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

by Seth Godin

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.

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.

If your passion is writing screenplays, it might be because you grew up in a world where there were movies—no one was born to win an Oscar four hundred years ago. 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. The specifics aren’t nearly as important as the journey. Even if our project doesn’t always succeed, it is the path for us to follow.

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 always involves a delay. We need to do something non-obvious or un-fun now so we can get the result we seek later.

Think ahead and reason back: When we know who it’s for, what it’s for, and how we hope to get there, we can start at the end and work backward for where to begin.