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by
Seth Godin
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April 24 - May 15, 2025
When we lack the empathy to imagine someone else’s “better”, we’re on the road to frustration.
Writing about technical change, Rogers has outlined the questions that inform any cultural or economic change we seek to make. I’ve added a few based on a strategic and cultural mindset. It takes empathy to answer these questions with others in mind, but it’s essential. Engineering and performance • How does this innovation improve on previous solutions? • What are the benefits of using this innovation? • Can the improvement be measured in terms of cost, speed, efficiency, or other metrics? Interactions and network effects • Does this innovation align with the smallest viable audience’s
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short-term game is a discrete interaction with an outcome. Some examples: • Talking your way out of a traffic ticket • Finishing a freelance project and pleasing the client • Writing a post that wins a lot of attention online • Winning an argument with your partner A long-term game is the sum of a series of short-term games. Examples include: • The outcome of a night of playing poker • A ten-year career as a brand manager • Building a platform for your work online
Use short-term games to build long-term soft assets like trust or habits. • Play iterated games, embracing the fact that you’ll probably be back tomorrow. • Take intentional risks, but don’t expose yourself to the chance of losing your core assets. You might lose a short-term game but lose in a way that makes it likely you’ll be invited back. No tantrums, no bridges burned.
There are infinite and finite games. Finite games are games we play to win. They have players, beginnings, and endings. Infinite games are games we play to play.
But there are also finite games that involve abundance. Book publishers understand that one book rarely competes with another—the opportunity is to sell more books overall. Bookstores are filled with competitive titles, but that’s where books sell best—next to other books. Every strategy includes a game. We need to choose and understand the game we’re playing.
In most models of economics and in most versions of our day-to-day strategy, scarcity is at the heart of the game. Only one person can get this job. Only $300 will be spent today on accommodations. Only one movie can be watched at a time. Copyright is based on scarcity, as are luxury goods. If everyone had access, it wouldn’t be worth much. But there’s been a remarkably swift increase in games that are based on abundance instead. Networks built on information or connection abhor scarcity. They’re built to be generative instead.
Generative approaches create value. It’s a chance to trade abundance for scarcity.
There are games that are won by dominance and those that are won by affiliation.
All the merchant cares about is which brand is going to return the most profit per square foot. They don’t need or want to like your product, nor do they need or want to care very much about how hard you’re trying. If you’re not ready to play a game based on dominance, don’t start.
Paying it back is trading favors. Reciprocity is a natural human instinct, amplified by culture. If someone does a nice thing for you, you are inclined to do a nice thing in return. Paying it forward means offering something to someone who can do nothing in return for you. This act of feeding the culture isn’t focused on what you’ll get back today. It simply creates the conditions for the culture to pass it on.
If you’re interested in developing your own resilient path, focus on games that are based on skill—and go get those skills.
The negotiation is often about how the negotiation is going to unfold. This is one reason why arbitration is such a powerful tool—agreeing to it assures mutual enrollment in the process and the outcome. Without mutual enrollment, it falls apart. The quicksand shows up when you skip the essential pre-negotiation and assume that this system will play by the rules you’re hoping for. It’s a mistake to assume that each player is going to imagine the same rules.
Teaching the opponent a lesson in this moment may cost you more than it’s worth. We can save oppositional games for the pickleball court. They don’t work well in real life.
We’re not sitting in traffic, we are traffic. Everyone brings some sort of selfish to the games they play.
All resilient strategies are based on expanding our circles of us and of now.
When there is competition, strategy is often offered a seat at the table.
What doesn’t work? Insisting. Trying harder. Being just like the leader, but not them.
The Red Queen Theory helps us understand why our world seems so chaotic. AOL won the internet, until Yahoo did, until Google did, until Facebook did, until TikTok did. There isn’t an end, but simply the beginning of a new game, played anew. Our strategy will work until it doesn’t. Because our strategy has an impact on the system, the system changes. Not simply as the result of our work, but in response to other strategies as well.
Your current success might have been hard-earned. But the future doesn’t care about this as much as you do.
Most of the time, we work in the system, not on it.
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.
Standards are consistent containers. They mean that we can automatically and easily accept anything that fits into that container, and this enables us to build complex and resilient systems.
When that standard becomes toxic or harms our culture, it needs to be changed. That’s a cultural and systemic shift. Teaching a bureaucrat or a customer service rep a lesson is pointless. They’re busy processing packages and checking off boxes, and our indignant response simply wastes our time. Instead, we might need to consider doing what needs to be done or saying what needs to be said to work with the system in this moment, so we can find the resources to change the system with more leverage and urgency where it counts. Sometimes, it’s satisfying to rail at an unfair system at the place
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Someone is going to win the lottery, but it’s probably not going to be her. When we sign up to feed the system, we’re joining in with others who are offering a similar product or service. Plenty of alternatives with little chance to build a unique asset, which means that it’s unlikely you’ll be fairly compensated. Feeding the system can be fun and it feels safe, which is why so many people do it. It’s a strategy with predictable outcomes. A reliable job might be what you’re seeking. Sometimes, though, the system will sell us a dream it can’t deliver, and these are the games we should avoid.
