✒️ 3 Sentence Summary
- Strategy works through systems. System has people and rules. You can’t change anything without first understanding the system that keeps things as they are.
- Choose a ten people audience. Great audience pay more, demand more, and spread the word.
- Execute the tactics. The tactics add up to the strategy.
🔖 My Favorite Quotes
- If the system sticks around, that’s because the system is delivering on a promise. It’s difficult to strategize and make a difference if you don’t understand the systems keeping things as they are.
- When you do a job, you do your job. Your boss decides. Our life is a series of projects. It’s not a job.
- First, ten. Find ten people who trust you / respect you / need you / listen to you.
🏃🏻➡️ How It Changed Me?
The book changed me in two ways. One, reminds me about the system and the fact that we can’t brute force our way into it. Instead we need to create some other value so it could shift towards to. Two, staying focused on choosing the limited sets of audience and letting the wrong audiences go in order to remain the strategy that we set our course on.
📔 Summary
Seeing Systems & Leverage
- L798 — Most people dance with three conflicting desires: Affiliation, Status, Freedom from fear.
- L836 — Elegant strategies use systems. Even when they set out to change the system, they don’t fight it directly but use the system as a tool.
- L842 — Systems respond to strategies, and elegant strategies give us leverage.
- L852 — If the system sticks around, that’s because the system is delivering on a promise. It’s difficult to strategize and make a difference if you don’t understand the systems keeping things as they are.
- L874 — Systems have nodes (buildings) and connections (roads). Roads have conventions we all need to understand.
- L875 — Buildings (and people) get replaced all the time. Roadways (and rules) fight like crazy to stay the way they are.
- L911 — Effective systems create the outputs that define them.
- L925 — Systems are more than built objects — they are the collisions between those objects and the natural world.
- L936 — Buckminster Fuller: to fundamentally change something, build a new system that makes the existing system obsolete.
- L1039 — By narrating, labeling, and publishing a hierarchy, an outsider changed a system that had been around since before the country.
- L1044 — The meter in the entrance hall made residents notice power usage every time they entered or left.
- L1069 — “Better” is tricky. The system wants what it wants until leverage points enable cultural shifts.
- L1392 — The system has limited our choices. We can “pick any card,” but rarely see the entire deck.
- L1903 — Feedback loops aren’t there to give advice. They either drive change forward or hold it back.
- L1933 — Put an efficient bicycle tire on a truck and the truck won’t work better. We spend time fixing tires, not looking at trucks.
Strategy vs. Tactics
- L816 — “What happens next?” is a different question from “What will I do now?”
- L1123 — Strategy is the hard work of choosing what to do today to improve our tomorrow.
- L1163 — Simplify because needless complexity was only created to insulate us from fear. Lightness, because agility increases resilience.
- L1231 — Strategy is easy to skip, because we’ve trained our whole life for tactics.
- L1232 — Strategy is a philosophy based on awareness of our goals and perception of the systems around us. Tactics support strategy.
- L1869 — Our next move is often something that decreases the value of our previously hard-won assets.
- L1891 — Tactics are how we win short-term games. Flexible, disposable, sometimes secret.
- L1893 — A tactic is what we do next. A strategy is all the nexts, one after the other.
Audience & Customers (Smallest Viable Market)
- L1371 — First, ten. Find ten people who trust you / respect you / need you / listen to you.
- L1711 — See the world as a web, our work as helping people in the web connect and grow.
- L2025 — If we’re competing with everyone, in every venue, no wonder we’re not getting much done.
- L2037 — When we choose our customers, we embrace their worldview and the system they are part of.
- L2057 — The best way for a freelancer to succeed is to find better customers — ones who pay more, demand more, and spread the word.
- L2069 — If you’re not firing customers, you’re surrendering your future to whoever walks in the door.
Early Adopters & the Gulf of Disapproval
- L2333 — Less than 3% of the population embraces something new. 97% will not.
- L2338 — The marketer’s job is to make something so remarkable that this tiny group can’t stop telling their peers.
- L2363 — As your new idea spreads, most people who hear about it will dislike it.
- L2369 — The dangerous moment: if you track all the haters, you’ll quit. The gulf of disapproval is at its maximum.
- L2374 — When the gulf comes, don’t track non-believers. Count the top line instead.
- L2447 — Marketers build scaffolding. Use tension, status, and affiliation to help people get where they seek to go.
- L2496 — Quality simply means “meets specifications.”
- L2508 — Prototypes are rarely applauded by amateurs.
- L2509 — Don’t ask for critical editing from well-meaning people who haven’t learned to give useful professional advice.
- L2566 — You might lose a short-term game, but lose in a way that makes it likely you’ll be invited back.
- L2603 — Referrals come from people who trust you, not those who have been beaten by you.
- L2610 — All the merchant cares about is which brand returns the most profit per square foot.
Business Model, Projects & Making It Sustainable
- L1256 — When you do a job, the boss decides. Our life is a series of projects. It’s not a job.
- L1403 — When we get compensated for creating value in a way that enables us to do it again, we’ve found a business model.
- L1436 — A healthy career and a useful project will have countless moments where we’re not getting paid.
- L1502 — The modern business plan has six sections: Truth, Assertions, Alternatives, People, Money, Time.