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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Seth Godin
Read between
October 22 - December 14, 2024
My narrative is recursive and elliptical, circling back on itself as it seeks to help you see how time, games, systems, and empathy dance together to make our world. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
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. This is the point. This is at the heart of our work and the challenge of our days. Toward better.
Once our basic needs for food, shelter and health are met, most people dance with three conflicting desires: • Affiliation • Status • Freedom from fear
“What happens next?” is a different question from, “What will I do now?”
Confronted with so much choice, it’s tempting to just do your job. To pretend that it’s up to someone else, and to put your head down and follow instructions. Don’t surrender your agency and revert to the numbing day-to-day grind of compliance. You can make things better.
Every successful system serves a purpose.
People are rarely rational. Even when we want the same things, we don’t always agree about how to get them.
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.
We can’t change capitalism. We can’t even put a dent into it. But we can change the incentives of consumers, employees and investors by creating different cultural boundaries and status roles that operate within the larger system.
You can’t step in the same river twice, because your footprint the first time turned the river into a different river.
once a built system gets even a little bit complicated, unanticipated outputs begin to appear.
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.
Serious games are all around us, whether we choose to play them or not.
A game has the following elements: players, rules, scarcity, choices, feedback loops, and outcomes.
We often spend more time figuring out how to win the game we’re in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place.
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.
it’s more useful to realize that the future is counting on us to create what comes next.
Strategy is the hard work of choosing what to do today to improve our tomorrow.
Constructing a strategy connects our goals to our insight, amplified by our resources, and allows us to make a difference. Our blueprint is the actionable strategy we’re committing to. 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?
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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.
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.
Every strategy depends on being conscious of the change we seek to make and the systems that can amplify or impede our progress.
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 Iroquois Confederacy lived by a simple principle: “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”
Hope is not a plan.
If I want the real truth about a business and where it’s going, I’d divide the modern business plan into six sections: 1. Truth 2. Assertions 3. Alternatives 4. People 5. Money 6. Time
Strategy is a commitment to seeing the race course before we begin. Your effort is up to you.
Minimum Viable Audience
There are countless conspiracies. They’re not a secret. We simply need to see the systems.
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.
A strategy is the most reliable way to get to a future we’d like to live in.
When we’re doing our job, there’s a checklist. Instructions. Deniability. Sooner or later we have to do our jobs, but it probably pays to focus on our work. Our work makes change happen. Our work is up to us. Our work is a series of choices that lead to the jobs we spend our hours on. Our work is our responsibility and our opportunity. Our job requires answering questions. Our work gives us a chance to ask them.
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.
Anyone who promises a detailed road map is unaware of how complex creating the future is.
Creating tomorrow by repeating yesterday is not a useful way forward.
Pick your distribution, pick your future.
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.
Our strategy fails every time the size of the logs exceeds our supply of kindling.
Good ideas are required, but they’re rarely sufficient.
As an idea moves through a community, some of the early adopters who join in early are aligned on mission and eager to help it succeed. But most of the people we encounter are skeptics. They’re looking for an easy way to keep things the same. They’re uncomfortable with the tension that change brings, and will conceal that fear with objections that seem like thoughtful feedback. It’s not.
Most of the time, the games we play aren’t clearly marked as games, and not all the players have agreed on the rules. And most of the time, the other players may have different goals, tactics, and approaches than we do.
Your current success might have been hard-earned. But the future doesn’t care about this as much as you do.
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.
Avoid projects where the system is organized to take all the value you create.
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.
Generous doesn’t mean free: Generous work requires emotional labor. It means looking at the problem instead of looking away. Leaning in when we feel like hiding. Generous work puts us on the hook, because it amplifies connection, it doesn’t diminish it. Generous work is more insightful than people expect, or more urgent or selfless. Generous work makes a difference, and often it’s okay if that generous work is expensive. 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.”
People adhere to a cultural system as long as the perceived safety and comfort in maintaining the status quo outweighs the potential risks and uncertainties of departing from it.
Systems change. They are dynamic. When an event occurs that stresses a system, the rules of the system change, as do the outputs.
Working on the system means turning someone who wants to say no into someone who says yes. Doing this with persistence over time cascades a single shift into several shifts. It’s a chance to create new standards and a different culture.
