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

by Seth Godin

We can decide to play in a system where our head start gives us a natural advantage. Or we can acknowledge that the feedback loops in the system are probably not going to help us at first, and we can work to find the support and coaching we need to overcome this. Scaffolding is hard to find and priceless. There are often ways forward if we’re willing to look for them.

The smallest viable audience is most useful, but only when serving them is a seed that grows into a larger segment of the market, causing the change you seek.

when a student is comparing an MIT degree to the benefit of taking the very same courses online for free, the bulk of value differentiation comes from what the system values—the degree, not the learning.

Most systems that are complex enough to be interesting are held together with tension. Individual nodes want different outcomes, but no one has enough power to insist, and so the system oscillates, with the invisible hand apparently moving from one edge to the other.

Beyond the conflicting agendas faced by complex systems, the entire system is often under tension as well. When technology changes, or public policy shifts, the system itself scrambles to find and maintain equilibrium. We most easily see a system when the system bends under stress.

The future sends us reports on what it’s going to be like. None of us have seen it, but it’s possible to make assertions about what is to come. We may have to walk away from our drawing tomorrow, no matter how hard it was to create, but the sketching pays off because it offers context and structure for what might come next.

One reason that we avoid choosing a strategy is that we’re not comfortable walking away from all the other possible strategies. Rather than celebrate the paths not taken, we take no path at all.

Risk is the price we pay to make a difference.

Never sign a contract or make an investment that you don’t understand at least as well as the person on the other side of the transaction.

Don’t get caught confusing money with security. There are lots of ways to build a life that’s more secure, starting with the stories you tell yourself, the people you surround yourself with, and the cost of living you embrace. Money is one way to feel more secure, but money alone won’t deliver this.

In the long run, doing work that’s important leads to more happiness than doing work that’s merely profitable.

Unstated instincts, feelings, and desires feel more amorphous and carry less responsibility than the ones we write down and defend.

Tamsen Webster points out that people rarely get “believer’s remorse.” Instead, they will do almost anything to defend their identity and the system they’re in.

Without boundaries, the free market races to the bottom because it finds shortcuts and the competitive system we live with forces many organizations to take those shortcuts.

John Green wrote, “Despair isn’t very productive. That’s the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself.”

The top ten causes of climate change all exist because they are convenient and cheap, even though in the course of a decade or less, they will create the conditions for disaster, a disaster that won’t be convenient or cheap to remedy.

Part of what it means to be a creative artist is to dive willingly into work that might not work.