe eventually.

Ideas that spread, win. And traction is underrated.

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.

Scaffolding is the cultural and organizational support we get at the beginning of adopting a new idea or practice.

How can we possibly get people to save for their retirement or vaccinate their kids? Like many important and beneficial practices, they don’t pay off right away. The path begins with fear or discomfort, and only later rewards us.

It’s much easier to ride a bike if someone on Rollerblades is scooting along beside you, holding the handlebars. A few hours later, you can’t remember ever not knowing how to ride.

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.

A brand isn’t a logo. It’s an invitation and a promise, an expectation about who someone can become, and what the journey will be like.

“The system will adopt you once you’re successful. In order to be adopted, you’ll need to be successful.” If your brand is selling a lot of units, you’ll get shelf space at the store. Of course, the only way to sell a lot of units is to have shelf space.

We overinvest in this tiny group, creating a scaffolding around their experience that others are eager to join in on.

142. Treating Different People Differently

The masses are a choice, one you can commit to or plan on avoiding.

When we pursue quality, we then have two jobs: • Agree on the spec for the customer we seek to serve. • Make sure the product or service meets the spec.

Perhaps your definition of better doesn’t matter. We can use someone else’s version of it and set the spec accordingly.

“For the kind of person we seek to serve, given that time will improve many of the elements you see, what’s missing?”