When a retail business is doing well, the store keeps 20% of the margin and the landlord gets 80%. When it goes under, that’s because the landlord got 105%. The difference between rent and profit margin is the driver of success or failure for anyone with a lease. They’re not making any more real estate, so landlords are able to drive the system of retail, and often of housing.
Facebook and Google are landlords. They’re in the business of selling attention. When businesses seek to buy clicks, these media giants run algorithms and auctions to determine the highest price for the traffic they can sell. If the traffic is worth more to their advertisers, media sites raise the price on that traffic and absorb all of the extra value. A law firm that makes $100 a click signing up clients for a class action lawsuit is willing to pay up to $99 a click to get that traffic. If they have competition, that’s exactly what they’ll end up paying, with Google keeping all the
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The smallest organizations have an advantage when they create projects. With nothing to lose and few people to please, it’s possible to create moments of magic. Small projects from small teams can leap forward with the confidence of knowing that they don’t have far to fall. When a project works, it’s tempting and generous to scale it. Offer it to more people. Turn one successful restaurant into a chain, or a small medical practice into a much larger one. And almost inevitably, it falters. The only way to effectively scale magic is to create a strategy where the scale is the magic.
Projects where the scale is the magic have a network effect. The more people who use them, the better they get.
When new technology changes the rules, old systems rarely thrive.
Each person in a system will always act in their self-interest. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll act selfishly. A healthy system is organized in a way that self-interest leads to behavior that’s in the common good. People sign up for systems that give them what they seek, and they stay as long as their needs are being met.
Decisions by nodes could involve questions like: • Will this get me promoted? • What will I tell my boss? • Does this fit into our standards? • Who has the power in this interaction? • Is this something I’m authorized to do? • What am I afraid of? • Will I profit from this? • What’s the least risky choice for me? • How do I maximize the metrics the system is looking for? • What’s the path of least resistance? • Do people like us do things like this?
If you want to predict how a system will respond to an input, begin by describing what’s in the self-interest of the node you’re interacting with.
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.
The choices we each make are driven by our goals and needs, our fears and desires. In the context of the system. No one is fully alone, and no one is completely powerless. We exist in community, seek connection, and worry about our status, fitting in, and getting ahead. The empathy of a useful strategy sees and respects the agency of everyone else.
We create value when we establish the conditions for status and affiliation to be delivered to those that seek it. Rock stars included.
The Newton and the iPhone had very similar results at the start—launch hype is overrated. Nature is similar. After just a few weeks of development, the embryo of a human, an elephant, and a blue whale each weigh about as much as a poppy seed. The future unfolds after the launch. When we embrace time and systems, the launch takes care of itself.
to the bottom line. A simple question like, “What’s for dinner,” becomes a complex problem, one with no obviously correct answer, because the system has independent variables and mutually incompatible goals. There isn’t a single solution. There are many solutions, and none of them are perfect.
When you have the leverage, you can change the system.
We are so entrenched in our professional systems that we don’t even notice that most of our choices have already been made for us.
177. What Does the System Respond To? Systems are all different, but they often behave in similar ways. If we know what people are looking for, it’s easier to find it. Here are a few, many of which are rooted in Western commercial culture. • Reassurance: This is the dominant one. The system wants what the system wants. And one thing it wants is to persist. If there’s a way to spend time and money to ensure that everything will remain okay, to avoid the current emergency, that action relieves tension. • Faster: The race for productivity continues unabated, and faster-moving ideas, devices,
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The best projects are often unique with no easy substitutes, There’s no real price pressure because you’re not offering a commodity. If you want this, here it is, and no one else has it.
But creators should recognize that when there are easy substitutes, there is little opportunity for profitable value creation and memorable storytelling.
Importante Reach
When you choose your genre, you’re sending a message. You’re choosing your customers and the expectations they bring with them. You’re also choosing (at some level) your staffing, funding, and production models.
The innovators in every field are seen as innovators because they confounded our expectations of genre. And many of the failures that have tried to change the culture did the same thing. If it’s not what we expect, the easiest thing to do is to ignore it. One way we change the system is by subverting genre. That new thing might look like an ordinary experience or product, but once we experience it, it changes us in a way that we can’t undo.
Price is a story, price is a signal, and price is a symptom of your strategy.
The slogan of generous work can be, “You’ll pay a lot but you’ll get more than you paid for.” And the tag line is, “I see you. And I care.”
Organizations and families make decisions based on price all the time. Thoughtful managers look at the cost.
At a certain point, a person’s story about money is far more important than money itself: Successful strategies seek to find customers who are eager to pay money to solve their problems. If you want to find a lousy customer, find someone who has a scarcity mindset, or is more comfortable with their problem than they are in spending to make it go away.
Money is a story, and price is a way of telling that story.
