You Need A Strategy

This week on the Next Big Idea podcast, Seth Godin and I discuss strategy: what we can do today to make tomorrow better. Listen on Apple or Spotify, and let's discuss in the comments below.

I have occasionally wondered — if a superintelligent AI of the future knew my personal goals and aspirations, and everything about my circumstance, how would it tell me to navigate my life? What would it do differently from what I am doing today?

I try to be intentional, strategic about my long term aspirations. I have been intentional in some areas of my life – building community, doing work I care about, and investing, for instance. But like most people, I have a long list of aspirations that have foundered for decades — like learning to play the piano, building wood furniture, writing a novel. So when Seth Godin’s new book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans, came across my desk, I jumped at the opportunity to talk with Seth. 

Here’s what he told me —

“I think almost no one knows what strategy is. … The number of people who have actual intent, systemic awareness, who can see time and who bring empathy to the change they seek to make is vanishingly close to zero.”

This idea that most people “don’t see time” is really interesting to me. It's reminiscent of Bill Gates’s comment, “most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.” Most of us do not have an intuitive feeling for the relationship between what we wish to do, and the time required for it to happen. We often ache to force outcomes that simply need time to mature. In this sense, much of what matters in life may be more like gardening than war, or chess.

Seth makes another point that I find insightful — our strategies will only work if they are based on an accurate understanding of how the world around us works. The world we live in, Seth says, is made up of systems. Seemingly infinite, often invisible, intricate, inescapable systems. Whenever we work together to create something, achieve something, solve a problem, we create a system. And those systems, in many cases, stick around for a long, long time. 

What are examples? The art market is a system, with different stakeholders who benefit, and others who are excluded. The wedding industrial complex is a system that is highly effective at separating you from your money. The ride sharing business is a system that has largely replaced the taxi system that preceded it. The book publishing business is a system, one that is increasingly under pressure from competing systems for delivering ideas. It’s next to impossible to stop a system that is working for the people who participate in it. What you can do is choose which systems you interact with, and build new better systems that over time replace existing ones (much as the founders of Uber replaced taxis).

Does this resonate for you? What do you think? Listen to our conversation on Apple or Spotify, and let’s discuss below!